Oh Read me, Review me, I long
for your praise,
For this tart, touching tale
took nearly two days.
It dripped though my head
when, too scantily cloaked,
I got caught in a rainstorm
and thoroughly soaked.
(Completely true. It happened
in the South of France, where -and when - it should NOT have been raining.
My colleagues insisted that the Anglaise had imported her lousy
British weather. I believed that the clouds had it in for me.)
Disclaimer: This story is
based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various
publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books
and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. It was written for pleasure,
not profit, and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
The plot is entirely original
(except for the Severus-Lily connection), but the dark-fairy-tale form
owes much to the stories of Hans Andersen and Oscar Wilde. The style’s
an Own Blend of influences too numerous to mention.
__________________________________________________________________
"One must either be a work of Art
or wear a work of Art" Oscar Wilde
("Or make a work of Art"
- textualsphinx)
He made her flesh creep - and knew
it. The gangling boy, being easily confused with the twisted trees he
lurked in, had heard many things he shouldn't have more than once. The
peculiar thing was, he only came back for more. It was better to be near
her and get hurt than not to be near her at all.
Only, it wasn't like being near her.
He could be two feet away, and as well be watching a constellation of
stars as a cluster of sixteen-year-old girls.
Two years before, he had heard them.
The ranking game. You couldn't complain - it wasn't as if the boys didn't
do it. Marks out of ten. If only he could make himself fall in love with
a three, or a two, or a one-and-a-half (the boys were chivalrous
enough never to award one or zero, or mindful of being made fools of if
they resorted to the lowest scorer.) It wasn't as if he expected a 10
to take him. Lily always got 8 when the votes were averaged out, which
meant his secret grade for her was balanced out by at least one 6. That's
as far as his realism went. The Girls were better at this: like rapiers
next to cudgels. The numbers were only a starting point. They could describe
exactly, but exactly, what it was they didn't like.
He would never leave the earth and
reach the stars. He was mud, he was slugs, he was worms, he was maggots:
worse than maggots, in fact. In Lily's opinion, it would be preferable
to lie in a coffin with maggots all over you than lie with that Slytherin
slithering over you. Slobbering, salivating..Ugh!
Yuk! Get away from me!
He forgave her. He was hurt and he
was furious, but unable to direct his anger at her, targetting instead
the hapless mirror that was fool enough to tell him (in warm motherly
tones) Never to Mind, dear, Looks Weren't Everything, especially not for
boy - Smash.
"Just 99 point 999 percent?" he asked
the shrieking fragments whilst they threatened
him with seven years' bad luck. Well
wouldn't that make a difference to his life.
He forgave Lily because he knew that
though she meant it, she only said it because that's what you did in groups.
He'd done as much himself, pretending to be like the other boys. She was
always polite to him, careful of him, even if she never quite managed
a smile. Felt pity, probably.
He would make her smile. He would
delight her senses. He would have her gasp with rapture. And she wouldn't
even know it was he who'd done it.
Now, two years later, the brightest
star in the constellation was showing off her
engagement ring.
The girls made the usual sighs of
approval, but Severus noticed that Lily looked faintly embarrassed. It
wasn't a nice ring. It was pricey and gold and had a large ruby – but
beautiful, it wasn't. It was vulgar. The kind of thing, Severus thought
(with a disdain that ought to make us hate him) that a boy who came from
a Family that Bought its Own Furniture would choose for his fiancée.
What made him smirk, in a rare glow of self-satisfaction, was that Lily
saw this because she knew what real beauty was. He had taught her. He
had given her his appreciation of fineness and grace: an appreciation
that only the Hopelessly Ugly could find by themselves.
He'd started with little things that
she mistook for tricks of the light. A flurry of autumn leaves danced
in the wind, but Severus' spell spun them to a neat minuet. In winter,
the unclad tree-tops looked like skeletons' hands, but when Lily walked
by (and Severus was near) she saw silhouettes of fine lace against the
coppery sky. He gilded the actual lilies in the school lake with carefully
re-directed sunbeams, and thickened the summer haze on Hogsmeade Meadow
to hide the seasonal creepy-crawlies from view. As he developed his skills
(sneaking into the Charms section of the library when no-one was looking
to research his next trick) Lily became convinced that her life was blessed.
