Chapter Text
The man who had once been Tom Riddle gazed back at him in the mirror, the once-haughty expression visible only as a remnant now in the chilling, murderous stare.
It had been a lousy Yuletide and an even lousier winter. The narrow miss at Godric’s Hollow the day before had been incredibly irritating, if fruitful in yielding the young Grindelwald's identity. Elusive Potter, pish posh! In addition to all of that, the snatchers hadn’t been doing their jobs properly, and the sacrificial Muggle mayhem his Death Eaters had been causing causing seemed hollow at best. All supposedly for his cause, “For the Dark Lord” they told each other, as if pest control deserved some special honor, was some demonstration of loyalty. And they were incompetent, oh so incompetent. Even the Hogwarts adolescent reeducation program was not progressing as quickly as he had anticipated. His whole life, no one had ever been his equal. Forever surrounded by dingbats and simperers, those collecting undeserved accolades and pandering after the approval of other putrid people. There was simply no one who could ever be... like him. He was alone. Even Dumbledore had gone down like a dog, without even a fight. The one warlock that had once seemed an enemy with worth contending. There was nobody else. No one.
With perhaps one exception.
The Other Dark Lord.
Their meeting had been but one night, all too brief, but Voldemort had felt his power. With a man like that at his side, there was no way Potter could have gotten away. His own magical prowess combined with such raw energy, well, they could be an unstoppable force. No, that was ridiculous, was he really thinking about partnership at a time like this?
It had been necessary to banish the other…magician? Of course it had been… what was he anyway? He had called himself a Sith…but Severus’s research had turned up nothing on the topic. What were these Sith? Perhaps there was some method of contacting them… No. It had been necessary. He could never make an accessory of someone who was used to being as in charge as he so clearly was (a bit bossy really…). Such a being would only try (and fail of course) to destroy him, to usurp his control for their own. Of course that is what would have happened…
But what if not? What if for the first time, he could have a truly adept ally on his side? Not someone with mere money or political influence like Malfoy had been, or mere book smarts and zero charisma like Severus. Someone… like… him…
~~~~~
“Headmaster!”
Phineas Nigellus smirked down at the office through his portrait.
“Headmaster, wake up!”
Snape stirred, asleep at his desk after a long day of poring over location spells.
“Headmaster! He is in the Forest of Dean!”
The professor rolled his head without opening his eyes.
“SEVERUS!”
Snape startled awake with a loud snore.
“Aghh! What in the name of—”
“Headmaster he is IN the FOREST of DEAN. Right now. This minute. I’ve no idea where it is, but as you’re the one with the maps and I, myself am stuck in a portrait, I suggest you get on with it.”
Snape blinked, shaking himself to get the blood to his brain flowing.
“The Forest of Dean, you say?” he mumbled, picking up his wand and waving it over a stack of tomes. One roll of parchment slid out from the pages, struggling to free itself from the paper weight above it, and finally unfurled itself midair and fell to the desk, strewn with other books and parchment.
Snape closed his eyes, concentrated, and lifted both hands, wand in his right. The red liquid from an inkwell on a nearby shelf formed a hairsbreadth bridge to the map, pooling on top of a section which upon closer inspection was marked, Forest of Dean.
His eyes snapped open, and he snatched up the parchment, inspecting it closely.
“Well what are you waiting for Snape? I can’t tell you how long they’ll be there! The mudblood girl is already setting up those blasted protective enchantments as we speak!”
Snape coolly continued his poring over the map, deliberately waiting a beat before drawling out a response in his most patronizing voice.
“I have never been to this place, Phineas, it would hardly do to end up overshooting and splinching myself across Monmouthshire, now would it?”
Snape set down the map slowly, briefly meeting the eyes of the portrait above him before spinning on his heels to search the opposite bookcase.
“No it’s no good, I’ll need a photograph, two or three maybe depending on the quality. It doesn’t help that they could be anywhere within any of a hundred and ten square kilometers. You didn’t hear anything else? Do other defining features? A nearby boulder, a birdsong?”
“No no no, of course not. Who discusses the scenery at a time like they’re having? And I don’t know if you’ve noticed in my previous reports, but things are a bit muffled in there.”
“Mmmmmm” Snape responded, disinterested.
“Well it seems like it’s a bit of a Muggle attraction, perhaps one of the students has been there,” Phineas offered.
“Ah yes, why don’t I just gather up all of the Muggle students and ask them? Oh wait, they’re—” Phineas Nigellus cut him off.
“They’re all in hiding or dead, none of them left of course at this pureblood institution. Ah yes, well don’t Muggles also have bookshops? Perhaps you could find something there.”
Snape turned around slowly, enunciating every word with a bite.
“Let us hope, headmaster, that it does’t come to that.” He returned to his perusal of the shelves, wand alight but dim, humming low.
“No this won’t do.” Snape pondered his predicament. “Nothing anywhere…. wait!” His want brightened, vibrating loudly in front of a book on Mooncalf dance circles and fluxweed collection. “There’s something about it in here.”
With a wave of his wand, the book flew off the shelf, opening to a page with a sparse illustration of the Mooncalf circles once observed in the area during the 17th century.
“Ughh,” Snape groaned. “This is useless. Maybe I’ll have to go visit some Muggle villages after all,” he rolled his eyes.
“Unless…” Snape’s voice brightened. “Perhaps there is a memory of it in the collection—”
Snape strode over to another bookcase, shifted the knickknacks set in front of the books, and waited for the shelf to swing open, revealing vials and vials of shimmering silver fluid. He began sorting through the bottles, checking their labels and replacing them one by one.
“BOUNDARY VIOLATION ALERT! BOUNDARY VIOLATION ALERT!”
