Through A Glass, Darkly
A Harry Potter Based Fan Fiction by Lady C.

WARNING: Deathly Hallows (Book 7) Spoiler!!

Introduction: Inspired by J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, and the personality actor Alan Rickman breathed into the Snape character in the resulting films. Although I admire Rickman, the Snape I see is more canon than film (although Snape's 'voice' is definitely Rickman's!). I let my fellow Deviants' impressions of Snape (teen and adult) guide me for that image. The story focuses at the very end of The Deathly Hallows as a parallel(?) ending. It includes one original character (of my own invention inspired by this photo).

Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling is the creator and owner of the Harry Potter world and all characters (except Seren Emrys, who is my own invention). No copyright infringement, disrespect, or claim of ownership is intended. This fiction was not created for profit, and is not for sale.

Censorship Recommendation: There is some mild coarse language, descriptions of death, and romantic overtones that may not be suitable for persons under 13 years of age (pretty borderline though).

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"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."
~ 1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV)


I

The evidence of defeat in Lucius Malfoy's face was unmistakable. He looked to the tall pale man in black who was pacing the room opposite him. Although they were good friends, he could not help but feel a small twinge of envy for the man. His friend's trusted position at Lord Voldemort's side served as a cold reminder that he would never again be one of their Master's elite, if he were to survive much longer at all. He licked his cracked and swollen lips hesitantly before he spoke.

"The Dark Lord has sent..."

"...you to summon me." Professor Severus Snape cut in quickly, twitching to free his face of a long greasy lock of jet black hair.

Snape folded his arms across his chest and regarded his old friend carefully. Malfoy was no longer the distinguished, confident, powerful man he had once been. The two had known each other since boyhood, having been schoolmates at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry; both had been sorted into Slytherin house, and although there was a couple of years between them they had made fast friends. But where Snape was moody, bookish and reserved, Malfoy was arrogant, socially manipulative and popular. An unlikely pairing perhaps, but their mutual clandestine attraction to Dark magic had provided plenty of fertile ground.

Yet the form before Snape now, once enviably handsome and robust, was decidedly thin and wan. Malfoy looked much older than his years and somewhat frail, as if the vigor of youth had been suddenly stripped from him. One crystalline grey eye was strangely tired and empty, the other swollen shut. Malfoy's long white-blond hair had become whiter somehow, and the sallow skin of his face still bore the stinging marks it had received as Lord Voldemort's punishment for allowing Harry Potter to escape. Malfoy, however, had been lucky.

"Of course I know," continued Snape matter-of-factly, noticing the faint surprise in Malfoy's weary eye. "Because it is otherwise unlike you to pay a visit unannounced."

Snape made no effort to conceal the acid in his voice. Visitors agitated him. Since it was his covert duty to play agent to both sides, even his most valued friend was not welcome without invitation for fear of stumbling upon something he could not easily explain. He had received other unexpected visitors earlier that year at his sanctuary at Spinner's End, and he was growing more and more irritated with such intrusions on his privacy. It was bad enough that Voldemort had insisted on Wormtail hanging about earlier that year; Snape had only recently returned to the comforts of solitude and was in no mood for company.

"Where is He now?" Snape asked in a cool, silky voice, turning his back on Malfoy momentarily. He looked down at his wand and began rolling it absently between his long fingers. All around him, alarms sounded in his mind. All was certainly not well.

"The Shrieking Shack." The response was breathy, weak.

"Severus..." Malfoy continued with a plea in his voice, "...about my son..."

"As I have already told you Lucius," Snape replied soothingly. "I will do everything in my power to ensure his safety."

"Thank you, old friend." Malfoy's voice was not much more than a coarse whisper. "I fear the Dark Lord has no more patience left for any of us."

Snape turned around slowly, still examining his wand. A small sliver of glass was embedded in the back of his hand and drawing a tiny bead of blood. He raised one eyebrow slightly as his lips curled in distaste. Strange that he hadn't noticed it before, he thought. He decided it must have become lodged there a couple of hours before when he'd rather ingloriously escaped Professor McGonagall's attack by diving through one of the castle's stained glass windows.

"Then I suppose I mustn't keep him..."

Snape scowled as he plucked away the shard of glass and flicked it to the floor, unwittingly causing the open puncture to bleed in earnest.

"...Waiting."


II

"Reparo."

Seren Emrys sighed as she cast the charm to restore the small picture frame she had just carelessly knocked to the floor and smashed. Grateful for the soothing dim light of her office after an exhausting day, she had barely noticed her own desk - a desk cluttered with many such frames, as was the wall behind it, displaying the various awards and honours she had received over the past 15 years. In the soft gloom her gaze swept across them all in rueful irony, as she realized how much they said of her life. Unlike the offices of her colleagues, hers did not boast cheery reminders of friends and loved ones; her momentos were purely academic achievements.

