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imagowrites · 4 months ago

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Noah

Part 3 out of 5 of Æternus.

150k, Snape x fem!OC, Sirius x fem!OC, Teen And Up Audiences, Snape POV, Post-Canon/Canon Divergent, Murder Mystery, Found Family.

NOTE: it doesn't make sense if you haven't Omegas and Sylvia.

TW: Explicit violence, mentions of suicide, grief discourse, depression.

Alone

There was a place, in a forest like many others, under an oak tree like many others, behind a wooden door like many others, that hid a family unlike any other. Behind a tall, gold-framed mirror, a Veela paced the tables of her pub, wearing a black dress cinched at the waist, a gleaming mane of silvery blonde hair, and an abundance of sparkling jewellery that drew the attention of every customer. Behind the bar, a man in a long tunic with raven hair pulled back into a dishevelled ponytail showed off a remarkable number of tattoos on his arms, shoulders and chest. In between serving drinks, he winked meaningfully at the bar owner, who returned them all with a knowing smile. On the wooden stage, accompanying the brave souls who left their seats to reach the microphone, was a boy in a floating wheelchair, his head tilted to one side, positioned behind a grand piano, his slender hands moving over the keys with surprising fluidity in stark contrast to his still body. Finally, around the long table set against the back wall of the room, familiar faces alternated: the pale, sharp face of Draco Malfoy, with his usual air of superiority; the serene, smiling face of Harry Potter, with his lightning scar and bright green eyes; those of Ginny, Ron, Hermione, Neville and many other young people who were not supposed to be in that pub for Animagi at all, but who had won the favour of the owner and thus earned their way into the back room. This close-knit group of friends, at least for some of its members, had gradually ceased to be such over the course of that hot, scorching summer and had begun to take on the qualities of a real family.

The boys would arrive, sit around the table, butterbeer in hand, and talk about their day, their work or their studies. Nodens and Sirius, an unlikely pairing that no one would have expected to see, spent most of their time swapping tales of their respective time at Hogwarts, even though the boy's time there was far from over. Sylvia, happier than she had been in a long time, if ever, listened to each story with great interest and had just as many stories ready for anyone willing to listen. However, there was something in that warm and loving atmosphere that caused the owner to alternate between feelings of fear and anger, which she expressed with icy glances at a couple of empty chairs around the same table. An absence, or rather two, that became increasingly difficult to ignore as the weeks went by. Every now and then, late at night, as she set up the wooden stage and floated the instruments back into place, Sylvia would gaze melancholically at those chairs, and almost invariably Sirius would join her, wrap his arms around her waist, take her hand and hold it close.

"They'll show up. Soon, they will," he said, every day.

But they never did.

Severus Snape knew the stages of grief better than most people in the world. He had seen them, studied them and then experienced them first hand. He had first done so on the day his mother had died, when he had just come of age; and then, of course, when Lily had died. From that moment on, Severus had decided he would do anything to avoid going through it again. It took him seventeen years to give in, and in the end he gained nothing more than he had the last time. Instead, this time, on top of the pain of losing someone, he now had to face rejection once again, all at once.

With Lily, the denial phase was relatively short. There's not much to deny when you're holding someone's lifeless body. This time, however, Severus' mind seemed to refuse to believe what he had experienced for so long that he convinced himself he could easily go on like that for the rest of his life. He got up, made the usual coffee and poured it into two separate cups. He put one full on the kitchen table and even felt that strange, loving irritation he had felt every morning for the past two years. "Why on earth do you keep drinking it if you don't like it?" he heard himself say. "I like that I don't like it," he heard her reply. Then he sat in his armchair with the cup in one hand and a newspaper in the other. It was easy to pretend that nothing had changed: the amount of silence remained more or less the same. Occasionally, Severus would comment on some news article in the latest edition of the Daily Prophet, and he could imagine the reactions he would receive with such precision and vividness that he could hardly tell the difference; or so he told himself. One day, when he found himself reading the news that the Garnet case had been closed with no culprit found, he clearly saw her usual mischievous smile and felt the urge to reprimand her with a cold "Stop it".

The period of deep denial of reality continued until something happened which forced him to wake up. It was a hot afternoon in late July, and Severus was sitting in his armchair, the door locked, the windows barred and the fireplace behind him blocked as usual. For days he had ignored the large grey owl that occasionally pecked at the wood that held the windows shut, and sometimes, when he lost his patience and cursed at it, he could hear her chuckling. One afternoon, however, it wasn't the usual owl that disturbed him; it was a determined knock on the front door. Severus ignored it. It was bound to happen sooner or later, he told himself. He had been too lucky not to be disturbed for the past few weeks. Instead of giving up and leaving, as Severus had predicted would happen within a couple of minutes, the knocking became more insistent and determined, until the Professor felt a strong urge to open the door and take out a lot of pent-up frustration on whoever was on the other side. Then that someone spoke.

"Omegas!" she exclaimed. "I know you're in there, you..."

Severus couldn't move a muscle until Sylvia's outburst was over.

"Come out and face me!" she shouted. "I don't know what your problem is, or why you've decided to ignore me, but if you harm my owl again..."

She went on for nearly half an hour. At the end of those long, intense thirty minutes, Severus was forced to admit that there was only one possible reason why the target of such anger hadn't responded to such provocation, if only to make it stop. Omegas wasn't there.

The anger came. In the past, the anger phase had been slow, suffocating, invasive. It had soon turned into a thirst for revenge, giving him a purpose, something to fight against, a reason to get out of bed in the morning. The anger he felt towards Lord Voldemort had been so visceral that, with enough effort, he could even use it to distract himself from the anger he felt towards himself. That anger had been with him through all the other stages, and it hadn't left him for seventeen long years.

This time the anger was explosive. As soon as he was sure that Sylvia was out of earshot, Severus rose from his armchair and the first thing he did was to overturn the coffee table in front of him. From that moment on, for the next few hours, he did nothing but destroy everything in his path. He was fully aware of what he was doing during the tantrum and consciously gave himself permission to succumb to it. He got angry with Omegas and made every single item that reminded him of her cunning face disappear from the house. He got rid of the second armchair, the overturned table, every book she had commented on in those bookshelves, and then all the sheets he had watched her toss and turn on. When the last pillow she'd rested her head on was gone, the anger still hadn't subsided, and Severus began to turn it on himself. He thought and thought again of every single thing he had done in their two years of relationship that could have caused her to leave for good. At first, he limited his self-loathing to things that made a semblance of sense, as he had done during his time away from her during the war. He had poisoned her with Veritaserum, poked his nose into her affairs, watched her risk her life more than once without doing anything. Once the relevant reasons were exhausted, Severus moved on to blaming himself for every cold look, every sarcastic remark, every show of disagreement or contempt he had directed at her. He listed them, one by one, from the first to the last, until he reached their final, painful conversation.

"YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME!" he heard himself shout.

He felt sick.

Perhaps as a defence mechanism, or maybe just because it was easier, Severus turned his anger on every single person who had been around them during their last few months together. He got angry at Sirius Black, then at Draco, then at Harry Potter, even at Garnet. He was especially angry with Sylvia and dwelt for a long time on that last conversation she and Omegas had had in the back room of the Black Cat. Yes, the answer must be there, he told himself. It had been her. She had convinced her to go. Surely she had said something, convinced her to leave him. Maybe under Black's influence, she had convinced herself that Omegas deserved better and managed to persuade her too. He was almost ready to leave the house, to confront her, to shout at her until he lost his voice, but he soon gave up the idea. After all, she did deserve better, he thought, and hated himself all over again.

The negotiation phase was supposed to be the time to try and come to terms with the pain and find a way to get on with one's life; or at least that's what more than one manual on the subject, muggle or otherwise, suggested. Severus had sought out those books, studied them, telling himself that if he was going to be a hopeless case, he at least wanted to be aware of it. Yet he had never been convinced by the negotiation. He hadn't seemed to have experienced it then, and his perplexity hadn't diminished recently. He should have felt the need to regain a routine, a life that was at least seemingly normal, but Severus had never really had a routine or normality. Unlike in the past, however, he knew he would have to face the phase this time; so he tried to force it. He forced himself to get up at what could be considered reasonable, or at least decent, hours. He tried to find something to do, books to read, and he tried to think about the future, the beginning of the next school year, but nothing worked. He couldn't find any real meaning in those mechanical gestures and obligatory thoughts, and he soon gave up on the idea that negotiating just wasn't for him. Severus had always been a practical man. There was no room for bargaining, not even with himself.