Later still, James Potter was to agree. Nature, decidedly, worshipped
her wherever she went, and so did he.
When Severus saw her lips turn upwards
and her eyes start to sparkle, he would crouch behind the nasty tree-trunks,
dig his nails in the bitter earth, and hiss "She smiled because of me.
She's smiling for me (and even, he could almost believe it) She
smiled at me."
Best of all was that knowledge (after
all, he was to become a teacher) that she was
outgrowing the need for prettifying
spells and learning to look for herself. She saw things that most people
didn't. She developed her own taste. She detected beauty where others
observed nothing remarkable, and even found interest in the sparse and
the bleak. The grotesque intrigued and impressed her, more than it repelled.
You could say she became an artist.
Severus thought it unlikely their
paths would ever cross once they'd left school. She didn't need it, but
he wanted to give her one last present, a wedding gift - 'for Life, as
it were'.
He had noticed that many of the charms
he'd learnt involved pain or darkness; some kind of risk or sacrifice.
Magical Arts copied Nature's rule that the most luscious flowers grew
in the most rotten soil. That was the paradox of beauty - it required
ugliness to exist. It was a strange consolation that this was why he was
so good at these charms.
He found what he was looking for in
book called "Olde Enchantements - the Giftes of Luvve". He wouldn't have
been seen dead reading it, and was forced to consult the heavy tome during
a Quidditch match (Gryffindor versus Ravenclaw. Lucky it wasn't Slytherin.
He could plead indifference if anyone noticed his absence.)
It was the shred of his own name that
caught his attention:
"To sever the lyninge
from a clouwde."
The lining of a cloud had powerful,
paradoxical properties. It would not stop terrible things happening to
you (and terrible things were round the corner. He knew. His own family
were planning them) but it would ensure that something good came out of
the bad. There would be compensation, one wonderful thing to help you
move on. There was no photograph of course, not even an illustration,
but he could well believe that the stuff was "the most beauteous thynge."
Silvery grey, from the description and like shot silk - but the highlights
would change colour according to the time of day. Severus pictured this:
steely, moon-blue at night, rose at sunset, greeny gold in the morning
and white at noon.
He had to get one for her. He just
had to.
"To sever the Lyninge from a Clouwde,
thou shouldst be heavie of hearte. Thou shalt give of thy hearte without
hope it bee returned. Ownlie he with that darkenesse which equals the
Clouwdes may repelle, with his force, the woe of the Clouwde - as do Lodestones.
In like manner shall his sorrowe drawe to him the Lyninge, as doth
the Lodestone. He that would have this beauteous thynge must peril himselfe
in the lightnyng storm. Then ownlie will he be force-full to drawe and
repelle, and to flye with his Treasure. But heedst thou: that Clouwde
will not pardonne the Thief. Thou shalt fear the Clouwde's wrath for a
year and a daye."
Why, Severus wondered idly, was it
always a year 'and a day' with punishments? Given that cloud formations
broke up all the time, surely it should be, like, a day and an hour. He
supposed the medieval spell-writers liked the sound of 'and a day', or
that it was something to do with coping with leap years.
Not that there was much of a spell
to go on. That was the problem with using really old books. He remembered
their House-Elf, in her one moment of frustration, making the same complaint
about recipes: modern ones did things properly, giving you lists of ingredients
with exact quantities and cooking times. Their medieval antecedents just
told you "To your rowste meat adde floure, almondes ande garlicke, see
they bee pounded well" ("So is you mincing the meat or not,
Missus Snape?" the elf had cried, with a soundless stamp of her bare
little foot.)
