A Dish Served Cold

Chapter 48 - Bait

“I am sorry, you were meant to be told beforehand, but the attack was very sudden and an opportunity that could not be wasted,” the elderly woman told Harry, with bright compassion in her eyes. They had meant to tell him, he clung to that fact to keep his temper in check.

“May I be told why?” The coldness in his own voice dismayed him, but Mrs. Dumbledore merely shrugged.

“Voldemort will not attack with Albus here, alive and capable of fighting him,” she explained and illumination bloomed in Harry’s mind. He kept his thoughts behind lock and key though, and saw Sabine Dumbledore’s approving nod.

“It’s a trap,” he breathed out.

“Yes, with you, I am very much afraid, as bait,” she told him gently, with a look of momentary regret, but he shrugged it off.

“When have I been anything else?” he snorted and her face twisted into a wry smile that echoed his own.
“Not since you were about a year old,” she answered quite honestly and he just sighed.

“So what am I to do now?” he turned to meet her eyes and saw a deviousness and cunning shining in them that made him damned glad that she was on his side.

“Now we wait for Voldemort to bait his trap for you, then we spring ours around his.” He found himself grinning suddenly, a wild fierce hunger in him.

“I am looking forward to it,” he replied and an answering gleam was in her eye.

“Me too,” she confided and her smile now, was decidedly predatory.

He was starting to understand what Professor Dumbledore saw in her. He was also starting to understand what Hermione meant about her relationship with Snape. He couldn’t imagine that their complexity and opacity was particularly easy to deal with. Anyone would have their hands full just figuring out what either of them was thinking at any given moment.

Still, the old woman was sharp as a tack and her grandson, for all his many faults, used his nastiness to fight on the side of the angels. Well, mostly for the particularly spiteful angels, the ones who hung around in pubs chain-smoking, but for the angels nonetheless.

All in all, better to be on their side than trying to oppose them, he finally decided. Mrs. Dumbledore was downright frightening when she got that evil glint in her eye and started chuckling. He grinned weakly and headed off to the dorms, unnerved enough to still look quite distraught over Dumbledore’s “death”.

It didn’t occur to him until much later that she might have done that on purpose.

Albus sighed and wriggled uncomfortably. For all that he understood the necessity of hiding out, he still disliked it intensely. He had traveled by port key from the scene of his death to the interior of a small carriage moving briskly along the road. The jouncing and bouncing his old bones were receiving was irritating and uncomfortable, as the road he was progressing upon was very badly tended and filled with ruts and humps.

What made it worse was that he couldn’t look out the windows and admire the scenery. All too familiar with his predilections, Sabine had charmed the curtains shut and all his efforts to even peek outside had been thwarted. He was being sent somewhere where Tom was unlikely to look for him, that much he knew. Where precisely Sabine’s wicked sense of humor was sending him however, was still a matter for speculation.

His last sight of his wife, looking rather horrified as he was bursting into flames, her wand still moving as she hexed Death Eaters with no pause, remained fixed in his mind. Despite the humor with which they had approached this plan, they both knew that it was appallingly dangerous to bait Tom Riddle this way.

For all her formidable power, Sabine would be going up against the worst dark wizard of their age, far worse than Grindelwald had been. He wished her luck, because even with all the help he had left for her, she was going to need it.

Severus Snape held his daughter in his arms with a feeling of utter terror. The infant was so incredibly tiny. There was such fragility and vulnerability in a being so very small, that it frightened him half to death. Little fists curled up and mouth working in her sleep, his child, still somewhat squashed and pink, looked at though she were fighting some enemy as she lay there. Black curls wisped across her head and he searched her face and form for her ancestry.

There, that curve of her cheek was that Hermione’s, or did it come from his grandmother’s line? The nose was small and button-like; it was obviously too early to tell if it would grow to match his own, or remain more reasonable in size.

Despite how light the child was, he could feel the weight of the burden of her safety as though it were a tangible force pressing down on him. They had to win this war, they had to kill Voldemort, or this new life would be snuffed out before it had really begun.

The thought of his daughter’s peril turned his blood to ice. He held her tightly to him, wishing that he could just tuck her inside of him, so that he could protect her forever. She stirred and made a mewling noise of protest and he relaxed his grip a little, peering down into her face. Large brown eyes gazed myopically back at him and a yawn cracked the face, revealing pink toothless gums.

Severus found himself fascinated by the tiny movements. His daughter was quite beautiful, he decided. There was warmth in the center of his chest that was spreading and growing inside him and he knew that he was falling in love with this child. It was a profound relief to know himself capable of such a feeling, since up to that moment he hadn’t been completely certain if he was.

“Severus…” Hermione, looking still tired and greatly disheveled murmured to him, arms outstretched and he returned the now squirming bundle of suddenly hungry infant to her.

