Disclaimer: All
characters belong to JK Rowling and Bloomsbury Books.
Title: Facing the Music
Author: Toft
Rating: PG
Severus plays the violin. You would be
surprised how few of the staff at Hogwarts would be able to tell you that, let
alone students. Or perhaps you would not. He plays with the same cold, exact
brilliance with which he calculates ingredients and follows recipes with his
hands and mind; his slim fingers are sure on the strings and bow, his black hair
falling across his eyes.
Dumbledore knows, of
course. In better days, he had come to listen quite frequently, tapping at the
door just as Snape removed the old violin from its
dark case, always with the same, "Ah, Severus, time
for our little chat", smiling faintly beneath his beard, his eyes twinkling with
silent laughter as Snape rolled his own eyes, and
pulled up a chair for the headmaster with a what-did-I-do-to-deserve this sigh.
Afterwards, Dumbledore would applaud loudly as Snape
scowled, and he would almost invariably wipe his eyes, although whether he
really had any reason to, Snape did not know. But
every so often an owl would arrive for him with a large brown envelope marked
'Strictly Private', and opening it at his desk out of it would spill pages and
pages of muggle sheet music, the black notes soft
against the creamy paper, the titles written in an old typeface. Beethoven,
Tchaikovsky, Schubert… the headmaster favoured the romantics, and although Snape scoffed at the overblown passion and jarring
harmonics, so did he.
He never played in front
of anyone except the headmaster. Once he had accidentally left the outer door of
his office open, and had come out to find Flitwick
listening, dewy eyed, but Snape had given him such a
murderous glare that the minuscule professor had scurried off immediately,
alarmed, and had never mentioned it again.
Harry Potter had seen the
violin, once. It had been a detention, and the fact that they both knew he was
too old for such a childish punishment could have made the boy arrogant, but
instead he acquiesced quietly, which made Snape more
resentful than he could explain. They had been in his office while the potions
master assigned him a task when he had seen it. Snape
followed his eyes to the tattered black case and had swiftly put it behind the
desk, but it was too late.
"Can you play that?" the
boy had asked incredulously.
"Yes", Snape had answered, short and sharp, and had tried to leave
it at that, but had made the mistake of looking at Potter's face, and had been
unable to speak.
"Play it for me." The
soft request was no more than that, but it froze Snape
still, and he stared at the boy, and some part of him far off was amused to see
what must be an expression identical to his own on the face opposite him.
Finally he had recovered himself.
"No", he snapped, and
then, "ten points from Gryffindor". He turned too late to miss the strange flash
in Potter's eyes, before they hardened and became flat,
deep emerald again. It was only after he had dismissed Potter from his office
that he realised that it had been pity.
That night, and many
nights after, he dreamed that his violin had been stolen. He had roamed the
school, furious and distracted, until he had heard the bright sliding of the
notes coming down a passage and followed them, his anxiousness growing as the
sound got louder and clearer. At last he found himself outside his own potions
classroom, and the music had become too loud for his ears to bear, it cut
through the stone corridors and made him suddenly afraid that it would bring the
walls down. He pushed the door open, and there was the boy as he had been when
Snape first saw him, aged eleven again, small, thin
and gawky, his eyes burning green and his unruly hair pulled over his
scar.
Snape felt a wave of hatred for the
Potter boy, and a sick envy at the ease with which he played. He tried to snatch
back the instrument, but the child held it so tightly he was afraid to break it,
and Potter cried out in an obscenely young voice that was no longer, nor ever
had been his own, "It wasn't me sir, I didn't take it, it wasn't
me…"
And Snape would wake, the strange, young Potter's voice still in
his ears, driving him almost to hysteria with rage. But his room was always
quiet, and the violin was still there, and he would press his forehead against
the cool stone to sleep again.
He had not touched the
violin except for scales and exercises for weeks, the next time Dumbledore
tapped on his door in the evening. He played furiously, thinking as he did of
the small boy in the potions classroom, and that same boy, still later, asking
him to play. The rage and anguish of his repeated dream swept through him, and
he forgot that Dumbledore was there until he clapped loudly, startling Snape from his daze, astonished to find himself close to tears. The headmaster got up to go, beaming
with satisfaction and ignoring his entertainer's state entirely, but turned to
him as he reached the door, smiling.
"I sometimes wonder if
you keep your heart in that instrument, Severus".
Snape actually gasped at the words, but Dumbledore
didn't bat an eyelid to his sharp glance. And then he was gone, leaving the
potions master as white as a sheet, slumped on a chair with actual tears in his
eyes, and the beginnings of a realisation in his mind too enormous and
shattering for him to contemplate just at this moment. Suddenly exhausted, he
closed his eyes, and responding to years of training, his mind shut itself down.
The dream was unchanged,
up to a point. He followed the music with the same sense of apprehension and
fear, and walked down the corridors with no recognition of the path he was
taking. But when the door swung open, it was somebody else playing his violin.
Potter, a boy no longer, but a young man, tall and beautiful; Snape watched him, the fury as great as before, but tempered
with awe this time, without the envy that made him feel worse than anything
else. The young man stopped and turned to him, and Snape faltered.
"Give it back", he said,
and Harry Potter looked at him again with pity in his eyes, and compassion. He
spoke softly, gently, in his older voice.
"I didn't steal it,
Professor. You gave it to me."
Sometimes in dreams, just
for a moment, the whole world falls into place; for a brief second, Snape understood. Then the rush subsided, and he simply felt
empty, as if he had been through a storm.
He woke calm, and sat for
a while before getting up, carefully replacing the violin, and getting into his
bed. He lay there for a minute, wondering if this simplicity came with
happiness. Harry Potter would be back in the autumn, in his new post as Defence
Against the Dark Arts Professor, and perhaps Snape would perhaps manage not to resent this successor to
the post. Perhaps…
Snape had learned enough in his life to
believe in second chances. The boy had never needed to
learn.
"Alright, Harry", Snape whispered, half asleep, in answer to a question from
long ago, and for once, the quiet of his room followed him into his
dreams.
The End