rm | Ghosts (repost), Snape/OFC, 8/48

Ghosts (repost), Snape/OFC, 8/48
Rating: G – hard-R; this chapter PG-13
Author’s Notes:

If you don’t know what this is, please read this: http://rm.livejournal.com/727358.html

This story was originally written in late-2001; despite a recent tune-up, it is in no way compliant with the current state of the HP universe.

Your feedback and commentary are always welcome, even for a time capsule such as this.

Each chapter of this story has now been tagged. You can find the whole thing here.

If you’re looking for slash, het, poly, Book-6 compliant Slytherin backstory please visit Fascilis Descensus Averno a WIP written with

kalichan. It features Severus Snape, Lucius & Narcissa Malfoy, Bellatrix & Rodolphus Lestrange and Regulus Black and mostly takes place in 1979 – 1981 but has forays both significantly forward and back in time. It is also a multimedia project.
Disclaimer: It’s JKR’s world, I just mess about with it.

Allosia felt like she was walking to her execution. It didn't help that the halls struck her as both unnaturally quiet and unnaturally cold. She felt her heart reverberating in her chest and couldn't help muttering aloud to herself, as if confrontations like this could somehow be solved through practice.

Severus had been polite about the invitation at least, and she sensed she was as obligated to say yes as he had been to ask her. Coffee, in his rooms, and here they were both adults, and all she could do was try to prepare herself for being told she was worthless for the next two hours.

She knocked tentatively, and then took a step back from the door. He opened it wide, smiled grimly, and wouldn't look directly at her, but motioned for her to enter. As he closed the door, she couldn't help but glance quickly around the room, trying to get a sense of the man he was now. Simple, solitary, probably far more brilliant than she had let herself realize when she was younger. While it was clear he didn't like himself, she was starting to understand just how much he did amuse himself. How could he not?

"I --" he paused. "Thank you for coming," he said, all formality.

Allosia nodded.

"Do you want to sit down?"

She shook her head. "No, not yet, thanks." Allosia looked at the ground, and raised her eyebrows at the awkwardness of it all.

Snape turned his back to her and began to pace. "I heard about your class the other day."

"I know; you already mentioned it."

"Crabbe told me what you said."

"It wasn't meant as an insult."

"Do you really believe that?"

"Severus, look at your life."

"Don't you remember me from when we were students? I'm not so terribly different. Neither, I suppose, are you."

"What's that supposed to mean?" She asked, irritated with the cryptic smugness routine.

"You don't know how to keep your counsel. You shouldn't be talking about other professors in class."

"I wasn't," she said, even though she knew such an assertion was at least slightly a lie.

"Don't be disingenuous."

"Must you act like this?"

"Must you always insist on having the impossible?" he asked, his tone turning nasty.

"Don't do this." Allosia said warningly as she pressed her hand to her face and tried to figure out what to do next.

Severus made the decision for her by grabbing her wrist to prevent her hiding, and having done it, seemingly couldn’t help but push her against the wall by the door, kissing her hard on the mouth in the process.

Allosia pushed him away and then slapped him as hard as she could with her left hand. "What the fuck is wrong with you?" She yelled. If she hadn’t been livid, she might have laughed at him.

They stood there for a moment staring at each other. Her hand still raised, his mouth open with shock. She gasped and slid down the wall to sit, as she realized she was shaking. “ What the fuck is wrong with you?” She repeated softly more than once, but who it was directed at seemed to become unclear.

"Oh, Merlin. I'm sorry." He began to pace if only to mask his chagrin.

"Severus? I don't belong to you anymore. You do know that, right?" She said. And while it was meant to be condescending, somehow it just made them both seem very young.

"I just thought --"

"You just didn't,” she replied. That was one thing of which she was sure. It was always obvious when Severus stopped thinking.

"I don't want you to be scared of me," he said stupidly. He ran his hand through his hair and heard a small gasp of surprise from her. It took him a second to realize the gesture had pushed his robe up past his elbow, revealing the Death Eater brand he had worn there since shortly after leaving Hogwarts. He looked from it to Allosia.

"Did it hurt?" she asked.

"Allosia, you don't want me to talk about this."

"Did it hurt?" she asked again, more urgently, suddenly distracted from her own unsteadiness.

He looked down at the mark again and took a deep breath. "Yes, it hurt, a lot, more than anything I've ever experienced." He paused and swallowed. "And I enjoyed it, Sia. It was and it remains, the most perfectly necessary sensation of my entire life. That's the punch line of all of it of course, that I needed it so much." He began pacing again, and let the silence broken only by his steps hang between them for a moment. "You've burned yourself, you've felt the Cruciatus, now imagine both, all the way to the bone, as an oath, because you chose it, and because it chose you."

