Chapter Forty-Six—Bargain

The snow had turned to sludge: white into a patchy grey that grew steadily darker the more he walked over it. Back and forth.

Perhaps he hadn't done it right. He'd once thought himself skilled, but in comparison to others, he'd realised that had been an impressive piece of self-delusion on his part.

Snape sighed heavily, the air twisting as it chilled into a pale, pearly cloud. Maybe not self-delusion. It had been like entering into a circle of people thinking you were better than they at something... anything... only to find that, in fact, you weren't nearly as adept as you thought you were. It stung like acid and made him resentful.

Back and forth, eroding a dark line into the snow in the swale. Slipping in and out of the shadows. Fingers interlaced and palms apart to stop himself from picking at his thumbnail in agitation.

Perhaps he hadn't done it right.

The cold rarely bothered him, but he'd been waiting out here for close to an hour; at first patiently, then irritably, then disappointedly. The snow was trudged to a wet mush that seeped into the cuffs of his trousers and up his legs with a creeping freeze. He stopped pacing. Realistically, how much longer could he wait before he had to give the idea up? For whatever reason, she was not here. She was not going to be here. He turned his head to look in the direction of the castle, hidden behind the rise, and wondered which he was most angry about: that she hadn't understood what he'd asked, or that she had already refused him.

He felt it, that precarious balance that occurred just before a decision, a decision that could go either way, and ached to hold on just that little longer before committing himself. Just another minute. He began to pace once more.

But would it be just another minute? Would it be five? Or ten? It had already been over sixty because he had been telling himself "just another minute" for the past half an hour. He hissed in irritation at his vacillation and swirled to the rise, accepting bitterly the finality of her absence.

A whisper stopped him, the slide of graupel in the distance. He held himself as still as possible and listened, eyes lifted to the crest of the rise. The distinctive crunch of foot in snow as the silhouette loomed above him. He squinted but could make no sense of its form in the poor light. The sky bloomed pendulous clouds that hid any sky-borne illumination so that even the stark whiteness of snow was dulled into a bluish bruise across the land.

The silhouette held steady, a shoulder of mountain that stood fast in the flowing chaos of the world around it, and then it was a flux of black water that coursed into the swale, flicking up white powder as it circled behind him with the speed and fluidity of a cat.

"Still here, Professor?"

She sounded surprised and not a little amused. He turned slowly to face her.

"Only just."

Parr laughed at that, a low-pitched rumble under her voice that echoed in the clearing. He couldn't see her face, but he fancied he could see every one of her teeth bared at him.

"Why out here?"

Snape blinked a few times, wondering how much he should say so early on. "So none other can hear."

The silhouette swelled as she stood straighter, out of her coiled crouch, looming up to the greatest height he'd ever seen her at. "Which of us is it that has something to lose?" she queried, tone deep and thickened into a threatening alto.

"Both."

A pause, then she dropped to her hands to stalk around him in a wide circle, her arms long enough to support her with her back at an angle above the horizontal. Snape turned on his heel to match her speed, determined not to have her hulking behind him where he couldn't see her.

"Interesting. If that is the case, then why do you risk destabilising the already precarious position we find ourselves in?"

"You have something I want."

There was a bullish huff, breath streaming out in pale grey before her bowed profile. "Is that so?" She completed her circle around him and continued to a second with a loping pace.

"And I have something you want."

Parr laughed at that, tossing her head like an equine unbroken to the rein. "I find that unlikely. My needs are very great, Professor, and I've heard many promises that have yet to prove their worth. What could you possibly offer that others haven't already?"

Snape's jaw clenched with a momentary uncertainty, his confidence off kilter from her predatory circling. "I will find her."

Parr stopped abruptly in her tracks. "Tread carefully, Professor," she warned with a deadly exactitude. "I will not have such things bargained so lightly."

"And I do not offer carelessly, Striker," he replied, watching the crisp delineation of her profile against the icy slope. "But I think, perhaps, my need is as great as yours."

She may as well have been a rock set in the ground for the stillness she had locked herself into. There was an agonising pause before she spoke. "And what need is that?"

"Do you agree?" he pressed, fighting the bone-deep urge to move his hand closer to the wand in his pocket, knowing full well it would be useless against her but so honed to its protection that he may well have forsaken the air he needed to breath than deny its reassuring power.

Her head dropped down and away from him, the arcing lines of her face hidden from sight, hair trailing across the snow. "This is not my place," she muttered. "I bargain poorly. I am Striker, not Screen."

"Do you have a choice?"

Her bulk shifted. He couldn't tell if she faced toward or away from him, detail lost in the blackness of her form under the clouded night sky.

