Chapter Forty-Seven — Role Reversal

A/N: Yes, it's been a painfully long time, but hopefully the length of this chapter makes up for it.

Lupin could hear the shrieking from the floor below. In the split second that it intruded on his awareness, his body had already decided on the course of action to take before his brain had even lurched in the direction of a conscious thought process. He cleared the last flight three steps at a time, hand fumbling for his wand in the only pocket that didn't have holes, and gaped at the scene laid out before him in the infirmary.

Parr was stuck ten feet up the wall, bellowing at the top of her lungs down at her audience of one. At first, Lupin couldn't see what was keeping her up there. Despite having become so accustomed to her immunity to magic, it wasn't her position that was the source of his disbelief. He'd seen her scale the side of a building with nothing more to assist her than hands and feet, but here, even she'd have trouble keeping herself up against the wall with the way she was thrashing her limbs about like a red-faced child pitching a tantrum. There was no mistaking the utter outrage on her face, twisted as it was into a mask of throat-biting fury, the screamed vitriol so forceful that Lupin could see the spittle rain down in the mid-morning sunlight streaming in through the windows. He doubted that the affront had as much to do with the state of her undress as it did being pinned up like a trophy animal that had been shot dead in a Muggle safari hunt.

Lupin sighed heavily and winced as a particularly colourful invective blasted out of Parr's mouth. If she didn't stop struggling, the material that was holding her up would certainly give way and dump her on the floor, totally naked. It wasn't her well-being he was worried about. If she got loose, her captor would find shreds of himself thrown like confetti around the room before he could blink.

The werewolf pocketed his wand and frowned as a headache bloomed behind his eyeballs. Why couldn't these two resist winding each other up? They fought more often than twelve-year-old schoolboys in the playground.

"Christmas spirit seems to be a bit thin on the ground in here," Lupin noted drily during a pause in the tirade as Parr sucked in a breath.

Snape's head swivelled slowly around to fix him with his finest death-glare from between the strands of his hair. "Probably because you drank it all, you noxious, repellent sot." The instrument responsible for sticking Parr to the wall was held lightly in his right hand, the tip resting on the pad of the middle finger of his left. That, coupled with his unmistakably ratty expression, told Lupin that Snape was attempting to make a point about something to Parr. And knowing Parr, she'd probably done something to justify her current treatment.

"Good morning to you, too, Severus. Get up on the wrong side of your lair?" Lupin had to yell to make himself heard over Parr's shouting, which took the edge off his attempt at nonchalance in the face of Snape's surliness. "Must be why you're displaying such impeccable diplomacy."

The black glare narrowed to a thin line.

"Ah, I know what it is," Lupin continued, refusing to be dissuaded by having two holes bored through his skull. "No students to terrorise. Bet you're hating that."

Snape actually bared his teeth, making Lupin blink and amend how close he got to the man. He left a very clear six-foot gap between them as he turned and looked up at Parr. The two men stood, silent, as insults rained down from above. Lupin was inwardly staggered that Parr knew so many words for a man's genitals, but he tried to keep his face as neutral as possible. She gave no acknowledgement of his presence, maintaining her full and vituperative attention on Snape as if her words could carve him into small pieces and then set the bits on fire. Considering some of the language she was using, it was entirely possible she'd achieve just such an effect.

Lupin stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned a bit towards Snape. "What do you call it?"

Snape squinted at him with one eye, curling his upper lip into a sneer. "What?"

Lupin nodded up at Parr. "What do you call it? 'Teaching Methods Series 5'? 'I Have A Short Fuse And I'm Not Afraid To Use It'? 'Near-Nude Descending A Wall'?"

"If you have a point to make, Lupin, it escapes me."

Lupin shrugged slightly, trying to suppress a flush of embarrassment as Parr vowed where she'd shove her fist when she got free. Truly, the woman had worse language than a drunken sailor when the mood took her. "I just thought perhaps you'd given up on Potions and segued into the art world since you have Chara tacked up on the wall like a canvas."

"I don't consider a foul-mouthed, violent harridan a work of art," Snape pointed out snottily.