As she slumped into her chair and ran her small, delicate fingers through her bluntly cropped coal-black hair, she thought it odd that the one framed award she had so clumsily broken was for her very first accomplishment. It was her Outstanding Achievement In Potions award from her OWL year at Hogwarts, 1979. Unfortunately it was also her most regrettable year, for which she would flog herself for the rest of her life.

Her exceptional skill had served her well though. Seren's talent and insatiable thirst for magical knowledge made her invaluable in her career at St. Mungo's Hospital, and had promoted her up the ladder to Healer-In-Chief for her ward in record time. Being a healer was a far cry from the dreams of her parents however, who had wished her to aspire to much loftier things. To her family, having proudly been in Slytherin house for centuries and vaingloriously claiming decendency from the origins of great Merlin himself, the healing arts was a waste of talent; merely a mundane occupation, not a significant achievement for someone with such illustriously pure blood. "All potions and no power" was their derisive cry. In their opinion not even their insipid feuding Norman cousins, the Malfoys, would stoop that low.

Seren's thoughts drifted back to her childhood; about how much her parents had underestimated her, and how much they did not know about even themselves. At the age of six, while exploring a seldom-used room of her family's ancestral house, Seren discovered a hidden door to a long-forgotten storeroom stashed with texts and scrolls heavily laden with dust. Since the day she had found it she began jealously squirrelling it away among her own things, parchment by parchment, tome by tome, until she had eventually emptied the store. There were journals and letters and hundreds of handwritten books of spells (duplicate volumes in Welsh and French) that had gone unread and unspoken for what Seren assumed must have been at least a century. Each volume of magic had been neatly marked with either one of two different family seals; the Emrys' Welsh dragon or the serpent-bound fleur-de-lis of Malfoy, and each one signed with the copyist's spidery initials "T. S. P".  The presence of these seals had always seemed strange to Seren, for the two families had despised each other long before she was born. The secret to what might have happened between them that had driven them to rivalry - when at one time, very long ago, they had obviously been close enough to share a library of some of the most complex and overtly Dark magic Seren could possibly imagine - was a considerable mystery to her. There was no one to whom  she could turn to for answers however. She knew full well that if anyone discovered such a store of Dark and illegal magic it could mean either the rest of her life in Azkaban Prison, or a reign of horror by whoever unlocked its secrets. Yet at one time there had been one person whom she would have trusted and would gladly taken the risk with; but much to her dismay, she never got her chance.

Seren glanced at the clock on her desk and regretted the late hour; there would be no time to search her ancestors' library for answers that night.

Although full of regrets, she was quite happy to have eventually severed all family ties entirely. The potent name her parents had given her, Seren, Welsh for 'star', was their attempt to instill greatness in her life, to give her power over her own destiny. It was for those ends that, when Seren was only a child of 15, they introduced her to the Dark Lord. Her naïve hunger for knowledge quickly fuelled her admiration of Voldemort, and she took to him like a moth to a flame. She had accepted the Mark of the Death Eaters eagerly, assuming she was party to his truest elite, and that someday He would impart some of His great wisdom to her. Instead, much to her slowly dawning remorse, He had given her nothing more than the rank of a lowly thug; an offer He did not permit his disciples to refuse.

Upon receiving her post at St. Mungo's it had become Seren's duty to Voldemort to ensure that those who had thought they had narrowly escaped His wrath and found sanctuary, hadn't. But which was worse, she thought sadly: a trip to Azkaban for doing his bidding, or brutally and ruthlessly tortured into insanity or even death for refusing? Much to her relief however, she was only one of many lesser agents and was never confided in nor called upon very often. This did not surprise Seren, since those who crossed the Dark Lord generally didn't survive long enough to reach the hospital in the first place.

Seren shuddered, rose from her chair and pulled a heavy black travelling cloak over her slim shoulders. As she headed toward the door, she caught her aging reflection in the long mirror behind it. Once upon a time she had thought herself beautiful. Her skin was flawless and unusually pale, her large dark almond-shaped eyes a shimmering bronze-green, her shapely garnet red lips once the object of many a man's desire. In sharp contrast though, as a child she had been unremarkable; a proverbial ugly duckling. Her eyes had seemed too large, her brows too thin and her skin too waxen. Her long thick bluntly-cut black hair hung shapeless and awkward about her shoulders like a comic book drawing, and by the age of eight it had earned her the mocking nickname 'Cleopatra'. Coupled with her extreme shyness, her unseemliness had been her downfall; the one boy she truly adored, her first and only genuine love, her would-be school sweetheart never even knew she existed. And it had torn her apart.

Though what had the eventual blossom into womanhood brought her? A curse of manipulative, shallow men in search of nothing more than another notch on their bedpost, and a life of disappointment, distrust, and bitterness. By her late 20's she had at last traded her veil of shyness for an icy mask of disdain; and as she looked into the mirror, now in her mid-30's, she was sure her face was losing its ability to conceal its troubles. She scowled at her reflection and snatched her handbag from the door handle. She snapped the cloak over her shoulder, flung open the door, and strode out into the hall in a scourge of black and green.


