October, 1985.

"Stop trying to sneak a peek at me, Minerva."

"Severus, I assure you —"

"You may fancy yourself a minx, but it's highly unsettling for you to be staring at me so lewdly while you ensure I'm not drowning in my own bathtub."

"I know you're cross with Dumbledore for sending me, but, really, he was worried about you. And frankly so am I."

"You owe me one nice young lad."

Minerva harrumphed. "If last year's Christmas shenanigans are anything to go by, you'll just have to settle for a certain Professor of Astronomy."

A small silence hung between them.

"Was that really a lad you were dancing with? Honestly, I mistook the both of you at first," she said.

"You know, you deserve all the manhandling you got for making assumptions about people."

"I certainly did not deserve to be picked up and passed around for — for petting!"

"Minerva. You can't just saunter into a Siouxsie and the Banshees concert looking like you did — cats are natural gothic rock bird magnets, if you know what I mean."

"No, I don't know what you mean."

But though it had been hours ago now, the memory was quite fresh in her mind.

'Standing in the light.' Bump of bass and pulse of purple lights and a writhing mass of black leather and lace and voluminous hair. 'Always sitting on the line.' The people were all so unique but also almost indistinguishable — if they were scantily clad she could tell their gender, but otherwise the room was a sea of androgyny. 'Never on a side.' She could feel his magical signature, could smell his scent, but the direction it came from revealed a couple of heavily made-up nearly runway-model-thin ladies tangled in a promiscuity that passed for dancing in this place. 'Pushing out the light. Standing in the light.' She was about to turn around and leave and curse Dumbledore for sending her on a wild goose chase when she caught the sight of a familiar hook-nose in the flash of a strobe light. 'I never wanted to be right. Now I'm attracted by the light.' She peered harder at the dancing duo, her whiskers twitching, and realized that they were both men and that one of them, beneath all the make-up and fishnet, was indeed Severus Snape.

'And blinded by the sight. Into the light.'

She prowled over, priding herself on her nimbleness in avoiding stomping platformed feet, and was almost to her colleague when she was suddenly picked up and stroked. Minerva let out a hiss, but to no avail. She passed from hand to hand, yowling, until Severus Snape finally took notice of her. He disengaged from his dance partner and lunged over to where she was being forcefully pet. He grabbed her from the cooing women and all but ran until he was outside with her.

"What the devil are you doing here?" her hooked-nosed peer sneered at her as he held her above him, his hands digging uncomfortably under her front legs, her paws sticking straight out. She felt foolish like this and she could feel her tail curling in shame and anger so she began to struggle within his grasp, frantically kicking her hind legs.

"The old man sent you, didn't he?"

Minerva mroawed long and low.

"You caught her!"

"Can we pet her?"

"Is she yours?"

"I want to hold her!"

Minerva was shunted to Severus' side and tucked securely in the crook of his arm. A group of overly made-up girls decked out in black lace, safety pins glinting from ears and noses and lapels, had gathered around him.

"Toss off," he said.

One of the girls stepped forward. "I'll do whatever you like if you let me play with your pussy."

Severus made a rude gesture and stormed off to a chorus of cackles and hissed slurs.

Between her indignation about being carried unceremoniously by her colleague, Minerva started to feel a tad sorry for him. That is, until he rounded a corner and drew his wand. As he aimed it at the group of girls, she bit the flesh of his arm.

He swore and dropped her. But as she shifted back into her human form, he fired off a spell.

A flash of flame — a high-pitched shriek — and Minerva drew her own wand. However, Severus had already concealed his wand and was stalking off down the alleyway. Minerva peered around the corner at the women. She could hear them exclaiming that it seemed that the lighter they had been using to light their cigarettes had malfunctioned and erupted into violent flames. They began asking around for matches.

Minerva shook her head. She couldn't help noticing that he had taken advantage of her shifting so that the minimal amount of magic he actually used would go quite undetected. Though he would have used his magic on those Muggle women anyway, Statute of Secrecy be damned, so it seemed. But, she had to wonder if such a small spell would have alerted the enforcement at all. Especially once she considered the Muggles' ready explanation for the preternatural event.