"Ah, then it must be some form of medical treatment, then," Lupin concluded under a blanket of four-letter words that threatened to smother them both. "After all, I can't imagine why else she'd be pinned to the wall by her underwear in the school infirmary. Have you passed this treatment with Poppy? I'm sure she'd be thrilled to see it in action." He looked around the room. "Actually, where is she?"

"Not here."

"Lucky you," the werewolf muttered, earning him a vicious glower. Lupin knew that Pomfrey would have a fit if she walked in and discovered this in her infirmary, and a part of him craned hopefully towards the possibility that might actually occur sometime soon. He'd love to see an altercation between Pomfrey and Snape and wasn't entirely sure who'd come out on top. Perhaps now would be the chance to find out. He sighed and looked back up at Parr. "I see you've found the loophole around Chara's immunity to magic."

"It proves to be an interesting method of control," was the terse response.

Lupin tried to ignore the burning sensation on the side of his face as Snape continued to stare with the kind of intensity of a cat about to rip a mouse in twain. "You wouldn't need to control her if you didn't piss her off," he mentioned a little crankily.

"Intriguing that your automatic assumption is that I was the instigator, Lupin." Even under the overwhelming volume of Parr's billingsgate, the warning was still blatantly clear in that sinuous, low voice.

Lupin cleared his throat slightly and fidgeted on the spot. "No, one could never imagine that you were a proactive shit-stirrer, Severus. I can't imagine what led me to make such a mistake." He turned his head to look at the man, steeling himself against the inevitable withering of confidence that exposure to those black eyes would incur. "What perceived infraction is Chara guilty of this time?"

"Miss Parr has a problem with boundaries. How I deal with that issue is none of your business."

Lupin's gaze sharpened on Snape's face. He could've been mistaken but he was almost sure that a flush of colour bloomed in the normally-sallow man's cheeks. He covered his surprise rapidly.

"And how long do you intend to leave her up there?"

"Until I hear the required words from her."

Lupin scrunched his face up. "Well, it's obvious those words aren't 'cock', 'wanker' or 'felch'," he muttered. "And I have no idea what 'crack a fat' means." He drew his wand back out of his pocket. "So for the sake of my delicate innocence, I think it's time she came down." He braced himself for the inevitable outrage and perhaps even a Stinging Hex aimed at his groin, but he got his second surprise when a tight smile appeared on Snape's face.

"Go ahead."

Those two languid words gave Lupin sufficient pause to wonder where the trap was. He vacillated as Parr started listing euphemisms for illegal forms of copulation and Snape's involvement in them. He studied the man's expression carefully as if that would give his intentions away, but the smile just widened as the Potions master drew the tip of his middle finger back and forth slowly along the length of his own wand.

Lupin didn't need to look in Snape's direction to know that his insulting smile did nothing but get larger as the werewolf futilely tried to undo whatever charm Snape had used to bond Chara's underwear to the infirmary wall. Lupin had always considered himself quite adept at charms, but everything he tried failed to have any effect whatsoever.

He turned full-face into Snape's derision at his inefficacy and scowled at him. The heavy-lidded eyes and insulting smile said it all: the man had known all along that Lupin would flounder like an inept first-year and was relishing the actuality with an almost perverse delight, the insufferable bastard!

Snape glided across the gap between them until there was less than half a foot separating them.

"Good luck with that," he murmured silkily, sneering down his nose at Lupin, and then side-stepped around him and out of the infirmary like an eel slipping past a rock.

Parr continued to scream obscenities after him for half a minute before she finally gave an indication that she knew Lupin was in the room.

"Hi, Remus. Any chance you could get me down? I've been up here so long my knickers have turned into cheese-wire."

Lupin glared up at her through his greying fringe. "Thanks for that visual. What the hell did you do to piss him off this time?"

The expression on Parr's face was so overdone it may as well have been a clay mask that had a parody of innocence scrawled on it by a four-year-old. "Nothing."

Lupin threw his hands in the air. "Like I believe that for a minute. I'm not getting you down until you tell me what happened."

Parr snorted in amusement, fists on hips, stuck up above him like a bizarre, dangling mannequin. "You weren't doing that anyway!" He continued to stare at her in disapproval until she huffed and relented. "I couldn't help it."

"You never can," was the curt reply. "What did you do?"

"He was bending over!" she cried, shrugging her shoulders awkwardly.