Eventually, depression came. It wasn't supposed to be the final stage; the manuals spoke of acceptance and a hypothetical, utopian, possible peace once the agony was over, but Severus had never believed it. He had never gone beyond Stage Four, and he knew in his heart that he never would. At first he refused to give in to the tears. He didn't want to cry, he didn't need to, and the latent and ever-present rage within him urged him not to let a rejection force him into that despair, not again, not like that. There were only many sleepless nights, many resulting headaches, and a persistent feeling of nausea that made him lose his appetite for weeks. He spent most of his time immobile, dissecting his pain with stoic, analytical impassivity. He compared this depression with others he had experienced in the past, listing the similarities and differences as if he were about to write a scientific paper. It was strangely difficult. Every time he tried to relive the past pain, even though he remembered every action he'd taken in relation to it, the feeling seemed so distant, so blurred, that he couldn't draw any satisfactory conclusions. He spent a long time wondering why, and finally found his answer. It wasn't true that Severus had never managed to move on from his depression: he had. It was just a couple of years ago, as he sat in the chair behind his desk in his office at Hogwarts. He had looked around and felt happy for the first time in seventeen years. That must have been acceptance; that must have been the start of that famous 'moving on'. Severus had moved on, and now he had gone back, and everything, from Lily's first rejection, to her death, to the lonely years that followed, to that night three months ago, came crashing down on him. It was only after formulating this thought that Severus finally cried.

He allowed himself to succumb to those tears over the next few days, especially as the time to return to Hogwarts approached, and he had no intention of revealing even the slightest hint of his feelings to anyone. Except anger, of course. The prospect of venting it, even partially, on students and colleagues was the only thing that gave him the strength to leave the house on the 1st of September. He apparated to Hogsmeade; he didn't want to get on the Hogwarts Express. There would be screaming children whom he couldn't punish yet; there would be the Headmistress, colleagues who would ask him how he spent his summer holidays; there would be Sylvia, who would surely be aware of the situation by now and would bombard him with questions; but above all, there would be that empty chair in the compartment reserved for professors. He didn't want to see it. He knew that sooner or later he would have to face it, whether at the High Table or behind the desk in the Potions classroom, but he wasn't ready to do so. Not yet.

Thus Severus made his way to the castle. He arrived first and found the school completely empty, except for the gamekeeper and the caretaker. In other circumstances, he would have been pleased; in this case, it made no difference at all. He had buried every one of his feelings under layers upon layers of tightly packed apathy, and nothing in the world could break through it. He waited for the train to arrive and for the first students and professors to pass through the grand entrance doors. He made sure to give each of the students a venomous look, and seeing them lower their heads and avoid his gaze gave him a satisfaction he hadn't felt in a long time. He greeted his colleagues cordially and nodded to the Headmistress with a touch more respect and a touch less bile.

Sylvia was one of the last to cross the threshold, and she did so with an expression as grim as his. She didn't bother to say hello to anyone present; she strode towards him, stopping directly in front of him as if she intended to slap him across the face. Severus prayed that she wouldn't; not so much because the thought itself troubled him, but because he didn't know how he would react if she did. Fortunately, that didn't happen. Sylvia's hands only reached her hips and she began to tap one foot on the floor in a clear attempt to show her frustration without resorting to violence.

"Where is she?" she barked.

Severus hadn't expected the question. If she was anywhere, and not dead in some mass grave in a war-torn country, Sylvia would surely know her whereabouts better than he did. He furrowed his brow and looked over at the new Professor of Transfiguration for a while. He opened his mouth to reply, but abandoned the attempt when he saw a smile forming on her face, a smile that expressed not a single note of joy, only pure, deep fury.

"There she is, that bloody..." she said.

She stormed past him, running across the atrium.

Severus didn't have the courage to turn around immediately. At first he told himself that Sylvia must have been talking about someone else and that he had misunderstood. When he found the strength to look behind him and saw a black curl behind Sylvia's thick white head of hair, he refused to believe what he was witnessing. It had to be a coincidence, someone who just happened to have the same haircut, the same shoes and a dress the same colour as her eyes. Then Sylvia pushed her and she staggered back. Severus' eyes landed on that round face for the first time in three months, and the very first thought his brain formulated, before he could stop it, was 'Why hasn't she come home if she's in England?' Immediately, Severus found himself sharing every one of the feelings Sylvia was expressing with her shouts, and he felt a strong urge to join her. He took a step forward, then another, and another. Just as he was about to reach the two of them, Severus had to stop. Omegas' eyes had met his for a fraction of a second, and he lost the ability to move. He remained motionless in the middle of that corridor until Sylvia left with a final, heartfelt curse and strode decisively and angrily towards the Great Hall, followed by a dwindling stream of students. He stayed where he was, so did she, until the last student had passed through the doors. They stood alone, in the same positions, for exactly two minutes. Then Severus found the courage to take another step forward, but she took a step back. Severus raised his head, determined to show her nothing but cold indifference, turned and also crossed that threshold, heading towards the High Table.

He sat down and prayed that she wouldn't have the audacity to join him and sit next to him as if nothing had happened. He was not surprised that his prayers were in vain. Omegas sat down and greeted Severus with a cordial, detached "Good evening" that was no different from the one she gave to everyone else at the table. He responded with a look that conveyed such hostility that he was grateful to be at the end of the table, where no one but her could see it. She simply ignored him. She waited in silence for the Sorting Ceremony to end and did not touch any food when the feast began. Severus, on the other hand, ate and made sure to do so in a way that gave her the impression he was enjoying it. He told himself he was doing it out of pure spite, but a part of him, buried under layers of bile, knew that the constant feeling of nausea had left him the moment he saw her, alive, safe within those walls.

The feast began and ended, and Severus could only think of the moment when he would finally be able to confront her. A simple apology along the lines of 'I'm a coward' wouldn't be enough, oh no. She would have to pay. When the entire High Table, as well as the student tables, rose in a single shared movement and the prefects began loudly exclaiming "First years, this way!", Severus could barely comprehend what was happening. He was distracted for just a moment as Professor Sprout, not far away, red-faced and beaming, waved warmly and announced to anyone who would listen, "It's Noah! He's my stepson, you know? A prefect, yes! What an extraordinary boy, really..."

Severus dismissed the chatter, which he found useless and cloying, with a displeased grimace and turned back to his thoughts. The subject of his musings, however, had vanished. He had just enough time to see her glide through the doors of the Great Hall, her violet dress billowing around her, and disappear down the corridor. He suppressed the urge to curse. He made his way around the table, determined to reach her as quickly as possible, but a crowd of students heading for their dormitories blocked his path. Someone joined what the Professor was starting to perceive as a crusade against him: Sylvia, who was once again standing in front of him, tapped her foot irritably.

"Is either of you going to give me some sort of explanation?" she asked icily.

Severus raised his head, imposing his full height on her. He looked down at her with the clear, obvious intention of intimidating her.

"Move, Barbosa," he ordered.

She looked indignant. "'Barbosa'?" she repeated, mimicking his manner. "Oh, so that's how it is now? I'm just 'Barbosa'? After everything we—"

"Step aside," he said.

He had taken such a menacing step that she unconsciously backed away. Yet the offended scowl on her face remained.

"Fine," she declared in a tone that suggested the exact opposite. "Go on, do your thing. As if it matters that there are people who care enough about you to worry. As if— hey!" she exclaimed.

Severus had pushed past her and she had tripped over a fifth year. He didn't care and continued on his way to Omegas' office on the second floor.

He took a deep breath and opened the door without bothering to knock. She was already behind her wooden table, busy with who knows what, as if it were a normal morning instead of the torturous night Severus was experiencing. She didn't even bother to lift her head from her work when she heard him enter, and the Professor quickly understood the reason for her apparent lack of respect. He slammed the door behind him with a flick of his wand, approached her and spat out an angry "Why?".