The idea was pretty neat though: your
heavy heart was a magnet, galvanised by an electrical storm (Severus'
mother had shrewdly made him take Muggology - precursor of Muggle Studies
- to disguise the extent of the family's allegiances). This separated
the cloud and lining by attracting the opposite (the lining) and repulsing
the same (the cloud). The reverse would not work of course. Someone light
and happy of heart, like Potter, might perfectly well separate the elements,
but they'd end up with the cloud, not the lining!
Severus really liked that bit - something
he could get that Potter, precisely, couldn't.
So, how did you do it without getting
yourself killed and defeating the object of your quest? Namely, to deliver
the prize to the soul-mate who found you repulsive.
It took him weeks to work it all out.
He found a spell that would take just a fragment of his heart and hold
it at the tip of his wand (no hope that said fragment 'bee returned').
He made an unlicensed Apparation to London, one Hogsmeade weekend, to
buy Muggle gloves, boots and raincoat of (less-than-stylish, he thought
disgustedly) rubber that would block his contact with earth, thus saving
him from electrocution. He practised summoning charms on all kinds of
nebulous entities to encourage the lightning his way if it wouldn't oblige.
It was a somewhat storm-free year, so he didn't get quite as much practice
summoning lightning itself as he could wish (plus he didn't want to be
caught, dead, in the rubber outfit). He knew he could manage pinpointing
the lightning with the tip of his wand. He'd plenty of experience redirecting
sunbeams, so it was merely a question of speeding up his movements and
reaction times.
He waited for the summer holidays,
the last they'd all have before returning as a seventh years and then
going out into the world.
First catch your cloud... He
was the only person in Britain to welcome a more than usually rainy August,
and chose the bleakly beautiful Scottish Highlands as suitable hunting-ground.
It was lucky he'd taught himself to Apparate. His parents wouldn't notice
if he went off only for a day. He kept a watchful eye on the weather forecasts,
and got himself up a mountain just before the promised storm.
The clouds lay low. He selected the
darkest, most thunderous he could see, and stepped right into it. Now
he couldn't see: another reason to have practised the lightning summons.
He'd left transferring a fragment of his heart to his wand as late as
possible. It hurt a little - a nagging needlepoint of pain, but that was
only to be expected. No amount of expectation could have prepared him
for the agony he felt when he made contact with the lightning. A few words
in Latin, a deft flick of his wand - and it was as if he’d been stabbed
with the finest of rapiers. He had to hold on. He had to wait and be still
a whole minute - and one second - whilst a bright grey layer (yes, paradoxically,
bright and grey!) was teased from the vaporous swirls. By the time the
whole lining had come free, and Severus, twirling it round his wand, began
his mad scramble down the mountain, the bereft cloud was blacker-purple
than a bruise.
Severus broke contact with the lightning.
He couldn't hold it longer, but it meant he had no magnetic protection
from the cloud. He ran and he ran, clutching his prize to his chest, and
the furious cloud hurled after him. Fortunately for him it had to fight
through a crowd of others, which held it up in enough time for the boy
to stop in the hollow of a rock and transport himself home by less natural
means than running.
For a year and day after, this was
not so. Severus' cloud would appear out of the blue sky: solitary as he
was, and just as inexplicable.
Except that he was the kind of person
you'd expect to bring a dark atmosphere to things, and it suited him somehow
- was very much his style - to appear with that impressive black cloud
behind him. No doubt this inspired the cut of his cloaks, which right
through his teaching career struck fear of the heavens into his students.
When Severus landed on his parents'
lawn, it was after sunset and the house-elf was calling him for supper.
He had done it. He lay there a few moments, trying to find his breath,
and lose the searing pain in his chest. That would go, eventually, leaving
him with slightly less heart: a splinter of absence that people called
Cruelty. He divested himself of the ridiculous protective gear as swiftly
as possible, hid his treasure, carefully rolled, under his robe, and went
into the house.
He was very, very pale. He had a dazed
look that even his parents noticed, and that
prompted them to ask (with more curiosity
than concern) where on earth he had been all afternoon.
"Went for a hike. Thought I 'd get
a bit of exercise and fresh air, as you've told me to" he answered with
perfect (if incomplete) candour.