Lupin held up his hand hastily. "Actually, forget it. I don't want to know!"

In the end, Lupin had to track down Flitwick and flush him out of the staffroom, having exhausted everything he could think of to undo the sticking charm. It flummoxed the Charms professor for a few minutes, but before long, Parr's feet were back on the ground and she was enthusiastically rearranging her underwear so that it wasn't quite so intimately invasive.

"Who put her up there?" Flitwick asked Lupin, a mixture of annoyance and curiosity on his diminutive face.

"Severus," Lupin replied with as much condemnation as he could fit into one word.

Flitwick rolled his eyes. "Ah. Well, he always was a fast learner," he muttered as he left the infirmary to return to his gossip mags.

"You could've just given me the note in the infirmary."

Parr looked down at him from her perch, one eyebrow raised.

"Whilst your pick-pocketing skills are potentially impressive, I fail to see the advantage of such a convoluted method of passing on the relevant information to me."

"Really? I don't," she countered calmly, a ghost of a smile on her mouth.

Snape felt that flush of heat return to his face again and glowered up at her.

Parr tossed her head slightly, flicking one of her tresses over her shoulder. "But enough of this banter." She held her hands out to each side, index and middle finger extended, palms to the concrete sky. "The ground rules. I feel it important to get them in the open first in case you have any... misunderstandings as to how this is to run."

Snape's expression darkened and he thought a swear word that, judging from the way Parr's lips thinned momentarily as she dropped her hands, she might have picked up on.

"Rule number one: no talking when I'm talking. It gives me the shits. If you have a question, I will answer it, but talk over me and I'll tear you a new one."

Snape sniffed as derisively as he could. A folded cloth slapped him in the face as Parr threw a handkerchief at him.

"Rule number two: if I find that you have spoken to anyone about what I teach you, I will stick my boot where the sun doesn't shine."

That earned her a frosty look.

"Then, I will ensure you never speak again. Rule number three: I decide what you learn, when you learn it, and for how long. Should you have other ideas, you can stuff them up your jacksie." She pointed emphatically down at him.

"How surprising that you choose to abuse your role and use this as an opportunity for petty payback," Snape muttered, hands clenched into fists on his knees.

"I can do that almost any time I want, Professor," she mentioned, guffawing. "Why would I wait until now?" She dug a finger under the bandage hidden behind the high collar of her black overcoat and scratched.

"Don't do that."

She pouted and shrugged. "It itches." She continued to scratch for a few more seconds. Undoubtedly to irritate him. "We begin. Any questions?"

"I want a bigger rock."

Parr's eyebrows climbed up to her hairline. "A bigger rock must be earned, not given away, Dual."

Snape tightened his jaw until he heard the bone creak. This was starting as poorly as he had expected it would. Not only had it taken him over an hour to find Parr, but he was relegated to sitting awkwardly on a rounded boulder that kept him barely a foot off the frozen ground while she peered down at him from a veritable mountain of rain-smoothed stone six-feet in front of him. The power-play was as blatant as a punch in the face, and he'd probably end up with one of those bestowed upon him before the lesson was out. He knew how ridiculous he must look, sat so low that his knees were up higher than his waist, the boulder underneath him slowly and inexorably stealing the heat out of him via his rapidly numbing backside, and the Scotch mist dampening his hair and clothing in its aim to make him as similar to a drowned rat as possible.

"Do you allow your students to swear during their lessons, Dual?" Parr frowned down at him, her eyes as unyielding as the stone that supported them both.

"Certainly not," he snapped waspishly.

"Then don't do it in my classroom, vocally or otherwise."

He snorted. "This is your classroom?" He indicated the rocky ledge set halfway down the side of tor where they sat, just east of the Black Lake.

"Outside is my classroom, Dual. You would do well to remember that." She shifted about in her cross-legged position and folded her hands in her lap. "Tell me about your mother."

"What?"

"Your mother," she repeated slowly. "You will tell me about her."

"No."

Parr unfolded her legs, slid off her boulder, and headed down the slope of the tor.

"Where are you going?"

She stopped and turned to look at him, her face as hard as her voice. "The lesson is over."

Snape stared after her until she vanished from view in the roiling mist that drifted in from over the surface of the lake.

She answered the door after the third time he knocked.