“I missed the birth,” he groused and she smiled sleepily at him. She winced as the baby latched on and then her face creased in concentration as she suckled the child. He could almost see her mentally reviewing the instructions from the Medi-witch, as though it were a homework assignment that she needed to get a good grade on.
“That’s okay, I was in a crockery throwing sort of mood by the end of it, so you were probably better off being out of the way.” A very clear mental image of his probable fate had he been present flashed across his mind and he needed no precognitive skills to know that he had had a very narrow escape after all.

By the bedside table the Ministry paperwork rustled politely, trying to get his attention. With a sigh he picked it up and went into the study to finish filling it out. Madam Tamarind’s round perfect letters gave time of birth, height, and weight and the medical particulars, all that remained was filling in the name.

After several long days and even longer nights of argument they had finally agreed on a name for their first child. He wasn’t entirely reconciled and considered penning in “Apathia” regardless, but the hexes that Hermione had discovered in the Forbidden Section of the Hogwarts library were proving quite effective and he doubted that the potion to re-grow all of his skin was a particularly appetizing one.

“Violet Snape,” he wrote in and it looked incredibly plain to him. Flower names tended to make him queasy, but there were two Violets and a Rose on his grandmother’s side, making the argument for continuity. Violet also served to make Voldemort think that he was being honored in the child’s naming, something that might keep him from killing her later on. It still looked far too short for a Snape’s name. “Violet Apathia Snape,” he corrected, hoping that by the time his wife found out what he had done, she would be too preoccupied killing Voldemort to do more than yell at him.

With a quiet feeling of satisfaction in having gotten his own way at last, Snape sent the paperwork back to the Ministry.

Sabine sat at the table in Grimmauld Place and looked about at the gathered Order of the Phoenix with some dismay. A part of her mind was taken up with revising her plans on the fly, while the rest of it was rather busy devising tortures for her absent husband. His airy assurances that the Order would be quite capable of taking on the Death Eaters had not been completely accepted by her, but the actual reality of the rag tag group was even worse than she had imagined. In fact, it was appalling.

They were a nearly helpless batch of infants. Sabine tried very hard to remember that this was hardly the first time that this group would have faced Voldemort, but she suspected they had won the last time because the Death Eaters had been too busy chortling at Molly Weasley’s pink knitted shawl to actually throw any hexes.

Taking a deep breath and trying to remind herself that she was a cynical, evil old bat and she should not judge these people by her own standards, Sabine faced the Order.

“At this meeting we need to consider what will be done against the Riddle boy now.” There were a few blinks of surprise as she referred to the powerful dark wizard as “the Riddle boy”, but she ignored them. She knew full well how dangerous he was, but he was nothing compared to giving birth at age one hundred and some. Now that was a task that she was dreading, Voldemort would be a walk in the park in comparison.

“Now that Dumbledore is dead, what can we do?” asked an untidy fellow with a rat-like face and the air of a Dickensian villain about him. He seemed to speak in a perpetually wheedling tone that did nothing to endear him to Sabine.

Except for Severus, Harry, Molly, and Arthur no one knew that Albus was probably contentedly warming his toes in front of a roaring fire at the moment, rather than wandering the halls of eternity and Sabine meant to keep it that way. She had no confidence in these people’s ability to keep a secret, especially if probed by a Death Eater, or by Voldemort himself.

“There are a great many things that we may do, young man,” she retorted with an arched eyebrow that served to quell his rising panic, or at least give him something to fear besides Voldemort. “For starters, we can plan for the inevitable attack that Riddle will no doubt launch against us quite soon.” If her voice was slightly more sharp than she would have liked it to be, well, she was feeling a little daunted by the primarily Gryffindor faces looking up at her with the expectation that she would solve all their problems.

If this was what poor Albus had been dealing with for all these years, then she felt a bit of pity for him. As for herself, well, a Slytherin was far better equipped to deliver a well placed admonishment.

“Dumbledore said that we were to place our trust in you, should anything ever happen to him,” the dewy-eyed Tonks girl assured her. Sabine added thumb screws and hot irons to her list of tortures and returned a benign smile to the child.

“I should think that placing your trust in your own skills and abilities would be more prudent, but I must concede some greater bit of experience in defeating Dark Wizards.” She eyed them all thoughtfully, they were young, it was true, they were also about as subtle as a pack of hippogriffs in heat, but there was material to be worked with here, she supposed.

“So, what’s the plan?” Remus Lupin turned those penetrating eyes on her and she smiled wryly in return. Here at least was one person who took all of this in deadly earnest and seemed quite capable of fighting off a dark wizard or three. This could turn out to be more interesting than she had at first supposed.

The planning session went on well into the night, but by the end of it Sabine was revising her estimations of these folks.

They looked so useless, yet contained some hidden surprises. Choosing each one of them was a nearly Slytherin act, she mused. Albus must have learned something from her after all.

Two days later, Tonks was sitting on a examination table blinking at the Mediwitch in surprise.

“Really?” she heard herself saying; despite the fact that she knew it was a silly response.

“Yes, Mrs. Weasley,” the slight redhead replied and as usual Tonks had to quash the urge to look around for Molly.