"You can't remove it, can you?" she asked simply, unwilling to be goaded into whatever emotional response he seemed to be looking for.

"No, but I wouldn't want to," he said as if it were merely a fact and not a shocking one at that.

"You still feel it, don't you?"

"Yes, but that's not why."

"And you're really not with them anymore?"

"I'm really not with them anymore. Allosia."

"When?"

"When what?" He snapped, feeling the return of his irritation at this conversation even being necessary.

"When did it begin; how long did it take you to earn that?" She practically spit the last word.

"Please don't ask me these things."

"Tell me."

"I'm going to sit down now. May I offer you a seat or would you like to stay there on the floor?" He offered a hand to her, and she took it, climbing off the floor. He gestured to a large green chair and she climbed into it, pulling her knees up like a child. "Would you like a drink?"

"Yes, thank you."

"Promise you won't throw it at me?"

"Yes, I promise." She almost smiled then, and it seemed to mean everything.

Severus poured Allosia a glass of wine and passed it to her, before filling his own glass and bringing it and the bottle over to the chair opposite her. All his motions seemed deliberate, slow, and she realized he was stalling for time. He bent to place the bottle on the floor, and then leaned back in his own chair. He took a sip of wine, swallowed and then ran his tongue over his lips quickly, to get the full bitterness of it. He smiled, slightly and sadly into the glass that he had perched delicately between the fingertips of both hands, and began.

"I made the mistake of telling Malfoy – Lucius -- about your little crush. He laughed at me at first, gave me grief about hanging out with mudbloods, which I then had to remind him you weren't, your appalling manners aside. After he thought about it for a day or two he was angry at me for not having had my way with you, I believe is how he put it. By all small gods, you were only a child. The prospect of hurting you appealed to him. The prospect of me doing it, appealed to him more. I don't know how well you've known Lucius, then or now, but he likes to watch, to encourage, to entice. Blood on his own hands is one thing, but if he can get someone else to lick it off." Snape trailed off then, and Allosia suspected he was remembering something very specific.

"At any rate, he eventually let the subject drop. I managed to convince him that the time I spent with you wasn't up to me; he thought I'd done you enough of a disservice by pushing you towards Gage, and let it drop. There were a million other things he was up to at any given time. At any rate, by the beginning of 7th year we all needed to figure out what on earth we were going to do with ourselves after Hogwarts. I'm not particularly suited to anything other than being an academic and at the time, I was appalled. The power of warping young minds obviously hadn't occurred to me. I wanted to spend time with my potions, make brilliant discoveries, write books and quite frankly, be left alone by what appeared to be a world filled with bureaucrats and fools." He paused for another sip of wine then; Allosia just continued to sit there, with her knees up, taking in him and their history.

"Of course, things were not that simple, not ever, and not then. My mother was dead, as you know, my father was diligently trying not to choose sides on anything and Lucius kept warning me I was going to waste away as some pathetic teacher somewhere," Snape looked around the room then, with both sorrow and anger. "He had already chosen, had become a Death Eater over the summer. I had been to a party his father had thrown shortly afterwards. He bought us all prostitutes. Mine didn't understand why I didn't hurt her more first, and eventually demanded I slap her, more than once, so the madam wouldn't think she'd hid from duty. They were not allowed to heal themselves until they got home. She had to taunt me and insult me until I could and then I liked it very much."

Allosia knew this tactic of his too well. He was trying to shock and might even be lying, but she took a gulp of her wine anyway, and would not look away from him. She kept telling herself to be as present as she could. He was looking into his glass as he continued.

"That was the beginning of Lucius badgering me. Voldemort wasn't what I thought, I had this huge potential that wasn't going to be of any use in a world filled with laws designed to protect people too stupid to live. He seized on the things that plagued me, my weakness, my intolerance for the slowness of others, my lack of any real place in the world, and my health. Imagine if it could be better. Imagine if the asthma and the coughing fits and the scarring on my lungs were gone. Imagine if I could be a Quidditch star." His voice had grown bitter now. "He knew I was worthy he said, but I'd have to prove myself, many times. To his friends, to his father, his father’s friends, and eventually to Voldemort." He drained his glass and refilled it, sighing heavily.

"And so, when we got into that stupid fight my last year, and I heard your anger, and I looked at you, this beautiful alien little creature and a dozen things clicked into place. I cared about you, which meant the path I was about to choose was going to put you at risk. I wanted you, and felt like if I went near you, after, I'd might as well be poisoning you; How could I touch you with hands that were about to live the life I did? And then I realized, this could be my first proof. I could take you, and love you, and tell Lucius I'd fucked you, show him the slightest bit of your blood on my fingers, and never talk to you again, and we'd be free of each other. It was for the best, I was sure of that." Snape stared at her for a long time, but she said nothing, merely holding the gaze, even as her eyes became rounder and sadder. "You were the first woman I was with who wasn't paid for it."

