crack_van | Silver and Green: A Quartet by alena -hu (PG-13)

Fandom: HARRY POTTER
Pairing: None
Length: ~4,700
Author on LJ:

alena_hu
Author Website: No other site for her HP fic
Why this must be read:
Alena wrote two fics for the

snape_after_dh fest, when fans (like me) were still flailing about, trying to adjust to the fact that Snape was dead. Both fics are worth reading, and the other is arguably the better crafted, but this one hit me hard at the time. It still fills a need that I wish more authors would address, because it deals with a small handful of minor-character Slytherins, survivors and real people, not evil, Dark, or stupid losers. This is a chamber-music piece describing what happened to each of them on the night of the last battle, spoken over the grave of their Head of House. In some ways, it's a bleak fic, but the four voices are wonderful. It reminds us that history is written by the victors, and that there are always victims caught in the collision between opposing sides. These children are sharp, smart, defiant, old beyond their years, and aware that life will never be brilliant for them. So they've gathered to pay tribute to the one teacher who ever actually gave them what they needed, even if that knowledge is more bitter than sweet.

The verb tenses wobble once in a while, but it nearly works to the fic's advantage, because the voices are so personal and the words informal. It may bruise your heart a bit, but it might also succeed where JKR failed: in showing that Slytherin students are just like any other children, and that the world makes a different sort of sense depending on where you're standing at the time and how much of an outsider you are.

I remember drawing my wand before a Death Eater, saying one thing and thinking another, clinging frantically onto the notion that I could make the silent spell work. I remember finding Tracey lying at the bottom of the stairs, blood pooling beneath her, staring off into space and muttering something about you, and a task. I remember killing a man. I think. But unlike all those other idiots we weren't afraid to attack from behind, and we weren't afraid to use anything the Carrows taught us. I wish they'd seen us, actually, those two. Do you think they would have been proud, Headmaster?

In any case, we survived the fight, more or less, but afterwards there were the aurors and the sanctimonious fools to deal with. You see, whenever we ran into anyone that night, we had to convince them we were on their side, true or not. And when morning came and he was dead and we still had to keep doing it, the fast thinking and faster talking, just to keep them from carting us all to Azkaban. Oh, and to get someone to help Tracey and take her to a healer. But all along the only thing I kept telling myself was that the one side I knew was yours. And that was the side I chose. So later, when they kept asking why, why--I got rather sick of it all, I'm afraid. So I told them the truth.

I still keep on telling it to myself.

Seems it's the only thing I really understood anymore.

Things aren't exactly all baby kneazles and roses for us Slytherins these days, as you can imagine, Professor Snape. But I think back to the way you were all year, all seven years, all your life, and I know that I don't need to explain a damned thing to them. Not one word. None of us do. Even though they call themselves the victors, we know they're just as much brainless sheep as they ever were. We weren't on their side anyway.

It's not as if any of them were on ours, after all.

Silver and Green: a Quartet