Note: "Angels on a Rampage" is the title of a song by Sunrise Avenue; it somehow suggested itself, seeing as Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy play a prominent, if not entirely successful part. The second part of the title is mutilated Shakespeare. (The Bard is most probably still spinning in his grave)
Also, be aware that this is crack!fic. Silly, adjective-laden and preposterous. I had fun writing it, especially this incarnation of Lucius as a slightly dim aristocrat with the attention span of a gnat.
Credit for the Animagus Potion goes to shiv5468 who, to the best of my knowledge, was the first to use it in her fic "The Beginner's Guide to Breeding Peacocks". It also inspired the author to have Lucius turn into a peacock.
The description of Manchester and Spinner's End may be a trifle too Dickensian, a liberty the author begs to regard as poetic licence.
Part, the first
In which there is more background information than you can shake a stick at
Spinner's End, a cramped, dead-end lane branching off Cranbourne Road, had never been of much interest to anybody but the people who happened to live there. The grimiest part of Chorlton-on-Medlock, a neighbourhood of Manchester hardly renowned for either cleanliness or safety, Spinner's End was not the kind of place people moved to intentionally; it was the kind of place they ended up in, to stay there – not out of any sense of 'home' or 'attachment', but simply because they lacked the strength to even dream of moving elsewhere. Till the 1950's, moving away from Spinner's End meant leaving it feet first, in a wooden box.
In the late 1960's and 70's, a first wave of urban renewal had done away with most of the unsanitary hovels of Chorlton-on-Medlock. Not, however, with Spinner's End.
While it is beyond doubt that Eileen Snape, née Prince, did not have more affection for the microscopic terraced house than she had for her husband Tobias, there can be even less doubt that the hard-faced, hook-nosed woman, whom her neighbours treated with the sort of grudging respect that is engendered by fear, knew very well where she stood economically and socially. An outing to Blackpool for seventh-year Muggle Studies had opened Eileen's eyes to that other world, a shrill and gaudy vortex of multi-coloured lights, cacophonous sounds and unheard-of freedom; a second, clandestine outing had soon followed the first. Without her classmates she'd felt alien and insecure – easy prey for Tobias Snape. She wouldn't have had to marry him once she found out that she was pregnant, but she was seventeen and defiant. In the end, her family had cast her out with nothing but her wand and the clothes she was wearing; she'd married a drunken, violent loser, and she had a child. Eileen was aware that Spinner's End was where she was going to live out her days, whether she liked it or not.
Urban renewal did not fit in with this plan – for lack of a better word – and so Eileen had done what she did best: when word began to get around that the appendix Spinner's End would soon be surgically removed, and its population of human bacteria subject to the administrative equivalent of antibiotics, namely relocation, she hadn't had a moment's hesitation. A subtle spider's web of Distraction Charms and Rejection Spells had flowed from her wand, to wind and slither around the blackened dead-end lane, insinuate itself into sooty bricks and age-worn cobblestones, filter into worm-eaten wood and rusty metal. The inhabitants of Spinner's End – not an overly belligerent bunch at the best of times, except when it came to the misappropriation of clothes lines or husbands – got used rather quickly to retrieving what little mail they received from the "Pig and Whistle" on Cranbourne Road, in exchange for which service they made liberal use of the pub's dustbins for their own refuse. Not that it made much of a difference for the pub; the inmates of Spinner's End didn't have much to throw away.
Inaccessible to anybody but the dwindling number of appendix-dwellers, Spinner's End sank slowly into oblivion, an incongruously grinning skeleton swallowed by the quicksand of time.
Eileen Snape died in 1981, at age thirty-nine, young for a witch, while Severus, her only son, was imprisoned in Azkaban, awaiting his trial after Voldemort's downfall. The two of them had never been particularly close – as a matter of fact, Severus and his father hadn't been close, either, but Severus had adored Tobias Snape with all the desperate fervour only a mostly-absent, unloving parent is able to inspire in a child. Eileen – always there, bitter and almost pathologically introverted – had inspired nothing but an intense desire to get away from her and her nagging, as far and as quickly as possible. Severus Snape had later achieved this aim by taking the Dark Mark, whereas Tobias had embraced the bottle (rather more literally than metaphorically). Escaping his wife's bony arms and beady eyes might have taken a little longer, had he not met his fate in the shape of a blindingly drunk truck driver, who'd mown down the even more epically drunk Snape one foggy December morning on his way to the market. Chorlton-on-Medlock ate well that day: the piglets that had escaped from the truck were not so lucky when it came to the grasping hands of the half-starved denizens of Manchester's underbelly, and thus the day Tobias Snape died was one remembered fondly by his neighbours and acquaintances. Not to mention his wife, although her pleasant reminiscences had less to do with the tender pork chops than with the fact that she'd eaten them all by herself, and for pudding there hadn't been the habitual beating but a real, honest-to-goodness banana.