She turned just in time to see Severus turn down another bend in the alleyway, a cigarette of his own in his mouth. She shifted her form again to catch up to him.

It either took Severus a little while to notice her or he chose to ignore her. Whichever one, he finally addressed her as he ground the end of the cigarette into the asphalt with the heel of his clunky lace-up boot.

"I take it he ignored my note."

Minerva shifted again. She crossed her arms and stared him right in his painted face. "The note was why he sent me after you, Severus."

He fished around in his jacket, mumbled, "Can't tell a hacksaw from a handsaw," and lit himself another cigarette.

She noted the slight tremor in his hands as he smoked, looked into his eyes and noticed his immensely dilated pupils.

"You're coming back to the castle with me where we're going straight to Poppy."

Severus laughed. There was no amusement in it. "Like hell I am. She won't know what to do with any of what's in my system."

At least she had gotten him to admit Dumbledore's main concern.

Minerva sighed.

Severus mocked her with an imitation of it.

"Then I'm taking you straight home."

He meowed like a cat but didn't resist her when she took his arm to Apparate him.

Presently, Minerva McGonagall leaned her head back against the wall of her colleague's washroom in good old Spinner's End. Severus was curled up in the bathtub, his back turned to her. One side of his face was partially submerged and he seemed to be staring at where his limbs met the surface of the water. He moved his hand up from the bottom of the tub and broke the tension, creating little ripples. He repeated this action three or five times and began cackling.

Minerva shifted her weight. "So what did you take? Some illicit potion? Muggle drugs? A combination of those things?"

"The water's rolling — I'm rolling." The man cackled some more, evidently finding himself quite clever.

Minerva huffed and tried a different angle. "Is the mixture of substances you took deadly?"

She watched as Severus submerged his face into the water. When he pulled it back out he gasped, seemingly at the tendrils of squidly inkiness in the water, then touched his face. The black eye makeup he had been wearing came off on his fingers and he smeared it onto the side of the tub. He dunked his face into the water and scrubbed furiously. Finally, he glared at Minerva and seemed to process her question.

"Do you really think I'd have been at a Muggle concert if they were?" he said. He rubbed at his eyes again, then sunk his face into the water and continued to scrub at it.

When he resurfaced, Minerva said, "Well I certainly wouldn't know — I was merely following a request from Dumbledore. How was I supposed to know I'd be interrupting you at some American-esque Hallowe'en dress-up dance party?"

Her Head of House peer sang softly, "'Trick or treat, trick or treat, the bitter and the sweet.'" He chuckled darkly before his face became an impassive mask and he said, "Don't talk to me about Hallowe'en."

Minerva quirked an eyebrow. That piqued her curiosity for sure. There was only one incident that came to mind, one that the Wizarding World was still reeling from. She wondered if the rumors about his dark affiliation were true. But then suddenly flashes of a stringy, dark haired little boy and a sweet, red-headed little girl dogging each other down the hallways of Hogwarts danced across her mind's eye. Surely not, she thought, not after all these years…

She hesitated a moment, unsure where to begin exploring her supposition. She settled on, "Is that what this is all about?"

But he merely narrowed his eyes at her, as if he could shoot venom from them at her, and then motioned with his hands between her and himself, seemingly to indicate that her presence was the issue and not the fact that he was on a possibly dangerous mix of unknown substances, flouting off his Head of House duties days before one of Hogwarts' fabled holiday feasts.

She crossed her arms. She knew by now that keeping to the general matter at hand would elucidate more information from Severus Snape than diving into the deeper subject head on. "Hmph! It certainly hasn't escaped Hogwarts' staff notice that as the wizarding world's quintessential autumnal holiday approaches, you tend to...become a bit...unhinged. More and more as of late," she said.

Her colleague slumped further down into the water. "'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.'"

"Severus?"

"Hamlet."

Minerva nodded her head. "Ah. Muggle literature — Shakespeare. But, do you? Have bad dreams?"

A thick silence, like the slowly curling steam in the room, passed between them.

Again he sang, "'This is the happy house — we're happy here.'"

Minerva sighed. "Will you tell me what you took, Severus?" she said and turned to face him directly, her arms still crossed.