She made no sign of having heard him. Severus was on the verge of overturning the cauldron she was working on; then, recalling a memory that only added to his anger, he told himself she must have cast an Isolation Charm. He raised his wand, pointed it at her, resisted the urge to hex her and said, "Finite Incantatem".

Omegas lifted her head. As if awakened, she looked around for a moment, then fixed her eyes on him for no more than a fraction of a second.

"Ah, Severus," she remarked.

She said it in such a casual tone, as she had dozens, hundreds of times before, that he had to make an enormous effort not to lash out at her. He took another step towards the table, placed his palms on the wooden surface and waited for her to bother to notice the anger in his face.

"Why?" he repeated in a threatening hiss.

Unlike how she usually was with the rest of the world, Omegas rarely misunderstood him. Usually she knew exactly what Severus was thinking, down to the last detail, almost as if she could read his mind. This time, however, much to his surprise, she had misunderstood the question he had asked her. Severus had meant it as an unfinished 'Why did you leave?'; she, on the other hand, felt it was 'Why did you come back?

"Because I made a commitment," she replied. "I couldn't leave as if nothing had happened. I would have let my students down."

Severus let out a false, joyless laugh. "You don't care about your students," he declared. "You never have."

She raised a pair of large, judging eyes to him. "Perhaps you don't know me as well as you think."

There was a brief pause, which Severus used only to summon the strength not to respond to that last remark with a violent slap on the table. Instead, he decided to remain calm and show her, in the most painful and sarcastic way possible, just how wrong she was. He gave her a wicked grin and began to circle the table in measured steps.

"You regretted walking out that door the moment you did, didn't you?" he asked in the tone of someone who knew the answer perfectly. "Just like last time. And now you refuse to tell me why you did it, just to avoid admitting to yourself that you made yet another stupid decision."

She showed no sign of losing her composure. Only then did Severus notice the missing detail on her face that had made her seem so profoundly different since he had laid eyes on her again. Omegas wasn't smiling.

"I left because I needed time, Severus."

He lifted his head and let out a mocking laugh.

"Fine. You took your bloody time and decided to come back, I suppose. Do you expect things to return to normal? That I am willing to—"

"I expect nothing," she interrupted firmly. She averted her gaze, focusing stubbornly on the cauldron in front of her. "I expect nothing from you. I'm here to teach, nothing more."

"Liar," he accused, grinning again. "Tell me why you left."

"Because I needed time," she repeated.

"Tell me why you needed time," he retorted.

Omegas lifted her gaze from her work and turned slowly towards him.

"It's none of your business," she declared.

Those words, spoken in that hostile tone, had never been directed at him by her, not even when he had invaded her privacy and looked at her memories without her consent. They should have made him angry, and Severus could feel the emotion, but he was too stunned to give it a voice. Omegas vanished the cauldron with a flick of her wand, took her bag, slung it over her shoulder and circled the table. She took a few steps forward, paused in the middle of the room and spoke without turning.

"Don't bother searching my office, Severus. You won't find your answer here," she declared. She walked to the door and gave him a final, feeble, "And when you're done searching, tidy up," before crossing the threshold and leaving him alone.

Severus searched the office. He found nothing of relevance, but it was far from the last of her belongings he would snoop through in the coming days. 'You won't find your answer here'; if he knew Omegas and her cryptic way of communicating, that phrase meant the answer was out there somewhere. At first, Severus convinced himself that finding that answer would allow him to quell the despair that took hold of him every time he saw her pass through the doors of the Great Hall, walk down a corridor or enter a classroom. Then, driven by a faint sense of optimism he was surprised to find himself still capable of, he persuaded himself that finding an answer to the question of why she had left would also allow him to find a solution. To fix what was broken and return everything to normal.

There are five phases we go through when we lose a loved one, whether physically, emotionally, forever or temporarily. Each time Severus faced them, he ended up experiencing a sixth. Now, forcing himself not to give in to depression, Severus slipped, as he had done each time he had experienced abandonment, into the deep pit that was the phase that seemed to belong to him and him alone: obsession.

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imagowrites · 4 months ago

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Sylvia

Part 2 out of 5 of Æternus.

148k, Snape x fem!OC, Sirius x fem!OC, Teen And Up Audiences, Snape POV, Post-Canon/Canon Divergent, Found Family.

NOTE: it doesn't make sense if you haven't read Omegas.

TW: Explicit violence.

A Quiet Life

The years following the Second Wizarding War were ones of quiet renewal. Everyone, from the owner of the smallest shop in Diagon Alley to the British Minister for Magic, worked to rebuild a harmonious, peaceful Wizarding Community, a world where the deeds of Lord Voldemort would forever be remembered as a warning, never as an inspiration. Everywhere, on every street, in every home, office and classroom, there was an air of gentle, comforting serenity. Everywhere except in Severus Snape's office, in the dungeon of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. There was plenty of silence within those four walls, but the Defence Against the Dark Arts professor quickly learned, at his own expense, to distinguish that quiet atmosphere from the peace that pervaded the rest of the castle. That apparent calm concealed something else entirely.

In the seven years leading up to Voldemort's defeat, Omegas had become so accustomed to surviving as a nomad that she seemed to have completely forgotten how to live in a civilised society. With almost a year to go before Hogwarts reopened, Severus initially tried to persuade her to leave the school.

"Why?" she asked, bending over a cauldron containing a milky liquid that Severus didn't bother to identify.

"Generally, professors don't stay at Hogwarts when there are no classes."

"Why?" she repeated, now adding what looked very much like human hair to the mixture.

"Because professors have no reason to stay at Hogwarts when there are no classes," he explained.

He was careful not to let his tone suggest how stupid he thought it was to underline that obviousness, for she had picked up a small silver dagger and was now staring at him with a frown, her head tilted slightly to one side.

"Where do they go?" she asked, without the slightest hint of irony.

Severus looked around in confusion. "Home," he said simply.

Omegas stopped looking at him, turned and stuck the tip of the dagger into one of her fingertips before dipping the bleeding finger into the whitish fluid. "I don't have one," she observed.

He approached the cauldron and watched in fascination as a dark red spiral formed in the milky-white mixture.

"I do."

She raised her head again and looked at him with a pair of half-closed violet eyes, still holding the silver dagger in one hand. "Are you asking me to come to your house?"

It was only then that Severus realised that he had just proposed to a woman he had known for only a few months, with whom he had a relationship that had yet to be given a title or precise definition, armed with a knife and engaged in something decidedly shady, to move in with him. He swallowed and continued to stare at her without saying a word until he was distracted by something even more bizarre than the situation he had found himself in: the contents of the cauldron had begun to scream. Omegas turned sharply, pulled out her finger and stared at the now pale pink liquid. She put the dagger down and reached out to him.

"Lend me your wand?" she asked, raising her voice to be heard over the screams.

He pulled it from under his cloak and handed it to her.

"What the hell is that?"

"Silencio," she cast, pointing the wand at the cauldron.

The screams stopped. She waved it again and the cauldron and all the ingredients around it disappeared. She slung her bag over her shoulder, gave him one of her indecipherable smiles and handed the wand back to him.

"Fine by me," she said. She walked past him to the office door. "Shall we go?"

Severus was not prepared for her to accept immediately. He had suspected that Omegas would enter his home sooner or later, but he hadn't expected it to happen so abruptly, without warning, from one day to the next. His apartment in Spinner's End had been unoccupied for months, and even in its better days it couldn't be described as a welcoming place. It was small, dark, the neighbourhood wasn't exactly respectable, and since he'd last seen it, at least a couple of spider colonies seemed to have decided to take up residence among the many bookshelves that filled his living room. As they crossed the threshold, Severus glanced at Omegas, and a vivid memory of the last time he had seen her in a house resurfaced in his mind. It had been with Jay in a flat on the fifth floor of a bright building in a quiet street on the outskirts of Liverpool. He had seen her sitting on a soft couch, surrounded by white walls and large windows, high ceilings and immaculate floors. He watched from a distance as she took the first step into the dark room. Omegas placed her velvet bag on the only armchair in the middle of the living room and walked slowly towards the walls covered with dusty bookshelves. She stretched out one arm and ran her fingers along the spines of all the books on the shelves. Then she stopped and stared motionless at the top corner of one shelf. A moment later, her hand darted quickly to a nearby spider web and caught what, from its size, would have been more accurately described as a tarantula than a mere spider. She walked over to her bag, pulled out a glass jar, and a moment later she was removing all eight legs of the large spider, one by one, and placing them in the jar. Job done, she looked at the result of her work with some satisfaction, placed the jar back in her bag, turned to Severus and gave him one of her most genuine smiles.