Severus was in his third year at Hogwarts when his father died; by then he'd understood that Tobias Snape had never had any love to spare for him. He didn't go home that Christmas, or any Christmas or summer vacation after that, and he didn't attend the funeral.
When he was told, upon his release from Azkaban, that his mother had been found dead three months ago by an elderly neighbour, after falling down the stairs never to wake up again, he merely shrugged. He did go back to the house, though. There weren't many people left at Spinner's End, and those who still shuffled about gingerly on the cobbled street that was just as dirty as he remembered it, didn't recognize him. He entered the house, Accio'ed his mother's meagre possessions, threw them in a shoe box without even looking at them and stored it in his parents' bedroom, disposed summarily of anything perishable, and left, never to come back again.
Or so he thought.
vvvvvvvv
There were times when all that kept Severus Snape from going stark raving mad was his sense of humour, as black as his hair, eyes and teaching robes put together.
It had been bad enough, having to live down his reputation in the years following Voldemort's disappearance (only the terminally stupid and/or optimistic – where was the difference, really – had believed him to be gone forever), but having to take up the mantle of double agent yet again was almost more than he could cope with. Hence the tendency to indulge in black humour: one of his favourite imaginary conspiracy theories was about a secret entente between Dumbledore and Voldemort, whose common and ultimate goal it was a) to divide the world amicably between the two of them, and b) to involve Severus Snape in their increasingly pig-headed schemes until his head exploded from sheer incredulity.
It ceased to be funny, though, on the day shortly after Sirius Black had Died By Veil, when both Severus' masters ordered him to reopen the house at Spinner's End, their requests separated by a mere three hours and phrased almost identically. Feeling that his salvation might easily become his downfall, Severus decided henceforth to abstain from developing his pet mental scenario any further. It was simply too difficult to distinguish from the truth to have any further entertainment value, and he'd have to figure out some other way to get through staff meetings with his sanity intact.
He had to go back to Spinner's End, though; there was no way he could wriggle his way out of that predicament. Dumbledore wanted him to use it as a bolt hole in case his plans (again, for lack of a better word) went awry, and Voldemort meant for him to have a place where he'd be far from Dumbledore's merrily twinkling blue eyes, a sort of habitable letter box where instructions were to be delivered and meetings to be held. Reasonably sure that neither Twinkles nor Slit-Nose were ever going to set foot into the safe house, Severus had done the only logical thing and asked both for an absurdly high amount of galleons, needed, nay indispensable, to renovate the building and make it habitable. Both had paid up with alacrity and without so much as a raised eyebrow (or the spot where an eyebrow ought to be, in Voldemort's case), and over the next two years Severus Snape's childhood home had been transformed into a comfortable, home-like place.
One of Severus' last thoughts, before oblivion took him on the floor of the Shrieking Shack, was that he would've liked to spend at least one peaceful evening reading on his brand-new sofa in front of his lovely new fireplace. Obviously, he thought snidely, fate had cheated him again. He was as good as dead, and no one would ever use the couch.
Or so he thought.
vvvvvvvv
While nobody in their right mind would ever call Severus Snape's house at Spinner's End an 'ancestral home', not even after it had been nicely renovated, nobody, whether compos mentis or not, would ever hesitate to call the Malfoys' family seat exactly that. Malfoy Manor was the quintessential ancestral home, and a stately one to boot. Any comparison between the two homesteads, however, began and ended with their concealment from the prying eyes of wizards and Muggles alike.
To those not in the know, the site where the Manor had been erected in the 1660's looked like a muddy, slightly uneven meadow of a shade of green so unappetizing that no cow, sheep or horse ever set hoof on it. Nestled in the Wiltshire Downs as it was, far removed from even tertiary roads, there was scarce probability of any human being ever venturing too close to the illusion; in case somebody did, though, they were immediately gripped by the irresistible urge to have their hair dyed blond. Such was Lucius Malfoy's sense of humour, post-change-of-heart. Had the local hairdressers ever found out about their benefactor, they would have worshipped him as their patron saint.
