Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

UnBroken	By : OddDoll Category: Harry Potter AU/AR > Het - Male/Female Views: 6172 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 5
- 6
- 7
Unbroken
By Odd Doll
Chapter 5
Phoebe's hotel, The Weavers' Guild, was a Tudor icon of the whitewash and exposed beam variety. The amenities were of the same vintage, but she always stayed there when she could. She loved its dark interior, ancient staff, and tiny rooms if only because there was no place like it in America.
When she arrived that evening, she ducked under the low doorway and went to the desk to find out how many bottles of cold beer she could coax out of room service. Getting drunk seemed the proper course of action. Behind a dark, gleaming expanse of walnut, an elderly gentleman in a maroon jacket held sway over a quiet dominion of guest books, room keys, and message slips. He shuffled his humpbacked body to her cubbyhole and came back with four messages. His hair was very white and his cheeks very pink, and his usual smile was gentle and warm. Tonight he looked troubled.
"Good evening, Fred."
"Bit of a disturbance here tonight, madam." She hated when the British called her 'madam.' It hit a little too close to home.
"Policemen?" Looking over her shoulder, she saw the officer that Dunst promised, sitting in a wingback chair across the lobby.
"Yes, Mrs. Baher." She'd given up trying to get Fred to call her Ms.
"I'm sorry about that. I hope they didn't disturb your other guests."
"No, they were fairly polite, all in all."
"I'll probably be checking out tomorrow, and they won't be bothering you again."
"Yes, madam." He looked at her as if he wanted an explanation, but she just could not bring herself to discuss it.
"Don't worry, Fred. I'm not in trouble." Yet.
Her footsteps plodded on the worn stairs and she leaned her weight on the banister. The excitement and fear of the day's events had left her with the inevitable adrenalin hangover. She was almost too tired and depressed to move.
Upon entering her room, she stripped off her clothes and let them lie where they fell on the floor. She called for beer on the vintage 1958 telephone, because she forgot at the desk, and then forced herself to read and return her messages: an apology to her pilot -- she had forgotten all about him -- and a four-minute-too-long, five-minute talk with her secretary. She ignored the message from George, asking her to dinner.
A cryptic message from an S. Waterman, asked her to 'call at your earliest convenience regarding a matter of some urgency.' She sank onto the chenille bedspread and then lay on her back, her legs dangling over the edge. It could be the wizard authorities, she thought. Maybe it was somebody calling on John Doe's behalf. She bolted upright and reached for the phone. As she dialed the number, she felt her energy flow back.
A machine picked up. "You have reached Sylvester Waterman. I am unable to take your call, but please leave your name and number and I will respond when I am able."
She left a message and flopped back on the bed. Sylvester Waterman spoke in a loud, stilted manner. He could be a wizard, unused to Muggle technology, or a very old man, unused to Muggle technology. The excitement abated, but her nerves returned.
"Oh, bloody hell!" she roared as she propelled herself off the bed. She stomped into the bathroom, one of the hotel owners' few forays into modernization, and ran hot water into the big bathtub, the very same one that was installed in 1912, she guessed. By the time it was deep enough to drown in, room service delivered her beers, two of them, and a glass.
"Nice start," she told Will, Fred's older brother and doppelganger. She handed him the glass. "Never interrupt the flow of fuel."
"There's a package store on the High Street." Will was able to dish it out with the best of them.
"But then you wouldn't earn any tips." She handed him his.
He winked and ambled down the hall. Phoebe placed the beers on the cold tiles beside the tub and shed the robe she had donned for Will's sake. With a beer in hand, she sank into the steaming water and twisted it open. She put the bottle to her lips, raised it high, and drank until she gagged and belched.
"Hooo HA," she said in military fashion. Just another thing Daddy taught her to do right. What Daddy had not taught her was to stick her nose in other people's business, be a bleeding heart, or act like some addlepated civilian playing at spy games.
She held up the beer. "To you, Severus Snape, wherever you are, for keeping my sorry ass out of a sling. May you fucking live through the night."
He handled it the way he wanted, she told herself when she thought of him lying somewhere cold and dark.
