For All Practical Purposes, the Truth

Disclaimer: All the good stuff belongs to JKR. The rest is mine.

13 For All Practical Purposes, the Truth

He summoned up his driest, most skeptical tone.

"Miss Granger, I am aware that I was not the most... nurturing of teachers. And you were certainly an exceptionally annoying pupil. But I think I would remember casting a hex which blasted part of your face off."

That had sounded less unkind in his head, but she seemed more puzzled than offended.

"You don't remember how you got to St Mungo's?"

He shook his head. "I woke up shackled to the bed, with an Auror on either side of me and a Mediwitch digging round enthusiastically in my neck. They didn't bother with explanations." Too busy trying to keep me from hexing them to shards and escaping through the window, bed and all.

"And the Shrieking Shack? You remember that?"

"I remember the Dark Lord setting that accursed snake on me. Do you ever see Longbottom? You must thank him for me...I understand he was the one who finally lopped its bloody head off. Wish I could have been there to see that."

"Do you remember Harry being there? In the shack, I mean, not at St Mungo's."

"Yes." He stifled a twitch of discomfort at the embarrassing memory of that desperate and maudlin exchange. "But that's the last thing I remember. And I don't recollect your being there at all."

"Well, I was. And after Harry and Ron left, it was just you and me."

"You stayed behind?"

She colored slightly. "Not right away. There was this...message from Voldemort, sort of broadcast, and we all three started back to the castle. But just as we were leaving, I saw...or thought I saw...a movement, just the tiniest bit, so I turned back."

"Why?" His voice was harsher than he had intended, but his throat felt clamped shut, and it was all he could do to force the word out.

"I thought there was a chance you might still be alive."

"And preparing to use my last iota of strength to throw a Killing Curse after you and your little friends?"

She looked surprised. "No. I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to save you."

He snorted in disbelief. "Why in the world would you do that?"

She grimaced. "That's exactly what Ron said. Well, not exactly...he was a bit more colorful about it, as I recall."

He imagined her hanging back, and Weasley shouting imprecations at her. What a thick-headed lump that boy was...he'd had a treasure like Granger close at hand for years, and all he could think to do was wheedle her into doing his homework for him.

"Why, then?" he asked. "There was a war on. I was the enemy, and I'd been conveniently dispatched by what I believe is known as 'friendly fire.' Why not just leave, and let nature take its course?"

"You weren't the enemy. Not really."

"No. But you could hardly have known that at the time."

She looked away for a few seconds, then back at him. "It just seemed like such a... such a waste, and I couldn't bear it. To have the chance to help you, and not do it...to just let you die, when you might live... how could I do that?"

"Quite easily, I should have thought."

"Perhaps you don't know me very well, then."

"Perhaps not. Perhaps I've greatly overestimated your intelligence."

She looked stung, and he cursed himself. Why the fuck was he sniping at her? The girl was telling him how she had saved his life...saved his life...and he was snapping at her like a cornered dog.

It was just that it made him so bloody uncomfortable. He hated gifts, because there was invariably some self-serving motive at the back of them. Some craven sycophancy, sucking up to the Dark Lord's right-hand man. Or the engendering of a debt against some future day of reckoning. Or a trap set to make him look a fool in front of his classmates.

Nothing was ever, ever free. There was always a price, and the longer the payment was deferred, the higher the eventual cost.

To hear her say so artlessly that it would have been a waste to let him die filled him with shame and a weary sense of dread. He had wanted to be done, had thought that serving out his time in Azkaban would make him, at last, quits with the world and beholden to no one. And now she was telling him he had incurred...while unconscious!...a debt so appallingly vast he could not hope to repay it.

First Shacklebolt's extortion, and now this. He felt as though a giant were sitting on his chest.

"Go on," he said.

"There was so much blood, I thought you must have a huge wound somewhere. But when I got your shirt off, I couldn't find anything else...just the two punctures in your neck."

She paused and drew a deep breath.

"I almost healed them shut. I thought the bleeding was the problem, you see. I hadn't got any Dittany, but I had my wand out, ready to try Episkey, and I suddenly realized that no simple bite would bleed like that, and it must be the venom causing it."

"And closing them would have made it worse."

"Yes, exactly. It would have sealed the venom inside, and you would have died for certain."

"Indeed." He suppressed a shudder. Nagini's venom would have digested him, a meal saved for later, until he was nothing but a liquid-filled sack made of skin.

"I didn't know any spells for drawing out venom. We learned antidotes to ingested poisons in your class, but nothing about bites or any sort of injected toxins. I didn't know what to do."

"Yet, clearly, you did something."

"Yes." She looked somewhat abashed. "I sucked on the wound."

"You what?"

"Sucked on it. To try to get as much of the venom out as I could." The shock must have shown on his face, because she laughed shakily. "What can I say, it seemed a good idea at the time. I had to lie down next to you and put my mouth to your neck like a vampire, and it was a good thing Ron had already left with Harry, or I'd never have heard the end of it."

"What on Earth were you thinking?"

She gave another little semi-hysterical laugh. "That I was so glad my parents were dentists."

He stared at her, beginning to wonder if she'd come a bit unhinged.

"My Aunt Jean? The one in America that used to sing to me all the time? She meant well, but some of the songs were really frightful, the kind of thing that gives kids nightmares. I mean, I love her, but she had no children of her own, and, well... there was one she used to sing me about a child that was so skinny that it went down the plug-hole while its mother was giving it a bath. I was terrified of the bath for months."