She could tell he picked up on her "no-more-drug-induced-nonsense" body language for he sighed, bent his left knee, and turned a bit on his left side to face her. He said, "I'm not trying to off myself — that only happens when I'm pestering the old man about giving me the Defense position. No, I was just...blowing off some steam." He waved a hand in the air as if that cleared the matter up.

Minerva gave him a very cross look. He sighed again and rolled his eyes.

"There's nothing to get your knickers all in a twist about; it's just a mix of Muggle drugs: A couple of stimulants — an empathogen and one that has anesthetic properties — and a very low dose of a psychedelic. Nothing unusual or taken in quantities that would kill me."

"Is that all?"

"Other than my usual intake of caffeine, nicotine, and tetrahydrocannabinol, the only other substance that's actually wracking my body and mind is ethanol. There. Now you've got the lot. Unless, nurse, you want a run-down of what I had to ingest food-wise today — here, I'll save you the work: I've barely eaten anything, knowing I was going to be ingesting a copious amount of drugs where I was hoping I was going to have a nice time away from my responsibilities for just a few hours listening to the sexual shriekings of Siouxsie Sioux. But of course fucking Dumbledore's got other plans for me and then you show up to the fucking disco and — you know, it makes me think of my parents."

Minerva had been happy just to let him ramble, slights aside, but now her curiosity had caught hold of her. "What do you mean?"

"Yes — it's like, I'm traipsing about the fucking bogs most days of my life and those fucking shit for snots never bothered to look into whatever I was getting into and then here Dumbledore is ordering me back through you and — and you show up to drag me back home and it's just — it's motherly, it's absurd, and it makes me sick."

"Severus, I'm not trying to mother you, I'm simply looking out for a peer."

"Don't you go feeling sorry for me," he said.

"And why would I do that?"

For an answer, Severus sang again. "'Downstairs I don't know if it's the springs in her bed, or her joints I hear creaking overhead.'" He seemed to have seeped into an even blacker mood, as black as the makeup trails smeared on the porcelain and staining the bath water.

Minerva considered him a moment, considered his disgruntled statement about maternal parental units, the disquieting song. Another memory drifted through her mind's eye — that of a sullen, worryingly quiet youth holed up with her in her office for remedial Transfiguration work after being absent for what Horace had told her was a grave family emergency, and then her being cross with the both of them until she read the obituary in the Prophet a few days later. She breathed a little sigh of relief: Perhaps this episode of his was linked to something, or someone, else.

She said, slowly, "I remember your mother — I was a first year student at Hogwarts when she was in her last." Minerva waited for Severus to speak. When he did not, she continued. "I remember the announcement in the Prophet when she married your father. It was something I thought a lot about when I fell in love with a Muggle myself."

"You?" he scoffed. "In love with a Muggle?"

"Yes —"

"That's fucked."

"Excuse me?"

But he was chuckling. "You want to see something really fucked up?"

"Other than you?" she retorted.

While she was not pleased about his glossing over of his bloodist statement, Minerva was at least pleased to see the quirk at the corner of his mouth. She really had to admit her weakness to the old adage: Curiosity killed the cat.

"What is it, Severus?"

He started to lift himself out of the bathtub but paused and squinted his eyes at her.

Minerva huffed in exasperation. "I assure you I'm in no way ogling you."

But he kept glaring at her until she pointedly turned her head away from him. She heard the sloshing of water, the rustling of clothes and the zipping of a zipper. She turned around when she heard the door open but stayed seated until Severus poked his head back inside and bid her follow him with a wave of his hand.

He led her down the stairs and into the sitting room. He pointed to a threadbare armchair and told her to wait.

Her interest piqued, she obliged and watched him descend into where she knew the basement was. She waited with hands folded in her lap, thinking she would give him until the count of ten before she barged down to check on him.

She made it all the way to the number nine before he reappeared, carrying what appeared to be a very rectangular violin case and a bottle of something.

"Care for some scotch?" he said as he set the case down on the little low table in front of her.

"No, thank you," she said, though she did indeed want just a smidge. Though she very much enjoyed that particular spirit, she felt she must retain some semblance of level-headedness in the face of his intoxication.

He stared at her a moment, seeming to sense her lie. But then he shrugged and said, "Suit yourself," and took a swig straight from the bottle.

