In Loco Parentis 11/?

FEEDBACK: Oh yes. Concrit especially welcome.

DISCLAIMER: The characters are the property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic Books, Warner Brothers, and whoever else may have a hold on them. I own nothing in the Potterverse, or anywhere else, for that matter. Strictly for entertainment, and no profit is being made. Please sue somebody else.

A/N: Thanks first to my two new betas, Whitehound and Betina. I’m grateful to them for their hard work, and any remaining mistakes are absolutely no reflection on them. This segment has suffered a bit by the distractions of NaNoWriMo and my losing my job near the end of that month (the two are in no way related.) I’m grateful now to have this to distract me in a different way. Feedback, as always, is most welcome.

As during NaNo, I commit to continue writing something every day. I have 3 WIPs to clear away: two that are already posted and one I’ve been hanging on to until I had a full draft. But watch this space for the continuation of A Father’s Love in the Buffyverse, and the sequel to Lost Boys, which I hope to begin posting by Christmas. Anyone who wishes to offer beta skills on either, please let me know. I particularly need a tarot expert for the upcoming chapter of the Buffy story.

Previously on In Loco Parentis:

“And we have the entire Order of the Phoenix mobilizing to come to our aid. We have only to hold out until they can get to us.”

Snape watched the various inhabitants of the house react to his pronouncement. It did not escape his notice that Miss Granger failed to react at all, even though he had come very near to complimenting her on her Defense Against the Dark Arts skills. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused. Damn it. He pushed aside his concern as he always had, by finding something constructive to occupy him. “Is there any chocolate in this house?” he snapped abruptly.

Petunia and Dudley answered at the same moment. “No,” she spat out witheringly, just as her son said, “Yeah.” He looked from one to the other, waiting.

Dudley gave his mother a sheepish sidelong glance. “After last summer, I’ve been kinda keeping some on hand. I don’t like it much anymore, now. But sometimes I have these dreams….”

Snape nodded, remembering how he, too, had lost his taste for chocolate ever afterward, after his own encounter with dementors. All he said, though, his face expressionless, was, “Dementors can have that effect.”

Dudley lumbered up the stairs and returned a moment later with his chocolate stash. Snape nodded his approval as the young man pulled the blocks of dark chocolate from the plastic grocery bag in which he had wrapped them. “Almost medicinal grade,” Snape noted, taking a piece, “or as close as Muggle shops can come to it.”

Dudley unwrapped another bar, broke off a generous piece and handed it over to his cousin. The little boy was snuggled up as close as possible to Miss Granger, but Snape noticed with some concern that she was not responding even to her friend’s presence. She didn’t even stir when Dudley reached past her, saying, “Here, Harry. This’ll help.”

She did rouse herself enough to take the remainder of the bar when Dudley pressed it into her hands. The young man seemed to take no notice as he explained, “That old man sent a letter, after last summer. To Dudley Dursley, The Second Largest Bedroom, 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey. He recommended this kind.”

Snape took in Petunia and Vernon’s expressions and realized this was as much news to them as to him. But it didn’t surprise him in the least. “Professor Dumbledore was like that,” he said.

Snape had hoped that chocolate would restore Miss Granger to her former insufferable self. But she remained unusually quiet and withdrawn for the rest of the morning. Snape was a bit preoccupied with Potter, who was more visibly shaken by the morning’s visions. So he did not notice at first that the girl had slipped away upstairs. He was watching Potter on the floor in the living room with his cousin, both of them building with small interlocking plastic blocks, when it hit him. “Where is Miss Granger?”

Dudley looked up and shrugged. “Think she went up to her room after lunch. Said she wasn’t feeling well.”

Snape rose. “You boys stay here,” he ordered, though they showed no inclination to follow him. He took the stairs two at a time and found her, not in her room, but in Harry’s. His heart sank as he realized how much time she had had alone with those books, strewn all around the room.

She was consulting the three nearest her on the floor, copying out various facts and incantations on her parchment. Still color coded, he saw, as he watched her use a nonverbal spell to change the ink in her quill from green to red and continue copying. But they were not the bright primary colors he had seen earlier in her school notes, or even the list downstairs. No, this was a sick, putrid green, the color of dark pus and decay. And the red was more a coppery shade of dried blood.

