Chapter Text

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Sean, at Hogwarts

Date not measurable in relative time

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The trees of the Forbidden Forest were an infinitely receding corridor of pillars, arching up and into each other as their branches intertwined, and everywhere I shifted my gaze another corridor raced off. It was as if I was standing in the center of a million paths through the underbrush, all coincidentally leading to this one place. Beneath me the grass swayed in time to a universal pulse that I could now feel- something from this world, or beyond? Impossible to say. Above me the skull of the Wiltshire Dog was hovering, joined shortly by the eyes, musculature, skin, and fur of the Wiltshire Dog, in that order. This was less unsettling than I’d found it in the past. “Dog!” I said, grinning merrily. “Are you actually here or am I just high as fuck?” My magic reached out and sniffed the thing, confirming that it was at least as real as I was. Which was a matter of some debate, to be honest.

“Both,” said the Dog, pithy as always. “Far be it from me to suggest that you have better things to do than hallucinate in the woods, human. Such activity is more-or-less the foundation of my entire reality, after all . But weren’t you here to learn magic?” He didn’t seem fully corporeal in this world- surprising, I thought, given how much influence Carroll had over British literature in general. If there was anywhere he could manifest outside his own world, I figured it would be here.

“I was! Am. Sorry, concept of time’s sort of…” I waved my hands, trying to describe with body language how difficult it was to form coherent thoughts at the moment. My brain was basically out to lunch and I was operating on pure consciousness- great for journeys inward, not so great for talking to a very real magic dog in the very real haunted woods. I tried to keep my cool- social anxiety could send me down a path that would ruin the entire trip. “Magic turned out to be much more, and less, complicated than I thought. Mostly it was just lonely. Say hello, magic!” I giggled as the detached and magical part of my soul grabbed the Dog and spun him about harmlessly. He looked positively alarmed, which was a first for me. “Oh good it actually works on you too, I wasn’t really sure how it would interact until now.” He felt… less tractable than the solid objects I’d handled, but not impossible to get a grip on.

After he recovered himself, he pulled his pace-behind-a-tree-in-midair vanishing act and appeared seated at my side. It was a little less fun, I thought, when you could actually trace every step of the way with your own expanded consciousness. I idly scritched his ears until he spoke again. “Well I won’t interrupt further. If anything, this is fascinating. Rather more Luke on Dagobah than something out of Hogwarts. Perhaps I’ll be your Yoda, for the next session.” There he goes with the Star Wars references again. Cecilia must have been a big fan. In any case he stopped speaking, and after a moment or two I closed my eyes. Ignoring the splash of color and light as the spheres of the multiverse leap into being before me, I continued my inward journey.

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A month ago

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“Psilocybin,” I said, standing in the office of the Potions Master. “Is broken down by the body into Psilocin, a Serotonin reuptake inhibitor. It also binds to the same receptors, which can cause hallucination and visual perception, though that isn’t what I want it for. There’s a suggestion, though I can’t remember if it has been confirmed, that the chemical may also force the brain to form new biologically stable pathways that make self-conscious thinking almost impossible. It’s supposed to be tremendously effective as a meditation tool.”

Snape’s office was surprisingly nice- more of Harriet’s work, I assumed, because the one in the books and movies had been described as a dimly lit dungeon. This office was the workshop of a master craftsman- cluttered, but well organized, with a place for everything and everything in its place. The particularly dangerous chemicals and concoctions he actually had locked away beneath a fume hood- probably enchanted, but still! That was the most safety equipment I’d seen in a full week of auditing the weird and terrible classes at Hogwarts.

The man himself was largely unchanged- at least, toward most students. I still shuddered to remember sitting in the back of the room during that first Potions lesson between Snape and Harry. I’d had to slip in last-minute to avoid Draco finding a seat anywhere near me, but that was one class I wouldn’t skip for all the world. “I can teach you how to bewitch the mind and ensnare the senses,” he’d said, with a lingering doe-eyed glance at the young man in the back row. “ Mr. Potter, our… new celebrity. Tell me, what would I get if I added powdered asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?” Harry had started from his reverie, glancing around at his compatriots. “Me, sir?” he asked, indicating himself. “Oh no, Mr. Potter,” said Snape, almost absentmindedly as if lost in a daydream- “It’d take an entirely different sort of concoction to get you.” I’d nearly died of a coughing fit and excused myself.