Time flexed and twisted and flattened as she gazed up at him, the deep red of her clothing throwing a tint up under her jaw and bleeding into the paleness of her hair, still damp after the rain.

He tried to keep his expression neutral and the swear words unformed.

"One hour. Not the same place," she told him and slammed the door in his face.

It took him just over three-quarters of an hour to find her and his mood had soured to dangerous levels. It was bad enough that the original start of the lesson had been less than stellar, and Snape had argued with himself for what remained of the afternoon as to whether or not he should even attempt to show some kind of contrition. Having to force himself to request, albeit silently, a second chance made him even tetchier. In the end, he couldn't deny that the end result was more important than the discomfort that Parr was putting him through. He'd find other ways to even the score. He always did.

"Why the game of hide and seek?" he demanded to know, a little more crossly than he had thought his voice would sound. "I have wasted too much time already trying to track you down. It would be beneficial for both of us if you would just tell me, specifically, where to meet you."

Parr squinted at him, her chin resting on the forearm that sat across her knee. She'd chosen to sit under the spidery fingers of a bare oak not far from the front gates, the trunk shielding her from view out of the castle windows and its roots slithering in and out of the bare earth around her and down the gentle rise of the land it grew from.

"That you need to ask the question means you haven't thought very hard about it," she told him serenely. "Sit."

"Where?"

She gave him a faint smile and didn't answer, but her eyes seemed especially bright, watching him carefully, if a little wryly.

He glanced around him, weighing up his options, and realised what the correct answer was. He backtracked a few steps and chose a weather-worn spur of wood that left his head noticeably below the level of Parr's when he sat down.

She hid the lower part of her face behind her forearm for a moment, but Snape knew that she was trying to wipe the smirk off before he saw it. Her hands formed the same gesture that had started the lesson the first time.

"Continue."

He thought carefully before speaking; not an uncommon practice for him if the circumstances dictated it necessary. "I do not know what it is you need to know."

"Start somewhere. Anywhere."

Why did she need to know anything about his mother? Snape had asked himself that question over and over since she'd left him in the drizzle earlier that afternoon. It was a taboo subject for him, one that he made apparent to others should they even head in the direction of asking anything about his family. He always made sure to make the sting of rebuke harsh enough that no-one ever tried a second time. Yet here he was, turning the charcoal and clinkers that summed up his relationship with his mother over and over in his mind to search for a glimmer of worth to break that taboo himself with something that didn't make it seem like the pitiful wreckage he knew that it had always been.

"My mother was a witch who married a Muggle. By doing so, she made herself a pariah."

"Why?"

"The man was a bigot. He hated anything and everything to do with the wizarding world. Gloriously incongruent of him to marry a woman who came from that world, yet so like him to punish her for his own stupidity."

Parr turned that over in her mind for some time, studying him with an unwavering determination.

"Was she sad?"

Snape blinked at the unexpected question, a question that he found distressingly difficult to answer.

"Yes."

"Was she angry?"

"Sometimes."

A pause.

"Was she broken?"

A cold hand reached into his chest and squeezed mercilessly. It took him several erratic heartbeats before he could reply, but he kept his eyes on hers even though he would have done damn near anything to hide whatever it was that she was looking straight into as if flesh and bone were as insubstantial and transient as breath.

"Yes."

Silence sat between them, a silence he didn't know what to do with, a silence she was seemingly unaffected by. There was a smell in the air, of damp and of cold and of the mountains, which would manifest in an ugly evening storm very soon. Were they going to sit out in it and stare at each other? He had no idea what that would achieve other than the obvious, and he was beginning to realise that what Parr wanted to teach him was something he was starting to wonder if he wanted to learn.

"Did you hate her?"

His hands in their fingerless gloves clenched tightly on his knees in an effort to remain where he was, physically and mentally, refusing to answer. That she would ask such a question betrayed that she knew just where to hit him, where to make that bitter cut so that it would pierce down through the flesh, past the bone and into the soul, the blade of her inquisition pulled back to flay him open and reveal what lay rotten at the core of him, what he'd never had the courage to scour out, what he'd never had the grace to purge, what he'd never let go of in the terror that it would leave him adrift in a groundless black where things made no sense. His way was simpler.

"Did you love her?"