"I like this place," she declared.

From the scene he had just witnessed, Severus might have been disgusted and vaguely intimidated if he hadn't been so busy being happy.

For the first few days, Omegas didn't live in the apartment as if it were a home; she lived in it as if it were a cave. She would crouch in the smallest, darkest corner of the living room with a book in her hand, only coming out to eat, sleep or change books. Severus barely noticed she was there and decided to treat her behaviour as perfectly normal. He did so partly because he felt it was her way of settling in and partly because, frankly, he had no idea how to behave either. As time went on, Omegas began to come out of her corner. One evening, when Severus returned home, he lit the fireplace with a wave of his wand and conjured an armchair identical to his own in front of the other. She rose from the floor, without taking her eyes from the book she was reading, and sat across from him, as she had done hundreds of times in his quarters, without saying a word. Slowly she began to comment on what she read in some of her books when she found it particularly interesting.

One day, while he was preparing dinner and she was sitting in the armchair in her usual silence, Omegas suddenly chuckled.

"Fascinating, Severus. It says there's no antidote to the Draught of Living Death. This book must have been written before the Wiggenweld Potion was invented," she said, examining the cover for a publication date.

Severus, who hadn't heard her voice in at least two weeks, jumped, nearly spilling the contents of the pot he was handling. From that moment on, Omegas began to speak occasionally, usually to correct something in the volumes that she found inaccurate.

"It says here to use Re'em Blood for the Exstimulo Potion, but believe me, if you add urine, the effect is almost the same, but the taste is much sweeter," she explained one icy Monday afternoon.

Severus looked at her in bewilderment. For a moment he considered asking her 'How do you know that?', but he was so pleased with her newfound sharing that he simply got up from the armchair, went to the kitchen table, quickly cleared it away and said, "Prove it," with an air of forced scepticism.

It was a winning move. Omegas began to take her cauldrons out of her bag, then her ingredients, then her clothes, and when she appeared one Sunday afternoon with a large stack of books and began to arrange them on his bookshelves, he was certain that those had just become their bookshelves.

From then on, life proceeded with such naturalness and simplicity that Severus had grown accustomed to it before he realised it. Whenever he found himself in a potentially embarrassing situation and feared that it would make him uncomfortable, she would do or say something so bizarre and vaguely disturbing that the feeling would disappear. On Christmas Eve morning, when Omegas got up and joined him in the living room, she found him hidden behind the pages of a crumpled newspaper. He had always hated Christmas. He had put his heart and soul into making sure that no one dared to wish him a Merry Christmas or buy him a present. Generally, he spent those two days at Hogwarts, locked in his quarters, except for the traditional feast, as far away as possible from anyone who might remind him of what was happening outside those four walls. The thought that Omegas' presence and their distance from the school might somehow interfere with his solitary habit had caused him to wake up with a feeling of anxiety and annoyance that had only grown as the morning wore on.

"Good morning," she said, sitting down in front of him.

"Good morning," he replied, lifting the newspaper to cover every inch of his face.

When, a few minutes later, he dared to peek in her direction, he found her looking at him curiously, and immediately went back behind his newspaper.

"Ah, of course," she said, leaning back in her chair. "It's Christmas, isn't it?"

Severus pointed at the date on the front page. "Not yet."

"Mm..." she replied.

She pulled a wand from her dress pocket, waved it and, in one swift movement, barred the window, locked the door and sealed the fireplace. Severus looked up from the newspaper, glanced around and saw her disappear behind the book she had put aside the night before. Then he noticed the wand she was holding.

"Where did you get that?"

"Vietnam," she replied.

He frowned. "When were you in Vietnam?"

"Last night," she said, turning a page.

Severus blinked, put down the newspaper and leaned forward in his chair.

"Is it..." he began, intrigued and vaguely intimidated, "is it made of—"

"Oh, yes," Omegas interrupted, now hiding a big satisfied smile behind her book.

He watched her in silence, his lips parted, without saying a word until she calmly put the book down and looked him in the eye.

"Would you like to try it?" she asked, knowing exactly what his answer would be.

Severus nodded and spent the next few hours having the best Christmas Eve of his life.

A new phase of their cohabitation began, just as quiet, but very different from the tranquillity of the previous days. Omegas was absolutely incapable of standing still. She conducted research and experiments of dubious legality and more than questionable morality. She would fixate on something, work on it for a while, then get bored and move on to the next thing. The first obsession was the arch of the Death Chamber, which remained in the living room for months, with its disturbing mystical aura. Severus found ghosts floating around the house, entering the artefact and emerging with disgusted grimaces, swearing they would never set foot in it again and loudly cursing Omegas.

"They won't tell me what's in there, Severus," she complained as the ghost of a middle-aged witch disappeared through the door, looking as if she wanted to slam it behind her. "This would be a lot easier if I knew how to cast the spell on the Weasley lenses."

She flopped down in the armchair with crossed arms and an annoyed look on her face, and remained silent for a few minutes.

"You know what I could do?" she said then. She leaned forward, swirling the brownish liquid in her glass, and Severus knew he wasn't going to like the next sentence. "I could perform another of those rituals, perhaps on a larger animal. Technically, it would be a corpse, wouldn't it? It could enter."

The next morning, the arch had disappeared from the living room and had mysteriously reappeared on the doorstep of the Department of Mysteries.

Not much more than a month had passed before Severus, returning from a few errands in Diagon Alley, entered his home to find a scene even more bizarre than any he had witnessed before. Omegas had conjured a low table, strikingly similar to the one in his Hogwarts quarters, and was offering a drink to someone sitting in his armchair. Severus blinked, and just as he was about to express the anger that had consumed him at the thought of her inviting a stranger without telling him, and that stranger sitting in his seat, drinking whisky with her as if it were nothing, he realised that the man was not a stranger at all. It was Gellert Grindelwald. He stood frozen, staring at him for several minutes as she smiled and handed him a glass filled to the brim. The man, motionless, his brown eyes fixed on her, showed no sign of wanting to take it.

"Is that a Boggart?" he asked, barely hiding his unease with an impassive tone.

"Merlin, I hope so," she replied, chuckling merrily.

Severus approached, snatching the glass from her hands with some irritation and placing it on the table.

"Why is there a Boggart in my armchair?" he asked, hoping that for once the dangerously oily tone that had always worked on everyone else would work on her. He wasn't lucky.

"Fascinating creatures, Boggarts. Don't you think?" she said.

She stood, clasped her hands behind her back and walked slowly around Severus.

"No one has ever bothered to study them properly. Too horrible for anyone to want to keep one in their office and do a bit of research," she continued, stopping a hand's breadth from his nose. "We don't know what they really look like, whether they do what they do consciously or on impulse, whether it's a form of attack or a defensive strategy, whether they're capable of communicating..."

Severus ran his eyes over Grindelwald's face, still motionless in his armchair, staring straight ahead. It was tempting. He had never managed to delve into the Boggart matter; when he had tried, he had been staring at Lord Voldemort's face and had decided to put that curiosity aside. But now Voldemort was dead and he had a woman in his house who was perfectly capable of sitting down and having a drink with her greatest fear.

When he looked back at Omegas, she was preening conspicuously, well aware that the temptation had struck, and he wasn't quite sure, as was often the case, whether he wanted to kiss her or slap her. In any case, he did neither. Instead, he reached for the table, grabbed the glass and nonchalantly raised it to his lips.

"Put it in your chair," he ordered.