Author's Note: The name "Emrys" is derived from the legendary wizard Merlin (son of a Welsh princess and a demon/incubus). The life of Merlin Ambrosius a/k/a 'Myrddin Emrys' (Welsh) is written of in the Historia Regum Britanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth.


III

"My Lord -" Snape took one slow, careful step to the side of Lord Voldemort, the rickety rotting boards of the Shrieking Shack beneath him groaning with age.

From their hiding place in a far corner of the room, at the entrance of a secret tunnel concealed both by an Invisibility cloak and a large rotting crate, three teenagers watched in mute terror. Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley had crammed themselves through the narrow passageway to the shack and waited silently for an opportune moment to move. Before them stood Lord Voldemort, accompanied closely by a great, thick, coiled snake floating captive in a strange transparent, enchanted sphere. Opposite him stood Professor Snape, his face like a death mask, marble white and still.

In the weak light of a solitary oil lamp the shadows across Voldemort's flattened reptilian face made it appear even more grotesque and menacing. His expression was placid, but behind his unnaturally red eyes he burned with rage. The great wand, the Elder Wand, which he had stolen from Dumbledore's tomb, did not possess the power he had expected. Something was wrong. And Voldemort was not one to easily accept failure.

"The Elder Wand cannot serve me properly Severus, because I am not its true master."

Voldemort's tone was distracted and calm as he casually looked at the great wand, but Snape was not so foolish as to let down his guard.

"The Elder Wand belongs to the wizard who killed its last owner, " he continued. Voldemort slowly shifted his eyes from the wand to his servant.

"You killed Albus Dumbledore. While you live, Severus, the Elder Wand cannot be truly mine."

"My Lord!" Snape protested, cautiously raising his wand.

Snape's hand was steady, his eyes were still, but inside his chest his heart churned with fear. He fixed his eyes on the massive snake floating ominously beside Voldemort in her heavily protected orb, and he was reminded of Dumbledore's words:

"There will come a time when Lord Voldemort will seem to fear for the life of his snake."

But Snape was trapped - he knew he could not strike either of them. If he managed to kill or disable one, the other would surely kill him instantly. And if he cast a spell and missed...

"It cannot be any other way," explained Lord Voldemort. "I must master the wand, Severus. Master the wand, and I master Potter at last."

Voldemort sliced the air with his wand, directing its point at Snape, but it did nothing. Expecting the worst, Hermione instinctively twisted towards Harry in a convulsive movement and buried her face in Harry's arm. As she did so, she had unwittingly pulled the Invisibility cloak with her, uncovering Ron's head.

Voldemort held his wand up slowly, examining it.

Taking advantage of his Master's pause, Snape's sharp black eyes flicked anxiously around the room while he felt the empty pockets in his robes, searching for something, anything, useful.

Think, Severus... think!

In the far corner behind a large crate, at the extreme edge of his vision he spied a shock of red hair. He shifted his gaze back to his Master, careful to keep his expression stiff and unreadable.

Weasley... he mused, If Weasley is here, then Potter may be as well. But no, if he is, then why has he not yet...

But he was wasting time. Snape decided Voldemort would be the deadlier target; he would take his chances with the snake afterwards, but not without making certain assurances first. Acting swiftly, his gaze set firmly on Voldemort and careful to keep his mind clear of emotion, he angled his wand and focused his thoughts in the direction of the crate.

Imperio...

Voldemort's glassy serpentine face seemed to be lost in thought. For a moment Snape speculated that perhaps he had been reprieved; then the sudden outrage in his Master's fierce red eyes made their intentions dangerously clear. Instantly the snake's hovering transparent cage tumbled through the air. Before Snape could do no more than yell, it had completely encased his head and shoulders. Voldemort unleashed a piercing hiss, and the snake lunged.

There was a terrible scream. Hermione turned her gaze back to the room, still clutching Harry, and watched in horror as Snape's face lost what little colour it had left. It whitened as his black eyes widened, as the great snake's fangs pierced his throat, as he struggled and failed to free himself of the enchanted cage, as he fell to his knees with the snake clamped to his flesh in a deadly grip.

"I regret it", said Voldemort coldly as he looked down at his former servant. He pointed his wand at the snake in her starry cage, which drifted upwards, off Snape, and followed him as he turned towards the door. Dark blood gushed from the two fang wounds as Snape slumped sideways onto the floor, grasping his throat, convulsing and gasping for air.

Voldemort swept from the room without so much as a backward glance, the serpent in its floating sphere wafting behind him. Then he was gone.

A few metres away from Snape's crumpled body, Harry's shape quietly emerged as he removed the Invisibility cloak and entered the room. Rapt with horror, neither Harry nor Hermione had heard the rapid scuffling of hands and feet hurrying back down the shack's secret tunnel only moments before, nor the sharp crack that followed them at the edge of the grounds.

Continue to Part 2