What he felt then almost blinded him.

Snape would freely admit that there were many, many people he disliked. In fact, it would have been far easier to list the ones he did like. On the fingers of one hand. Yet despite the idiosyncratic misanthropy that made up a goodly portion of his attitude, there weren't that many that he could say he truly hated. It was a term he used sparingly lest it lose its significance amongst the other words of hostility that he attached to the names of those he knew. But Parr was giving it a damn good shot that she'd end up on that dreaded list very soon. A more rational part of him whispered that it was an over-reaction on his part, but the adrenaline and bile in his body were too strong to allow reason to lower his hackles.

Parr's expression was one he hadn't seen on her face before; no less steely, no more yielding, but something that looked unexpectedly like regret. "I do this for a reason, Dual. I wouldn't ask unless it was absolutely necessary. I am a bitch, but not that much of one."

He wanted to disbelieve her statement, to see it for the lie he needed it to be because it would make it easier to categorise her, and so much easier to hate her in the end.

"Do you have any other female relatives?"

"None that ever visited. None I ever met."

She actually looked away from him as a clench of pain twisted her face, eyes closed as if she had witnessed something that upset her greatly. The harsh vindictiveness in him was pleased at that.

"Do not judge her so harshly, Dual. She was alone."

She heard his unspoken response, and turned her eyes back to his, the skin on her cheeks drained of blood.

"You were her son. You could not teach her. And she did the best that she could, as paltry as that may seem in your eyes."

Surprisingly, Parr said it in such a way that it wasn't an accusation. An explanation, nothing more, no matter how hard he tried to find the sarcasm or condemnation. But had the understanding come from common experience, or had she lifted memory from him? Snape didn't know which possibility worried him most.

"This topic is distressing. I would appreciate it if we could stop." He spoke the words, even knowing full well that it would probably end the lesson as abruptly as his recalcitrance had the previous time, but he couldn't continue to sit here, haemorrhaging inside and searching for ways to hate her.

Parr nodded once. "I understand. I shall not speak of it again unless you deem it necessary."

That made him blink a few times, at a loss as to whether her acquiescence was due to an unexpected consideration for his feelings or whether she had found out whatever information it was she'd been after in the first place. The notion that the first option could be true caused the cogs of his mind to jam.

"I don't know who has taught you, but your mind flexes strangely for a seevy," Parr mused, studying him like an oddity.

"Perhaps because I am not a seevy."

This time it was Parr's turn to look confused. "You are Dual. Of course you're a seevy, whether you realise it or not." One eyebrow lifted. "Which, plainly, you don't." She breathed out heavily. "And if you're fortunate, nor does anyone else." She stood, dusting earth from the back of her trousers. "Nevertheless, there are too many traits for it to be otherwise. So let us see what you're capable of."

Her fingers delved up one sleeve and drew out a narrow orange strip of material roughly three feet long. Even in the darkening afternoon, Snape could see the colour was the same as that of the strip of orange she wore down the back of her overcoat, the same orange that bound the hilt of her knife. The same coppery colour as her Handler's hair.

"You've managed to hobble yourself in order to keep others out of your mind, but if someone is experienced enough to find a way around it, you're in a lot of trouble." She held the cloth straight between her hands. "This is the best way I can describe it, since it's rather hard to draw a diagram of a thing that has no form. Using a piece of material to represent the topography of the mind is limiting but it will have to do for now." She tied a knot at the centre of the cloth strip. "The knot is the block you have in place to stop people from seeing what you don't want them to see. It's not an uncommon way to block others, and young seevy use it as a way to block until they're taught something more advanced. Knotting should be a temporary block only, and you should never leave the knot in place because it causes a weakness around the snarl that could be exploited, or worse, allow your mind to become torn or fractured." She held the cloth by one end, leaving the other end free to sway back and forth gently. Pinching the material just under her fist, Parr pulled her fingers down so the material slipped through them until she reached the knot." Most people will be stopped by the knot, but these are people who are runted so their mental agility is poor and linear, rendering them reliant on tracking along the mind from one end."

"What do you mean by runted?" He had a suspicion but wanted to see if she'd admit to it.