He saw all this in an instant, frozen in the doorway, knowing he was on another threshold of sorts. He had no idea what to do in this situation. But he also knew he absolutely had to handle it correctly. The consequences otherwise were unthinkable. Before he was even able to formulate a plan, she turned her eyes to his. They were black and glittering with a malice he had never seen there before. And she smiled at him.

“Professor! These books are marvelous! I’m learning so much, and I’ve already found quite a few spells that might help us….” She thrust not a “few” but a whole sheaf of parchment at him. He did not move to take it, falling back instead on the calm, detached professional persona he had used from the time he was her age. Catching his expression, or lack thereof, she faltered slightly in her mad enthusiasm, and somehow that gave him a bit of hope. Perhaps it was not too late.

“Don’t be angry, Professor. I just— I had to do something.”

“Indeed,” Snape acknowledged drily, though his heart was pounding all the while in his throat. “And have you discovered the mystery Professor Dumbledore intended me to solve using these books?”

“Horcruxes,” the girl replied without hesitation, in a dismissive tone. As Snape gaped at her, still trying to wrap his mind around the cold horror of the plural, she continued blithely, “Tom made them, from artifacts connected to his family or the school. Like his diary and the ring. Here’s that list. There may be more. We weren’t sure.” She proffered a single sheet of parchment now, and this time his fingers closed around it absently. “But don’t worry. I can see how several of these spells could be adapted to destroying them, perhaps from a distance, and giving us a boost of power for whatever final battle he has planned. We might be able to do it without ever leaving the safety of these wards. Wouldn’t that give him a nasty shock?” Her smile, like her words, chilled him through.

And Snape knew, in that moment, the price for which Miss Granger would sell her soul. Not having to go out there and face the horrors she had seen through the back garden fence. Not having to confront her helplessness, being at the mercy of monsters who reveled in her fear and their own cruelty. What did he, for all his knowledge of the Dark Arts and their seductive evils, have to offer her, that could begin to compare to the power and safety they promised?

But he knew he had to try. He took a deep breath and fell back, again, on sardonic humor. “It may interest you to know, Miss Granger, that contracting Bubonic Plague is not the recommended, nor the optimum way to gain knowledge and power over it.”

“What? What do you mean?”

He extended his hand to her and helped her rise, steadying her as her cramped and stiff legs caused her to lose her balance. “Come with me, Miss Granger.”

He led her downstairs, far away from the books, past the boys playing with their blocks in the living room and Petunia wiping down kitchen counters, obsessively removing non-existent stains. Once on the patio, he motioned her to one chair. He seated himself smoothly, allowing old habits of motion to confer the illusion of confidence, of power. But inside, he was trembling with the heavy weight of his responsibility. And, he suddenly realized, he cared for these foolish children; not just about living up to the trust they and Dumbledore had placed in him as a professor, but about them as individuals in their own right. He ran his tongue over suddenly dry lips and offered up a silent prayer to whatever gods there were, that he get the next few minutes, at least, right.

Hermione felt a buzzing in her veins from all the dark magic she had absorbed while reading. The effect had been described in one of the earlier books she had swept through, a warning of sorts she had not at all heeded. Now, she felt vaguely nauseated, and the way Snape was looking at her now, as if she were mad, or ill, made her feel a little worse. But it also made her a little more angry and defensive. He should have trusted her to read through all these books days ago, she thought, while he was in the room with her. Never mind that back then they had made her restless and unable to concentrate, had given her headaches and a sour stomach.

He was regarding her now with an expression she couldn’t read— not pity, surely. Not from Severus Snape. Such a thing wasn’t possible. Then he spoke in a raspy voice.

“The Dark Arts are unlike any other branch of Magic. Most other magics are, inert, if you will. Their use requires attention and focus, and powerful spells can drain the caster, just as physical exertion can sap one’s energy and strength. But after a period of rest, one is unchanged, or perhaps slightly stronger from the exercise.”

