Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

honed by stirring potions to unimaginably fine tolerances, reached up and rubbed at the temples of the man's forehead. "It is enough to drive me to madness, so much hinging on such fragile words. Power he knows not... it must be more than some unknown spell. Not something he could acquire simply by practice and study. Some innate talent? No one can learn to be a Metamorphmagus... and yet that hardly seems like a power he knows not. Nor can I see how either could destroy all but a remnant of the other; I can see it in one direction, but not the reverse..." The Potions Master sighed. "And none of this means anything to you, does it, Miss Felthorne? The words are nothing. The words are shadows. It is her intonation which carries the meaning and that is something I've never been able to..."

The Potions Master trailed off, while Rianne stared at him.

"A prophecy?" Rianne said in a high squeak. "You heard a prophecy? " She'd taken Divination for a couple of months before dropping it in disgust, and she knew that much about how it worked.

"I will try one last thing," said Snape. "Something I have not tried before. Miss Felthorne, listen to the sound of my voice, the way I say it, not the words themselves, and tell me what you think it means. Can you do that? Good," said Snape, as she nodded obediently, though she wasn't sure at all what she was supposed to do.

And Severus Snape drew a breath, and intoned, "FOR THOSE TWO DIFFERENT SPELLETS CANNOT EXIST IN THE SAME VULD."

It sent shivers down her spine, all the worse for knowing the hollow words had been spoken in imitation of a true prophecy. Unnerved, she blurted out the first thing which came to mind, which might have been influenced by her present company. "Those two different ingredients cannot exist in the same cauldron?"

"But why not, Miss Felthorne? What is the meaning of a statement like that? What are we really being told?"

"Ah..." she hazarded. "If the two ingredients mix, they'll catch fire and burn the cauldron?"

Snape's face did not change expression in the slightest.

"Perhaps," Snape finally said, after they'd sat on the sofa in awful silence for what seemed like minutes. "It would explain the word must. Thank you, Miss Felthorne. Once again you have been most helpful."

"I -" she said, "I was glad to -" and the words stuck in her throat. The Potions Master had thanked her with a tone of finality, and she knew that the time of the Rianne Felthorne who remembered these moments was drawing to an end. "I wish I didn't have to forget this, Professor Snape!"

"I wish," Severus Snape said in a whisper so low she could hardly hear it, "that everything had been different..."

The Potions Master stood up from the sofa, the weight of his presence vanishing from beside her. He turned and drew his wand from his robes, pointing it at her.

"Wait -" she said. "Before that -"

Somehow it was unbelievably hard to take the first step from fantasy to reality, from imagining to doing. Even if it was only one step and would never go any further. The gap stretched like the distance between two mountains.

The Sorting Hat had never offered her Gryffindor...

...was it fair that thus a woman's life be judged?

If you can't say it now, when you won't even remember it afterward - when nothing will continue from this moment, just as if you were to die - then when will you ever say it, to anyone?

"Can I have a kiss first?" said Rianne Felthorne.

Snape's black eyes studied her so intensely that her blush started to reach all the way to her chest, and she wondered if he knew perfectly well that she was still being weak, and it wasn't a kiss she'd truly wanted.

"Why not," the Potions Master said quietly, and he leaned his head down over the sofa and kissed her.

It was nothing like she'd imagined. In her fantasies Snape's kisses were fierce, seized from her, but this was - it was just awkward, actually. Snape's lips pressed down too hard on hers, forcing them back against her teeth, and the angle wasn't right and their noses were sort of bending and his lips were too tight and -

Only as the Potions Master straightened back up again, raising his wand once more, did she realize.

"That wasn't -" she said in a wondering voice, looking up at him. "That wasn't - was it - your first -"

Rianne Felthorne blinked at the stone cavern she'd discovered, still holding the extraordinary ruby she'd found embedded in the dirt of one corner. It was an incredible windfall, and she didn't know why looking at the ruby made her feel so sad, like she'd forgotten something, something that had been precious to her.

Chapter 77: SA, Aftermaths: Surface Appearances

Aftermath: Albus Dumbledore and -

The old wizard sat alone at his desk, in the unsilence of the Headmaster's office, amid the innumerable and unnoticed devices; his robes a gentle yellow, of soft fabric, not such clothing as he ordinarily wore before others. His wrinkled hand held a quill scratching away at an official-looking parchment. If you had somehow been there to watch his lined face, you would have been unable to deduce anything more about the man himself than you understood of the enigmatic devices. You might have observed that the face looked a little sad, a little tired, but then Albus Dumbledore always looked like that when he was alone.

In the Floo hearth there were only scattered ashes without a hint of flame, a magical door that had been shut so solidly as to stop existing. On the material plane, the great oaken door to the office had been closed and locked;