Minerva tried not to wince. Instead, she focused her attention on the instrument case he had brought up from the basement.

Severus wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and set the bottle down next to the case. Then he unveiled the instrument.

It was some sort of keyed violin. Minerva could count on one hand how many times she had seen such an instrument played, and all of them connected directly to the man standing before her. But before she could say anything, Severus had picked up the instrument, slung it around his shoulder like a guitar, and began to tune it.

While she had insisted she wasn't staring at him earlier, she couldn't help it now: He was wearing nothing but those tight, black, ripped pants he had had on at the disco. They sat rather low on his angular hipbones and framed in stark contrast the traditional instrument he was fiddling with. And yet, it all looked quite natural on him.

And then he began to play. Softly at first — a haunting tune that gathered speed and volume. And then it took on an intensity. Minerva thought she recognized it, but wasn't sure. While it was quite traditional in sound, it was also otherworldly: A dance tune from the faerie realm.

She listened in rapt attention, watching his long, slender fingers work their magic on the keys and the bow to the strings, noting how his features were a perfect blend of his parents'; there was no mistaking his heritage.

The silence that followed the end of the tune was stuffy as a wool sweater in spring.

"Completely fucked," Severus said. He laid the instrument back in the open case. He took another large draft of scotch.

Minerva hesitated, but the performance and resemblance she saw compelled her to ask none-the-less, so she did. "Is that your father's?"

Severus touched the instrument once, took another long drink of scotch and scoffed. "What d'you want to know about him for? Oh, right — you fancy Muggles —"

"I saw him perform. When I was a girl growing up in Scotland. My father took us to see the Travellers' play their tunes when they were in town for a solstice festival."

Her colleague looked at her as if she had stabbed and gutted him. "Yes," he said in barely a whisper, "it's his nyckelharpa."

Minerva continued, "Their sets were a popular attraction around the Isles. I saw the troupe once more in Ireland, before —"

"Before we were ousted out of there —"

"We?"

"I was born there."

"In Ireland?"

"Right in the middle of a Traveller's caravan."

Minerva tried to hide the shock she felt on her face by redirecting the conversation, saying, "He was quite good —"

"Except here I am."

"Severus —"

He slammed the lid of the nyckelharpa case closed. "And then he loses a couple of fingers in that fucking factory and — and — you simply can't cage a man that's never stayed in one place for very long: The wanderlust becomes madness!"

"So he did die?"

He laughed, with a grim humor behind it. "'Hope is the thing with feathers', Minerva. While the records show here that he's dead as a doornail, the truth is is that drunkard left on a boat back to Sweden with a pack of other Scandoromani. If I'm lucky, he fucking froze to death begging or finally succumbed to his poison or something equally stupid."

Minerva sat there, contemplating this, digesting his contempt of Muggles — while severely misguided, at least it made some modicum of sense, at least when framed this way. But while satisfaction did "bring the cat back" so to speak, Minerva still could not help her vicious cycle — if Tobias Snape's obituary was a farce, what of Eileen's?

Staring right into her colleague's dark eyes, she drew in breath to speak, but Severus spoke first.

"I — I need to get back in the bath."

While odd, Minerva didn't see the harm in it. She nodded her head and followed him back upstairs.

Once he was settled into the water with another cigarette again and she had taken up her spot on the toilet, he spoke.

"So tell me about this Muggle you were supposedly in love with."

Minerva wasn't keen on this portion of her life, but she did have to admit his bringing it up made it easier to jump right into the heart of what she was wanting to get at anyway.

"Well," she said, "we were going to be married. But I turned him down the next day."

"Good — if you hadn't, you would have ended up like my mother."

Ah, she thought, some headway. "Or like my own mother, I suppose," she said.

Severus gave a look of mock-astonishment and sneered, "Your pureblood mother died in the water closet from an overdose of heroin?"

Minerva felt like she had been struck. Her hand went to her heart and she said, "Severus... I thought — I thought she passed away in St. Mungo's."

Her sopping colleague flicked ash into the water with him. After a couple of inhalation-exhalation cycles, he said, with a lazy plume of smoke, "The thing that took over her body passed on there, but she herself died here." He flicked the ash from the end of his cigarette into the water with him.