But it had cemented my plan of action in my mind. Now, in front of the man himself, I was having second thoughts. “Tell me, Mr. Peakes, if that is your real name-” he purred, full of dark intensity and mysterious purpose. It worked a lot better on actual 11 year olds, I assumed. “Oh yes, Dumbledore told me all about you, not that I believe everything I hear. Why would I provide illicit substances to you under any circumstances? Why do I not simply throw you in detention for the next month just for asking? Yes, unlike many of my… colleagues, ” I had to hand it to him, he had an impressive sneer- “I am aware of Muggle chemistry and even, to some degree, their recreational use of drugs. I am not in the habit of dealing to my students. Especially ones who, to hear the others tell it… can’t even cast a spell?”

I really didn’t have time to mince words with a catty bitch. I cut to the chase. “I look eleven but I’m more-or-less the same age as you so cut the shit, Severus. I’m also far more intimately familiar with your story than you are with mine. I’ll demonstrate but first I want a guarantee that you aren’t going to throw me out of this room when I hurt your feelings.”

Snape rolled his eyes but with my other senses, still in their infancy, I perceived him casting something that I surmised was a privacy spell on the room. “I do not tremble before the barbs of precocious children, Sean. Carry on.”

I sighed. “You felt responsible for the death of Lily and James Potter because you reported the prophecy to Voldemort that got her killed. You remain in his good graces but secretly work for the Order of the Phoenix out of a need to redeem yourself. You know that you must publicly shun Harry Potter but you are secretly falling madly in love with him…because of Lapsus Libidine, or whatever.” Okay that last was a guess but come on, I wasn’t an idiot.

He leapt out of his chair halfway through my spiel and levelled his wand at my chest. A frightening situation, but honestly I’d been in worse and I trusted in the narrative- nothing would be served if he killed me here. “A legilimens,” he hissed, referring to HP’s version of mind-reading. “I don’t know how you got past my defenses but-”

I cut him off. “Your defenses have nothing to do with it. I read the books. I’m under orders not to influence future events so I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know. But you’re well aware that I’ve never cast a spell, so I can’t possibly have read your mind. You can check it yourself.” He did so, and eventually satisfied his paranoia that I did not have any backup wands either. He remained wary, but climbed down off the metaphorical ceiling eventually.

He sat behind his desk, hands folded. “Let us say, hypothetically, that I believe you. Unsettling as it is to have your knowledge about me floating free, I will not be blackmailed. If that is all you’ve come to do I will bid you goodnight and warn you that any attempt to-”

He was just as paranoid even without the sneering veneer of a fantasy villain. I cut him off again. “Damn it Severus I’m not here to threaten you, I’m here to help you. I need to reach a deep meditative state to test a theory about a different form of magic. I don’t care if it’s Psilocybin or not. What I can offer in return is my help. I can give you dates, times, locations. Places nobody will notice if you and Harry run into one another. I’m not going to help you… romance him.” He grimaced, and I sighed with a little bit of relief that that was apparently not his intent, not yet anyway. “But I can make it substantially easier for you to find time to speak with him, unnoticed. You need an ally in this. Circumstance has offered me up to you.” Circumstance, and a certain teenage girl who is going to get SUCH a lecture if I ever see her again. I feel like even this is farther than Sean-in-his-right-mind would ever go.

He considered and I waited with baited breath. Eventually the pull of the narrative won out, and he nodded. “I cannot get you psilocybin on such short notice. But there are several other… substances, which may help you achieve the same effects. You will tell no one, and you will provide me with a list of times and places no later than one week from now.” We shook on it and I made myself scarce. I didn’t like that I was feeding into a romance plot that, while amusing from the outside, was highly questionable when you started looking at power differentials and issues of informed consent. But the story was going there anyway and I rationalized that that made it less… un ethical to help, if it got me out of here. Didn’t it?

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Present

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I fell inwards and down. It felt rather like the surface of my mind was a sea shore, and I was setting sail in some kind of boat into waters unknown. But, beneath the ocean as well, somehow. This was the third of Snape’s party favors I had tried and the first to prove really successful- the first, Wanderwort, had knocked me right out, while the second, a blue powder called Fool’s Snuff, had made me hallucinate demons for two hours- some of the little bastards were still following me weeks later, and Madame Pomfrey gave me some very suspicious looks when she saw the hem of my robes randomly catch light while faint cackling carried through the air. I was beginning to despair of the project when he gave me this final prospect- a magical strain of Azurescens that danced, swaying its little cap seductively in the strangest motion I’d ever seen produced by the fruiting body of a fungus. And boy had it done the trick.