" Not up to it, obviously" his father
commented, and they ate their meal in silence. It was a few days before
Severus could eat properly. Swallowing hurt.
He spent the rest of the holidays,
wisely, indoors - lying in bed, exhausted, when he could get away with
it. Fortunately this was what you expected of boys his age. He slept a
lot. Perhaps the cloud-lining's magic was working on him, for it was one
of the few times in his life when he did sleep a lot.
He would only get up to look at Lily's
present. It was every bit as wondrous as he had imagined. Thin as
the material was, when you looked at it seemed to have infinite depth.
It was slightly translucent, and its silver-grey hue was enlivened by
an iridescent sheen that was indeed never the same colour from one hour
to the next. Severus liked it best at sunrise. Sometimes - only on laundry
day, when the sheets were fresh and his nightshirt newly washed - he would
take it to bed with him, holding it ever so tentatively. He didn't want
it to get dirty, or heavens forbid, smell. (Contrary to popular myth,
Severus was very pernickety about personal hygiene. The recalcitrant oil
on his hair was actually aggravated into overproduction by frequent washing;
shampoos, both natural and magical, have developed a lot since, but too
late for him to benefit.) At Hogwarts’ he would look up how to launder
the fragile prize - rainwater, probably. He huddled up ne xt to it, pretending
it was Lily, not quite sure if he could feel it was there or not. It was
exactly half-way between substance and shadow. It had a soothing coolness.
You could feel it the way you feel heavy mist, the surface tension of
water - or the repulsion between two magnets when you hold them together.
There was one snag - literally; the
result of a snag on a thistle when he was wrenching the lining to his
wand. It had a rent, a tear that spoiled its perfection. He couldn't give
it to Lily just as it was. He'd sort that out back at Hogwarts’, he thought
tiredly, where you could find the right books.
He slept.
Autumn term came round again, and
Severus hid his precious gift in the trunk under his dormitory bed. He
decided the best thing to do was to make the material into a dress. The
problem was, he knew nothing about dressmaking. That involved some more,
very surreptitious visits to sections of the library he wouldn't be caught
dead in. He sought out the most accurate cutting spells for substances
of this kind, and learned that you could only stitch the thing, by hand,
with a sunbeam trapped in a hair. At least the recalcitrant oil was an
advantage here - the sunbeams slipped from his wand-tip along each strand
like a dream. Severus, hiding in one of the school attics at dawn, watched
his horrible long black hairs turn to gold.
But they burned; you had to stitch
with them while they were still hot, otherwise they lost their suppleness,
became brittle, and broke. He spent many hours in that attic, trying to
thread needles quickly and sew without letting the magical thread flick
a nasty sting on his hands. The scars were with him for life, but so thinly
etched into his flesh that you only saw them if you got very close - which
no-body did.
A dress. That tipped the whole enterprise
into a dangerous area. An anonymous cloth turning up alongside items from
the Diagon Alley wedding list was one thing. 'The card must have got lost,
wonder what it is, well, whatever, it's ever so lovely.' but an oh-so-slightly
translucent dress could only come from someone in love with her and was
decidedly tinged with the erotic. He 'would be with them on their wedding
night', so to speak. Too late, the dress was cut. Severus felt slightly
sick for a week. It took awhile to persuade himself that his sublime present
wasn't somewhat indecent. The material reassured him. It's beauty was
so unearthly, and it had power to do good. The problem was how to get
it to Lily without her ever, ever suspecting. The couple could probably
cope with the idea of someone else in love her - quite a few boys must
be. He wasn't the only one to have given her a 10, he calculated. If she
knew it was him though - he remembered how he w as worse than maggots,
that he made her flesh creep. The very softness and silkiness and subtlety
of the lining-of-a-cloud would make her shudder all the more. Slytherin
slithering. He would have
to think very carefully about that.
There was plenty of time. He would find a way. He always did. He tore
the key pages out of the ancient book of charms, as a starter to covering
his tracks.
