FIC: Leman (R)
Title: Leman
Type: Fic
Age-Range Category: Five
Characters: Severus Snape, Harry Potter, Garrick Ollivander
Author: eldritcher
Rating: R
Click to View [Warning(s)]Creator Chooses Not to Warn.
Summary: A wand is made.
The hands on him were papered by years and calloused by work and ruined by war. He closed his eyes, counting in his head the knots and the gnarls marking the appendages that moved over his hair.
The hands returned with the tools of blade and comb. A knuckle's tap to his brow, commanding him to be still. He would be. Even his breathing matched the other's, following where he was led.
Fingers moved deftly over him, turning his head about as if he were inanimate and inert. First the comb. Then the blade. Then the comb again, and then the blade.
Water sluiced down the bared of him, streaking away what had been shorn off. He trembled, although it was not cold. Hands came to his head, skimming once from crown to ear in assertive command. He held still. In this gloaming place between baring and beginning, stillness was no ordeal.
Hair bristled along his skin, caught in the creases and the clefts. Hands came to brush off one or two caught in the crinkles of his eyelids.
"There you are."
There he was.
The sharp of brine. The pungent of truffles. The foul of moss. The fresh of sanded wood. Breathing, one matching the other. Falcon cries. The play-tussle grunt-growl-bark of hounds.
Hands came to his mouth, to open him wide. Fingers, first, and then the stumps. They trailed along his crooked teeth, scratching along the inside of his cheeks, lifting his tongue and plucking along the underside, before leaving him empty to daub smears of mouth's wet along his nose. They moved then to his bared head, tricking him out of his inertness with how they raked along uncovered scalp.
"Go on."
He touched himself.
The hands remained on him, dipping from head to brow to jaw, and then skirting to shoulders and breast and arms, and then clutching him by the cheeks when he bowed and broke.
~
Petrichor stained the morning. He picked his way through the slush. The descent was tricky, even for one who had navigated the foothills for ten or twelve winters.
The falcons trilled warning.
Whizzed through the treeline of spruce a boy on a broom. Swaddled in colourful knits, red-cheeked and red-nosed, hair askew, he made a quaint sight among the black spruce. He hovered five feet high, frowning fierce. His lips were pursed in disapproval. Had he learned that from his aunt?
"Potter."
"Snape. You are going to break your neck on the ice."
"What brings you here?"
Potter shrugged. He sat the broom easy and quiet as he trailed along, despite the maze of trees and the snowfall. He was a sight to watch. The Quidditch pitch had seen exploits of better fliers, but there was an inchoate becoming to how Potter broomed about in a black forest in the winter.
"McGonagall is worried about you."
Minerva had been worried about him, when he had crawled out of the shack as a bloody spectre.
"I am worried about you," Potter continued briskly. Ten or twelve winters, and old nervousness had long fled.
Then, seeing that he was not going to get new answers, Potter switched the subject. "What are you looking for today?"
"Dragons."
"Oh!"
The childish curiosity and enthusiasm in Potter was the same he had worn when he had tumbled into the Great Hall as a little boy of eleven with wide-eyes and a jagged scar.
Potter cloaked himself. The creatures of the forest disliked magic and boys on brooms.
"Foggy."
Dragon's breath.
He glanced at where Potter must be. No sign of wariness yet. Potter's senses, what remained of them, were acute.
Once, he would have asked Potter if he required assistance, as they negotiated the descent into the ravine. Potter would have bristled and snapped and trudged on in a sulk. They would have had a roaring row about fathers and mothers and betrayal and failure, and floundered as fools with nowhere to turn to. Once. Once had been long ago, before the boy had become man.
If Potter could fly across the channel to this desolate and black forest, with boldness that neither the Romans nor the Alemanni had once had when crawling through its dark belly, then there was little assistance he needed from anyone.
"You should get on the broom. The cloak can hide two, you know."
A flying spell would have been handy. It spooked the creatures he sought. So he must do it as the Alemanni had, with axe and clumsy handholds and scraped knees.
He lost his footing as he scaled down a crag, but he had walked this path in all seasons; swiftly, he righted himself by catching hold of the thick undergrowth that had not yet withered to winter.
"Don't break your neck," Potter warned him.
This had been negotiated over the years. Once, Potter would have swooped to save him. Potter had learned that swooping and saving did not suffice anymore, in the times they lived in. He settled for grumpy warnings instead.
"Worried about my neck, are you?"
"About what is left of it."
Potter had grown acerbic over the years. Minerva's doing, no doubt. She had a tongue of brine.
"She is fine," Potter said abruptly.
