TITLE: harm / heal
FIRST PUBLISHED: October 5, 2023
SUMMARY: Severus Snape practices his Dark curse in the Forbidden Forest, where no one will follow him... except the one person who knows all his hiding places. [post-SWM]
oOo
Hogwarts is big enough to get lost in, but the forbidden forest is bigger even than that. On the map tucked away into a side corridor, behind the edge of a hanging tapestry, even Hogwarts with its dungeons and turrets and towers, its ramparts and the remains of its curtain wall which swing out and enclose a piece of the Great Lawn like a scribbled half-moon, is nothing more than a Knut tucked into a coin purse, velveteen and dark. Sometimes, when Hogwarts becomes too much like a maze of stone and chill and the deep sadness of being trapped, a Prince hostage in an enemy land, Severus walks across the Great Lawn and its rippling grass, past the greenhouses and the vegetable gardens, low-lying and half-flooded from the streams, over the fertile land which rolls up and down until even the castle is just a frowning grey stone, reddish when the sun’s light hits it, with a glow from every sparkling window. From here, it is easier to love. From here, Severus can feel the chill leave him; that tug under his chest; and when at last he slips into the trees of the forbidden forest; the tall white glimmering of the birches, the gnarled, mossy beech, the Scots pine with its rusted trunk and high blue-green canopy, he feels a quiet come over him and rest upon his heart.
Severus has been wandering into the forbidden forest for years, and he knows how to keep a careful eye on the mood of the creatures around him: birds chirping, the rustle of small animals in the undergrowth, the occasional dark-eyed doe, and to make his steps soft enough and quiet enough that he disturbs nothing. He waits until he’s in a clearing where the dappled light brightens to sun and only then does he practice his Dark spell, hurling out again and again sectumsempra, sectumsempra, sectumsempra until his voice is hoarse and angry tears are blurring the corners of his eyes. The long cuts from his wand are red against the pale edge of his arm and the pain is sharp, and Severus tries to imagine that he was cursing anyone else—cursing Potter, cursing the werewolf, cursing Black with his cold cruel mouth and Pettigrew with that ugly glee watching—always watching, as though he’s at a show. The blood runs thick and hot over his arm, but his aim is getting better, now, and Severus watches, distracted by the ruby brilliance of it, berries and rubies and the scarf that Lily wrapped around her shoulders with a smile, Gryffindor-red and glowing. He does not want to think about Lily. He has vowed to himself that he never will again; it’s the least, after all, that he can do. But all his memories are traced with her footsteps, and Severus is afraid that if he forgets her, the only things left will be the chill in his bones and the eerie lakelight and the sound of his own voice scraping its way around a tarnished curse.
The forest doesn’t warn him of her approach, because they had learned to walk silently together; it is only when Severus turns and sees Lily’s hair all glowing under the sun, brightfire, that he knows she’s here, that she, too, had needed the silence and the safety of the encircling trees. She stands and watches him without speaking and Severus feels the blood from his three long cuts run like rivers down over his arm, and then she steps forward, or he does, and the ground under their feet with its grasses rippling shine and shine.
Lily touches his arm; she touches the warm blood and the edge of the long, thin cuts, and her face is just as he remembers it from when they were friends, a year and a lifetime ago: pretty and perfect, and eyes like the the forest, sun-dappled and deep. He does not think that anyone except him has ever seen past the canopy, past the ever-changing leaves and the beauty of it, down to the shadowed, quiet loam and the beasts that move. “What is that curse?” Lily asks, in a cold voice, as though she were asking something necessary of something very much beneath her.
“Sectumsempra,” Severus says.
“A cut that lasts forever,” Lily says, and he nods.
“You’ve got to have a countercurse, though,” Lily says.
“Course I do,” Severus says.
“Good,” Lily says, and she pulls out her own wand, resting the very tip of its willow-length along his arm; “Sectumsempra,” she says, and a thin cut opens in his skin as though she’s mining for rubies under a coat of new-fallen snow.
Lily Evans hates Dark curses, everyone knows that. She hates them as much as she hates him.
He watches the thin cut and she does too, and then she lowers her wand, looking tired. “What was the countercurse?” she says.
Severus looks away from her; takes the tip of his own wand, traces it over the four parallel cuts, one slow line at a time, and chants in a way that reminds him of mass, because although he didn’t create the countercurse he knows how to imbue it with the most power: “vulnera sanentur, vulnera sanentur, vulnera sanentur…” it takes more time to heal than to destroy, three chants for each cut, and Severus loses himself in the latinate spell, noticing nothing but the trail-back of blood and the slowly-knitting skin until suddenly his voice is joined by another, higher and sweeter and full of mourning.
Heal this wound.