The Innocent and Damned

A/N: My thanks to Indigofeathers, Anastasia, and Melenka, for their assistance with this chapter.

10: The Innocent and Damned

In the torchlight, the drifting seeds were the same color she was.

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Outside the safety of the groaning stone keep, the wind whipped the moonlit walls and windows of the sleeping castle.

In a tower beyond the reach of the others, isolated by a trick of architecture, a stone finger pointing at the sky, behind a cracked window under a feathered counterpane on sheets without the smallest wrinkle, Hermione slept.

From beneath the ground, from the rocky depths bearing the weight, a single memory drawn upward, forward from an eternal past, cycling forth, spiraling higher, whispering silently through lifeless halls, past sleeping portraits, recoiling without waking, the slowly wavering mists untouched by the force of its formless, endless passage.

Ron's body turning to smile at her...

Her head tossed on the pillow.

"You know you want to."

I shouldn't hear it, he has no voice, he's dead, he's dead, he's –"

----

The wind rose to a scream, and in the darkness beneath the wind, Horace Slughorn's eyes opened wide.

----

"– dead, he's –"

"I'm not."

Dark.

Lips and breath moving on her skin, masking the howling rage of the rising wind, and, held in the Darkness beneath its scream, she forgot to remember her name.

----

Severus tossed, the sheets and blankets a snarling tangle of knots, the tendrils licking at his ankles, at his thighs, over and around his arms, pinning him with his own weight to a mattress that bore his impression where his body had lain for years, a dread weight upon him unmoving in the darkness; no less emblazoned, no less bound than the Dark Lord's soul in Potter's scar.

But deep within his dreams he knew the word and had long-since found it would bring about the end.

"Lumos."

And he was awake and methodically readjusting the blankets when he heard a soft tapping at his door.

Belting his dressing gown, he padded across the stones worn smooth under his bare feet and opened the door.

"Severus." Poppy inclined her head. "Something's wrong."

"Slughorn?"

She nodded grimly. "He's not dying. And he should be."

Severus felt at his pocket for his wand and followed her into the darkened corridor.

The Bloody Baron swept toward them as they entered Slughorn's chambers. "There's been no change. I must awak–"

The rest of his words were swallowed by the ceiling, but neither witch nor wizard noticed, focused as they were on the elderly wizard's wide, staring eyes.

"How long has he been this way?" Severus asked, his eyes narrowing as he closed the distance to Slughorn's bedside.

"A few minutes – I came in search of you once I suspected."

He leaned over the tight, unmoving form, senses alert, the skin prickling on the back of his neck.

"Is it... ?" Poppy could not bring herself to complete the question.

Severus nodded once, curtly, hesitating only briefly before muttering a spell under his breath.

Slughorn's body relaxed slightly, but his eyes remained open, staring at the ceiling.

Poppy shot Severus a startled, questioning look, but his eyes were shuttered and he said nothing.

The Bloody Baron returned through the wall, and Minerva entered moments later. Seeing Severus' and Poppy's grim faces, the headmistress stepped back and drew her slight form rigidly upright. "What is it?"

Neither witch nor wizard replied at first; then, at Severus' deferential nod, Poppy raised her chin slightly and glanced at the ceiling.

Minerva's eyes followed the Healer's, but she discerned nothing and shook her head. "What, Poppy?"

"He was dying, Minerva. His eyes opened, and fixed on the ceiling, in the way that they do sometimes..." She swallowed.

Minerva nodded. They had all seen the stares of the dying, fixing on nothing as though in leaving they could glimpse within it some significance, some importance that eluded those whose eyes were veiled with living.

Poppy continued, "... and I thought he would go, but then he... he stopped."

"He stopped?" Minerva blinked. "He stopped dying? Is he still alive, then?"

The Healer opened her hands, then let them fall. "I can't say, for sure."

"No," Severus spoke quietly. "He is not alive, but neither is he really dead."

Minerva opened her mouth to speak, but Severus was already turning to the Baron, hissing, "Granger."

The Baron nodded and zoomed out of the room, bearing in a direct angle for the professor's tower.

"What? What is it, Severus?"

He sat heavily in a chair and ran his fingers harshly through his hair. "The Dark Arts, Minerva."

The atmosphere in the dim chamber seemed to shrink inward, away from itself, away from him.

"Once you allow them to touch your mind, you are never free from the temptation."

Minerva and Poppy exchanged a glance, their hands twitching toward their wands.

Severus laughed, a dark, mirthless chuckle. "Resisting temptation is the first lesson for those who would touch the Dark Arts. Those who do not learn it do not survive as long as I have."

The women's embarrassed hands fell to their sides.

"Then Hermione..." Minerva breathed.

"If she has never acknowledged to herself what she did, Minerva, then she has no way to control it now."

"Then she must be stopped," the headmistress said, eyeing Slughorn's unmoving form with growing horror.

Minerva's words echoed in the silence as the three awaited the Baron's return, but between the echoes, Severus' mind supplied the word a younger Minerva would have used: "Helped."