There was more Potter would not say. She was as fine as she could be, saddled with a war that Albus had not ended, saddled with leading a cause against a madman who held half the country in his iron-clawed grip.
"She is not alone."
She was not. Potter was by her side. Potter had cunning in spades and ruthless courage to match. How could she hope to be as him? How could anyone? He was moulded to purpose by Petunia and Albus and the Dark Lord.
The fog lay heavy on valley's breast. Dull rattled a dying thing.
"Snape-"
Look away, he would have told Potter once. He did not.
Potter's worry was a palpable beast on Snape's back as he approached the dragon. The ground was slushy. Snowmelt over char. A ring of spruce stumps stood watch, their black blackened to night. He moved to the cratered pit where the beast lay slumped.
There were three ravens sat upon a stump. They were as black as they could be.
Potter's heart was loud, louder than the dragon's.
An embered eye watched him.
"It is all right," he told the beast. "It is all right." He put down his climbing axe and stripped himself bare. Snow flecked his hands as he reached them out in open supplication.
There was no time. The beast's heart teetered drunken to its end. He picked up the obsidian. Potter's fear was loud in its silence.
The beast uncurled itself, baring its breast to a bare man.
"It is all right," he repeated, because he had nothing else to offer. He tore the skin and ligaments with obsidian, delving through flesh and viscera until he reached heart's string. He plucked it with his naked hands.
~
Potter showed up, ill-kempt and grumpy.
"What have you done?" He scowled. "Why do you have to do something stupid every twenty years?"
He could not reply. There was not much left of his neck. Poppy was optimistic about the prognosis.
"McGonagall said you were leaving. You can't. I won't let you. I need you here. There is a bloody war going on, if you haven't noticed!"
Potter was rage and determination and summer's vengeance.
"Mr. Potter."
"You!" Potter growled at Ollivander. "You are the reason he has that damn wand!"
The boy fell quiet when Snape managed to bring his hand to signal silence.
"Mr. Snape agreed to be my apprentice for twelve years. He will accompany me to the Continent, Mr. Potter. We wish you good luck."
"Headmaster Snape hasn't shown the least interest in wand-making, in the time I have known him."
Minerva. Her tongue was brine. She came to stand beside Potter; compatriots who meant to see a war through to its bitter end.
"Now he has," Ollivander replied. "We must leave soon."
"A minute with him," Minerva demanded.
Ollivander nodded courteously and stepped out.
"Listen, Snape-"
"Listen, Severus-"
Potter waved Minerva on, ceding his turn.
"There can be no wand to equal the one he carries," she said bluntly. "What foolishness did you promise Ollivander?"
Twelve years.
"Why did he agree?" Potter asked. "They tortured him half to death in those dungeons. Why the hell would he agree to build us a new wand? He is terrified of Voldemort."
Ollivander would not be crafting that new wand Potter needed.
"Severus." Minerva again, wearied, frightened.
Hold the line, he wanted to tell them. Hold the line, for twelve years, for a turn of Jupiter about the sun.
"All right," Potter said finally, grim-faced. He turned to Minerva. "Come on, Headmistress. We need to shore up the defences."
"We need to evacuate before we are trapped in a siege," she argued.
"All right," Potter said, dulled and illumined by purpose fell and destined. "All right. Let us evacuate then."
~
"You are confident, then?"
"I am not an astronomer."
He knelt before Ollivander. Hands came to his head. There were fingers and there were stumps. The dungeons had not treated the wand-maker well.
He knew what Ollivander wanted.
"Shear me."
With blade and comb, with hands clumsy and unlearned, Ollivander sheared him. Warm was the water poured on him as anointment, wiping away blood and hair, leaving him bare.
"Go on," Ollivander commanded.
He touched himself.
The hands remained on him, dipping from head to brow to jaw, and then skirting to shoulders and breast and arms, and then clutching him by the cheeks when he bowed and broke.
~
"When do you have to return?"
"Tomorrow morning," Potter answered absently, from where he was sat before the hearth with a cup of broth. The dogs lay on his lap, whining when he stopped petting them.
"Did you really name them Punch and Judy?"
The dogs nipped at Potter's hands playfully in response.
"I guess you did," Potter muttered. "I cannot believe you are keeping house here with dogs and falcons while McGonagall is fighting the damn war." He relented. "I know what you are trying to do. I do. But it won't work, Snape. We know that wand is unstoppable. And that is all right. We only need to hold the line and wait for him to make a slip."
"We have been waiting for twelve years."
"It hasn't been easy on us. It hasn't been easy on them."
Potter spoke with the assurance of a general, as a little Napoleon in knitted jumpers, as a patron saint of all good dogs who clamoured to him for pets and treats.