She nodded her understanding; she had gathered as much in her reading. He continued, “The Dark Arts are so dangerous because they do not sap one’s magical energy. They seem, in fact, to bestow limitless energy and power on the wielder. But what is Newton’s First Magical Law, Miss Granger?”

Hermione could feel this power still throbbing within her. But she remembered her reading the previous school year— could almost see the page of her Defense book, could remember her excitement when she discovered Newton had been much more than a Muggle mathematician. She recited, “The Law of Magical Conservation of Energy states that just as in the physical world the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant, so in a Magical context the amount of energy available for any spell is that residing within the caster. The Wizard or Witch is, in this sense, an isolated system.”

“Where, then, does the power for Dark Spells originate, Miss Granger?”

The horror dawned on her, and she wondered distantly how she hadn’t realized it before, why she hadn’t run from the books upstairs, it was so obvious. “From— others. It steals energy from other living things, without their permission. It even kills them.”

Snape nodded. “That is why so many of the Dark Spells in those books require the lifeblood of something, or a sacrifice. Or even just an act that corrupts an innocent. There are a number of ways to steal the energy to power the spells. But even that is not the worst of it. There is an— intelligence behind much of the Darkness. Not a personal devil, no. But you yourself have experienced it. It promises you something you feel you cannot achieve any other way. And it obscures your reason just enough to get a foothold, make you forget, for just a moment, what you are really doing.”

Hermione looked into the older man’s eyes, and she saw now a strange naked vulnerability mixed with a guilt and sorrow so strong she wondered how he bore it. He took a deep breath and continued, holding her gaze, “Miss Granger. I was once as you are now. Drunk and slightly ill on the power studying Dark Magic can give one. And do you know what I did then, in the service of the Dark, Miss Granger?”

She wanted to flinch away from the terrible truth, but his eyes held hers, and suddenly, she just knew. “You,” she breathed, and the horror of it pushed everything else from her mind for a moment. She felt as if she had been submerged in cold water. She gasped out, “You didn’t study the curse. You made it.”

Snape inclined his head slightly, but his eyes did not leave hers. They bored into her. “And why would anyone do something so very loathsome, Miss Granger?” he whispered.

And Hermione realized then that part of the buzzing was a kind of whispering, almost subliminal. It was urging her to use the new power she could feel coursing through her, to make something— something horrible. A new curse, perhaps, so disfiguring and debilitating that its victim would linger on in agony for hours before succumbing to it, or....

Even worse was realizing, as she did in that moment, that the urge to use the power was so strong, that the target did not really matter to her. Under the right circumstances, she might have cast it on her best friend, as soon as on her worst enemy. She could see herself casting it on Ron, or even little Harry. “What— what have I done?” she whispered.

“Nothing yet,” Snape replied, his relief evident. “You recall that motion picture some years back— Star Wars?”

She nodded, puzzled.

“Well, much of its cosmology was vastly oversimplified, for it was, after all, merely Muggle entertainment. But it was correct about one thing. Giving in to the Darkness. If you use it to power anything, even in what you believe to be a good and worthy cause, it will entangle you in it ever afterward. I am a horrible man, in part, Miss Granger, because I have had to contend with urges and desires darker than anything you can now imagine. It is not too late for you, but you must not enter any further into the Darkness.”

“But— I found—”

“I will look through your notes, Miss Granger, and if there is anything useful contained therein, I will be the one to use it. I, after all, am already damned. And I know the limit beyond which even I dare not go. But you must stay away from the books, and from the temptation to use anything the Darkness suggests to you.”

Her face fell a bit at that, but at the same time she was relieved. Snape studied her for a moment, then nodded, as if satisfied. “There still may be one matter you can research for us, Miss Granger,” he said. “Accio Medical Parchment.” A moment later it sailed through the living room and kitchen, to the startled shouts of the various occupants of those rooms, and through the open door into his hand.

“We will need to prepare ourselves for Potter’s next mishap. Study this carefully, and let us see if we can pinpoint what remedies we will need on hand to counteract his next illness or injury.”