Guilt

"She will be here in two hours. No less."

He was standing in the doorway when she looked up. How long he had been there watching her staring at the ceiling, she had no idea.

"Why can't she come right away? That thing still exists!" She was nearly shouting in her despair. She knew that the emerald was locked in a box that was locked in a cabinet and that Snape had placed several charms over the cabinet to prevent its removal, but that still did not seem like enough. "Every minute that goes by is another chance for that monster to find his way back here! It should have been destroyed years ago!"

His eyes seared into hers. "Miss Flamel," he said with a calm that did not mirror the danger that had flashed in his eyes. "In order for the Dark Lord to return, the emerald would have to fall into the possession of a powerful Death Eater. I have taken every precaution to make sure that does not happen. She will be here soon enough. She has gone to retrieve the Sword of Gryffindor from the goblins. I imagine that the protection of that particular artifact has increased tenfold since the battle, wouldn't you?"

"Don't you see?" she screamed. This time, she couldn't contain her panic. "The emerald has fallen into the hands of two powerful Death Eaters already! We don't have time to wait for the goblins and their nonsense. It needs to be done now!"

"Attica!" he screamed in return. Just as his voice had matched hers in intensity, so did his eyes reflect the panic she knew was evident in hers. He had never seen her lose control like this. Her normally calculating eyes were wild.

"I thought you had placed more trust in me than this. You discerned my true loyalties when Voldemort himself could not. You've known from the beginning whose side I'm on. You know better than anyone the lengths I have gone to to ensure Voldemort's definite demise."

She finally broke eye contact with him and took a deep breath. She wanted to scream in frustration. Instead, she asked a simple question. "But what about me?"

"What about you?" There was a moment of confusion before comprehension dawned. "Attica. You can't possibly think..." He trailed off, leaving the thought hanging poignantly between them.

He suddenly looked weary. "I wish you could see the goodness that I see in you. People make mistakes, Attica. Your only mistake was placing your faith in the wrong person. And one instance of misplaced faith should not constitute lack of faith in yourself. It's what you decide to do with the results of those mistakes that speak volumes to your character. I know you, Attica Flamel. I think I know you as well as any person could. Save Neville Longbottom, perhaps. And I know that your heart is pure. It has been tainted by the power of the Horcrux, but this stain is nothing that cannot be washed clean. Have faith in yourself. You are kind and generous and intelligent. You're also fiercely competitive and driven for perfection. That's who you are. None of those characteristics have receded just because of a mistake that hundreds of others made throughout the course of Voldemort's tyranny."

Attica groaned, mostly out of frustration but also to cease his soliloquy. She could not bear any more of his kind words, nor any more of his ignorance.

"It will be soon taken care of."

She wanted to argue. She wanted to tell him to destroy it now, to get rid of it in whatever improper way he knew how. She wanted to insult his intelligence and insinuate a lack of courage because he had to insist on waiting for a physically unimposing woman to appear and resolve an issue that he should have just dealt with himself. He could burn it, with fire or with potion, he could hex it, he could obliterate the stone with a crude mallet. She didn't care, as long as it was destroyed.

It needed to be destroyed. Even though it was tucked supposedly safely away in a lead-lined box under lock and key in a securely charmed cabinet, its power was still palpable to her. It was pulling on the imaginary string that connected itself to her. With every passing minute, it was pulling harder and harder, tugging, beckoning her to come closer. Voldemort was calling out to her, whispering her name. His voice was at once revolting and tantalizing.

She pressed the heel of her hands into her eyes until she felt pain. She was hoping that physical pain would assuage the emotional pain that was threatening to wholly consume her. "I can feel it, Professor," she whispered. "I can feel it, him, calling me, waiting for me."

"Stop. Do not think about it."

"It is the only thing I can think about," she choked. "Only his voice and the guilt. I try to forget, I try to think of other things, but he continues to whisper to me, reminding me of what I've done." She looked down at the hands that were now wringing themselves in her lap and caught a glimpse of her Dark Mark. She pulled back her shirtsleeve gingerly, exposing the mark in its entirety.

Snape did not respond right away. Instead, he flicked his wand and an ottoman scooted closer to the chair Attica was sitting in. He sat down slowly, his knees almost touching her as he spoke. His voice was surprisingly despondent. "Everyone carries guilt, Attica. Most of the time, it can never fully be absolved. But we can learn to move past it."

She tore her eyes from her mottled forearm and turned her gaze to the wizard before her. "And what if I do not deserve to? Should evil ever get the chance for a peaceful resolution, Professor?"