It was the fashioning of the dress
- what went into making it the right size and style for Lily - that was
his undoing. The easiest way was to let magic do most of the work for
you. You drew an idea of what you wanted on parchment. You got a hair
from the person who was to wear the garment, wrapped it and the design
in your material, and said the tailoring spell. Then you stitched up the
seams. He tweaked the hair from her during a potions class, when, oh joy,
he was partnered with her half the lesson. Unfortunately she noticed something.
She couldn't be sure, and wasn't prone to think the worst of him, but
was worried enough to mention to James that Snape might have touched a
hair of her head. James was always overprotective (and bored with their
current truce). Though Lily chose to forget the whole thing, he decided
to find out what the Slytherin was up to.
And he had his Invisibility Cloak
to do it.
James also watched Severus' hair turn
to gold. He followed him up to the attic at dawn and - though he disliked
Snape - winced with him when he stung his hands with stitching. He saw
the dress take shape. He'd overslept and missed the session when Lily's
hair was rolled up with the parchment. He also missed the hour when Severus
took the red strand, sun-beamed it, and with unusual playfulness sewed
a spare button (dewdrops trapped in sycamore seeds) into the hem. Clothes
always came with a spare button, he knew that much. Severus was exactly
a hair's breadth from getting away with it. James' niceness, his innate
sympathy, blew it. It did not take him long to realise that, whoever the
dress was for (he couldn't prove it was Lily) the Slytherin boy was doing
no harm. He couldn't work out what the material was, but he was certain
it had something to do with rainbows, which are never evil. He kept spying
on Severus because he was fascinated. When the dres s was finally done,
right down to the nonchalant rose sewn from the remnants, Severus still
slipped up to the attic, with invisible James in tow. At midnight this
time. James thought it was a trick of the moonlight that the dress changed
colour. Sometimes the Slytherin boy would just gaze at his artwork for
hours. Once or twice he whispered to it, with an odd mixture of adoration
and anger "Tell me I'm ugly now, why don't you? Say I make your flesh
creep."
Then, on one fateful occasion, he
thought of enchanting it further. Just for a night. Just until he had
to give it away for life, as it were. He recalled the minuet danced by
autumn leaves, and Animated the dress.
It filled out (with Lily's contours
exactly). Severus almost laughed and clapped his hands when the dress
started to dance (as did James, but he stopped himself just in time).
He certainly smiled when the dress sidled up to him. It had Lily's persistence,
and made him dance with her. Although he thought he was alone, Severus
blushed, but the dress would not let him just watch. Surprisingly, he
did know how to dance - at least, this sort of formal dancing - as he
came from one those families that make you learn for the "season" however
much you protest it's pointless. Ugly as Snape was, James thought, he
moved gracefully enough; but it was horribly, horribly painful to watch
him partnering the empty dress. When the enchantment wore off, and Severus
stood forlorn, holding the shrunken garment that seemed to hunch its shoulders
in shame, a needlepoint of pity jabbed at James' throat. Tears stung his
eyes and he choked on the word "Lily".
Severus heard and spun round. He recognised
the voice. Everyone knew James had an invisibility cloak - it was the
only explanation behind his pranks. It didn't matter how many times the
disembodied voice whispered "I'm sorry, I'm sorry", Severus lunged at
it, clawed at it and pulled off the disguise.
They stood there looking at each other,
each clutching their magical clothes. James couldn't help noticing that,
next to the Slytherin's, his once-lovely cape seemed, well, cheap. It
suddenly reminded him of that tinselly 'silver lamé' stuff that
his ghastly future sister-in-law wore to nightclubs with her equally ghastly
husband. James would in fact find out just how costly was the lining of
a cloud, though Severus never knew that he would.
"You've - ruined - everything! All
that work - lightning - pierced me - running - my hands - she'll know
- won't want it now - She'll KNOW-"
James tried saying he would never,
ever tell, but Severus was completely incoherent
with rage and then, to James' horror,
started to tear at the dress. He was going to destroy it, rip it to shreds.
"No, no please! Don't!"