That Boggart stayed there for quite a while. Severus told himself it wasn't that bad for an obsession after all; at least it was harmless. He was even somewhat relieved, at least until one of the first warm days of the year when Omegas decided to fall asleep curled up in the armchair and the Boggart, seeing him enter the room and recognising him as the only conscious person around, attacked him. Severus grabbed his wand and prepared to cast a Riddikulus spell, not wanting to deal with Voldemort's ugly, snake-like face at that moment. But instead of transforming into him, the Boggart collapsed to the ground, forcing him to look at the lifeless body of Omegas lying on the cold floor of his house. He hesitated for just a moment and it was enough for her to wake up and see the scene. There was a tense and rather awkward silence that neither of them could break for at least five minutes.

"Oh," she said. "Well, it's kind of romantic."

Severus knew for a fact that the urge to slap her had overtaken everything else. He turned to her with a face contorted with anger and slowly pointed a finger at her double, still lying on the floor.

"Make. That. Thing. Disappear."

She swallowed audibly, and the next day there was no trace of Boggarts.

After that episode, Omegas confined herself to experiments and research involving cauldrons and, at most, ingredients of dubious provenance. One August morning, still far too hot for Severus' liking, the routine of her working at the usual large wooden table, now placed against the living room wall, and him reading in the armchair, pretending not to hear the ominous noises coming from her cauldron, was brutally interrupted by the doorbell. Severus' eyes snapped to hers, and she returned his gaze with an equally worried expression.

"Do you... do you want me to..." she began, gesturing vaguely towards the bedroom.

He stared at her, eyes wide, in silence, until the doorbell rang again.

"I can... I can go if—" she tried, only to be interrupted by a third ring, longer and more insistent than the previous two.

Severus stood impatiently, glancing at Omegas one last time, his eyes telling her to stay where she was. He reached the door, opened it and found himself facing Draco, pale and long-haired.

"Sir," Draco said, somewhat intimidated by the other's angry expression. "Am I intruding?"

He looked up and down at Draco several times, sternly, and only when he felt that he had frightened him enough to ensure that such a display of disrespect would not happen again, did he gesture for him to enter. Draco took a few steps into the house and, as expected, froze in front of the long wooden table and the woman working behind it.

"Omegas?"

She looked up, gave him a polite smile and resumed chopping a root. "Draco."

The boy turned, looked at Severus, then turned back. He did it at least five times in all before he found his words.

"Have you been here all this time?" he asked, surprised and genuinely confused.

"No, no," she replied. "Only since the middle of November."

"Ah," he said. "And where were you before that? I wanted to thank you, you know, for—"

"At Hogwarts. In his quarters," she said, nodding at Severus.

Draco fell silent. It took him a while to find the strength to turn around and look the Professor in the eye. Severus hid his embarrassment perfectly behind a blank expression and gestured briskly towards one of the armchairs.

"Have a seat."

The boy hesitantly approached Omegas' armchair and sat down.

"Something to drink?" the Professor asked, reaching for a nearby cupboard.

Draco looked around in confusion. "It's ten in the morning, sir."

Severus glanced at the glass in his hand, then at the clock across the room. He had spent so much time locked in that dark room, eating when he was hungry, drinking when he was thirsty, sleeping when he was tired, that he had completely forgotten that normal people out there had schedules and conventions. He put down the glass and sat down in his armchair.

"Why are you here?"

The boy settled into his seat, and Severus could clearly read a note of embarrassment in his sharp features.

"Well, sir, you see..." he began, looking stubbornly elsewhere. "I have... decided to sell Malfoy Manor."

The Professor frowned at him. "And?"

"Well, you know..." Draco continued, now drumming his fingers on the armrest. "I've been told that, technically, before I can sell it, I have to inform the closest member of my family, as they would have priority over other buyers if they wanted to—"

"And?" he repeated impatiently.

The boy lifted his head and fixed his blue eyes on him.

"You are my godfather, sir," he said.

Severus remained silent for quite some time. It had been a long time since he had been part of any family, and hearing himself referred to as the 'closest member' brought back a number of emotions he wasn't sure he wanted to face. He locked eyes with Draco in silence until they were both forced to turn towards the wooden table to their left. Something had roared. Omegas quickly pointed her wand at her bag and whispered "Silencio." Then, slightly embarrassed, she gave them both a crooked smile.

"Pretend I'm not here," she muttered, and went back to her work.

Severus looked back at Draco and continued to do so until it became too difficult and he had to look away.

"I don't want Malfoy Manor," he stated.

"Good," the other said, getting up from the chair.

"But I don't think you should sell it," he added.

The boy, who had already taken the first step towards the door, stopped and looked at him again.

"I can't live there," he said in a whisper. "I've tried. I can't—"

"Then don't live there," Severus replied, taking measured steps towards him. "You don't have to. You can own it without—"

"I'm not sure I want to, sir."

Severus scowled at him. The boy had never dared to interrupt him since he'd known him, over eighteen years ago. He took a few more steps towards him and watched as he went pale and bowed his head uneasily. Severus felt guilty. More determined than ever not to show it, he searched for a way to change the subject.

"Where are you staying now?" he asked, taking great care not to sound worried.

Draco lifted his head, looking even more embarrassed than before. "Well, I was in St Mungo's for a while, sir, after the war," He explained. "When they released me, I tried to go back home, but..." He stopped and swallowed hard. It took him a few moments to find his words. "Sirius took me in for a while."

The Professor frowned. "Black?" he asked, not bothering to hide the wave of nausea that the pronunciation of that name had just caused him.

The boy nodded. "Yes, sir. He took Harry in as well. Black house is big."

Severus looked away, a big, eloquent grimace of disgust on his face.

"Anyway, I had to leave," Draco went on. "Ron and Hermione are always there, and the Weasley girl, ever since she came of age, has been sneaking into the house."

He looked at the boy from under his eyebrows, his eyes narrowed, wondering why Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger deserved the privilege of being called by name and why that did not extend to Ginny. Eventually he decided that he was not interested enough in the answer to that question to waste his time and energy.

"Where did you go then?" he asked.

Draco walked back to the armchair and sat down with his arms and legs crossed and an annoyed frown on his face.

"Nowhere. I tried to go home, I told you, but I couldn't..."

He stopped again, choking back what looked very much like a whimper.

"I wanted to sell Malfoy Manor and find another place," he explained. "A different place. A place far away. A place like..." He looked around. "Yes, like this."

Severus frowned again. For a moment he suspected the boy was asking to stay there and became irritated; then he understood the implication behind his 'like this'. He didn't mean 'like this house'. A 'different' place, a 'distant' one. Draco was tired of living in the Wizarding World. He wanted to find a place where he wasn't constantly reminded of his lost family. By 'like this' he meant a Muggle place.

He looked at Omegas at the other end of the room. She must have understood. She too had wanted to escape the Magical Society in the past. Indeed, when he met her violet eyes, they were more understanding than ever. She nodded slowly, reached for her bag and pointed her wand at it. Something small and sparkling came out, and she caught it in the air. She approached the armchair Draco was sitting in, bent down in front of him and handed him a set of keys.

He took it and looked from her to the object a few times, confused. "What are these?"

"They're keys."

Draco narrowed his eyes, even more confused. "I can see that."

"Good," she said. She stood up and turned her back on him.

The boy looked to Severus for help, but he honestly had no idea what had just happened.

"What do they open?" he finally asked, turning back to the woman in front of him.

She turned and gave him the sly and slightly impressed grin she reserved for those who asked the right question.

"A flat," she replied. "On the fifth floor of a building on the outskirts of Liverpool. It's far, but you can Apparate back if you like."

She gave him a genuine smile, taking great care not to look Severus in the eye.

"Sorry, you..." the boy murmured. "Are you lending me a... a house?"

"Oh, no, not at all," she said, giving him another broad smile. "I'm giving it to you."

Draco and Severus stared at her, stunned.

"Why?" the boy asked in a whisper.

She shrugged. "You need it, I don't," she replied briskly.

Draco opened his mouth to object, but Severus caught his eye and signalled him not to.

"I mean... thank you?" he finally said.

"You're welcome," she replied.

She went back behind her desk and didn't move or speak again until Draco had left.

As he did so, Severus slowly approached her, his two deepest and most ingrained instincts fighting each other. The first, which generally prevailed, was the desire to ignore any kind of intimate and potentially painful conversation he happened to be engaging in. The second was the renewed curiosity that had refused to leave him for over a year. On that August morning, having successfully avoided anything remotely related to Jay's story since discovering it, curiosity won out.