He arched an elegant eyebrow. "You are not evil, Attica Flamel. Do you think that evil feels such regret? Do you think evil feels remorse? I have only known one wholly evil being in my entire life. That being, obviously, was Voldemort. And I can honestly tell you that the creature never felt remorse once in his pathetic existence. You are completely and utterly different from him, Attica."

"He murdered my parents in cold blood. He was responsible for the deaths of my grandparents. He was the sole source of sorrow in my life, yet I joined him. I left Neville alone and defenseless in order to join his ranks." She paused, searching for the words. When she continued, her voice was tinged with a calm that she did not feel. "I saw so many people die. I watched as Voldemort killed them. I watched the life extinguished from their eyes, and I did nothing. Absolutely nothing." She knew that she did not need to explain this because he had experienced it for himself, but she was admitting it more to herself than to him.

"That was not you," he said simply.

"But it was!" She exclaimed as she slammed her fist onto the end table beside her. She was sick of him making excuses for her. "It was me! I watched and I..." She began to choke again, struggling for the word she was loathe to utter. "I enjoyed it," she snarled.

"The Horcrux..." he began, but she cut him of with a glare.

"It was absolutely me. I cannot hide behind excuses," she said. "The things I wanted, the things I longed for, Professor... My heart is dark."

He pressed his lips into a hard line in an apparent attempt to repress the urge to shake her, to rid her of whatever twisted notion she possessed of herself. He was simultaneously filled with compassion and frustration, arising from a fierce sense of kinship. He believed that he knew exactly what she was feeling, and he felt pity for her because of that, but he knew that it was imperative to restrain those emotions in order to move on with his life. She was an intelligent girl, and he knew that she would be saving them both a lot of heartache if she would only realize that the nonsense she was speaking would not help either of them. "If you had said anything, done anything, to save those people, you would not be sitting in front of me right now. You were his pet, his golden child, but he not would have tolerated your insubordination. You could not have acted any differently than I."

"But you had a noble purpose," she countered, weaker this time. "You were working for Dumbledore, doing what no one else dared to do. I was there for selfish reasons. I was there to..." She couldn't say it. At the beginning of this conversation, she had harbored a hope that she would finally be able to disclose her most severe transgression. She had shared much with this man already, they had shared countless trying experiences with one another, and she had fleetingly fostered the delusion that she would be able to share this with him as well.

"I don't know what else I can say to you to prove that your heart is not shrouded in the darkness that you mistakenly believe to be there," Snape said.

She nodded once. Her face remained passive, as her heart grew cold. Her only hope of redemption was relinquishing the will to redeem her. But she knew that it had been unfair of her to hope that he could save her from this despair. There was no proof of something that was not true. He could not prove something that could not be proven.

He stared at his hands and cleared his throat. "I can say only this," his silky voice was almost inaudible. "You saved me. You saved my life. You did not have to. No one knew I was dying in that decrepit building, and no one would have known if you had turned your back on me and walked away, saving the Elixir for yourself. You gained nothing and lost almost everything in that act of graciousness. You had no need of recognition, yet you saved my life." He looked up at her to observe her reaction to these words. She wanted to turn away from his dark gaze, but it held her, and she found that she could not have looked away even if she had wanted to.

"Why?" he asked.

She shrugged slightly and offered him a rare, lopsided smile. "Because you saved me first. I was only returning the favor." The smile faded as quickly as it had come, and her face returned to her now customarily melancholic expression.

"Elaborate," he said.

"You saved me from the fire," she said simply. He winced, and she knew that he was aware of the dual meaning behind her statement. She was referring simultaneously to the night he carried her away from her burning home and the fact that through his kindness he had saved her from her own personal hell. "I sensed your kindness, even when you tried to hide it. And, you offered to me a reasonable facsimile of what I had lost." Confusion crossed his features only for a second.

"The brewing sessions?"

"I may have been young, but I was more grateful for the time spent in the dungeons than you can ever know. And I'm not sure that I ever thanked you properly."

He shook his head. "There was never any need. I..."

"Put up with a shrewd and meddlesome child simply to restore a semblance of the happiness that had been unceremoniously torn from her life," she finished.

"You cleaned up your messes."

"Would it be so bad to have someone think well of you, Professor?" She shrugged. "Anyway, 'I have never been one to overlook a kindness,'" she said, paraphrasing his own words. She looked at Snape in wonder. While she had not been able to find relief in confessing her sins to the man, he had drowned out the whisperings of Voldemort and allowed her to focus on pleasant memories from her past, even if it had only been for a moment. That in itself was an incredible feat.