By the time morning came, Severus had worked through all the books from the office and the treasury. He had also read the diary that had been lying beside the pot and learned what the plant was. It did not disappoint him.
There was not much written, because even Helga herself had not been able to fully understand it.
In the forty years after she first received it as a seed, the plant had grown only a centimetre, and it now stood twelve centimetres tall. Across more than a thousand years, that was a painfully modest pace. As for what it did: it produced a calming fragrance that spread outward from the plant. When Severus moved it to his own home and connected it to a magical source, putting a limit on how much it could draw, it woke from its dormancy almost immediately. A pleasant scent filled the whole house and spread roughly a hundred metres in every direction. More striking was this: the amount of ambient magic generated around the building doubled. The house-elves ended up with extra work, mowing the lawn more often than usual, because with that much magic in the soil the grass and everything else was growing considerably faster. Outside it was already spring, and the weather was warming steadily.
The two elves were surprised but not at all put out. On the contrary, they were delighted. More work was simply more work, and work, to them, was more or less the same thing as happiness.
Severus was pleased with the acquisition. He had already been thinking about ways to increase the ambient magic around the building and had not yet found a clean solution. This one had simply landed in front of him.
Beyond what the plant did, the diary contained an enormous number of recipes, cooking spells, and Helga's personal observations. The final entry described the results of an experiment with ingredient-chopping charms, and then mentioned a meeting with someone, and after that the entries stopped. The histories claimed she died peacefully, surrounded by her descendants, but history is written by the people who survive it, and the truth was probably beyond recovery now.
As for the books from the treasury, most of what they contained was already in the Grimoire. The exceptions were the oldest ones, which dealt heavily with dark magic and blood rituals, though one among them caught and held his attention.
It described a stone archway draped with a dark veil. Nothing could be seen through it, and only those who had lost someone close could hear faint voices when they approached. If any living creature stepped through, it lost its life at that moment. The author called it a gateway between the living world and the dead, arguing that it took only the soul while leaving the body behind, and pointing to the voices as evidence.
Something like that was impossible for Severus to simply read past. His own suspicion was that it was a dark artefact that absorbed souls, possibly with some capacity to read minds, rather than a true gateway to anywhere. The frustrating part was that the location was nowhere in the text, as though it had simply been omitted or never recorded. But if he ever found that archway, he would want to understand it.
The next few days were quiet. No one among the students seemed to have noticed the open room in the kitchens, but Severus was not paying much attention to that. He had already moved on to Ravenclaw, watching and working out where a passage might be concealed, and so it continued until Friday.
Toward evening he left the castle and went home. The shop was running smoothly without him: Karner had proved reliable enough that Severus no longer needed to be there, and Tobby handled the rest, removing difficult customers and keeping all the unrented spaces clean and in order.
The same could not be said for Voldemort's operation. After two failed missions, he had turned his frustration on the people around him with considerable energy, blaming them for everything. Five Death Eaters were dead already, tortured to the point of no return. Another ten had simply left the country.
The strain of those two setbacks had cracked something in Tom that he had been keeping barely contained. Many of the aristocrats who had previously supported him were now quietly weighing their options and wondering about the practicalities of relocation. He had almost no genuinely loyal people left, apart from Lucius's father, Bellatrix, and the elder Lestrange.
And it was not only the aristocrats. The magical beings who had aligned themselves with the Dark Lord were also beginning to reconsider, because none of them wanted to follow a man who killed his own supporters out of anger. Fear of Riddle was real, but the desire to live was stronger.
Severus spent Saturday, as he usually did now, with Bellatrix. She still came, but something was missing. The sharpness in her eyes was gone. The spark. She had been thinking about her own survival for weeks, and that single thought had put her mind into something close to civil war: one part of her insisting she stay alert and pull back if things deteriorated, the other one that would have taken any punishment the Dark Lord chose to give and called it devotion.
Three weeks of that. She had come to this meeting hoping to stop thinking for a few hours.
Toward evening, crossing a long suspension bridge, Severus stopped at the centre and went to the steel railing. He stood watching the sunset. It was particularly good that evening.
"What is going on with you?" He looked over at Bellatrix. "You look like something the river brought in. If you want to talk, I will listen."
She answered with a slow, flat shake of her head.
"Nothing is going on. I am just tired."
"Is it your work, or is it something else?" He moved close and wrapped his arms around her from behind. For once she did not resist. "You are definitely not all right. If I had tried this a month ago, you would have put an elbow into my ribs before I finished the sentence. Tell me."
He got a tired exhale for an answer. She did not pull away or fight him. She simply stood there, largely absent from the moment.
"I am confused." A pause. "I have been thinking about what you did, from the first time we met in Diagon Alley, and what you said here on this bridge, from the day you took that necklace. I felt as though I woke up. Thinking became easier. The hunger for blood went quiet. I started thinking about things I had never even let myself consider. These feelings are strange to me. I do not know how to describe them."
"If you have been thinking about everything I did, then you already understand it. You are not a stupid woman."
"The necklace had attachment charms on it, I know that, but there is something I cannot work out." She turned her head and looked at him with a complicated expression, into a pair of dark eyes that gave her nothing but steadiness. "Ask."
"When the Dark Lord checked our memories, he should have seen all of it. How you took the necklace. That conversation. Everything that followed. I spent that day certain I was about to die."
"I am sorry. I cannot tell you how."
"I see." She made herself smile and turned back to the sunset. "Why did you start any of this?"
"For a fairly ordinary reason. Love."
"Love." Her voice was flat, and then it was not. "If this is love, why are you hurting me? You must know how much it hurts."
"I do," he said, his voice unchanged. "But if I had said it to you outright, you would not have believed me. Or you might have gone straight to him and told him everything. The problem is that you wore that necklace for too long, and only now has your mind found enough ground to push back against what was forced onto it. His own instability helped, too, because the desire to survive is not something that can be fully suppressed. You are probably being pulled in two directions right now: one part wants to go back to him, confess everything, and put the collar back on, and the other part wants to live." He felt her skin rise under his arms. He was right, and she knew it. "To be who you actually are. The real Bellatrix." He turned her to face him and held her gaze with a quiet steadiness. "You have to choose who you want to be: a spineless instrument for a madman's purposes, or a dark witch and an aristocrat of the ancient House of Black. But do not hurry. Think it through properly."
The number of contradictory things moving through her expression was almost difficult to watch. I hope I did not push this too fast. He lifted her chin, stopped a centimetre away, and waited.
He did not wait long. Bellatrix leaned forward, and their lips met. She simply wanted to stop feeling the pain that had been eating at her from inside, even for a moment.
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