He was cusped on thirty. His hands were stained by war, in scars and burn-marks and reset bones.
"I hate the mushrooms."
"Truffles, Potter. They are truffles."
"Fungus!" Potter complained, and drank down the broth in swift slurps.
Truffles served nothing in wand-making. Snape could not stand them. He had not been made for the finer things, he supposed. He foraged them for Potter's sake. Potter, for all his disavowing, licked his bowl clean when truffles were involved.
"If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were cooking children," Potter continued. "No meat on the bones."
"Pigeon."
Potter snorted. He ate as a ravenous man, as Sirius Black had at the Weasley feasts. War had thinned Potter to a machine of purpose. How did Minerva fare?
"Aren't you eating?"
"I can't."
Potter put down his bowl. Punch and Judy whined and slunk away, sensing the turn in the cabin.
"McGonagall-"
"We haven't the time. Jupiter turns. It must be tonight."
~
He knelt before Ollivander, with potions and tinctures and a healer's purpose.
"I saw three ravens today."
The hands he held were broken. He splinted the wrists with learned care.
"Three ravens?" Ollivander asked faintly. Pain drenched his voice and turned it lush and odd.
"Yes. They were as black as black could be."
"Did one of them turn to his mates and ask, Where shall we our breakfast take?"
"There is no dearth of breakfast."
The Dark Lord was an excellent addition to the ecosystem, as far as the carrion birds and the scavenging beasts were concerned. No dearth of corpses.
"Snape."
An old argument, and a loathsome one.
"I think I can brew something, Ollivander. A tincture and then you'll be as right as day."
Fingers dangled purple and broken from Ollivander's splinted wrists.
He should fix them. If he didn't, if Ollivander could not make another wand, then Potter would-
"The wand of death the Dark Lord carries cannot be defeated by any I make, Snape." Ollivander's gaze turned distant. "Death cannot be defeated."
There was a grave in Godric's Hollow, which declared bold that over them death had no dominion.
"What turns the dragon heartstring potent, Ollivander?"
Ollivander laughed; a pain-bleached and sepulchral sound. He brought his ruined hands to Snape's head, and trailed down his brow and nose, and pressed them against his heart.
"What turns the heart potent, Snape?"
~
"If this doesn't work, I want you to return with me," Potter hissed, broom-borne and fierce-faced.
"It isn't safe anymore," he continued, when Snape did not reply. "They have allies in these parts, in Baden-Baden. Fleur said that they have snatchers in the forests. If I can find you, so can he."
Potter's senses, what remained of them, were acute. He excelled at finding that which did not wish to be found.
The falcons cried warning, before they met their feathered foes with beak and talon.
"What is that?" Potter demanded. Wary, but without a whit of fear.
"Ravens."
"How many?"
"Three."
~
"What did you see today, Snape?"
Punch and Judy went to Ollivander, seeking to be petted, only to return to Snape disillusioned. Ollivander did not tolerate the canines. Snape had not thought himself particularly of a mind to keep a pet, but he kept Punch and Judy and his falcons two. Hagrid's parting gifts. When they had made to evacuate the castle, Hagrid had stuffed two puppies and two hatchlings into Snape's arms. That had been that.
"There were three ravens sat upon a tree. They were as black as they could be."
"Did one of them turn to his mates and ask, Where shall we our breakfast take?"
They had cawed to each other in ravenspeech. The falcons had chased them away. Punch and Judy had guarded Snape as he clambered up from the narrow valley to the craggy uphill paths. All had been hidden by spruce, but he had heard the ravens making a feast of the dragon he had left behind.
~
Snow lay virginal under the moon's gleam. They had climbed to an altitude where the fog had given way to clear. The stars above them were Cassiopeia's.
"Why here?" Potter asked.
"It must be here."
There was an old quarry somewhere on the foothill that the Muggles had once mined from. This mountain was rich in ore; silver was her veins. They had carven her open and unspooled the lustrous threads of her.
~
"Why here?" he had asked Ollivander.
"The stars above us are Cassiopeia's."
Snape had little interest in astronomy. He looked up and marked the constellation.
"A queen, enthroned. They say that it is her punishment for her sin to be tied to her throne in that undignified position, upside down, bared, defeated and subjugated."
"What was her sin?"
"She was vain and arrogant. She thought herself beyond the dominion of the Gods."
The Dark Lord was vain and arrogant. He thought himself beyond death's dominion.
Snape knelt before Ollivander, on the snowy summit. Still he remained as he was bared and sheared.
"It is time."
He held the broken hands in his own and kissed them with a trembling mouth.
The falcons cried shrill. The dogs bayed woe.
