2

August, 2030.

They sat on Snape's back porch under a rare cloudless, smiling sky. Al brought chicken sandwiches from home. He was drinking Cola out of a glass. Snape had his usual glass of whisky.

Al wore jeans, a junior football league t-shirt and trainers. Snape was wearing a strap-style t-shirt and tattered pants held up by suspenders. They looked like they had come from the very bottom of the last box in the consignment shop downtown. Tacky. Al was going to have to do something about the way Snape dressed when he was at home.

His old man's voice rose, papery, hesitant, sometimes barely audible. An observer might have thought them grandfather and grandson, the latter perhaps attending some rite of passage, a handing down from one generation to the next.

"And that's all I remember," he finished, and took a large bite of his chicken sandwich. Mayonnaise dribbled down the bony slab of his chin.

"Why'd you kill Dumbledore?" Al asked. It was something he had been wondering about. Some of the accounts didn't make sense.

"Ah, I wondered if you would get around to that," Snape said, and gave his gap-toothed grin. "The great Hero of the Light, dissolving from the inside out … you no doubt have many questions about that, eh?"

"Yeah. What's the deal?"

Snape sipped reflectively from his cup. "I joined the Death Eaters at the behest of Dumbledore, did you know that? Yes indeed," he said, responding to Al's look of surprise. "Dumbledore was looking for someone to spy on their activities. Unlike the others he approached—Malfoy, Avery, Mulciber—I had nothing to lose. I agreed."

"What do you mean, 'nothing to lose'?"

"I had no family, no real friends, and no one he or the Dark Lord could use as leverage against me."

"But I thought … you and my grandmother-"

"Pah. Your grandmother was a high-boxed Mudblood cunt who had to marry above her station to get anywhere," Snape said, flipping his hand dismissively. "We grew up next to each other, it is true, and we were friends of a sort, this is also true. But she did not have what it took to make it in the real world. And look what all her dewy-eyed idealism got her."

Snape smiled at Al's reddening face.

"Shocked you, did I? Probably thought your grandparents were saints, eh? You didn't know that your grandfather once took a little Slytherin first year named Severus Snape, stole his wand and locked him in a closet behind silencing charms for a weekend, did you? You didn't know your grandmother put up a great front in public but was the biggest slut in Hogwarts, did you?"

"All of that is a lie! My grandmother stood up for you in your fifth year! She died so my father could live!"

"Ah, the famous O.W.L. caper," Snape said, and now he almost look like the Severus Snape that had terrified ten years of Hogwarts students as their potions master. "I suppose Lupin must have told you about that. Is he still alive, by the way?"

"No, he died five years ago. And he told me that you called her a Mudblood when she was trying to get my grandfather to leave you alone."

Snape lit a cigarette and idly made smoke rings with it in the air. "She did me no favours, boy. She had her public reputation to uphold, yes? Couldn't be seen as anything but pure. It got even worse after her death. The selfless Madonna, martyring herself for her child. Your father. It made me sick, the way they idolized your father and grandparents."

Al was silent. It had often struck him over the years that he almost never heard anything bad about his grandparents. They were both heroes, with spotless reputations. Now, hearing from someone who knew them, hearing that they had not in fact been perfect symbols of virtue made him feel a sour kind of triumph. It never occurred to him that Snape might be lying. After the initial burst of anger over what Snape had said about his grandmother, Al was almost eager to hear more about them. Similar to the way he wanted to hear about the camps. But that would lead them off track. Maybe later he would find out more about his grandparents, but they weren't of immediate interest.

"Never mind them. We were discussing Dumbledore."

"When I joined the Death Eaters, I had to undergo a Legilimency assault. The Dark Lord found out that Dumbledore had sent me. I expected to be killed on the spot. Instead he smiled—or at least as close as he could get to one—and took me aside. He showed me some memories."

Snape paused. A bird shrilled from a tree nearby. A dog yelped from beyond the fence. Neither of them paid any attention.

"Dumbledore was Gellert Grindelwald's lover once upon a time. They apparently met in Godric's Hollow around 1899. The famous duel was no more than a sham. Grindelwald was put into Nurmengard where he died in 2002, or so I heard.

"Wow," Al said.

"Quite. It turns out that Dumbledore and Grindelwald only disagreed in methodology, rather than philosophy. The Dark Lord found this highly amusing as I'm sure you can guess. He went to see Grindelwald in 1968. Broke in through the window. Got a lot of ideas from him, like using the camps. Grindelwald was masquerading under the name Heinrich Glücks during World War II, and it was he who oversaw the economic aspect of the Nazi concentration camps."

"Why do you think Voldemort didn't release him? Maybe cause a little diversion," Al asked.

"The Dark Lord wanted no competition, boy. He wanted to be the only game in town, as the saying goes. That's basically why he wanted Dumbledore killed."

"But why the sleeper poison?"

"Think, boy, think. Don't be a dunderhead. A new teacher—a former Death Eater no less—joins the staff and a month later Dumbledore keels over? You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to work that one out. I started giving him the sleeper poison after the Dark Lord fell, upon his previous instructions. Dumbledore still thought I was working for him, of course. Everything worked out rather nicely."

"But if you thought he was dead, why'd you follow his instructions?"

"Because I wanted to," Snape said, looking at Al as though he thought the boy might be a little dim. "The man was a smug sanctimonious bastard. I knew not when the right opportunity would arise, but I was sure it would, eventually. So I kept at it."

"And when Voldemort rose again…"

"I knew that killing Dumbledore would grant me instant forgiveness and I would be elevated to a higher status than every other Death Eater. That would help increase the odds of my survival. And I was right."

They sat in silence for a while. Al was feeling a little cheated. He was hoping for more dirt, but all Snape did was motivated by self-interest. He decided to get back to his original purpose.

"That was interesting, all right, but we got a little side tracked. Tell me more about how the prisoners arrived."

And Snape talked to him about prisoner intake, about the cavity searches, and about prisoner selection, while Al smiled and smiled.