Wonder of wonders, she actually hesitated before replying, a simulacrum of awkwardness about her. "It's what we call magicfolk who manifest the recessive seevy mental talent. What you call Occlumency or Legilimency. There is a..." She wrinkled her nose slightly, trying to locate the right word. "... prejudice amongst seevy about it. It's viewed as a rather distasteful disability stemming from a cross-breeding between seevy and magicfolk." She saw the affront form on his face. "The shortcomings of seevy society's tolerance are not what we are here to discuss, Dual," she pointed out in a voice that brooked no argument. "Unless you wish to end this lesson here and now." The flinty eyes and stock-still posture confirmed her readiness to back up her statement.

Snape weighed the options up in his mind, balanced the scale, and remained mute. She took his silence as acquiescence.

"The only way to achieve your end goal is to unpick the knot. Otherwise anything I teach you will be wasted."

He didn't much like the sound of that.

"But first I have to figure out if I can unpick it, because if I can't, we are at an impasse."

"So much for our agreement," Snape pointed out, a twist to his mouth.

"Bloody hell, were you this aggravating as a student?" Parr snapped, flinging the knotted cloth at him. "Forgive me if I don't keel over in shock at the hypocrisy coming out of your trap!"

He snatched the cloth out of the air and gave her a tight smile.

"Shitting shit it!" She clenched her fists at her temples briefly and took a deep breath. "Unlike some, I don't profess to be a miracle worker, so instead of underlining my perceived shortcomings as a trainer, I suggest you take a close look at your own stubbornness to co-operate in a valiant attempt to convince me that you might be capable of learning anything without giving me a fucking aneurism!"

"Welcome to the world of teaching, Miss Parr."

That made her laugh. "Touché, you colossal wanker, but I meant what I said. I need to figure out if this can be achieved at all. If not..." She spread her hands. "... then I must annul the agreement in disgrace."

The stricture of fear that comment tangled his insides with was just another reminder of how much he needed her help, and how much he resented her for it.

Parr took a few steps down the gentle rise and crouched so that their eye lines were equal. "What I am about to ask you to do I need you to do without reservation, without restriction and without remorse. Whatever ethics you may have, you must suspend them until I say otherwise. I must know what you're capable of now in order to determine what you can possibly achieve, so you must break into my mind by whatever means you have at your disposal. Regardless of whether or not you feel it is moral. Do you understand?"

Snape squinted at her, trying to predict how she would fend him off, but her face betrayed nothing and the steel door to her mind had been in place before the lesson had even begun. He'd checked, tentatively.

"I understand."

"But...?"

She would have to ask, wouldn't she?

"I have concerns."

"Which are?" Those grey eyes stared into his, and he couldn't shake the feeling that she knew exactly what he was thinking.

How was he to verbalise the reasons for his hesitation? How could he truly convey to her how much it would sicken him to do what she asked, how he could barely do such a thing even when given no other option? Hemmed into living a life he didn't want to be living, every day forced him into making choices he never wanted to even consider. The only difference was the degree of his loathing for the choices he had to make. And now, to have one more person kick him down the path to damnation as if he had no will of his own birthed such malignity in him that a part of him wondered if who he was and who he needed to be were not as different or separated as he thought. It was a realisation that frightened far more than he ever thought possible – that the act had become reality.

It wasn't that Parr was asking him to deliberately claw his way into her mind that was the only problem. She was telling him to put his full weight behind the effort, to break in by whatever means he could, allowing her to see the enormity of his moral degradation and ethical debasement with an attempted rape of the mind. To see what he was capable of. How could he show her that?

"You've done it before," Parr mentioned quietly. The certainty in her tone changed Snape's hesitation to an acidic resentfulness that she would know such a damning piece of the life of which he was ashamed.

"And how would you know that?" he snapped at her, channelling all the venom that poisoned him inexorably into his voice.

"I can see it in your face."

It was enough. He lashed out with no other thought than finding that realisation, that recognition of his disgrace in her mind and scouring it out, blotting it forever from her thoughts, erasing it from the way she looked at him and judged his every action based on it. He would not have her see him as the monster that others had made him, even though his actions would condemn him to being precisely what he was trying to hide.

