He had been kept busy throughout the battle at Hogwarts. He knew that neither side liked him. People feared him – they always had. Tall, pale and skeletal, he was always going to look like everyone's idea of a villain. His Goth fashion sense didn't help, but after all, even if he didn't dress in black, it would hardly make him look cuddly and inviting. All right, when it had been absolutely essential, he had taken over the job of the twinkly-eyed, white-bearded old man, even if most people thought the substitution was grotesque. He'd done the job as well as he could under the circumstances. After all, the children had needed him to keep some kind of continuity going, even if most of them were odious little brats.
People thought of him as a murderer, he knew. Just because, when Dumbledore had been mortally ill and dying, he had been there to free the man's soul from the wreckage of his body – and do it before young Draco Malfoy could become an actual murderer, too. Dumbledore had understood, had been ready to go. But Dumbledore wasn't around to tell anyone.
And even the few people who didn't regard him as evil didn't really know him. They didn't know about his habit of adopting unwanted kittens when people tried to drown them. They didn't know about the summer he had spent working on a farm, and the woman he had met then. They didn't know about his granddaughter, who managed to fit into the muggle world by being an infants' school teacher, sinc parents never paid any attention when five-year-olds informed them that Miss could do magic.
Still, there was no time to brood on that now. Death stepped through the wall of the Shrieking Shack, to where his next client was lying on the floor, blood pouring from the bite-wound in his throat. Witches and wizards could see Death if they were paying attention, but the dying wizard was preoccupied with trying to get a final message across to the three teenagers surrounding him, and they in turn were focusing on him. One of the boys, Death noted, had a lifetimer that was due to run out in an hour.
The dying man was too badly injured to speak much, but managed to pour an assortment of memories from his brain into the flask that the dark-haired boy held out for him. Death waited for him to finish before swinging his scythe to put an end to the pain.
WELL DONE, SEVERUS, he said, as the man's spirit sat up from his body, massaging its ghostly neck. IT WAS A TOUGH JOB, BUT SOMEONE HAD TO DO IT.