The Observer Effect | Harry Potter for Grown-Ups

Chapter Three

She begins to follow Severus in her Animagus form, so she knows when he goes into Hogsmeade, knows what he's going to do when he puts on his glamour, trudges away from the castle, and slips into the seedy lane, nearly disappearing in shadows between The Hog's Head and the nameless apothecary.

She watches the first time. But she cannot see his face in the gloom of the alley, so the next time, she pads silently away when the woman gets to her knees. Nevertheless, it gives her a devilish little thrill to know this about him, that he has a need to be touched.

It is summer when he catches her at it.

She has lost him in the small corridors of the East Wing—he usually slips out the hidden door that gives onto the North Courtyard—when she is grabbed from behind and lifted by the scruff of her neck. She manages only a quick yowl before a Silencing Spell renders her mute and she is flung into the darkness of a bag.

When the bag is opened, she transforms and finds herself in his classroom. She is standing on the desk, alongside several jars of she cannot say what, and he is peering at her, his eyes having regained their peculiar intensity and lustre over the years of distance between his Great Tragedy and now.

He does not ask what she was doing, and she does not attempt to explain. He comes to her and puts his hands on her waist to lift her down, and she doesn't stop him when his fingers begin to fumble at the buttons to her summer dress.

She doesn't desire him—not in this way—but she lets him open her dress and bury his face between her breasts, and her hands float down to comb through his hair because she has always wanted to feel it, to know if it is as greasy and fine as it looks.

When he has gone, and she has righted her clothing, she brings her fingers to her nose and inhales his scent. It smells of sweat and cheap soap—nothing extraordinary after all—and she is somehow disappointed.

They do not speak, other than at the one daily communal meal Albus insists the summer residents take together in the staff room, but he comes to her rooms one night afterwards, and she admits him. He says nothing about why he has come; they talk about Quidditch and Transfiguration, and when a silence stretches out between them, he stands.

When he inclines his head toward her in a formal, unspoken "good night," she stands, too, and unfastens the clasps to her robe, letting it slide from her. It does not drop to the floor but folds itself and floats over to the table, where it comes to rest in a neat silk square. She stands shivering in her linen shift, wondering if she has mistaken the reason for his visit.

But he finally comes to her and unties the bow that holds the garment together at the top. He steps back and waits to see what she will do next, and it becomes a game of sorts: his move, her move, until each stands bared to the other, clothes discarded on the knotted pile carpet as if they couldn't be made to join her robe on the table with the mere flick of a wrist.

They are mirror images, or nearly so, each moon-pale and knobby of spine, with coal-black hair on head and on sex, both straight and tall and quiet on the surface.

No, she does not desire him, but she allows him to make love to her—that isn't the term he'd use, she's certain, but she is of a generation that lacks the casual comfort the young have with the more biological terms—because it seems to be something he needs from her, finally.

He is fast and almost rough—inexperienced, probably, although that's the pot and the kettle, she supposes. He is only her third lover, and she gets little pleasure from their coupling. When he finishes, he rolls off her and puts a tentative hand on her sex. After a minute or so, she pushes the hand away, telling him, "Thank you, but no." He stiffens but says nothing and gets up moments later.

He comes to her infrequently, but when he does, she admits him to her rooms and her bed, and though she never really comes to enjoy the press of his flesh, she is glad that, as time goes on, he learns to go more slowly, because she can observe. It is almost like watching him unawares; he is far away, and she wonders where he goes when he pumps and sweats over her, his eyes closed and his face collapsing in on itself. She wonders if he finds his past a more welcoming place than his present, a question she takes care never to put to herself. Her choices are made, as are his, and there is no going back, she knows, despite the Time-Turner Albus showed her years ago. It sits in a locked and warded drawer in his office and sometimes appears on a chain around his neck—Albus's little reminder that the past is a gift he can bestow, if only one asks politely enough.

~~oOo~~

The liaison stops when Potter emerges from the Triwizard maze to deposit the body of that poor dead boy in the June muck. It's just as well. She has become bored with their trysts, although she never says so to him. But he is no fool, and he has surely known that she was merely tolerating for her own private reasons his use of her body. It was, she supposes, less expensive and less risky than the alley next to the Hog's Head. She has come no closer to sussing out his thoughts on this or any other subject, despite the time he has spent in her bed, and so, when he stops coming to her, she is not sorry.

The altered situation, as terrible as it is, affords her an opportunity to observe him under new pressures. He is all grim purpose now, and she almost envies him. She is relegated to organising Order meetings and keeping an eye on Potter. During the long, beastly hot summer days, she is required to sit in feline form, watching over the boy as he struggles in the clutches of his Muggle relatives, and she wonders whether it is intended as punishment. As she observes the lady of the house, thin and prim as a prayer book, she has a vision of herself in a Caithness farmhouse, caring for the husband she never married and the child she would not bear.

As she watches Harry Potter—young, careless, and out-of-place in this strange suburban Purgatory—she diverts herself by wondering: Does Severus see his past in the Potter boy's eyes? Yes, she thinks as she watches him with the boy that autumn. But is it the past he lived or the one he didn't that he sees reflected in Potter's face? Which fuels the clawing hatred?

He has the luxury of knowing what he would choose if Albus loosed the Time-Turner from around his neck and sent him back to 1976. He knows that his sins were sins, knows what he must do to atone, while she is not at all certain about hers. She does not know if the Minerva of 1996 would act differently when faced with the choices of 1956, and this lack of certainty drives her nearly mad.

By the time she ends up in St Mungo's, four painful, livid reminders of her failure to protect her charges marring the white skin of her chest, she is almost relieved to be there. Potions and pain keep her from thinking about things, about him and about what her—oh, let's call a spade a spade—obsession should tell her about herself. Yet when she returns, weak and unsteady on her legs, she is nearly overwhelmed with relief that he is the one to greet her. His eyes roam over her, and she can feel the heat rise in her cheeks, so she speaks brusquely to the students and turns away from him.