Time twisted and flexed, a rope that knotted into unimaginable turns and snarls, a membrane that rippled to the edges of existence and beyond to where instance and eternity merged.

"There is always choice, but some choices are so much harder to make than others. I do what I must," she sighed as if to herself. "What is it you want?"

"To live."

Again, that bullish exhalation. "You seem capable of that already, Professor. I cannot imagine that you would need my assistance for that."

"To survive, then."

Parr pondered on that for some moments. "And how could I increase your chances of that?"

Snape stared into the dark mass in front of him, a hole punched into the air to a place of unfathomable depth, a chasm that could easily claim the life he tried so desperately to hang on to even when the crushing despair of inevitable ruin threatened to drown him. "Teach me how to hide."

Her head swung around slowly and for a brief moment a line of green flame flickered across her eyes. Her silence was question enough.

"Thought. Intention. By necessity my mind must be my own if I am to succeed."

"And which of your three masters do you wish to hide from?"

Three? Snape frowned, wondering if he had misheard her. "There are only two," he reluctantly admitted, a bitter twist to his mouth. "And they are more than enough."

The swelling rumble made him edge back and away from her. "Understand this clearly, Professor. If this is to be done, there must be no secrets. No occlusion. No lies. You enter into this with the understanding that if you mislead me in any way, the bargain is null and void and I will take whatever action I deem necessarily to even the score. I must know who has their hands on your throat, and you must accept that I outrank them all. All three of them."

"I... do not know of a third," he maintained doggedly, muscles tensed in a futile readiness should she decide that he was already attempting to hide a truth from her and cut him down right there and then.

"That may be the case," Parr mused with a surprising mildness. "Nevertheless, I must stand above them all for this bargain to proceed."

"That condition may condemn me to the death I must delay."

"Everyone dies, Professor. Immortality is not in my power to bestow." She actually chuckled, making him blink rapidly at her mercurial changes of mood. "Surely such a great Potions master needs no assistance to put a stopper in death?"

The wry comment made him press his lips together tightly in a flush of chagrin and annoyance. "Death and I have a very special understanding."

"Which is?"

"All debts must be paid. Eventually."

"Ah." Parr sighed in realisation. "The third is the strongest, but not as strong as she thinks she is."

"But strong enough," he noted quietly." Everyone succumbs in the end."

"I do not go where she leads," Parr stated flatly, implacable determination hammered into every word. "No matter how hard she pulls. Yet be aware that if I stand behind you, Dual, I may bring you closer to the end you wish to avoid."

"Avoidance is not the issue, only delay of the inevitable. I am a dead man anyway, whether I discharge my debt or not."

She resumed her circling, the first flakes of snowfall drifting from arctic heights to settle in her tracks. "Then why discharge it at all?"

"If I succeed, my death will be short. If I fail, my death will last a long, long time." Snape turned to follow her on her encirclement. "A poor choice, but a choice nonetheless."

"And how did she trap you into such a choice?"

"I made a mistake, a fatal one, and she showed me what waited for me at the end. I made a bargain, and she agreed."

Parr's steps paused momentarily. "She agreed?" There was a huff of heated exhalation. "Interesting. Perhaps your tongue is more silver than I thought. But then, Death bargains better than I. She is notoriously sly and stubbornly greedy." The shadow paced once more. "You may have lost more than had you not bargained."

"More than my life?"

The snow began to fall thicker, peppering the darkness into a speckled confusion.

"She was going to get that anyway," Parr pointed out, the hidden gleam of her teeth twisted through her words. "But I like a challenge, and nothing gives me greater pleasure than sticking it to Death. Validus quam nex," she hissed. "Name your terms."

"I will find your Handler and in return you must teach me how seevy hide their thoughts."

Parr grunted. "Remus said he would find her. Not a very strong bargain on your side of the table, is it?"

Snape blinked the snow out of his eyes that had begun to drift in a light wind. "Lupin is ill-suited to such a task. He may believe he can do it, but unless I am mistaken, it has been several months...time neither you nor your Handler can afford."

Parr's pacing turned stiff in agitation, her silhouette slipping in and out of clear focus as the snow sighed down faster. "He is not the only one who searches."

"But the months have passed nonetheless, Striker. Of them all, Lupin has the greatest chance of finding her. His lycanthropy buys him access where others are forbidden to go, but that is not enough. He cannot go where I can."

"Remus is a good man, but he is... weak," Parr muttered, the admission coming to her mouth with obvious difficulty. "He is my friend and I owe him much. Another hard choice..." her voice trailed off. "What if he finds her before you? What of our bargain then?"