Snape quickly hushed the alarm with a spell aimed at a corner panel near the door.
“He’s here,” Phineas whispered.
Snape hurriedly replaced the vial in hand, shutting the shelf, and returned to stand in front of his armchair just as the door to the Headmaster’s office flew open.
“My Lord,” Snape uttered, bowed his head, and knelt.
~~~~~
Snape paced back and forth in front of a cauldron in an out-of-the-way, imperturbable room in the dungeons. His voice trembled with repressed rage and fear as he ranted in the general direction of the portrait of Phineas he’d brought downstairs for emotional support.
“He wants me to SUMMON him a SOULMATE GOOSE?” Snape’s words felt like ice water as he said them, and they metaphorically splashed across Phineas.
“As if that magician wasn’t enough of a hassle last time! Do you know how far back I had to research to find out how to get rid of the goose last summer? Even with my expert-level proficiency with ancient runes it was a near-impossible job to translate the only text I could find on the topic, and the tome was very clear that ONCE BANISHED THEY ARE NEVER TO RETURN. The Dark Lord agreed to that! He said that was what he wanted! And now he wants me to just undo an irreversible spell, which he approved, at his whim? Honestly, he’s a maniac!”
Phineas Nigellus nodded blandly, “That’s why I always preferred to be in charge, myself. Of course, I was never such a fickle ruler. Consistency and discipline, that’s what I say. Severely lacking nowadays.”
Snape halted his pacing and inhaled a sharp breath of dungeon air.
“Even if I can somehow, by some ingenious Atlantean feat, invent a way to find him this goose he wants, and of course” Snape huffed again, annoyed, “if I want to keep my hands, feet, and liver I’ve got to,”
Phineas winced at the reminder of the disgustingly specific threat the Dark Lord had given the current Headmaster.
“Even if I can figure that out, there’s absolutely no way we can allow that lunatic loose, wherever he came from. He was far too powerful to be contained easily, that was easy enough to tell. Even if he took out V-” Snape stopped himself just in time to not trigger the name-jinx. “Even if somehow he defeated the Dark Lord, he doesn’t seem the type to sanction a peaceful transition of power back to the plebs like us.”
Phineas grumbled something about being part of the ruling class in his day, actually. Snape continued, pacing.
“And I can only imagine the situation turning into a true horror story if by some twist of fate, they actually managed to work in tandem. We’d really be done for then.”
Snape stopped pacing again to thumb through the tome on the table next to his cauldron, which was bubbling now with a purple vapor.
Phineas nodded in agreement, “Quite right, quite right.”
Snape, still waiting on the potion, continued flipping through the ancient pages. “Honestly there’s no way out this time. I knew my life was forfeit from the start of this whole venture, but if I can’t last long enough to get Potter his damned sword, none of it matters. Perhaps it’s for the best my liver is now forfeit too, as there’s simply no way—”
Snape stopped yapping for the first time all afternoon, the only sound the vapor rising from the cauldron nearby. Phineas couldn’t take the silence any longer.
“Severus, what—
Snape silenced him with a raised finger, as his eyes darted back and forth across the parchment he was reading, and his face drained of the little color it had. He slowly raised his eyes in alarm to meet the gaze of the observing portrait.
“Severus, for the love of all—”
“I found it,” Snape cut him off, his entire body full of dread, his voice quavering. “There’s a ritual to retrieve the goose.”
~~~~~
Snape stalked the hallways of Hogwarts with a pocketed vial of purple-vapor potion. It was a hail-Mary move, truly. How far the master had fallen.
As he slouched past the tapestry of Hector & Cassandra, he checked every direction for students, staff, and poltergeists, and slinked into the corridor to the North Tower.
Entering noiselessly into the classroom (employing a few choice charms to do so, and secure the door behind him), he was relieved to see Trelawney passed out in an armchair next to a small pile of bottles. Her state of unconsciousness would make this easier on everyone.
Snape snuck over to the armchair’s matching pouf so he could sit right next to Trelawney, and using his wand, unstoppered the vial and took a deep breath as the vapor filled the space between them.
As the disgraced divination teacher breathed in the hazy violet cloud, Snape gently took hold of her right hand and closed his eyes. “Sybill, I need to know what will happen if I enable the ritual to take place. What will happen to our world? What will that magician do? Is there any way it could work in our favor?”
Severus waited patiently for Trelawney to ‘wake’ into the state of insensibility he had witnessed once before, so many year ago. After a while though, it seemed that no answer was forthcoming. Snape felt defeated and wondered how long he should wait, silently cursing himself for hoping this obscure potion might actually work a second time.
Finally Snape stood up to leave, gathered the potion back into its bottle, and walked over to the window to gaze out of it in despair. The moon was full, reminding Snape of the night he had almost died- mauling by werewolf it would have been—and noticed a shadow flitting by him. Another shadow behind him, and Snape spun around to see a werewolf approaching his throat snarling. Snape panicked and spun around as he was deafened by a CRACK CRACK of thunder followed by a blinding flash of lightning striking the tower (that wasn’t right was it?) Then a clammy dementor hand touched the back of his neck. The dementor had him and it pulled him down, down, down, as the tower stones blew apart in a blaze of lightning and stone shrapnel.
Drowning, Snape could finally see the world as it really was. He could see everything.
“NO! NO! NO!” he tried to shout, but his mouth wouldn’t move. He had to warn them—he had to warn himself! ...but he couldn’t
Snape’s eyelids fluttered open, his real eyes this time he hoped, and he gasped for breath just as Sybill, still surrounded by the purple vapor, grabbed his face and pulled him toward her manic eyes.
“There is only one way out.” she hiss-croaked “There is only one way.” And they both fell, exhausted by the strain of the vision they now shared.