He really did save her ass. What had she been thinking? That they would disappear into the sunset and no one would ever come around asking questions? Even on painkillers, he was the only one of the two of them that was thinking clearly. The Death Eaters would come, but maybe she could get herself out of the country before then. Maybe she could drink some Veritaserum and tell them everything she knew, and they would let her go, thanks to Snape.
The water grew cold, and she turned on the screeching tap and let in more hot. Nobody is going to take a shower at this hour. Let's just drain that boiler. While the pipes rumbled and belched hot water into her bath, she thought of Severus Snape again. Phoebe wanted to cry for him, if for no other reason than there didn't seem to be anybody else willing to do it. But it wasn't the time to let go. She looked at the beer in her hand and took a sip, smaller this time. Maybe getting drunk was not the proper course of action, after all.
She leaned over the edge of the tub and set the beer bottle on the floor. It was time to stop behaving like a loose cannon. Laying back in the tub, she closed her eyes. She was not the meditative sort. When fearful, she tended toward nervous activity rather than quiet relaxation. There was one memory, though, that never failed to help her focus her thoughts.
*****
Snowflakes fluttered down from a white sky, and Daddy took the time to put chains on the tires of their battered station wagon. There was no question who the target of Daddy's lesson would be, it was Phoebe's time after all, and so her brothers, Brad Jr. and Charlie, chatted and laughed throughout the ride. Phoebe stared at the back of her father's silver-gray head and prayed for a small car wreck. The object of her attention cracked the window to smoke a cigar and joked with the boys.
They drove for an hour. City gave way to suburbs, to farms, and finally to foothills covered in deep evergreen forests. Her father parked the car at a lot near the trail heads for a number of public hiking and cross-country ski trails. From under a tarp in the back of the station wagon, he produced four sets of snowshoes.
"It's too deep to make any headway without them," Edward Baher told his children. "And it wouldn't kill you to learn a new skill."
Phoebe breathed a sigh of relief. The activities for the day would be about stamina and coordination. She found the humiliation of falling on her face in the snow much more bearable than the other types of challenges her father could dream up.
The snowshoes forced her to walk in an awkward gait, raising her knees high with her legs spread. She concentrated on staying upright and keeping herself in pace with the others. After they had gone the first quarter mile, she felt herself fall into a rhythm. She looked up at the falling snow and smiled.
"It's nice out here, isn't it?" She spoke almost for the first time that day. She stuck out her tongue and tried to catch snowflakes. It was like trying to chew gum and walk at the same time, and she ended up putting one shoe down on the other and tripping face forward into Charlie's back. Like dominoes, they all fell laughing into the snow.
They went for over an hour. Phoebe enjoyed the hike, but was eager to have a rest when they came to a clearing in the trees and her father put up a hand for them to stop.
He circled back to Phoebe. "You're in charge."
Phoebe groaned. It was no use complaining. She looked around and realized there was no sign of a trail. The woods were open, with little undergrowth, and if there had been a path, it was buried under at least two feet of snow. She looked behind and saw their tracks disappearing under fresh snowfall.
"Where are we, Daddy?"
"I don't know. I'm lost." He said it matter-of-factly, with just a trace of challenge in his voice. "What are we going to do, Phoebe?"
Phoebe crossed her arms over her chest and stared at her snowshoes. Her thoughts were as white and blank as the surrounding snow. She was permitted to ask her brothers questions, although not for help, and they were not allowed to volunteer information.
For Phoebe, the worst danger was to disappoint her father. She was quite certain that he knew exactly where they were and could have them to safety in short order if they ran into real trouble. She didn't want it to come to that. Her father knew what he was doing and would never give her a challenge he didn't think she could face.
He put his arm around her shoulder and spoke in a firm but gentle tone. "Listen. You're in charge. We are lost in a hostile environment, and the lives of four people depend upon your thinking. Can you tell me what the first mistake you made so far was?"
"Getting in the car." Her brothers snickered at her pout.
"Think about it, Phoebe. We have time. Go back over the trip and tell me what you did wrong."
Phoebe thought for a long time. After a while she went to a tree and leaned against it. Brad and Charlie, realizing that this could take all day, went into the clearing and played at making pictures in the snow with their snowshoes. Tears of frustration hovered in her eyes, but she would rather die than let Brad see them. He would tease her forever.