"Why?" he asked her.

Omegas looked up at him for a moment. She gave him a smile, one of those sincere and slightly melancholy ones; then she bowed her head back over her cauldron. "Because he needs it. I don't."

Severus approached the table even more cautiously. "You kept it for eight years," he noted.

"Eleven," she corrected him.

He shot her a penetrating look, to which she returned with a furtive, embarrassed glance.

"Why?" he repeated.

"Why I kept it, or why I decided to give it away?"

"Both."

Omegas opened a cylindrical container, pulled out what Severus identified as hairs from something he preferred not to delve into, and added them to the bluish liquid she was working on.

"I felt at home in that place for a while," she explained, taking great care to sound as if her words were of little significance. "I kept it because I thought it would never happen again." She picked up a long, thick nail and began to sharpen it; then she raised her head and fixed her violet eyes on him. "I gave it away because I was wrong."

And she bowed her head again, showing complete nonchalance and pretending not to notice that the man in front of her had completely lost the ability to speak.

"Anyway, we'll be back at Hogwarts in a few days, won't we? Why would I need a house?"

They looked at each other again, and continued to do so until a small clawed hand peeked out of Omegas' bag. She gave it a furtive look, grabbed a nearby sharp knife, jabbed at it and it was forced to retreat back into the bag.

Severus opened his mouth to speak and closed it almost immediately, unsure of what to do. "What—"

"Don't ask me questions you don't want the answers to, Severus."

He tried to reprimand her with a stern look, but it was far less effective than he had hoped. He turned and walked back to his armchair, hiding behind his book a genuine smile that showed no signs of fading for the rest of the day.

A few days later, the time came to return to Hogwarts. Omegas spent the entire night before their departure rereading her textbooks as if she were preparing for an exam. It took Severus a while to understand what was going on in the mind of the woman he had lived with for almost a year, for he had never seen her express such emotion, not even on the brink of the final battle against Lord Voldemort.

The next morning, as he watched her in front of the mirror, trying on a dress, changing her mind, trying on another, changing her mind again, and then pulling out a third, Severus scrutinised her closely.

"Do you think this colour is appropriate?" she asked, smoothing the folds of an indigo dress.

"Appropriate for what?"

"For a professor."

Severus frowned. "What kind of question is that?"

She didn't answer. She stood in front of the mirror, adjusting her dress unnecessarily, with an expression somewhere between suffering and fear. Only then did Severus understand. He approached her with measured steps, forcing himself to look at his own reflection, which showed an inquisitive look and a vaguely malicious grin.

"Are you nervous?" he asked her.

Omegas turned and looked at him with guilty eyes. "Yes," she admitted, lowering her head to hide her face.

Severus resisted the urge to burst out laughing. "Why?"

She huffed, walked briskly away from him and flopped down on the bed with a bounce.

"You know why," she said, crossing her arms and looking away. "I have to talk to a class. A whole class! I'm not... I'm not good at managing people. How am I supposed to manage a class?"

Severus didn't know much about relationships, but he was fairly sure that this was a situation where he should be understanding and say something that would make her feel better. He approached her very slowly. He really tried, with all his might, to say some words of encouragement, but all he could manage was, "They're not people. They're just kids."

Omegas lifted her head sharply and looked him in the eyes, stunned as he silently realised what he had just said.

"That may be the most disturbing thing you've ever said to me, Severus," she remarked. She gave him a grimace that implied, 'and that's saying something...'

She stood up, looked at herself in the mirror again, and when she turned back to him, she did so with a newfound sly smile.

"Thank you," she said.

Severus gave her a sincere smile that he had no control over and nodded his head in something that vaguely resembled a bow.

As they walked side by side through the doors of Hogwarts, then sat together at the High Table for the Sorting Ceremony, then chatted happily before the Start-of-Term Feast, Severus spent most of the time wondering when things would start to go wrong. The idea that the extraordinary life he had been granted over the past year could remain unchanged forever was simply too good to be true.

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imagowrites · 4 months ago

Text

Omegas

Part 1 out of 5 of Æternus.

139k, Snape x fem!OC, Teen And Up Audiences, Snape POV, Post-Canon/Canon Divergent.

TW: Mentions of suicide, explicit violence.

Chapter 1: The Other Side

Severus Snape had always been a practical man. Many of his colleagues, acquaintances and even some of the few people he had felt comfortable calling 'friends' throughout his life often spoke of The Other Side. They have passed on to a better life, they would say, or They’re in a better place now; but Severus had never believed in a better place. Sure, it was undeniable that every living creature had what was commonly defined as a 'soul', and yes, there were ghosts, proving that some sort of afterlife was possible; but those were merely echoes of those who had been alive, and as for souls, there was not a shred of evidence to suggest that they were anything more than a piece of an individual, a component, just another part of someone's essence that, when the time came, would fade away like all the others. The kindest term he had been given by the few people he had had such conversations with was 'cynical'. However, those were certainly not the only circumstances in which he had been called that, and as it happened, every single one of his cynical insights had been proven correct. So, when Severus began to regain consciousness, aware that he had been killed by Lord Voldemort and was therefore most certainly dead, his astonishment was such that he failed to notice the large, throbbing, blood-soaked wound on his neck. As soon as he opened his eyes, a blinding light poured through his half-closed eyelids, burning his irises and making his head explode. He realised he was lying on a soft surface and immediately tried to sit up, but a sharp pain forced him to stay still. He groaned and realised that his throat was so parched that he could barely make a sound. If this is the afterlife, it certainly isn’t a better place, he thought. Then he heard a voice.

"Oh, you’re awake!" it said enthusiastically.

Suddenly a terrifying realisation broke through his thoughts. He was not dead. He was alive, unable to open his eyes, unable to move, in the middle of a war. He tried to sit up again, but the pain was too much and he collapsed. He tried to open his eyes once more, and this time, forcing himself to endure the invading light that threatened to blind him yet again, he managed to make out a blurred figure not far from him. A person, he thought. A threat. Forgetting the pain, he made a quick movement to retrieve his wand, only to discover to his horror that it was not under his cloak. The figure approached and he, now gripped by fear, could do nothing but flail and wave his arms in an attempt to fend it off.

"Calm down— hey!" he heard the figure shout.

But he did not calm down. He fought with even more energy until his hands hit something soft, which he recognised as fabric. He grabbed it and tried to hold whoever was in front of him, pulling with all his might.

"You need to calm down, please!" they continued. "You're making things worse!"

He continued to flail his hands, now in the midst of a full-blown panic attack.

"STOP!" they shouted, and the man realised that his wrists were being held in a very tight grip.

He tried to free himself, but his strength was exhausted, and the wound on his neck burned as if a red-hot blade had pierced it. Helpless, unable to react, Severus stopped struggling and braced himself for the worst. But the worst did not come.

"I don't want to hurt you," the voice said calmly, "I just want to turn off the light so you can open your eyes."

His wrists were released. He heard a click and then footsteps moving away, stopping a short distance from him.

"You can open your eyes now."

Only then did Severus recognise the voice that had spoken to him as female.

He opened his eyes cautiously. The room was shrouded in darkness, but he could still make out the blurred outlines of a four-poster bed on which he lay, a chair not far away, what appeared to be a large table with indeterminate objects on it, and a woman. Severus tried to sit up again, fighting the pain. This time he managed, though not without a muffled groan.

"Be careful, please," she said.

She spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper, and her tone was soft, gentle. He tried to speak but could only produce a choked hiss.

"There's a glass of water on the bedside table next to you," she said encouragingly. "Don't make any sudden moves," she hastened to add, for the man had turned his head in a decisive gesture, forgetting the wound, and let out another hoarse groan.

Cautiously, he reached for the glass on the bedside table. He brought it to his face, but did not drink; instead, he sniffed it suspiciously, wet his lips and touched the liquid inside with his fingers. It seemed to be only water. Unable to do anything else —he had no way of checking the contents without his wand— he decided to drink. The water slid down his throat, cool and refreshing, and made him feel slightly better. Now he would finally be able to speak.