She had expected it. She held him back, stopping him before he could even get close. No matter how hard he pushed, how much he twisted and turned to get around her defences, he could find no way in. His desperation turned to anger at being denied even the chance to enter her mind and change her perception of him. He fought harder, jaw clenched in effort, as she deflected every piercing thrust, keeping him at bay like a giant with its hand around a house-elf's neck as it kicked and swung futilely at the enormous creature that held it. That laughed at it in its pathetic attempt to free itself and take down something fifty times its size. So not only could Parr now see him for the abhorrent brute he'd become, but she could also mock him for the wretched inadequacy of his abilities, tricking him into revealing how pitiable a figure he was. His anger turned to hatred. And something inside him snapped.

Parr's eyes went wide as the push turned into a pull, as Snape dragged her mind towards his, latching onto her deflection with a tenacity born of overwhelming fury.

"Stop!"

He ignored her, turning her own trick against her by trying to swallow what he couldn't break, his mind swelling in consumptive threat.

"Enough!"

A whip-line of pain struck him across his mind, causing him to physically flinch back and startling him enough to stop before he could discover how far this new technique could take him.

Parr was on her feet, staring down at him with an expression he couldn't interpret. He searched the lines of her for disgust, outrage... anything that would mirror his own revulsion at what he'd tried to do, but her face went blank before he could find it. It took a monumental effort to look her in the eye, but the residual anger at being forced into the act gave him the steel to do it. Was she hiding her loathing of him, of what he'd done? Or rather, what he'd tried to do? Was she laughing at him inside, from behind that blank expression? He didn't know whom he hated more: her or himself.

Parr opened her mouth to say something, but paused, a line appearing between her brows momentarily. She appeared to change her mind about something.

"I can unpick the knot," she told him finally. Woodenly. "But you need to know that if I do, it will leave you completely open. You won't be able to stop anyone getting in until I teach you how. And I think, perhaps, that leaves you far more vulnerable than you can afford to be."

Her eyes dropped to the ground and away from him, the blankness wavering briefly. And there it was – the inevitable judgement that meant she couldn't even stand to look at him.

"Think long and hard on it, Dual. It's not a decision I can make for you."

With that she turned her back on him and walked away, the orange and white down her back like scores of accusation in the black of her overcoat.

Snape sat where he was, frozen in disgrace and defeat, yet another poor choice before him. He dimly realised his hand was hurting and looked down to find that he'd grasped the cloth Parr had flung at him so tightly in his fist that the knot had imprinted painfully in his palm.

Rain swept down from the mountains, drenching him in an icy wetness that he resolved to remain in until his body went numb, as if it could wash the stain of corruption off his soul. It didn't work. He couldn't sit here in this place that was a witness to what he could be pushed to, regardless of the fact that he'd failed to achieve that repugnant end.

He stood in pain, his knees screaming in agony at being left in such a torturous position for so long, and paced awkwardly around the limits of the school grounds like a trapped animal seeking escape from a cage. He stumbled occasionally in the failing light, feet slipping in muddy earth sodden with chilled rain as he tried to reach a decision, shivering as his clothes became soaked.

To say yes would leave him open, as easily read as book left open to the eyes of whoever might pass, and the most likely candidate would be the Headmaster. If Dumbledore discovered the extent of the relationship between Snape and Parr, it would only serve to lower him in the old wizard's estimation of him. He was a pawn already; an expendable piece in Dumbledore's convoluted and precarious game. What worth the man perceived in him was truly the only thing that kept Snape out of the gutter of society and from the cruelty of those who wouldn't hesitate to remove him swiftly from the equation. He couldn't imagine that Parr would fare any better if Dumbledore uncovered a threat to his carefully-laid plans. Both he and the Striker were submitting themselves to significant risk in attempting this.

To say no would leave him hobbled, stunted, and still prey to someone stronger or less scrupulous. It was a choice that was no choice at all, for choice would give the impression that one option was more favourable than the other. Here, there was nothing but either immediacy or delay of the inevitable. If the knot was undone and a Death Eater with even a rudimentary skill at Legilimency crossed his path, it could endanger everything he was bound to. If what Dumbledore suspected were true, that it was only a matter of time before the Dark Lord found a way back into the realm of the physical, then if he called Snape to his side before Parr had a chance to teach him how to keep that insane, genocidal maniac from ravaging through his mind, nothing could hide Snape's treachery. She had not said how long it would take to teach him what he needed to know. Perhaps there was no definitive answer. Perhaps, as with all things, it depended on the skill of both student and teacher. If the knot was left tied and the Death Eaters bound even one seevy to their cause, the knot would mean nothing in the end. There were too many maybes, and far too many uncertainties.

