Davina | hp. ✓

30 | The Contingency Plan

She drew in a deep breath.

"I've seen the outcome of the war."

He sat back and drew in a deep breath. "Do I want to know how it ends?"

Davina pressed her lips into a thin line and contemplated her answer for a moment. "The way I see it, it's up to us to determine the course of this war. I believe that I've seen the outcome because I am meant to change it somehow -- to stall it, at the very least, until we can fix the mistakes that will be made."

Snape bowed his head at the implication of her words. By the dim gleam in her eyes and the solemnity in her voice, he realized with dread that they were projected to lose the war in her vision. Fifteen years of sacrifice, duplicity, and now returning to the ranks of the deatheaters and that was all that was to show for it.

"Show me."

He looked up and stared into her eyes, watching with intrigue as she pulled down the walls in her mind -- it was almost like watching glaciers melt and sink in the blueness of her eyes. In the next moment, he was claimed by her vision. 

A night marred by stormclouds and fragments of green light, falling over the Hogwarts castle like glass -- the eerie darkness of the Chamber of Secrets -- a small golden cup bleeding the remnants of a broken soul -- the Dark Lord in possession of the Elder Wand -- an army of deatheaters -- Theo and Draco at the helm -- Blaise and Pansy on a collapsing bridge -- a menacing Nagini, the Dark Lord's glinting eyes -- Snape laying in a pool of his own blood -- a great battle -- tears falling, blood spilling, bodies dropping -- Potter facing his fate too soon -- an fatal explosion -- darkness. 

He found himself staring back at again as the glaciers slowly emerged from the sea of her eyes, blocking her mind again. His heart hammered in her chest and the blood rushed through his ears as flashes of his own death and Potter's failure hijacked his senses.  

"We can do what Dumbledore has asked of us. We can lead Potter and his friends along the right path. We can protect them from the inside. We can beguile the Dark Lord. It's going to come at extreme costs, but we can manage it. We cannot, however, control whether or not Potter finds and destroys all of the horcruxes in time."

"You said you can sense them. You could lead him to them --"

"--I very well could, yes, but Potter and his friends haven't trained in Legilimency or Occulmency. Whatever I do -- whatever we do -- must be done in the shadows so if they are ever captured, they won't expose the parts we play in their journey." She pursed her lips and picked up the glass again as the bottle poured her another serving. "Which brings me back to my initial statement: the timeline for finding and destroying the Horcruxes relies solely on Potter."

"Everything you've seen...Everything you showed me...is it definite?" 

Davina could see that the images of his own death were disturbing his usual composed demeanor, and she almost felt a little more justified for what she was going to suggest next. 

"More or less. Death can seldom be escaped, Severus. In all of your years, you've learned that firsthand."

He seemed to have expected her answer, but it didn't make it any easier to hear. He always knew that there was a possibility that he would die for Harry Potter, whether directly or indirectly, but seeing it was an entirely different concept. 

"But in those years, you've never had me as an ally."

He looked up at her. Her deep blue eyes pierced right through him as if she was gazing right into his soul, and her lips were quirked into the ghost of a smile. But there was something about the way she was looking at him -- as if with loathing for herself -- that inspired a sense of unease within him.