𝐒𝐀𝐂𝐑𝐈𝐅𝐈𝐂𝐄 || Severus Snape x OC ||

36. OPAL, SILVER & BLAME

*.·:·.☽ ✧ ☾.·:·.*

Muggles do not like uncertainty. They do not like change. Change is frightening. Change is painful. And perhaps wizards and witches, too, shared the same feelings.

Alice did.

But change bears gifts even if wrapped in pain and in fright. A strange, cleansing euphoria that pooled like ink in the heart, and drained the fear and the droplets of melancholy.

Loose cannon. These words could describe her better now. For that's what she was. What she had become.

The thorns around her heart, tightened like a snake, and squeezed, mourning the chasm that stood echoing the growing distance between her and Severus. But for all the love she harboured for him, all the need and desire to be by his side, dripping like blood from a wound, it wasn't enough to fill that chasm. Nor was the thought of a cause enough to bridge it.

A little cloud of warm breath appeared for a few seconds in the cold air as the raven-haired witch sighed, pushing further into the path, pushing his thought out of her mind. A familiar path of cobblestones that she had visited a few times before.

No, not a few times. Solely once, she corrected herself.

Perhaps a wiser Ravenclaw would have tried to seek cover some place away, or at least farther away. But Alice did not want to hide. Not exactly.

She glanced behind her at the tracks of Hogwarts Express. When Luna had asked her to follow her to the castle, she felt the sharp knife of her decision graze the tender flesh of her heart.

"I won't come, Luna," she had said to the fairy-like young witch. Luna's eyes had glanced at her, questioning, wondering.

"Why?"

"Because I may cause more harm than not, my dear..." Alice's voice had come out soft, but heavy of woes. Some were her own, others were his. And which of them could cause more harm she could tell no more. Hogwarts was a place where help is thought to be given to those who seek it. And Alice had almost believed as much, until the coming of the last days she'd spent with Severus. Until the slow, but steady realization that one way or the other, one can only trust so much in others.

And she wanted to trust Severus. The last time she had felt betrayed by him was still raw in her mind, in her heart. But switching true and bogus truth potions before giving them to Umbridge was far less of a matter compared to this. Compared to what she feared had happened. Had he truly betrayed her? Readied her for the Dark Lord when she ever so blindly gave her heart and her mind to Severus? Or was the fear speaking again? That wild, battered animal that bit before being bitten, and growled at the first sign of worry, certain that the worst is to come.

There are those who believe that fear is an enemy, one that must be avoided at all costs. They run at its first stirrings. They seek shelter from the storm inside the house only to get crushed when the roof falls in. And Alice had run. That was what she had learnt to do, that's what she always did. Solely Severus had managed to become her anchor, a broch that would shield and shelter her from her own nature at times. From her own fears. But even he couldn't harness that side of her. Couldn't break the spell of that living, breathing wildling that made her run, carved out of her life, born out of her woes, sharing the same heart with the vengeful beast within her. That, she would have to do on her own. And until she would have done as much, she would not return to the castle.

Not as before.

Not until the fog had cleared and she could see truly, clearly, which side she was on and who was indeed the one betraying her.

What is to come, will come, her mind whispered the words like a mantra. Perhaps, if she were to repeat it to herself enough times, she would banish the doubts, banish the sorrows.