"Such hawks, such hounds, and such a leman," Ollivander breathed. He closed his eyes and brought his war-marred hands to the bare scalp offered him, tracing ear and nape and many paths to crown.
Ollivander handed him the obsidian.
Three the ravens that circled in hope.
~
"McGonagall and I were sure there was a life-debt," Potter said. "But it wasn't just that, right? I can see that now."
The tear in Potter's voice was no sulky, boyish thing. It hung there between them, as a note of grim, human rend.
Leman had been Ollivander's name for him. Leman. Beloved to man.
Old English was not Snape's forte, but Ollivander had slipped into it ever so often, imbuing the archaic with heart's earnest. Snape had learned the language, as he had learned the craft, as he had learned to be still when broken hands roved over the pieces and the places of him. They had begun in life-debt and desperation. They had ended as man and leman.
"You buried him here, didn't you?" Potter continued.
He had. He had climbed the mountain with summer's dawn. Fallow had he been, and as full with heart's magic as he might be. He had lifted up the bloody head and kissed the wounds that were so red. The falcons had swooped to chase off the ravens. Punch and Judy had kept him company.
Potter stood before him, as his little Napoleon, windswept and ferocious and fearless. His face was brighter than Cassiopeia's stars.
Snape knelt before him and handed him the comb and the blade.
"What must I do?" Potter asked. For the first time in ten or twelve years, fear tinged his voice.
"Shear me. Bare me."
"I cannot see," Potter whispered, terrified. "Snape, I cannot see. I am bloody blind! You cannot ask me to-"
There were senses beyond sight. Snape caught Potter's hands in his own and felt the cold fingers flinch and tense.
"All right," Potter said, fierce and steady once again. "All right."
Potter's hands were steadier than Ollivander's had been. Ollivander had nicked and scraped, in the beginning. Potter did not.
"You are so still. And quiet. This isn't like you," Potter muttered. "I don't like it. Say something."
"There are three ravens above us."
"Say something else!" Potter exclaimed. "I don't want to hear about the bloody buggers."
Fingers moved deftly over him, turning his head about gently in the manner of a lover touching his living beloved. First the comb. Then the blade. Then the comb again, and then the blade.
It had taken desperation to cede to this, when Ollivander had first taught him. The wand-maker must be bare and shorn to pluck a heart's string, Ollivander had said. Their plight had forced his hand. Potter needed a new wand that would make him sovereign when he met the Dark Lord in battle again.
Their plight remained desperate, but it was not desperation that left Snape still and quiet and pliable and surrendered. It was Potter's hands, and Potter's tense and grumpy babbling, and the glint of Potter's cloak under the stars of a defeated Cassiopeia. It was the grim knowledge that Potter had flown to him, unnumbered times, across channel and mountain, sightless, guided only by his heart. Potter had found him as a pigeon finds home.
"It suits you," Potter said nervously. "All this. The black forest. Punch and Judy. Those bloody falcons. This. Even this. Kneeling before me waiting to be shaved and stripped. All this suits you. I didn't imagine you like this. I didn't want you like this. But I want it now. I wish I could see you now. Did he have this too? He must have, right? I am not sorry that he is-"
Potter snuffled a wet sob and gritted his teeth and carried on. Ever the hero, his little Napoleon, too noble to wish death on another.
The comb and the blade fell to the snow. Potter bowed and kissed his brow, and then kissed the bared scalp of him, and then his ears, and then seized him in a clumsy embrace.
"Harry."
"All right," Harry replied, weeping, furious, determined, taking up the obsidian. "What should I do?"
~
Alone on a snowy summit, there lay a man slain under a cloak. His hounds lay at his feet. His falcons flew over his head, chasing away the ravens three.
Then came a fallow man, as great with heart's magic as he might be, sightless and seeing. He lifted up the bloody head and kissed the wounds that were so red.
"It is over," the little hero said.
It was over. Jupiter turned and Cassiopeia fell undignified.
"I told Hagrid to come for Punch and Judy."
He bore a stick of love, spun from heart's string, encased in the spruce of their black forest. It had defeated a stick of death.
"McGonagall is furious. She is really, really furious."
The hero took his leman into his arms and sung to him soft summer rhymes.
"I wish I could see you."
He had. He had bared and sheared and opened all there was to see; he had plucked leman's heart and strung it to spruce.
~
Ravens three circled the summit. They were as black as they could be.
They watched man and leman fade at even's cusp, leaving only a stick of spruce and heartstring.
Falcons cried and flew away. The hounds bayed and ran away. And the sun, too, tumbled away to blotting night.
Soft sank the stick into mountain's breast, dirged deep to bier by raven coronach.