Luckily - thank the stars - the seams
were strong as sunshine, and it was not the kind of stuff you could
tear with bare, un-electrified hands. You might as well try to rip water.
James was relieved, but Severus' frustration brooked no limit. His rage
swelled like a thunderstorm. He Banished the dress. He told it to get
back to its lousy cloud. The dress slunk away, scraping the floor, then
flew through the window into the night sky.
James went too, when Severus told
him to go.
Professor Severus Snape never found
out what happened to his cloud's silver lining. He surmised that it never
rejoined its origins (maybe fashioning it into a dress put paid to that
- the cloud couldn't adapt) since he found it necessary to live indoors
for the full year-and-a-day, dodging quickly from one building to another
when he had to. At least he hit on the idea of hiding the protective rubber
as soles within a perfectly elegant pair of shoes, so avoiding embarrassment
added to disgust. Or Pity. He never knew, then, that when he saved the
life of James' son Harry in the brat's first year at Hogwarts’ (to settle
a quite separate score with the late Potter) it was for the second time.
Lily died wearing that lining-of-a-cloud.
She was buried in it too (and it held off the maggots, could Severus but
have known, but of course he never could for this was deep in the bitter
earth.) She and James had been fooling around in the Forbidden Forest
late one Sunday afternoon when a silver and faintly golden dress, that
danced waveringly in the wind, drifted towards her and clung for dear
life. Lily accepted this without surprise. She was used to her life being
blessed, and to Nature and heaven knows everything else worshipping her.
She was wise enough to go to Professor Flitwick, though, to check it wasn't
cursed, and that's when they found out about the linings of clouds, and
wondered (she genuinely, James falsely) who could have plucked it from
the thundering skies. Then they lit a solemn candle; for no-one, they
were told, had ever survived such a quest. They were always found struck
by lightning under their silver shroud.
It was with some difficulty that James
persuaded her not to wear it to the graduation ball - someone might steal
it after, he argued. Heeding the school motto about sleeping dragons,
he knew better than to tell Severus that his gift found its receiver as
perfectly and anonymously as it should. He thought better of breaking
his midnight vow to keep the secret. A nagging, needlepoint of anxiety
punctured his courage for the only time in his life. Spiritual, sharp-eyed
Lily saw beauty lurking in the strangest places. Would she not be drawn
like a magnet to the one who'd worked hardest for her love? Lily never
knew.
Severus Snape never knew. Of that
golden summer of graduation, he only remembered how, for all that he gained
the highest grades of every House, Lily and James and Remus and Sirius
and even little Peter Pettigrew - those stout-hearted Gryffindors - marched
out of school trailing Clouds of Glory, whilst he, Severus, left under
one.
His own, very personal cloud of Vengeance.
___________________________________________________________________
Notes
- "A family that Bought Their Own Furniture"
– the English upper classes pride themselves on inheriting their things.
If you have bought your own furniture, you must be ‘nouveau riche’.
Tory Minister and diarist Alan Clarke created a scandal when he referred
to Michael Heseltine (another Tory) as being ‘the kind of man who bought
his own furniture’. It was only mildly less shocking in would-be classless
Britain than his admission to having had an affair with a woman and
her daughter simultaneously.
- "For Life, as it were" is the last phrase
in Henry James' Washington Square.
3 )"First catch Your cloud"
follows Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management:
First, catch your hare.
4) Nerdy-technical points
about cloud-linings and sewing: it is tear-able (by the thistle) only
when in
flux – ie magnetised by the
lightning. Once ‘free’, it is eternally strong. Severus does not thread
the needle at leisure before trapping the sunbeams because it would
make the needle even hotter than the thread and burn his fingers right
off.
5) "He would be with them
on their wedding night " echoes Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein - the Creature’s
threat to Doctor F.
6) "When he saved the life
of James' son Harry..." I'm assuming that Snape's Countercurse during
the
Quidditch match was critical
in restraining Quirrel's attempt to kill Harry, buying Hermione enough
time to save stop the curse
completely.