I disconnected from the conscious portion of my mind, and spread outward. My mission today was to identify the path to this magical portion of myself, and communicate with it. I knew that on some level it was me, but it seemed disjoint enough in daily life that it was more like a friendly dog or attentive butler- willing to work with me, but not particularly well trained or interested in following commands. It wasn’t instinctual yet. I had managed to educate it on a dozen or so spells through wand motion, spells it would repeat on command and generally get more-or-less the effect that I wanted, but it was quite frustrating to try the Colour Changing Charm and have an object become so refulgently red that the kids in the castle thought someone was shooting off fireworks. And nothing I did worked in there- the second I passed through the doors, my magic became like a phantom limb to me. And I to it, I’d learned- it couldn’t sense my directions nearly as well. After a single disastrous lesson in charms class where I’d nearly put Professor Flitwick through the stone ceiling, I had not attempted to do any more casting in the school. Having never even seen me lift my wand, most of the children had begun to assume that I was some kind of squib- reactions had varied from pity to outright bullying, which I largely ignored. The opinions of children mattered a lot less to me, these days, which was a nice change from my actual elementary and high school experience.

But not Draco, of course. Oh no. He was convinced that I was hiding something, and took every opportunity to snoop and lurk about. It was harder and harder to get out of the castle without him, and rumors were already flying about our illicit rendezvous in the woods. That was harder to ignore. Not because I wanted there to be a rendezvous, mind you- but there was an intense tug in the back of my mind that kept saying if something WERE to happen … I viciously suppressed such thoughts. That isn’t me. Get out of my head, Harriet.

I stood on the boat of myself as it dove into deep waters- flashes of anger and joy and humiliation and triumph and a hundred other emotions crept over me as the waves broke and the light from above the waterline began to dim, simultaneously. I realized that I was traveling through some kind of… emotional core. Of course, it made sense that the secret to the Potterverse’s magic would live in such a place. The core conceit of half the narrative was the power of emotion on magic, wasn’t it? I didn’t try to shunt the emotions away- I was the emotions, and experiencing them was the point of the journey. Instead I traveled through them, as the sea foam blasted me in the face with flecks of lust, and the bubbles of my greatest despair traveled upwards to burst on the surface, far above. This metaphor was getting unwieldy, I thought.

Before I could consider altering it, a flicker of something caught my eye. A vast shape, in the infinite black water, moving fast, staying outside the dim light I could see by. I was drawing closer then. I hoped I was drawing closer. I didn’t really consider what else could be lurking, this deep.

Harry and Snape had been getting on like a house on fire. Harry was a sweet kid, for an eleven year old who’d been trapped in a broom closet most of his life- a bit dim, but his heart was in the right place. He hadn’t seen past Severus’s veneer of sneering cruelty yet, and he hated him with a fiery passion that was actually pretty common among the Gryfindors I’d met. Yet at the same time something about the dark flouncing of his mother’s former BFF fascinated him, and already they’d been trapped in at least two scenarios that I knew of. Draco and Harry had also kicked off their rivalry, albeit less heatedly, and I had parleyed the fake duel in the Trophy Room into a chance encounter with Snape rather than Filch. Harry’s pals ran off when he appeared, but Harry returned to the common room alive and well some time later, albeit… a bit bemused. That, and his firm silence on the matter, kicked the rumor mill into high gear. When the Nimbus 2000 arrived for him this morning it had a single raven’s feather tied to the grip, and half the girls in Hufflepuff had some kind of stroke at the sight. It was mucking up the timeline somewhat but I hadn’t seen any real damage come of it, so far.

My boat settled on a vast shoal at the bottom of the ocean. The very roots. The foundation of my emotional understanding of the world? It was hard to even conceive of the concept of “I” down here- I was simply a viewpoint, in the moment, an eternal camera capturing whatever caught my interest. Nevertheless I wondered what my core would be. Jumping from the deck, I made contact with it. Curiosity. A desire to know, to be, more than I was. A growth mindset. Of course. Of course. Some great sense of… relief washed over me. I hadn’t realized I had even been nervous about understanding this part of myself. But confirming that such a thing lay at the center of the construct I called self… it firmed me up, in some way. Let me feel more real. I turned to meet the leviathan swimming silently up behind me.