“Tonks will do fine,” she grumbled, positive that she must have mentioned it at least a hundred times. Except for a slight stretching of the plastered-on smile that the Mediwitch wore, there was no sign that she had heard the correction at all and Tonks was wearily certain that the older woman had no intention of complying.

She counted on her fingers, distracting herself with calculations. It was now mid June, nearing the end of the school year at Hogwarts, if the baby came in the usual number of months, she would be giving birth around the end of January or the early part of February. So, she needed to see to it that Voldemort was defeated before October so that she wouldn’t either be waddling into combat or leaking milk as she fought.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Weasley?”

“Perfectly fine, I know exactly what I need to do,” she responded absently and missed the look of bafflement on the other woman’s face.

Now, she just had to convince Percy.

Margaret Tamarind, nee Goody flipped through the past issues of various newspapers seeking a clue to puzzle that she wasn’t even sure had an answer. Oh certainly she knew the bare bones of the tale, everyone did. Marcus Tamarind, the late and unlamented, had been a brilliant scholar and wizard; his advances in Arithmancy were legendary. Then, somewhere along the way he came across some old tomes of Dark Wizardry, exactly where and how, it was not known. In his brilliance and arrogance he began experimenting with the magics he discovered and was soon drawn down to his own destruction and the ruination of his family. End of Story.

It was a cautionary tale told to young witches and wizards to keep them on the straight and narrow. Yet, it was also the story that had shaped Georgian’s life. His father’s legacy had been the shame and disgrace that had been heaped upon a child innocent of the crime, but still paying the consequences for it.

His father had been dragged away by the Aurors and died years later in Azkaban, a broken creature, scratching meaningless formulae on the walls of his cell, while he frothed and howled. Add to that the betrayal of his fiancée, Therese, and she began to see where some of his reserve and coolness came from.

Maggie closed her eyes, trying to imagine what an eight-year-old must have felt, watching his father being dragged away kicking and screaming. How his life must have been after that, the looks, the whispers, the bullying he must have endured. How many mothers wouldn’t let their children play with him?

“Maggie?”

Her eyes snapped open to see her husband standing beside her, a pained look on his face. “Must you read that rubbish?”

“I was trying to understand,” she admitted and his face softened a little. With a weary groan he settled into the chair across the breakfast table from her and picked up the nearest article. The lurid headlines and “Artist’s Conception” drawings made for good reading, no doubt, but it was entirely too cruel a thing to witness, especially for the child that Georgian had been.

“What’s to understand? My father went mad; he did unspeakable things and paid the ultimate price for it. My mother and I were left behind to live with his actions, while he rotted in Azkaban so completely insane that the Dementors couldn’t even reach him.” The statement was dry, delivered with a tired, almost academic tone that leached all the emotion from it.

“I was trying to understand you, actually. I was thinking about what it must have been like for you as a child.” He looked up at her with a look of surprise. His mouth moved as though he was going to say something and then he closed it. She waited patiently for him to speak and when he finally did it was nothing that she had been expecting.

“When we thought that my father was just having affairs, that all the women he was seen with were just his mistresses it was bad enough, but to find out what he was really doing to them, that was the worst.” He paused, his face twisting with the memory of the past. “Even all the torment I went through from the other children, the shunning I got from all of “good” society, wasn’t as bad as knowing that my father had destroyed those women with magic.” He tapered off, his eyes closing against the pain of the past.

“I only wish that he had actually achieved his goals,” Georgian added, with an absent tone and Maggie gasped in shock. He turned and gave her a wry smile. “I meant his original goals,” he explained. She shook her head in bewilderment.

“What original goals?”

“He had been trying to figure out how to kill Voldemort. The magic he was researching was designed to break down the layers of magical defenses that surround Voldemort. The terrible things that Voldemort has done to gain for himself a sort of immortality, needed to be countered and my father were trying to figure out how.” Maggie nodded her understanding.

“So what happened?”

“He tried to recreate some of what Voldemort had done, so that he could analyze it and counter it. The evil of those acts however, corrupted and destroyed him.” Georgian sighed.

“We need his notes,” Maggie announced with a thoughtful air.

“Are you mad? Those experiments drove him insane!” Georgian roared and slammed out of his chair with enough force to knock it backwards.

“I am not suggesting recreating his experiments, just reading his notes to see how far he got!” Maggie protested. Georgian stared at her and his face went from furious, to terrified and finally to stony cold.

“Albus did that already; he said what little he could get from it he has already put to use.” Maggie deflated at his words and nodded.

“Of course, Professor Dumbledore would have already done that, it was silly of me to not think of that,” she apologized and watched as he carefully peeled his fingers from the tabletop, the whitened knuckles giving way to a subtle trembling.

“I apologize for my outburst. I find myself rather sensitive on the subject,” he murmured with a chagrined look at her.

“Ask me about planned C-sections some time and watch me fly off the broomstick,” she replied with a smile of forgiveness.

“I would be pleased to hear you opinions on the subject at any time,” he answered and she nodded. They were back in charity with each other and she was very much relieved by that. Now they just had to survive the upcoming war.