"Who are you?" he asked brusquely.

"My name is Omegas," she replied simply. She reached over to the table behind her and picked something up. "I'll come closer if you don't mind."

Severus recoiled and tried to form a threatening scowl; utterly useless as they were in total darkness. She must have sensed it somehow, because she added, "I don't want to hurt you. I just want to return your wand."

She approached with measured steps and placed something on the bed, a few inches from his hand. He reached for the object and immediately recognised it: it was indeed his wand.

"This won't be pleasant, but I think it's necessary to turn on the light so you can see me. I know you're frightened."

Severus did not like those words at all. He did not like others making assumptions about his state of mind, especially when they were right. He did not answer, and the woman took his silence as agreement. She slowly approached the bedside table beside him and, with another click, switched on the lamp. When she turned back to face the bed, she found Severus' wand pointed at her throat. She barely flinched in surprise, but did not retreat. Instead, she flashed a cunning smile, raised an eyebrow and said, "This isn't very polite."

He watched her, his black eyes finally visible in the dim yellow light of the lamp. The woman named Omegas had a round face, thick black curls pulled back in a messy bun, and large eyes of a strange dark blue, almost violet. She was pale and looked like someone who hadn't slept for a long time. She also had a small scar near her left eye and a deep cut on her lower lip, which was curled into a cunning smile. Severus tilted his head slightly and squinted, studying her carefully.

"Who are you?" he asked again, this time trying to sound as menacing as possible, his wand still pointed at her throat.

"Try not to tilt your head like that, or your wound will get worse."

"WHO ARE YOU?" he repeated with such vehemence that his throat burned again.

She swept her eyes over his face a few times without losing her odd smile.

"I told you. My name is Omegas."

Severus pressed the wand to her throat. "That doesn't answer my question," he said with a growl.

Omegas stared at him in silence for a few more seconds. When she spoke again, there was no trace of the calm she had shown him until that moment.

"I am the person who just saved your life, and I would greatly appreciate it if you stopped pointing your wand at me."

She said it in such a dangerous tone that Severus was taken aback. He considered for a moment; then, carefully and without stopping to give her a venomous look, he lowered the wand.

"Thank you," she said, finding her smile again.

Severus looked around, finally able to look at the room they were in. It was definitely the Shrieking Shack: the four-poster bed was the same as always, as was the wooden chair with the crooked leg. However, the large table and everything on it were new. Omegas reached it, picked up a large black velvet bag and slung it over her shoulder.

"What happened?" he asked her.

"You died," she replied. She snorted a laugh and added, "Well, just for a while."

That mocking laugh, coupled with the story of his recent departure, irritated him quite a bit. His eyes darted to her, sending sparks of hatred. She did not notice, however, as she had begun to fiddle with the bag, looking for something.

Severus had had enough. With an irritated gesture, he threw off the sheet covering him and moved a leg towards the edge of the bed. She saw him, huffed and reached him in two quick steps.

"Oh, no, no, no. Absolutely not!" she exclaimed, placing her hands on his shoulders to force him back onto the bed.

He shrugged her off violently. "DON'T TOUCH ME!" he shouted.

The reaction seemed to impress her. She quickly released his shoulders and stood staring at him in confusion. Severus groaned slightly and brought a hand to his wound: the angry gesture had caused it to bleed again. She noticed and gave him a reproachful look.

"I told you it would get worse."

His eyes darted back to her, fierce. This time she noticed, but didn't seem to care.

"I wanted to treat it while you were unconscious, but I wasn't sure if you'd wake up and, you know..." she looked at him and smiled guiltily. "I didn't want to risk wasting precious resources on a dead man. No offence."

He didn't respond, but continued to stare at her grimly.

"I can do it now, if you let me."

Severus' eyelids narrowed into two suspicious slits.

"Oh, come on, it wouldn't make sense to hurt you, would it? I just saved your life." She took a few steps towards him and added warmly, "Let me help you."

"I don't need your help," he snarled.

"Of course," she said sarcastically, "you're in excellent shape. Have you just been on vacation?"

She chuckled as the scowl on Severus' face grew darker.

She sighed. "Listen," she said briskly, "you have a wound on the right side of your neck, inflicted by the bite of a large snake. I, on the other hand, have a vial of Phoenix Tears that would make you feel much better."

She moved away from the bed and placed a glass bottle of clear liquid on the table.

"I could give you the vial, but to be honest, you haven't given me any reason to trust you yet. Phoenix Tears are extremely rare and I don't intend to waste a single drop. So..." she grabbed the wooden chair and placed it in the middle of the room, "if you want my help, you can sit here and I can treat you, otherwise do as you please and keep bleeding."

Severus remained silent for a while, thinking. He studied the woman in front of him closely, moving his eyes up and down as if to assess her danger. Omegas was quite tall, with broad shoulders and a small waist, and wore a flowing dress the same blue-violet colour as her eyes. She wore a worn black cloak over her shoulders and a pair of fingerless gloves on her wrists. There was not a single wrinkle in her face. She must be very young, Severus thought, a girl. All in all, he judged, she did not appear to be a threat. Reluctantly, his neck still throbbing and burning, he got out of bed, reached the chair, sat down and began unbuttoning the collar of his robes without saying a word.

"Good," she said. She picked up the vial she had placed on the table, rolled up her sleeves and positioned herself beside him. "Tilt your head."

Severus did so, and the skin on his neck tightened, causing another sharp pain. She took off a glove and gently probed the area around the wound.

"There doesn't seem to be any permanent damage," she said to herself. "You're lucky, you know that? I don't think there'll even be a scar."

She uncorked the bottle, which made a soft pop.

"This may be unpleasant. Try to stay still."

He closed his eyes as she poured a few drops onto his wound. For a moment it burned as if a hot coal had been placed on it, then slowly the heat diminished and seemed to take the pain away. Omegas recapped the bottle, looked at him and gave him an encouraging look.

"Done. Good as new."

Severus pulled up the collar of his robes and buttoned it quickly.

"Why do you have Phoenix Tears?" he asked.

She gave him a cunning look and her mouth curved into a mysterious, enigmatic smile.

"I collect rare substances. I gather everything I can find."

"And where did you find Phoenix Tears?" he asked again, raising an eyebrow.

Omegas looked at him for a few seconds in silence, her smile still on her face.

"It's a long story. How are you feeling?" she asked, hastily changing the subject.

"Fine," he replied dryly.

"Good."

Severus rose from the chair, straightened his robes and walked determinedly towards the door. Now that the pain was gone, he could finally leave. He needed to know. He needed to make sure that Potter had completed his task, to make sure that he had seen his...

A lump in his throat prevented him from finishing the thought.

"Where do you think you're going?"

He snapped out of it and turned to look at the woman who was now sitting in the chair, nonchalantly pulling a crumpled newspaper out of her bag.

"Out. Not that it's any of your business."

She frowned and smiled, as if impressed by the man's audacity.

"You can't do it."

Severus gave her a cold glare and looked her up and down.

"Are you going to stop me?" he asked, half threatening, half mocking.

"Yes," she replied, rising from the chair with a defiant air.

His sallow face twisted with pure rage.

"Listen, girl," he growled, "I don't know who you are or why you did what you did. But if you think you can tell me what I can and cannot do just because you saved my life, assuming you did—"

"Assuming I did?" she retorted, offended, pointing to the dusty floor next to the door. "You were practically dead! Even Harry Potter left you to rot on the floor."

He ignored her and spoke more aggressively.

"I have matters to attend to, probably too complex for you to understand. So I'm going now, and you certainly won't be the one to stop me."

They stared at each other, he grim, she incredulous. She moved her hand slightly under her cloak and he instinctively reached for his wand. Finally, she looked up at him with a haughty air, gave him another sly smile and asked, "Through which door?"

Severus turned. The door he had almost walked through a few seconds earlier had now become a thick wooden wall. He pulled out his wand and cast every spell he could think of to make it reappear, but it stubbornly remained a wall. He turned to Omegas, who seemed amused, the mischievous grin still on her face. He was tempted to slap her.

"Make it reappear immediately," he ordered.