She was vast. Bigger than the ocean, bigger than the world. In some sense she was both, and I had been swimming through her as well as myself all this time. Distinctly female, distinctly me yet not me . She had purpose and power but no form, as such, until I looked at her. When I observed her in her totality she settled, and I felt relief again. Another of course for the pile. So many revelations, and not a one of them surprising. I stood on the heart of me and stared at its occupant- the vast golden dragon. Mysterious and powerful. Alien but intimate. Lawful yet wild, untamed. Magical, beyond space and time, beyond all comprehension. Love.

It made perfect sense that she would look like my wife- after all, those were the thoughts that dominated the emotion, for me. I realized she was waiting for me to speak. I cleared my throat and ignored the bubbles spinning away underwater. “Sean,” I said, extending my hand. “Pleased to finally meet you.”

She did not reach out to shake back. She seemed wary, if anything. “What are you?”

I blinked. How to explain oneself to one’s own conception of an emotion? “Don’t you know? I’m you. I’m the… the thing that feels the feeling that you are. We’ve met before- I’ve been trying to do magic with you. I wanted to come here and… and meet you on your terms.”

She brightened at that. “Oh! I recognize that shape now. So interesting, I usually only see your shell dimly through the riot of colors and synaesthesia that comes when I’m outside. It’s quite overwhelming at times. I’m glad you came down here! You’re not going to hurt me, are you?” She even sounded like Haley, and I was momentarily overtaken with longing for the woman I could not currently reach. As my emotions surged the ocean pulsed and she grew, visibly. I guess absence makes the heart grow fonder, after all. She looked puzzled. “What was that? It felt… good.”

I smiled wistfully. “Just thinking about the person you represent. Also, what do you mean about hurting you?”

She swam around me, so huge that she should have formed an enormous whirlpool just by her movement. It didn’t move me in the slightest. I felt absolutely safe in her presence. “There’s something else in the depths with me. Look!” She rolled and exposed her belly- great sucker-marks marred the scales there, as if she were a whale who’d one battle with a giant squid. “I don’t like it. It attacks me and I feel lesser. Make it stop?”

I didn’t have the faintest clue what she meant by it. I certainly hadn’t changed my opinion on my wife, and I wasn’t about to! An external force? “I promise I won’t let anything happen to you,” I said, and I meant it. “I’ve promised that before. Til death do us part, and maybe more than one death, at that.” She smiled and it was radiant. “When was the last time it happened?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean by time.”

I grimaced. Of course she doesn’t have a concept of sequence- she’s timeless, after all. “Uh. Us talking now, that’s one event. And the thing attacking you, that’s… another event. Since you remember that happening, it must have happened before this one. That’s time- the dimension in which events can be compared.”

She just looked confused. “But it’s always attacking me. And we’ve always been talking. Haven’t we?”

That sounded less rhetorical and more… metaphysical. I grew alarmed. “Is it attacking you right now? Can you show me?”

She whirled and some other portion of her vast bulk came into view. Sure enough, it was being… torn at, latched onto and leeched away by many tendrils of every size and shape, spinning away to some dark depth that I couldn’t perceive. As I watched she snapped and snarled at them, ripping some away, but they were always replaced. Scales came away, and blood tainted the water. Horror filled me- my love for my wife is under attack. Was this the work of the narrator? How could I not have noticed something shifting my values like this? I leapt at it, and a blade of rejection sprang to my hand. When I made a cut, the tendril stayed cut. The thing fought back- whipping and lashing in a frenzy. But my will overrode it, and it landed no blows on me. My magic swam at my side, fighting as well, and between us we dismantled the thing and sent it fleeing into the depths. Magic sighed. “Oh, that’s so much better. What is that?” I didn’t know and I wasn’t ready to guess. We stayed together for a time, silently.

Eventually I held out my hand again. “Can we work together, from now on? Now that I know what you are, how to listen for you- it should be much easier for me to protect you, and you to work with me.” This time she shook, and as our hands touched the bubbles surged around me and the dream dissolved.