"I will teach you what they will not," Snape offered, winter's touch trailing down his face and smothering his clothing as if to embrace him into the landscape around him, to absorb him into its bleakness as one of its own.

"And what is that?" She sounded amused at his offer.

"Darkness."

"Why would I need to learn that?"

"Because that's what has your Handler. Because if you and your kind mean to seek protection in magical society, you must know that there are just as many among us that will use you just the way they use others. Because I know how the darkness works better than those who fight against it."

Her laugh was empty, like the space between the splintered teeth of a mountain range, harsh and unforgiving. "So you play both sides, Dual? How apt. But perhaps both sides use you as much as you use them." There was a tired sigh. "We are all tools. You. And I. That is how it has always been."

"Then we will use each other," Snape proposed, "and your Handler will live."

"And you?"

"I will live long enough."

Parr became still again, nothing more than a smudge of blackness to him, her thoughts her own as she turned the offer over in her mind. The connection with her earlier was nowhere to be felt here and now. She was blank to him, an impenetrable wall hiding all. Even had he been able to see her eyes, Snape knew that he would not have been able to divine anything from them.

Refusal was just as likely as acceptance, and he had no way of tipping the balance any further into his favour. Every time he tried to sway her, she dug her heels in, suspicious, cautious, cagey. His desperation to have her agreement concerned him. He hadn't realised how much he had needed what she could give him, weakening him into a reliance he could ill afford. He already depended on others far too much for his own liking. Perhaps her hand would just end up being one more on his throat, one more to squeeze the life out of him with unflinching mercilessness.

"I will ask," she stated roughly. She must have sensed his alarm, taking a few steps towards him, still obscured in body and mind from his perception. "We come as a set, Dual. I do nothing without her consent, but understand that the three of us are all who are to know of this, whether bargain is struck or not. You may play both sides, but you will not play us." The threat was a stark as bare branches against the sky.

He nodded, one step closer to the desired end. "Very well."

"Wait."

And then she was gone. To where, Snape could not tell. She could be ten feet from him or ten miles for all he could see through the snowfall. He had no choice but to do as she said. Parr could teach him to be stronger in mind than he had thought ever possible. He would take anything that would give him an edge over those who used him. She would take anything that would save her Handler. Please, let it be enough.

He curled his numbed fingers into the palms of his hands and shivered, head tipping forward to shield his face from the falling snow. And waited.

This time, he did not hear her approach, but her presence pressed against his mind like a hand on a door.

"The bargain is ill-balanced. We cannot agree to it."

Snape didn't raise his head, the abrupt heaviness that formed inside him causing every bone in his body to petrify under the weight of cruel refusal.

"I cannot give you any more," he told her, defeat saturating into his will like poison. "So be it." He turned to leave.

"You misunderstand."

Her voice halted his departure.

"The bargain favours us too greatly. We cannot agree to it. We owe more than we repay."

Confusion and triumph warred within him for the upper hand at her words. "It bothers you to be advantaged?"

"It is not right. It is not our way. There must be something more."

He smiled. "It is enough."

The contusion bloomed in front of him, a blade held point down toward him. "In your eyes, maybe. Perhaps I can find a way to tip the scale level once more."

Snape shrugged slightly in response.

"Take it." Parr pushed the slender blade closer to him, her bare, elongated fingers wrapped around the hilt. She pulled back and away from him once it sat in his hand. "She wanted you to have it."

The pale metal was blood-warm in his palm. It must have sat next to her skin to avoid the night's chill. It seemed a peculiarly intimate gesture to him. He should have been ashamed at how much that pleased him, but he couldn't deny that victorious sensation as it slithered down his spine and swelled into a perilously sweet licentiousness that caught him off-guard.

"Then we are agreed?" Snape asked, trying desperately to hide the gasp that had found its way into his breathing, trailing the fingers of his free hand down the length of the blade with a smothering cupidity for what it represented.

"We are."

The confirmation made his blood surge with unfamiliar heat.

Parr cleared her throat quietly. "I... ah... am freezing my arse off here, Dual," she whispered, a taint of what sounded like contrition in her voice. "Is there any chance..."

"Get inside," he replied smoothly, his fingers tightening around the hilt of the familiar blade greedily. "If I find you have caught pneumonia, you'll regret it in more ways than one."

This time her laugh held genuine levity. "If you say so, doc," she replied from behind the curtain of swirling white between them. "Don't play out here too long, now." And with that caution, she left Snape clutching his prize, his body tight with a rapaciousness he had no clue as to how to quench.