Minerva looked around.

"Not here. The downstairs water closet," said Severus.

She looked back at him. "There isn't a downstairs water closet here, Severus," she said.

He shrugged. "Not anymore there isn't." The smoke curled lazily from his cigarette and the ash drifted into the water like sooty snowflakes.

Minerva tried to intake a slow, deep breath but let out a little cough. She stood up and opened the little window and gulped in a waft of air. "Severus, what do you mean when you say 'the thing that took over her body?'"

She watched her colleague stick his cigarette into the side of his mouth. He then sat up and drained some of the water in the bathtub and began to refill it with a new batch of hot water. While the water filled the tub back up, he took a couple of glances over at her and then he stubbed his cigarette out in the soap dish. Minerva simply waited through these actions, knowing that he would answer her in his time. When the water was turned off and Severus had settled himself down into the tub again, Minerva resumed her seat on the toilet.

After another long while, Severus spoke. "Are you at all familiar with the Muggle drug heroin?"

Minerva's eyes narrowed. "I'm afraid I don't have much experience in being able to tell Muggle mind-altering substances apart, but I have heard tell of that particular drug's tremendously harrowing effects," she said.

Severus made a face and relit the last half of the cigarette in the soap dish. He finished it in a few long drags. He sighed out the last of the smoke through his nostrils and said, "Well, from what I've found, that highly addictive intravenous substance turns people into portals for Dark creatures. Muggles call them demons. But whatever you want to call them, some users make friends with this Dark thing, some allow it to consume them, but all are controlled by it."

"Does this thing...is this thing ever released in any way?"

"They can indeed escape and run amok, but they can also be banished back from whence they came, if that's what you're asking." He squinted at her face. "And, yes: My mother sustained and nurtured this parasitic, demonic force for years, years, succumbing to it even in her dying breath so that all that was left of her was this, this withered husk animated by some Dark creature that fed off that vial substance alone.

"And, yes — I blasted that thing back into the dimension it came from and so if I want to let loose for a few days during the time of year it rolls around to stem the tide of memories I incurred from the — the research I undertook to defeat the vile thing then neither you nor Dumbledore can stop me!"

Minerva would have laughed at his utterly petulant pout, were it not for the fact that she could plainly see that he was trying very hard to keep from crying. Not to mention that he had shared a very deep, dark secret with her, so laughing would be utterly inappropriate. She could only imagine what that harrowing ordeal was like for him, what with the kind of hands-on research she knew he operated on, and what it was like to lose a loved one.

In shock after that confession, she could only stare down at her feet. He had demanded she not feel sorry for him and she was trying not to.

She heard him stand up and exit the bath. She pretended not to hear the slight sniveling, but nodded her head when he announced he was "coming down" and therefore needed to lie down.

Minerva gave him a moment to head to his bedroom alone for she didn't think he had bothered to put anything on when exiting the bath. When she checked on him, he seemed to have become unresponsive. She would have said sleepy, but he seemed more catatonic than anything else.

Minerva maneuvered his head so that it was properly on the pillow and then she tucked his slightly shivering form more completely under the covers.

She looked at him, hard and a little sad, but with a reverence she felt building inside herself: If he could come through to the other side from such a wickedly addictive substance just so that someone he loved could rightfully be put to rest, then perhaps his whispered dark past was something of similar ilk. It struck her that the essence of this revelation was something that Dumbledore had been saying to her, to all of them, all along. Perhaps this was even why the man had sent her out tonight.

Minerva contemplated resting up on the couch downstairs. Sunrise wasn't far off, and she could use the meager slumber. Yet she felt she couldn't leave Severus alone. So she shifted into her cat form and curled up on the foot of his bed instead.

But Severus rose shortly after what to her felt like barely an hour of sleep to brew himself some coffee. As he offered her some, she wondered if he ever slept at all. The heavy, dark bags under his eyes seemed normal while dressed in his voluminous robes, yet she knew some of that darkness was due to the eye make-up he had donned while out at his Muggle concert.

Masks on masks, she thought.

As they Apparated back to Hogwarts together, Minerva hoped that Dumbledore was right about being able to trust Severus Snape.

She supposed only time would tell.