The select few enjoying the privilege of knowing the manor's location – the rest were admitted by Floo or Portkey only – could savour the spectacle of approaching the house and grounds on foot or broomstick. Lucius' great-grandfather Antoninus had carefully adapted the original brick structure to the taste of the 1830's by facing the brick with limestone, thus both softening and lightening its squat, Jacobean solidity into something almost-otherworldly Palladian.
One satiny, early summer morning in 2005, Narcissa Malfoy was languidly lounging on a chaise longue in the north-facing breakfast parlour; she had taken up a book and ordered a House Elf to float her last cup of coffee over from the breakfast table. Reading was a relatively new pastime for Narcissa; she'd taken it up during the years of house arrest she and Lucius had been sentenced to – much to her surprise reading, and reading Muggle literature of all things, had really grown on her and proved to be even more rewarding than her previously favourite hobbies of shopping, having bitchy tea parties with other idle pureblood spouses and getting manicures.
It had also provided a welcome distraction for her and Lucius; cut off as they'd been for five long years from most of society, it would've been difficult to find subjects to talk about. Reading the same books and discussing them, however, was probably what had saved their marriage.
That, and Severus Snape.
This, too, had come as something of a surprise.
Of course, she and Severus were related, albeit distantly, and family ties were highly valued in the wizarding world, but she wouldn't have expected him to honour this bond any more than superficially, after all that had transpired during Voldemort's second reign. Nor would she have had any hopes for the ties of friendship linking Lucius and Severus to survive the strain of those horrible years. And while she was aware that Lucius' and her successful attempts at administering first aid to an almost-dead Severus had, indeed, established a life debt (though not the horribly choking kind that came from actually sacrificing one's blood, wealth or health), she wouldn't have thought it possible that Severus would feel compelled to move heaven and earth, throwing his own War Hero status into the balance, until Kingsley Shacklebolt gave in and conceded visiting rights to him and Draco.
Draco's visits, few and reluctant at first, had become more frequent after a while; Severus dined with the Malfoy couple once or twice a week, bringing gossip and news and smuggling in the occasional newspaper. Thus, the five years they'd spent in the confinement of their house and grounds had proved to be almost agreeable; she and Lucius had finally got to know each other, and if this involved the discovery that Lucius had an unsuspected, schoolboy sense of humour and a fondness for Asterix comics, then so be it. He'd borne her newfound enthusiasm for regency romance novels with admirable equanimity, after all.
"Devil's Cub" was one of her favourites. Not that she would ever have confessed to Lucius that she rather fancied imagining the two of them as the Duke and Duchess of Avon, with Draco as fittingly devilish offspring. Now, however, the novel was dangling from her listless fingers, while she sipped at her coffee and stared into the blue-green distance.
Was this the right moment for involving Lucius, or wasn't it?
In the years following the war they'd both derived not inconsiderable – and only ever-so-slightly malicious – entertainment from Severus' accounts of various encounters, affairs, dalliances and flings with witches of practically every age and shape. It had seemed as if the meaning of "twenty years of celibacy, cloistered in a boarding school with colleagues he didn't want to touch and nubile girls he wasn't allowed to" had finally dawned on the poor boy, and he was hell-bent on catching up. Had made a pretty decent (for some definitions of the word, at least) job of it, too.
It had, however, never been serious. Never anything but a few dinners and sex, maybe a weekend in some place so hot that wearing clothes was strongly discouraged. But never, ever, had Narcissa – or Lucius for that matter – had any reason to assume that the former Headmaster of Hogwarts was actually in love. In between his various affairs he'd always come back to them as their Third, and if Lucius hadn't noticed that their friend had been conspicuously absent from their bedroom for many months, well, Narcissa certainly had.
If that wasn't a sure sign...
And considering who the object of Severus' affections was...
Lucius was going to have kittens. This could be fun.
vvvvvvvv
Had anybody told eighteen-year-old Hermione Granger – the bright, the overachieving, the War Heroine, the rising star – that, at age twenty-five, she was going to be a pastry chef owning her own (and wildly successful) bakery, she would have told them to a) piss off, b) fast, and c) check themselves into St. Mungo's before she reduced them to a state that would necessitate a prolonged stay in the Spell Damage Ward.
