The Same Dismal Destination

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14 The Same Dismal Destination

He stayed away for a full week, then turned up again just as Hermione was considering setting off in search of him. He walked in through the side door of the lab...after a perfunctory knock that he didn't await an answer to...just as if that unsettling conversation, and the ensuing week of silence, had never happened.

She was sitting on a stool at one of the lab tables, casting Cushioning Charms around a vial of the Invisibility Potion before packing it for shipment. He came round the corner of the table and picked up the discarded "Love Potion No 9" label, which she had replaced with one that read "Poção de Invisibilidade."

"Where were you keeping those?" he asked, without preamble. She opened her mouth, then shut it again, momentarily dumfounded by this abrupt plunge back into the conversational waters.

"Unless you'd rather not say," he added.

"Oh! No, that's not it. Hidden compartment behind the wine rack," she said. "Anything iffy or secret goes in there until I send it out." Then, after a pause, "Severus..."

He held up a hand. "Don't."

"But I just..."

"Hermione. I've made my peace with it. Best to just get on with things." He unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. She noticed that he rolled the left one just a bit longer than the right, little enough difference that it could have been accidental.

"Okay, then. I was just packing these to send ahead of us to Brazil." She gestured toward a pile of bundles in one corner of the room. "If you'll reduce those and put them in a single box, I'll label it. I've got a freight owl ordered for tonight, so it can all be waiting for us when we get there."

"Why not just take them with us when we go? It won't hurt them to travel through a Portkey."

"We're not Portkeying."

He looked at her, disbelief on his face. "You can't mean to Apparate over a distance that great? It's far too dangerous. Surely the international Portkeys aren't that expensive."

"They're not. But I don't use them anymore, because I've heard that the Ministry secretly monitors them. And I don't want those bastards knowing about my comings and goings."

"Understood," he said, "and you'll get no argument from me. But that doesn't make Apparition a safe alternative."

"We're not Apparating," she said. "We're flying."

"You're not serious."

"Completely."

"You'll have to lend me a broom, then, unless you're proposing that we go in tandem. Which we might have to do, now I think of it, so we can take turns sleeping. Not to mention that it's nearly November and we'll freeze our collective bollocks off. It must take, what, three or four days?"

"On brooms it might, but we're going in an aeroplane. Which takes about a day."

He was silent for a moment. "That still doesn't explain why we can't take all our things with us. You're allowed baggage on aeroplanes, surely?"

"Of course you are, and we'll be taking suitcases for our clothes. But nothing that has to be Reduced. Or Disillusioned in order to get it through customs," she said, indicating the potion vials.

"Because?"

"Because magic and electronics are a dangerous mix. Simple electrical devices seem to work all right in the presence of a small amount of magic, but aeroplanes are controlled by very sensitive navigational equipment, and any spells or magical emanations could interfere with them."

"You know this for a fact?"

"As it happens, no. It's only a working hypothesis; would you like to be the first to test it? Be my guest. I can keep a broom in the air...just barely...but a hundred tons of aluminium and perspex and hysterical Muggles? No, thank you."

He exhaled forcefully. "When are we leaving, then?"

"Day after tomorrow. Have you got your passport with you?"

"It's at the hotel; I'll bring it."

"Do the Ministry know you're in Spain?"

"I think not. They certainly know I'm out of the country, but I Apparated to France before Portkeying here, so they haven't got any way of knowing where I am. Unless, as you suspect, they're monitoring the foreign Portkeys. But you know there's no love lost between the French and British Ministries, so I rather doubt that you're correct in that particular case."

"Well, then. We'll need the use of some owls so you can keep in touch and not arouse their suspicions." She thought for a minute. "Our flight has a stopover in São Paulo, and I know a witch there. Maybe she can meet us at the airport and lend us a few. How often are you supposed to check in?"

"Once a week should do it."

"Really? I would have thought they'd have you on a shorter leash." That had sounded rather ruder than she had intended, and she immediately amended it. "I mean, aren't they afraid you'll just do a runner?"

"They've taken precautions," he said, and something in his tone forbade further enquiry.

"Well, then," she said brightly, "All that's left is for you to pack your bags. You get one big one to check in, and one small one to take with you onto the plane. No liquids or sharp objects in that one...just a change of clothes, your toothbrush, and something to read. You can use my toothpaste."

"Any other instructions, Matron?"

She stuck out her tongue. "Don't be difficult. I've done this before, and you haven't, so it makes sense for me to take charge. And for God's sake pack some lightweight clothes, or you'll be sorrier than you know once we get there."

******

In the event, he was glad enough of her officiousness; it was oddly comforting in such unfamiliar surroundings. The airport was insanely crowded, with people either scurrying about like voles or standing in endless queues. A bit like the Ministry in the final days of Voldemort's ascendance, now he thought of it. Except that at the Ministry, there were actual sentient beings who transacted business with you, instead of a rank of featureless computer monitors. He saw an elderly couple in some sort of tribal dress, peering apprehensively at one of the screens and chattering back and forth in an unfamiliar tongue, and he felt a pang of empathy. There but for the grace of Miss Granger go I, he thought.