Minerva found herself toying with the heavy ring she wore. It spun loosely, its band cool satin between her fingers. The longer she remained in the lower levels of the castle, the colder the metal grew; she felt the familiar dull ache start in her knuckles as the ring seemed to leach the warmth from her very blood.

She exhaled impatiently and muttered, "Whatever can be keeping him?"

Neither Severus nor Poppy moved. Their heads were bowed, both of them, and all of them were lost once again in the contemplation of their own hands.

After a long, choking stillness, the Baron drifted slowly through the outside wall, his hand coming last. It was held by another, smaller hand.

The tiny ghost wafted hesitantly behind him, one hand reaching upward to grasp his, the other remaining outside.

She leaned up and appeared to whisper something to the Baron, but the living heard nothing.

The Baron opened the window, and the little ghost gave an echo of a smile, as if in thanks, drawing her other hand through the opening.

In her tiny hand she held the bare, seedless flower stem, and she drifted forward and laid it on Professor Slughorn's chest.

She gazed at him sadly before turning to drift out the window.

After a moment, the Baron spoke. "The wind has died," he said.

Some dry corner of Minerva's mind registered that he sounded like a centaur again. "And Professor Granger?" she asked, with no small asperity.

"Asleep. Soundly, to all appearances, but the bedclothes are much disturbed."

Although he kept his head bowed, under his hair, Severus raised his eyes.

The Baron perceived his glance. "I sent the little one in to check," he added, apparently to no one in particular.

Neither Minerva nor Poppy caught the deep, brief flare in Severus' eyes before he spoke.

"Something stopped her," he said quietly. "She was reaching for him, and something stopped her."

The witches looked at him, confusion and alarm warring in their features.

Severus continued, "I fear that Professor Granger has discovered how to break a soul in a way that doesn't require murder. I fear it very much indeed."

Poppy recoiled, but Minerva merely raised her eyes to look directly into his face for a long moment.

"But why? Why would she do such a thing?" Poppy asked, the pitch of her voice rising with her alarm to a tone never heard from those in her profession.

"Because she has before, Poppy," Minerva said quietly.

Poppy started to speak again, but Minerva laid a hand on her arm. "I shall explain in a moment," she said.

"She has before, insofar as we know, Minerva, but that's not it, not entirely," Severus stated, his lips forming a thin line as his mind raced behind eyes that were suddenly old, suddenly tired.

Both women glanced at him, then back at their hands, certain only that they did not wish to hear his next words.

"No, not even the seduction of Darkness working in the mind can account for this, not fully, or it would have been tried before. She is repeating a past action, I think, in a desperate and probably unconscious attempt to undo something that cannot be undone."

"Severus, whatever do you mean?" Minerva asked, her throat suddenly dry.

Careful to keep his voice even, he said, "I mean that she is a Gryffindor, with a Gryffindor's honor, Minerva, but one whose mind is tainted, and the taint was left to fester." He paused for a moment, then continued, "I believe her to be experimenting – testing whether or not a soul can be removed without a death."

"Can she be stopped?" Minerva barked, bracing herself on the nearest wall.

"I've protected him as well as I can, Minerva. No," he responded to the question she was about to ask, "no, you have no wish to know how I did it. None at all," he finished, leaning his head into his hands as his wand clattered to the floor.

The taste of the stasis spell he had cast on Slughorn lingered acrid in his mouth: smoky, overripe, an aftertaste of lemon, fallen, left too long lying in the dust.

Damn you, Albus, he thought. Damn you straight to the abyss, and beyond.

For he knew now, with absolute certainty, that it did not matter that Albus had remained alive, had required everything of him in a deadly sham, a distracting spectacle; but even as he realized that much with certainty, for the first time in twenty-two years he also knew that it mattered a great deal that he had lived.

Potter had failed, his promise smothered by the cloying naiveté of Dumbledore's belief in the power of blind innocence; he had failed, and a darker love had swept into the vacuum of his failure – knowledgeable, silent, surrendering to Darkness to do for Potter what he dared not dream do himself.

Hermione Granger had not killed Ron Weasley, but she had accepted the sacrifice of his soul in the name of his best friend.

Severus had no doubt she'd been acting by prior arrangement.

He had some idea how that worked.

She had perverted her own innocence, preserving them all in one blinding moment of panic, and had spent the last twenty-two years willfully ignoring her own painstaking reconstruction of how she had done it.

He knew now what she searched for on the ceiling.

It wasn't something saw, or something she hoped to see.

No, she wanted to see nothing – the nothing that even now transfixed Slughorn's unblinking stare.

She was too young to want to die, but too smart not to know she was already buried.

And her hand was on the cornerstone, and it was moving, and he felt it move.

And a harsh wail of searing siren song, and he felt its call, and he ached softly, urgently, to cover her hand, so smooth, so small, with his own, and help her push.

He wanted to touch her hand, to feel her skin, warm, alive, to feel the deep, cold stone of the castle bow and shudder under the betrayal of their touch.

A rush of perspiration on his skin, drying instantly to salt.

In a sudden, fluid motion, he retrieved his wand and swept from the chamber.