On her eighteenth birthday, Hermione had been eager to return to Hogwarts, finish school, get as many N.E.W.T.s as possible and, thus equipped, set out to save the world.
She'd gone back to school and sat her N.E.W.T.s. She'd scored twelve, all Outstanding.
And after that she'd gone to Australia to retrieve her parents and restore their memories, or rather the other way round. Reversing the memory spell hadn't exactly been a piece of cake, but she'd been well-prepared; she'd succeeded where many a seasoned wizard or witch would have failed and, once everything had been explained and forgiven, she'd begun to work on persuading Howard and Gina Granger to return to their native England.
When she'd booked her Portkey to Australia, the possibility of her parents wanting to stay down-under hadn't even dawned on her. She meant to set things right, didn't she? 'Right' meant Mum and Dad living in England, in the cottage in Surrey which had belonged to Grandma Granger, commuting every day to London... This, as it turned out, was one of the many reasons why Mum and Dad were dead set against going back to England. Also, the house they'd bought with the proceeds from selling their dental practice, and the cosy little Italian restaurant they'd opened, first rented, then bought; Gina reigned over the kitchen, while Howard was responsible for managing and accounting...
In the end, Hermione understood. Even more, she accepted. And she decided to extend her vacation – Mum's pastry chef was due to start her maternity leave, an adequate replacement hadn't yet been found, and Hermione hadn't forgotten the culinary skills she'd been taught by her Italian mother (especially the to-die-for Torta alla Nonna, Cantuccini, Zuppa Inglese, Cassata – hence the obsessive teeth-cleaning habits).
She stayed for two years.
Hermione had expected not only to miss England and her friends (she did), but also research (not much), campaigning for the underdogs (not at all) and saving people (ha-ha). Once she'd decided to become Acting Pastry Chef Pro Tempore, she'd also dreaded considerable weight gain. But there was swimming, and surfing, and taking karate classes together with Mum – when she was finally ready to go home, she was fit, tanned and in possession of a hefty volume containing top-secret, family recipes. The cottage had been hers anyway; in order to avoid inheritance tax, Grandma Granger had gifted it to her granddaughter on her first birthday, and happily lived out more than the required seven years in a comfortable flat she shared with her two sisters.
In two years spent in a restaurant kitchen, making desserts, Hermione had found out the following truths: 1) a bit of foolish wand-waving saved a lot of time, and the sweets were every bit as scrumptious as the ones made by non-magical means; 2) while cooking was fun, dealing with guests was not her cup of tea; 3) a cutting-edge chocolate-and-almond cake was at least as likely to contribute to world peace as anything she could accomplish as an Auror, lawyer or healer; 4) if she found a couple of House Elves willing to be trained up and paid, she'd actually be able to devote her time not only to cooking and baking, but also to research.
It had taken three years for "Dolce & Grandioso" to lift off and gain a sufficiently broad customer base – both in the wizarding and Muggle world – and for the logistics of catering and delivery to be fine-tuned to Hermione's satisfaction; in the hot summer of 2003, however, she was finally able to look at the accounts, give a contented sigh, and open the box that contained the notes on a research project she'd begun during her final year at Hogwarts and abandoned in favour of travelling to Australia.
It had been paradoxical, really, to give up on this project of all projects in order to go halfway around the globe and reverse the Obliviate she had put on Howard and Gina Granger, because what she'd been working on was exactly that: a potion to counter the effects of memory spells.
The idea had – hardly surprisingly – been triggered by her feelings of guilt concerning her parents. Besides, administering a potion was so much simpler than performing complex counter-spells. Still, being the practical young witch she was and all emotional entanglement notwithstanding, she'd weighted the possible benefits against the time and effort she'd have to invest. This, in turn, had led her to consider the applicability of such a potion, provided she'd actually succeed in creating it. Memory charms were, after all, used selectively and intentionally as a last resort: they were the wizarding world's one and only means of dealing with PTSD, as well as vital for ensuring the continued secrecy of the magical culture.
But – and this realization had provided the final push – Obliviate was neither regarded as Dark nor was its use even closely monitored. The fact that she'd cast it on her parents with complete impunity was ample proof that, in theory, everybody was free to use it, and if in reality the wizards and witches actually skilled enough to perform it were few and far between, there was no guarantee that their prowess would be counterbalanced by moral rectitude. They had both the ability and opportunity to wreak considerable harm, and for those who had both opportunity and motive but lacked skill, well, Gilderoy Lockhart was just one of many examples.