How could he possibly make a decision like this? Every way he looked at it, it was a stalemate. He scrubbed at his face in agitation, desperately attempting to find a shred of objectivity and distance from the roiling sensation in his gut and the gasping hatred and anger in his chest.

Night fell.

He kept walking, simply because he didn't know what else to do.

The rain slowed to a faint drizzle.

Like a thin trickle of water down his spine, distress and pain began to muddy his thoughts. He tried to push it down and away in a vain hope that he could prevent it from influencing his eventual choice but it persisted with an iron-fisted doggedness that confused him as it grew stronger. It took Snape some time to realise that it didn't originate from him.

The sound pinpointed her before he could stumble over her, crouched in a desolation of surrounds and spirit, her back to him as she stared sightlessly off into the distance, breath gulping in and out of her body like a hysteric so locked in terror that she could not even vocalise her panic with unarticulated cries.

It was then that he realised that in his overweening selfishness, he had not even given a thought to Parr's distress at what she had made Snape do. Separated by force from her Handler, there was no foundation for her to rely on to support her through what she did out of necessity. Isolated by the secrecy of their collusion, she could not even seek comfort of whomever she could possibly regard as a friend at the school. The disgust that he thought he'd seen on her face had been at her own actions, not his. She had known all along what it meant to ask of him what she had, but she had done so anyway.

Due to Lupin's continued failure at finding her other half, Parr had been forced to accept an arrangement that must have been as unappealing to her as it had been to Snape, but the need to find her Handler was so strong that she couldn't even contemplate refusing him. To admit that she may not be able to fulfil her end of the bargain was a terrible admittance on her part, one that could lose her the one chance she felt she had left. What would she have done if she had discovered that she couldn't undo the knot in his mind? It seemed that Snape was not the only one who walked on the edge of a knife.

"Why... are you here?" she groaned at him through her gasps, one hand gripped around the blade of the long silver dagger that was the twin of the one she had given him, the one that he'd not let out of his possession since he'd first held it. The veins of black running down the back of her hand were blood flowing from the cut in her palm that the dagger's edge must have bitten into her.

"What will you do if I say no?"

Despair rolled over him, but her face never changed and her eyes never shifted from the horizon, a fish dying slowly as its gasps failed to alleviate the terrible, slow suffocation.

"I don't... know."

She seemed so much smaller to him, on her knees on the drenched earth, her clothes heavy with water and painted with mud, her distress shrinking her into a huddled, lonely figure, hyperventilating in either physical or mental torment, most likely both. He didn't know she could look this broken, even with the darkness hiding the clarity of her hopelessness.

"You could have lied and told me what I wanted to hear," Snape pointed out. "Others have done it before."

"I am not... others," she told him angrily. "That is not... our way."

"Your way could mean death."

"So be it," Parr replied harshly. "Validus... quam nex. She's tried... to catch me... before."

"You can't evade her forever."

"Perhaps. But long enough... will do."

Snape didn't know what to say to that.

"You could have lied," he told her once more, as if he couldn't understand how she could not have. "What will you do if I say no?"

He didn't expect an answer and almost missed the words she whispered. He didn't know if he was meant to hear them or not, but as he bent closer he saw how gaunt her face was, how the bones of her hands stood out sharply as they held the dagger that was slowly bleeding her the way her Handler was bleeding the strength from her in order to survive.

She repeated the words over and over between her gasps as if they were the only thing keeping her upright, a litany of forbearance under a crushing burden that she could not possibly relinquish.

"Don't... make me beg. Please, don't make me... beg."

Snape took the orange cloth from his pocket, untied the knot and held it out to her.

The shame that he felt when Parr clutched at the cloth like the lifeline it represented was not from the way she'd been forced to hope he would give the reply she so desperately needed, holding back from influencing him with lies or omissions of truth and trusting that the strength of both their needs would be enough. It was from the surge of visceral pleasure that came from knowing that she was tied closer to him than ever before. He hated himself for it even as he embraced it.