I was back in the forest, sitting up against a tree, and the Wiltshire Dog was nowhere to be seen. Twilight was beginning to fall- it would be dinnertime soon and if I didn’t get back Hagrid was going to come out after me again. But I could feel the magic now, in a way I hadn’t been able to before. It wasn’t a dog or a detached limb- it was my love, all of it, surging outwards and around me in a great radiant aura. A spell came to me unbidden and I had to cast it, I knew the magic was requesting it of me. The true form of the Patronus charm- it isn’t a ward at all. It’s a physical manifestation of my magic. I didn’t lift my wand. I already knew the form this was going to take. I barely had to mouth the words. “ Expecto Patronum-” and my magic surged and burst forth in a bloom of light. A perfect picture of my Haley stood in front of me, big as real life, luminous and white but real for all that. I rushed for her and fell to my knees as I passed straight through. I bit back the surge of despair as the form dimmed slightly, and she knelt down to nuzzle me- I accepted the comfort even if I couldn’t feel it.

Our private moment was interrupted- a crash in the forest underbrush and a triumphant shout sent me whirling. Draco was standing there, robes disheveled and eyes wild, pointing at the dragon over my shoulder. “I KNEW IT ” he whispered angrily, gesturing at her. “You CAN cast spells, and your patronus! It’s a dragon! You DO care about me!” Oh goddamit. I hadn’t even made the connection between his name and the creature before now. Is that some kind of cosmic irony?

My Patronus shuffled uncomfortably. Then it opened its mouth and spoke. “Sean, what is this? Is that… Draco Malfoy? ” It sounded just like her. Wait, Patronuses couldn’t speak for themselves . Dimly it registered with me- this wasn’t just my magic, just an illusion. A connection had been formed, a slim tether that I could barely even perceive, extending out of the world.

I turned toward her, shuffling around on my knees in the dirt once again, mouth hanging open. “H-Haley?” It occurred to me in that moment, we hadn’t spoken since the afternoon on the hill. I’d been assuming that she was alive, that things would work out with Aslan after she gained full control, but I’d had no way to confirm. “Are you really… here? I’ve missed you so much. Oh honey.” I reached out and my hand rippled through her like smoke.

Draco stalked up behind me, hissing. “ Don’t try to bluff your way out of this one, Peakes. You aren’t going to play that dragon off- all month I’ve been trying to understand why you won’t talk to me, won’t look me in the eye. I’ve been tearing my hair out over you, and here you are, summoning my namesake in the woods! Enough of your games.” The last thing on earth that I wanted to deal with right now was a boy child with a crush and an entitlement complex the size of the planet, but all my magic was tied up and I couldn’t risk losing her. I ignored him.

She looked at me, still confused but understanding our time might be limited. “Sean- I, there’s too much I need to say. So much has happened and I don’t know if I can do this, I-”

I tried to soothe her. “You can, you’re stronger than you know, than anyone knows. I love you so much. I’ll write to you. We’ll see each other again, soon, just as soon as I can stand by your side.”

She choked back a sob, “You can do that right now, please come home. I love you and I miss you and it’s all falling apart. ”

I stood up and held out my hands. “I can’t. I died in that world, honey. I don’t exist there any more, narratively. I’ve got to find some other way back to you. But I will. Haley, there’s so much more to all this than you know- ask the Dog where we really came from-” and then our time was up- Haley shouted a warning and I had barely begun to turn as that bleach-blonde idiot shouted EXPELLIARMUS and miscast the spell so hard it threw me to the ground, cutting my Patronus spell off entirely.

As Haley’s image evaporated he looked alarmed. “You- what are you, Peakes? What was that… thing?” Then his natural arrogance reasserted itself. “No- you’ve gone mad with longing. That’s what it is-” he turned, muttered something that I only half heard, “-must have made the dosage too high-” and then turned back, leveling his wand at me. “Back to the castle, you. Everyone’s going to hear about this. Bad enough you snub me, but you’ve been keeping your spells from everyone? Skiving off your classes? You think the rest of the house is going to take kindly when they hear how many points you cost them?”

A hundred years as Sheriff taking lives like a farmer reaps his crop welled up inside me. My magic surged at my back, love curdling into something like a killing rage barely restrained and some of it began to leak out into the surroundings. The forest turned dark and the grass began to clutch at his feet. I don’t think he liked the look in my eyes when I stood up. “You.” I said. “ You.” I couldn’t get more out than that. You just ended the first conversation with my wife in three months. Maybe the only one I’ll get. “Little boy, you need to run away. If you stay here they will never find your body. ” My voice didn’t sound anything like an eleven year old’s, now. He cowered and turned to flee, not one speck of triumph left in his eyes. I let him.

Consequences be damned, it was well past time for a reckoning with the author of this farce.