The research had been even more demanding than Hermione had expected. After running into one dead end too many, she'd taken a step back and admitted to herself that, yes, she might eventually reach a breakthrough, but if she meant to get her parents back before their retirement, she'd better do it the traditional way.
Countering the effect of a potion with a counter-potion wasn't easy, but it could be done; the same went for spells and counter-spells (not your run-of-the-mill Finite Incantatem, which only negated the effects of basic spells, and not always all of them).
Countering a charm with a potion or vice-versa, on the other hand, was seldom attempted and even more rarely successful – there was a reason why Professor Snape had banished "foolish wand-waving" from his Potions classroom. At the time they'd taken his summary dismissal of spell-casting for a belittling of his colleagues, most of all Professors Flitwick and McGonagall, but during the N.E.W.T.-level lectures on Theory of Magic it had become clear that that hadn't been his intent at all. Or maybe not his primary intent. Performing spells in the vicinity of potions or their ingredients could have unforeseen, sometimes lethal, consequences; it was one thing to attempt the combination in a protected environment, but quite another to prevent the catastrophic outcome of thirty first-years simultaneously trying to levitate their bottles of armadillo bile.
The problem Hermione had to tackle was, a little oversimplified, this: firstly, and most obviously, a potion's efficiency was determined solely by its shelf life, the potency of its ingredients and the skill of the brewer. Neither the potion-maker's magical power nor his or her intent were able to change the way a potion worked. A lethal poison was a poison and would kill, whereas an Avada Kedavra cast without the complete determination to kill would cause harm but not take a life.
This was true for all spells, curses, charm, incantations, and the like. The wand, its movements and the words were mere vehicles on which travelled the caster's intent and magical power.
Not only were wand-magic and potions-magic polar opposites, they also affected their target in diametrically opposed ways.
Obvious as these observations were, it seemed to Hermione that nobody had bothered with them ever before. But they were also only the beginning, and she had no intention of merely scratching the surface. Taking observations at face value, though, shrugging and moving on, was what wizards had been doing for millennia. The notion of turning a concept on its head was alien to them. Not so to Hermione.
Never mind that McGonagall sent her on her way with a few words of choice advice that she ought to get a life; never mind that Flitwick went all shifty-eyed and evasive and talked a little incoherently about "arcane" and "better left in peace"; never mind that Slughorn tried to slake her thirst for knowledge by administering candied pineapples and got seriously cross when she demanded answers, no sugar coating please. They were all purebloods, and they were the only experts she knew at the time.
When she decided to let the project lie for a while, she had formulated a working hypothesis – testing it would have to wait, because not only was she going to need a mentor, there was also considerable cost involved. Hermione was a reasonable girl; she knew exactly when to stop and husband her energy. Her time would come, she was sure, and her foray into bakery didn't change that conviction.
After a break of more than five years, the hypothesis had lost nothing of its simple beauty.
But now Hermione saw herself confronted with a problem of a rather different nature: she had always done well in Potions; in Charms, however, she'd excelled right from the beginning, and so it had seemed logical for her to start working on that side of the problem. It was the discipline that allowed her to be creative and innovative without needing the guidance of an expert. When it came to Potions, she'd have to get help sooner or later, and she knew who she'd have to get it from.
Come to think of it, this might have been the real reason why she'd neglected the Potions aspect for so long. If she was quite honest with herself, it was the reason.
She would have to face her own private Canossa. Contact Snape. Tell him what she was working on, face derision, belittling and cutting sarcasm, swallow it all and persist in her plea for help.
'Unpalatable' didn't even begin to cover it.
For months and months she had invented excuses that wouldn't have fooled the simplest of minds; like Sisyphus his rock, she'd pushed the issue ahead of her, only to have it come back down, crushing her and making her miserable. Once she'd had enough of being miserable, she'd sat down and written to Snape, and written again, and again, but never received so much as a sign of acknowledgement, let alone an answer.
Considering how she'd planned her life and how it had turned out, she really should not have been surprised when, in the end, the Gordian Knot hadn't been cleaved in half by an act of supreme willpower but had simply crumbled apart under the awesome power of Italian patisserie.
vvvvvvvv