The sun rose in the sky, but the temperature grew colder. Maybe it was from leaning against a tree for so long. Phoebe shook out her arms and legs, one after the other. She had given up thinking at least a half hour before. Now she only waited for her father to give up, too. He approached her when Brad and Charlie started to whine that they were cold and hungry.
"Phoebe, this is the most important lesson I may ever teach you. In any situation, whether it's a challenging one like this or an everyday one that you'll face when you're grown, never give up your control or your safety to someone else." He looked in her eyes to make sure she understood. "You may choose to follow someone you trust, but never let yourself be led. Do you understand the difference?"
She frowned. "If I trust someone, then I've chosen to pay attention to what they are doing. But if I'm led I'm not paying attention. Right?"
"Right. You are always in charge of yourself and what happens to you, and how you choose to react, even if it seems you are in a situation that has no choices. And even when you are the leader, you are in charge of yourself first. If the leader falls apart, then everybody is sunk."
"We'll talk about this some more later," her father said. "Now, Miss Leader, how do we get out of here?"
"I don't know," she answered, feeling the beginning of the shakes coming on. She loved her father, but she never seemed to be good enough for him.
Edward Baher shrugged and said. "Follow me, kids."
*****
Phoebe rose up in the tub and pulled the plug. She knew what she had been doing wrong and why she had come close to bawling so many times in the last two days. Phoebe had been unwilling to take charge of Severus Snape's life in the way he really needed her to. All day she had waffled on her decision to help him. She left him to make his own choices when he was in no position to have even that level of responsibility. And by doing so, he had made her own choices for her. He was a very sick man. She knew that they should have left the hospital together earlier in the afternoon. She should have walked him straight to her car and on to London where he could get the kind of care he needed. At the very least, she could have gone to Diagon Alley to get him real painkillers.
She dressed in a jeans and a white blouse, with low-heeled comfortable shoes. Under her blouse, she wore a money belt that included most of her money and her papers. She got her bags packed and ready to leave with a second's notice. She longed for her wand, but there was nothing to be done about that.
After sitting on the edge of the bed, making a mental list of the steps she needed to take, Phoebe got up and started to prepare for what she deemed inevitable. She went through her purse, pockets, and her luggage to find any traces of collaboration with Snape. She had thought to destroy the tags and receipt for the clothes, but found the list of his sizes still in her notebook. She tore it up and dropped the pieces in the toilet, flushing it twice to make sure they went down.
Another phone call to the pilot with apologies, put him and the co-pilot on standby. Be prepared to leave at any time, she told him.
She had a difficult choice to make. She could leave now, sneak out the back door of the hotel, abandon the rental car at the airport, and be en route to the States in about two hours. It was the wisest choice for her personal safety. The problem was, there was more than her personal safety at stake. To flee would arouse suspicion and bring the Death Eaters to her door. If Snape never turned up, dead or alive, they would suspect that she took him with her. In the end, she would not be any safer in the States.
No, she thought, better to face the Death Eaters, and the police and the Ministry for that matter, here in England. The police didn't worry her. At some point the Ministry would step in, alter a few memories, and they would be off her back. The Ministry of Magic didn't worry her too much, either. Snape was a hero to most of them, and they weren't that interested in his whereabouts, anyway. At least she hoped they weren't. The Death Eaters had made inroads at the Ministry.
It was the Death Eaters that she needed to worry about. She hoped she could work with them and convince them that she knew nothing. And once she accomplished that, she could set about finding him, if she chose. It was that decision that occupied her mind while she went to the phone book. She would make a pro-active move and contact the Ministry herself. This was the wisest action. If she convinced them first, perhaps the Death Eaters would never bother to come to her.
"Damn it." She couldn't turn it into a magical phone book without her wand. I'll go to London. She was about to head for the door when there were two loud knocks on it.
Phoebe left the chain on and peered through the crack. Two uniformed policemen stood in the hall.
"Ms. Phoebe Baher?" one said. "Would you please open the door? We need to take you in for questioning regarding the murder of Pieter Talinnin."
- 5
- 6
- 7
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

UnBroken