More than a bit, perhaps. She seemed to have wandered completely off the track, and he looked questioningly at her.

"Oh, right, dentists. Well, there was another song, an American folk song about a young couple. The husband is mowing a field and gets bitten in the heel by a snake, and his wife sucks out the venom. And then the last line goes, 'But Molly had a rotten tooth, and so the pizen killed them both.' I used to think about that when I brushed my teeth, that I had to take care of them because when I grew up I might have to save my husband from a snakebite."

He dropped his face into his hands. It had undoubtedly been the saving of him, that impulse to draw the venom from his neck into her own mouth. But Nagini was no ordinary viper, and her venom needed no breach in the body's natural boundaries to wreak its destruction.

"Oh, god," he said, into his hands.

"It didn't hurt, you know," she said. "For a long time, I didn't know it was affecting me at all. It didn't even taste especially bad...just a sort of sickly-sweet taste. And not only was I taking in and spitting out great mouthfuls of it, I'd been lying with the right side of my face in the puddle where you'd started to bleed out before we'd got there."

Oh, Merlin's hoary beard, why hadn't she just left him to die?

"But it didn't hurt at all," she repeated, as if that somehow made it all right. "There was just a tingling feeling, and then that part of my face went numb. I didn't pay any attention to it, because I knew I had to get you to hospital, and you were way too heavy for me to lift, and I'd only ever side-alonged anyone twice, and the first time I did it Ron got Splinched, plus I'd no idea how to manage it at the same time as a Mobilicorpus, and..."

She paused in this headlong narrative and took a deep breath.

"I just put my arms round you and rolled over."

He gave a little nod of satisfaction. A very resourceful girl, our Miss Granger.

"And took me to St Mungo's."

"Right. Which was chaos, absolute chaos. We landed in the reception area of A&E, and there were injured people everywhere, bleeding and screaming and groaning. Not a Healer in sight. I left you on the floor, and started off to find someone who could help you, and then... the room went very dark and I just sort of fell over, and the next thing I knew it was three weeks later."

"And did they ask you about what had happened to me?"

"No one made the connection between us. They assumed I'd been damaged in the battle by some sort of hex, and kept me asleep for most of the reconstructive work. When Harry and Ron came to see me, I asked about you, and Harry said you'd been taken off to the hospital wing at Azkaban as soon as you were fit to travel."

"And that's all he said?"

Her mouth was a tight line. "That's all he said then. A few weeks later he told me that there had been a trial...a very short one, since you pleaded guilty. Which I still don't understand. At all."

"I was guilty."

"Like fuck you were. There's guilty, and there's guilty. You could have fought it."

"To what end?"

"Freedom. Justice."

He shook his head. "Don't you remember what it was like, those first few months? All those fools who had buried their heads in the sand while the Dark Lord rose to power...they were out for blood, now that he was safely dead. They would never have let me go free. And if they had, where would I have gone that some mob of righteous citizens wouldn't have seized upon the first opportunity to tear me to pieces? Look what happened to Thorfinn Rowle. I was probably safer in Azkaban."

"Truth, then."

"Hermione." He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes briefly. Had he ever been this idealistic and naïve? Even as a boy?

He felt profoundly tired, and old.

"When people are determined to believe something...when they want with all their hearts for it to be true...then it might as well be true. It becomes, for all practical purposes, the truth. And the truth is that I murdered Albus Dumbledore. That is the one salient fact that will always be associated with my name; in fact, it will probably be written on my tombstone."

"Not all killing is murder," she said stubbornly. "You could have proved it. There was evidence."

"Was there?" He raised an eyebrow.

"You gave those memories to Harry," she said.

"And he showed them to you, did he?"

"Well... no. He said they were in a safe place. But he told me what was in them."

"When? Before the trial?"

"No," she admitted. "Afterwards. We had a bloody great row about it."

"Did you now? Do tell."

She had begun, strangely enough, to cry. "I couldn't believe he hadn't spoken in your defense. I called him an ass, and a coward, and a hypocrite, and said if he was willing to sell you out after what you had done for him he was no better than...than Voldemort."

"That was a bit hyperbolic, don't you think? And let's be clear...I did nothing for him."

"You protected him! You helped him!"

"What I did, I did for his mother. Never for him."

"As if that makes a scrap of difference!"

"It does to me." He looked hard at her. "Understand this: I went willingly to Azkaban. I had done terrible things, Hermione, and allowed even more terrible things to happen by my own inaction. And if, as you seem to think, I didn't deserve to be punished for killing Albus, there was certainly enough guilt on my conscience to warrant the sentence I was given."

A dull pounding had begun behind his eyes. He stood, and was suddenly aware of the weight of the tiny notebooks in his trouser pockets.

"I should be getting back," he said stiffly. "I...thank you. I am in your debt, it would seem; I apologize for having caused you injury."

"Don't be an idiot," she said fiercely, stepping towards him and holding out her hand.

But he had already begun to turn, and before she could reach him, he was gone.

A/N

My betas, corianderpie and exartemarte, are made of win.

Songs referenced in this chapter: Mother's Lament, an old music hall song you can hear performed by Cream here: http://youtu.be/zwEPCd0wtEI

Springfield Mountain, an American folksong supposed to have originated in Connecticut. You can read about it here http://www.lizlyle.lofgrens.org/RmOlSngs/RTOS-SpringfieldMountain.html and hear it sung (by a woman who sounds British) here: http://youtu.be/4abM0CNcGrg .