"No," she replied firmly. "Now sit down and listen to me." She pointed to the foot of the bed, bravely facing the angry sparks his eyes shot in her direction. "When you have finished listening to me, I will make the door reappear and then you can choose whether or not to get up and leave."

They stared at each other for a while, motionless. Severus considered cursing her, blowing up the wall and escaping. But he thought that would probably draw attention, and he didn't know who was on the other side of that wall. He didn't know how long he had been unconscious, he didn't know the current state of the battle outside, and most of all, he didn't know if he would survive an encounter with a Death Eater or a member of the Order of the Phoenix. Probably, he told himself, every single fighter on both sides would try to kill him on sight. So, without ever stopping to glare at the woman, he reluctantly reached the edge of the bed and sat down. Omegas, without taking her eyes off his face, reached for the chair and moved it closer so that they were facing each other. She sat down and spoke in a stern tone.

"My name is Omegas. I am part of this war and I am aware of the current situation. I know that you are a Death Eater, judging by the mark on your arm, or at least you were. It was your master's snake that did this to you, so I imagine you have exhausted your usefulness in his eyes." She curled her lips into a grimace that mimicked a contrite expression. "I'm sorry."

She pointed to the wall to their left, where the door had been a moment before.

"If you go out there now and are seen, both armies will try to kill you, making all my efforts up to this point a waste of time and precious resources. I can't allow that. Do you understand?"

She gave him an intense look and Severus noticed, for the first time since he had seen her, that her eyes were not dark blue, almost violet: they were actually purple.

"Oh, and I'm not a 'girl'," she added irritably.

A sudden surprise cracked the man's grim expression. He frowned and tilted his head slightly.

"You... think I'm a Death Eater?" he asked in a whisper.

She replied with the same look of puzzlement and a raised eyebrow.

"Aren't you?"

He shook his head slowly.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, good for you.”

There was a pause; then a macabre realisation made Severus clutch his wand tightly under his cloak.

"Why did you help me if you thought I was a Death Eater?" he asked, ready to fight. "Are you a Death Eater?"

Omegas gave him a look of disgust.

"Absolutely not," she declared.

She rolled up her left sleeve, revealing a pale forearm free of Dark Marks. Severus let go of his wand and looked at her again, curious.

"Then why?"

Omegas sighed, getting up from the chair and walking quickly to the large wooden table.

"I don't have a satisfactory answer," she replied.

"Give me an unsatisfactory one," he retorted.

She turned sharply and an amused smirk appeared on her face. She reached into the black bag from which she had taken the Phoenix Tears, opened it, pointed her wand inside and twirled it. A second bottle emerged, slightly larger than the first, made of dark glass. She uncorked it, sniffed it with some satisfaction, recorked it and threw it into the man's hands.

"What is it?" he asked.

"An antidote."

"To what?"

Omegas gave him another enigmatic smile. "If you tell me, I'll let you out."

Anger once again distorted Severus' thin face. "We're not playing," he growled.

"Oh, come on," she huffed, "I've been here watching over you for hours. It was rather boring, you know?" She pointed to the bottle in the man's hands and smiled again. "Tell me what it is and you're free to go."

Severus had the distinct, annoying feeling that she was trying to buy time. He stood up, reached out to her and looked into her eyes for a moment, threateningly. She continued to stare at him, impassive, with the same irritatingly cunning expression. Severus looked down at the potion, and an emotion he had forgotten he could feel rose up in him: curiosity. A mysterious woman saving his life under Voldemort's blind eyes, an unknown potion in his hands, and he, still alive, challenged to identify it. The enigma was so inviting that for a moment he forgot that he was in the middle of a war and had a mission. Without saying a word, he walked solemnly to the wooden table, placed the bottle on it and began to examine it. Satisfied, the woman jumped onto the four-poster bed and went back to reading her newspaper, probably thinking it would take him hours. Severus, however, took no more than ten minutes. He uncorked the bottle, sniffed the contents and let a few drops slide onto the table's surface. Watching them closely, he wet his fingers and ran one over his lips. Then he took out his wand, pointed it at the mysterious liquid and said, "Revelio". Apparently he did not like what the potion had revealed to him, for he frowned, pointed the wand at it again and repeated the spell. He did it four times in all, and each time he seemed a little more puzzled than the last. Finally, he put his elbows on the table and rested his chin on the back of his hands, his back forced into an unnatural curve and his eyes reduced to slits.

"It's impossible," he whispered.

She smiled, not taking her eyes off the newspaper.

"You can't figure it out, can you?"

Severus, his attention now entirely on the object in front of him, ignored her.

"Did you use this to..." He didn't finish the sentence, but gestured vaguely towards his neck.

"To save you? Yes."

"It's impossible," he repeated, not taking his eyes off the potion.

"Are you giving up?" she asked with a grin.

The question woke him; he straightened and looked her in the eyes with a stern expression.

"This is an Antidote to Common Poisons," he announced, pointing to the bottle, "Bezoar, Mistletoe Berries, Unicorn Horn, to which a good dose of poison has been added. From the snake, I deduce." He leaned over the table again, studying the potion in fascination. "In general, this is how you turn a common antidote into a specific one. However, the poison has to be modified so that it does not affect the person you are trying to cure. It usually takes weeks to derive a working antidote for an unknown poison." He picked up the bottle and held it between his face and the lamp to study it against the light. "It is practically impossible to make a potion recognise a single ingredient as the substance to be identified and acted against, while treating all other components as mere parts of the mixture, even with a spell."

He took out his wand and waved it at the bottle again. An eerie black halo rose around the dark glass, which emitted a faint, disconcerting hiss.

"This is a... this is an Imperius Curse," he said in an incredulous whisper. "An Imperius Curse cast upon..." he swallowed, unable to finish the sentence. He opened his lips again, but no sound came out; finally, in a last, barely audible murmur, he repeated, "It's impossible."

Omegas, who had already put the newspaper on the bed and was giving his full attention to the man's words, looked at him wide-eyed, almost as astonished as he was.

"Bravo!" she exclaimed. "You have... you know, you are the first to ever—"

"Did you cast an Imperius Curse on a soulless thing?" he cut her off.

Omegas smiled, intrigued by the sudden glimpse of respect in the man's eyes.

She nodded. "I did."

"How?" he whispered.

"An experiment. It's not exactly an Imperius Curse, I had to find a formula that could enchant something without consciousness, but..." She rose from the bed and reached for the table, stopping in front of him. "Well, I tried. I never got a chance to test it though." She looked at him with a vague note of guilt. "I had to. You were too perfect an opportunity to miss. I mean... you would have died anyway..."

Severus, who had never taken his incredulous eyes off the object in front of him, suddenly looked back at Omegas, his brow furrowed and his expression severe.

"You used me as a guinea pig?"

She did not answer, just shrugged and gave him a wicked look.

"How did you figure it out?" she asked after a moment.

"I used to teach Potions."

"Oh, really? At Hogwarts?"

It was then that Severus realised he had revealed a vital piece of information about himself to a stranger, in a dilapidated shack with no door, in the middle of a war. He cursed himself for being distracted enough to make such a stupid mistake.

"Wait," she continued, "are you..." She fixed her big purple eyes on him. "Snape? Severus Snape?"

He nodded slowly. She immediately lowered her eyes, and he had the distinct impression that she was blushing.

"Do we know each other?" he asked, a note of curiosity cracking his rigid tone.

"No," she replied, a little too quickly to be believable.

Omegas pulled out the wand and waved it at the wall to her left. The door reappeared.

"You have won. You're free to go."

Severus watched her as she kept her eyes stubbornly fixed elsewhere.

"What are you going to do?"

"Why?" she asked, surprised at the sudden interest.

"You said you were part of this war. Why aren't you out there? Why have I never seen you?"

She shook her head vigorously. "I don't let myself be seen."

"By whom?"

"By no one," she stated.

"I see you," he observed.

She turned to him and gave him a wide, cryptic smile.

"Yes, but it doesn't matter. You'll forget me," she declared, gesturing towards the door. "Go now. I won't hold you any longer. Try not to get yourself killed again."

Severus watched her for a few moments. Then, cautiously, he reached for the wooden door, placed his hand on the handle and gave her one last, furtive glance before opening it and being swallowed by the night beyond.

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