Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets (7)

"I'll do everything I can behind him," Dumbledore said. "I'll assign tasks to you, Minerva, and Filius, make sure the students in the castle are safe before he enters the Chamber of Secrets. I'll find the entrance, determine exactly what the monster inside is, and find a way to deal with it. I will..."

"You'll send him to his death," Severus Snape interrupted again. "Then stand aside and say, 'I believe in him.'"

Dumbledore's lips pressed into a thin line.

Silence spread between them like a waterlogged blanket, growing heavier and heavier until it was hard to breathe beneath its weight.

The flames in the fireplace flickered, casting shifting shadows across their faces. The portraits of former headmasters and headmistresses on the walls had all awakened, but not one of them spoke. They watched the scene in silence, like a silent jury.

Severus Snape was the first to break the silence. The emotions in his black eyes had settled into a cold calm that carried almost no warmth at all.

"Do you know what this is like?" he asked, his voice terrifyingly calm.

Dumbledore said nothing. He merely watched him.

"Raising pigs," Severus Snape said, enunciating every word. "Feeding them carefully, tending to them devotedly, waiting until they grow up, grow fat, grow strong, and then dragging them off to slaughter. That's how you treat him. From the day he stepped into Hogwarts, you had already been plotting around him. Giving him the best protection, the best resources, the best... illusion. Making him think he was loved, cherished, treated as a person."

His voice grew lower and lower, but every word landed like a stone smashing into the air between them. "Then, when you need him, you shove him in front of a monster. In front of Voldemort. In front