So he followed behind her like a dim-witted uncle, hauling their two large suitcases while she managed the smaller bags. They stood in one queue until she coaxed a computer into spitting forth their tickets, then in another where he hefted the suitcases onto a scale and relinquished them to a functionary, and finally in a third to undergo a thoroughly undignified security inspection.

"You have to ask yourself," he said, shoving his feet back into his boots, "how bad getting Splinched could possibly have been."

She laughed. "Oh, trust me, the fun is just beginning."

He liked it when she laughed, he realized. She had a snorty kind of laugh, the kind that came from deep in the throat...worlds away from Narcissa's affected tinkle or Bellatrix's demented cackling. There was something so genuine and, well, wholesome about it that it made him remember...almost...being young himself, and laughing at things that were comical rather than cruel.

Thinking about her in this light always brought him round to an uncomfortable consideration of the trajectory of his investigation, and its inevitable intersection with their nascent friendship. The fatal geometry of it intruded into his consciousness for the briefest of moments, until he was able...from long practice...to consign it to that compartment in his brain reserved for things best left unexamined. I'll think about that later, he told himself. Stick it in the vault and just get through today.

"Today," however, turned out to be unpleasantly long, and made up primarily of waiting, in various attitudes of discomfort. Once they had boarded the plane, Hermione firmly refused to permit him even the most benign spells like Muffliato or Amplifico, so he passed a sleepless night with his knees jammed against the seat in front of him and a foam plug crammed into each ear canal.

Hermione, meanwhile, rested her head on his shoulder and slept with the pragmatic opportunism of the veteran campaigner, snoring softly and occasionally drooling onto the thin red blanket that was apparently what passed for bedclothes among Muggle travelers. He wished he had thought to take a dose of Dreamless Sleep before boarding; surely a digested potion couldn't possibly interfere with the workings of the fucking aeroplane.

He was exhausted but unable to rest, his nerves scraped raw from the crowds and noise and strangeness. Try as he might to keep his mental vault sealed, his awareness of her sleeping form, snuggled unselfconsciously into him, contrived relentlessly to prise open the door.

He brushed a curl back from her forehead with a tentative hand. There was a vulnerability to her face that called forth an uncomfortable surge of tenderness in his chest, and with it an answering stab of guilt. And close on its heels came that terrible trapped feeling that had once been his constant companion: the knowledge that what was done was done, what was bound could not be loosed, and whichever way he turned, all doors were closed to him save the one that led back into the darkness.

Through the porthole he could see the inky sea miles below them glittering in the moonlight, stretching out endlessly in all directions. As the hours passed, he examined one possibility after another, searching savagely for the loophole that would let him keep something of his life for himself.

Every path his mind ventured down led to the same dismal destination.

By now he knew from experience exactly how delicately he could dance along the edge of Shacklebolt's orders before his gut would begin to cramp with the initial stirrings of Azkaban's implacable summons. He always kept some titbit in reserve to dispatch the instant he felt the sickness blossom inside him, living constantly barely within the letter of his instructions and just shy of the overwhelming impulse to Apparate back to the gates of Azkaban.

And this, he knew with sudden certainty, he would never do. Could never do.

At first, when it had been simple incarceration, it had been endurable, even cleansing. Life in his cell had had a certain monastic sparseness that had even seemed to him to be an opportunity for atonement, a way to finish paying off, once and for all, the debt he had incurred in his youth. And except for the boredom...which he alleviated by setting himself increasingly difficult intellectual exercises...being deprived of liberty, of comfort, of human companionship...how was that different, really, from his entire life since taking the Mark at seventeen?

But then the Dementors had been returned to Azkaban as its guardians, and his existence there had abruptly changed from simple penance to desperate fear, and the certain knowledge that his sanity was slipping away. His mental barriers were practiced and strong, so he had been able to hold out longer than most, but the erosion was inexorable, and made the more dreadful by his awareness of it.

He would do whatever he had to do to avoid going back. And there lay the bleak reality of it: any strategy he could devise was, at best, temporary. He had ten years left on his sentence, and there was no possible way to spin his current assignment out for more than five or six months at most. Shacklebolt would get what he wanted, Snape's usefulness to him would end, and back he would go.

Except that I will not. I will die first.

This knowledge, he reflected wryly, had a wonderfully focusing effect on the mind: he understood with resignation...and, surprisingly, without too much self-pity...that what he must do now was decide how he would spend what little time remained to him, and how he would bring about his own death when the clock ran out.

Their westward flight had made for an unnaturally long night; by rights, the eleven hours that had passed since they left Madrid should have taken them through the night and well into the morning. Instead, when the flight attendant switched on the cabin lights and announced the imminent distribution of breakfast, it was still pitch-dark outside.

****

A/N: Thanks to my brilliant support team, corianderpie and exartemarte, for sorting out my POVs and antecedents, and setting me straight on the materials from which airplanes are made.