Allosia opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

"I couldn't have told you, I couldn't have warned you. You would have fought me; you had to go back to Gage."

"I never told him."

"Did you ever -- "

"Our sixth year, as he was drifting towards Constance, yes."

Snape nodded. "Do you hate me yet?"

"I won't give you that satisfaction. I don't hate you. I am angry, and shocked, and repulsed and I think you were a greedy and awful child and are probably a greedy and awful man. A part of me would rather you had just raped me,” she said, knowing it was her own turn to shock. “My god, Severus, you cried. You cried. And even that was just all about you." She sighed. "Fuck, I am so angry. I just wish I had known."

"Say what you need to say to me."

"No. I know you'll enjoy it on some level. The things I need to say need to be said to a Severus that doesn't exist anymore. I will not give you the satisfaction."

The hardness in her voice grieved him and frightened him, and he didn't know what to say next, or how to say it.

"Do you know why Gage died?" he asked.

"I gave him faulty information. We both know all about that."

"No, you don't. You gave him information, a tip on a Death Eater plot, someone he could arrest, foil the whole thing. The information was weak, you remember that, right?"

"Yes. But I knew Kenia, trusted her."

"And you gave the information to Gage, which he never ever would have acted upon if it hadn't been from you, right?"

"Yes? But I don't understand."

"It was misinformation. Intentional misinformation, a trap. Information that had Gage received from anyone else he would have ignored. It was never supposed to go through you. I play both sides; I know you’ve seen the files on my position,” he sneered. “I know the Death Eaters don't trust me anymore, but still it's enough, I have some sense of what's going on, of who is with him. I was asked to do something to prove my loyalty. I tried to do it in a way that would make it obvious it was a set-up, a trap, so that no one would act on it, no one killed. I'd be hurt, of course for blundering, I've been hurt before, I miss it when it's not on schedule it seems. But because I made a mistake, you got that information. You gave it to Gage, he trusted you, he died. You didn't make a mistake and kill Gage, I did."

"Oh. Oh oh oh. No. I should have -- "

"You're an auror, you were doing your job, we were all doing our jobs. That's all. To say anything else is self-indulgent"

He ran his fingers through the front of his hair and left them there leaning his head into his palm, waiting.

"I don't know what to say to you, Severus. I don't know what to say at all. I just don't know anymore. I feel like that little girl again, who was so in awe of you. But it's not love, not at all." She finished her wine then and Severus gestured to the bottle. She nodded and they both leaned forward in their chairs so he could pour her another glass.

"When did you cut your hair?" he asked, tone abruptly casual again.

It was an odd topic change, but Allosia understood the question. He was asking her when she had become this Allosia. "About five years ago. Just one day, I was someone else, this," she gestured to herself, "needed to catch up."

"What has your life been like?"

"You know what my work means. I've lost two other friends, besides Gage. I have a flat in London. I almost got married once, scared him off though. We had a dog. He took it when he left. I sing. I drink too much coffee. I dislike mornings unless I see them come on. I am still struggling with German. I don't know what else to tell you. I've become, or I had become, very still inside."

Severus nodded, somber and amazed. "What was his name? What was he like?"

"Brown hair, bright blue eyes, smart, a very particular grin. He owns a restaurant. I wasn't the girl he had dreamed of as a child. Eventually, he decided he couldn't live with that. I was relieved in a way."

"Why?"

"It seemed like someone else's life."

Severus nodded again. "It's hard to picture."

"For me too, now. It was a long time ago." She smiled wistfully. "Can I ask you something?"

"You may."

"It's a bit awful."

"Go ahead."

"Did you kill a lot?"

"Yes."

"Did you like it?"

"For a time."

"Did he, Voldemort, did he keep his promises?"

"After a fashion."

"Be careful what you wish for?"

"Yes, exactly, Sia."

"Will you tell me about it?"

"Not tonight, not now, not yet. I'm so tired."

"Oh, goodness, it's late, do you want me to go?" she asked, starting.

"No, no it's fine; just, it's a large burden. Please, stay, it's pleasant having you here, I just can't tell you those things right now."

"Fair enough." She paused. "May I see it?"

"The mark?" he asked already beginning to push his robe back.

She nodded. He leaned forward across the space between them and held his arm out. She stared at it for a time, and then touched it gingerly. When he made no protest, she traced it slowly, eventually looking at him to see a look of extreme concentration on his face. "I'm sorry, am I hurting you?"

"It's fine."

She continued the trace, until done, and then he drew his arm back and covered it without looking. "I've never seen one, that close, on someone who was still alive."

"There are so many people I would trade places with," he said shaking his head.

"Don't. Things have their reasons."

"Not good ones, Allosia, not good ones."