A/N: I've been dreadful at updating for so long that I don't even feel apologizing is appropriate anymore, since an apology implies I might change. That said, I have decided to continue this fic after months of other projects and some mental wrestling. Updates should come faster now, hopefully one or two a month as I work on other things simultaneously.
This will be a somewhat introductory chapter, establishing Severus and Eileen as residents in the domestic violence shelter. If anyone takes umbrage at the fact that Sev is now technically a Gryffindor, let me dismiss your concerns. I chose to call the shelter Gryffindor House to emphasize the requisite bravery of those who enter it. :)
The nameplate read D. Umbridge in pointy gold typeface. Eileen and Sev were to call her Delores, she said. Sev could not imagine ever wanting to call her.
"We don't mean to perpetuate prejudice," said Delores. She extended a hefty hand, and Sev accepted his ID back and tilted his bony hips out of his chair to pocket it. "But Gryffindor House is a small shelter, and we are grant funded. We must abide by the rules laid out for us. If we housed everyone, we could house no one."
"Doesn't matter," Sev said. God, the woman went on.
"It isn't that we believe men are never the victims of domestic violence," Delores added, though the indulgence in her tone and bug eyes indicated she believed they must very rarely have been. "Young men such as yourself prove they can be."
"Yeah." What did she want from him? Tears? He knew he ought to be grateful, but he was dog-tired. After leaving Spinner's End in the early AM, he and Eileen had bounced for three days from one overcrowded homeless shelter to another. Now, after arriving at a stodgy, two-story shelter reserved for victims of domestic violence, he only wanted to be shown upstairs into a bed.
"But sheltering a man in such a cramped house poses problems. For various reasons. Had you been one year older, I'm afraid . . ."
She trailed off and rolled her chair from behind her desk to a metallic shelf standing nearby against her office wall. She plucked a thick folder from the most easily accessible shelf and reached further down until she found a more streamlined one. The former, she passed to Eileen. The latter, to Sev.
"Minnie is our vice administrator. She will process your intake," she told them. With these officious words, she appeared to dismiss them. Turning toward the computer behind her, she hit a button on the keyboard to wake the monitor.
Process? thought Sev, exasperated. Good god, not another process! Where the hell is my bed, you charitable old bat?
Eileen was more tactful:
"Sorry—our what?" she asked. She leaned timidly forward with one hand pressed to her chair handle to indicate she would rise and be gone obediently the moment she understood where she was going. Sev saw and hated the inherent subservience in her form.
"Your intake." Delores blinked at both of them. "Your admittance forms."
She must have seen something insolent in Sev's look, because she held it for a moment with a sort of steady purpose. He knew the look. It was a kind of bearing down. He got it from Tobias at home.
Sev drew in a long, ragged breath and released it. His heart pounded and climbed his ribs like a ladder to his throat. He reminded himself that he was tired and annoyed and fucking homeless, by the way. Now was the time to pick his battles.
"Thank you," he said and got up.
Delores' vice administrator occupied another office in the same diminutive, managerial section of the shelter. There were two rooms in between the offices. The one they now entered housed a set of locked filing cabinets and a telephone. The other was not to be entered without a key. Sev looked toward the window on the door and could see nothing but a short, empty corridor lined with cabinets. The cabinets were covered in dangling combination locks. Locks all around him. The place was like a bank.
Or a prison.
He flipped open the shiny, green folder. Tucked into its pockets were a few photocopied worksheets. At the top of the foremost were the words, scrawled in a bold permanent marker, CHILD INTAKE.
Minnie's door was open. Eileen tapped it and poked her nose inside the office.
"Minnie?"
Minnie was a tall, spare woman with sharp eyes and graying hair. She emitted a grim sigh as she looked up.
"My name is Minerva McGonagall," she corrected.
"Oh." Eileen drew back an inch and bumped Sev with her shoulder. "I'm sorry, Delores said—"
"Yes, I know she did," Minerva interrupted dryly. "Be that as it may, my name is Minerva McGonagall. You may call me Minerva, if you wish. Your name . . ."
She glanced down at her notepad.
"Is Eileen Snape." Leaning to one side, straight-backed and square-shouldered, she found Sev standing behind his mother and ran her shrewd eyes up and down his length. "And you are the child. Severus, I believe."
"That's me." He lifted the child intake folder,
Minerva nodded and reached out a long arm. Sev and his mother entered the room and placed their folders in her care. She set Eileen's aside and opened Sev's.
"You look tired," she observed. Her tone did not indicate any particular concern or sympathy evoked by this fact—and yet Sev liked her all the better for it, after Delores' simpering apologies. "And dirty, quite frankly."
Sev and Eileen glanced at each other and saw how true this was. They had not bathed properly in days. Their hair hung in lank, greasy curtains about their faces. All at once, Sev woke the realization that he could smell himself. His elbow was propped along the armrest of his chair. Now, he tucked it self-consciously into his side.
"You'll want a bath and a bed," Minerva continued. She took out the topmost paper. "Most of this can wait until morning. Much of it is meant for a small child in the first place. I doubt you'll want to bother with the coloring sheet."
With a barely repressed smirk, she held up a hideous black and white cartoon printout of a black-eyed kangaroo and her joey. What's happening, Mommy? the baby kangaroo asked, courtesy of a cloudlike, fluffy word bubble.
"Maybe later," agreed Sev.
"I thought not." Minerva laid it aside. "I'll get the basics. We know your name . . . your age . . . Do you have any allergies?"
"None," Eileen spoke up.
"Mum," Sev stopped her. He felt childish enough. The black-eyed kangaroo mother was staring at him, upside down. To Minerva: "None."
She nodded and struck a line through the blank space.
"Name and number of your personal practitioner?"
"None."
"I suppose that makes me sound like an irresponsible mother," said Eileen.
"It's not unusual," replied Minerva, entirely unfazed "Not for the women who enter Gryffindor House, at any rate. If they had access to basic resources, they would likely have no need of our shelter. Name of school?"
"Ah . . ." Sev glanced at his mother. His school was three towns away by now. Surely, they didn't expect him to attend.
"You'll need to enroll in Hogwarts High," Minerva moved on smoothly. "You were enrolled before you left?"
"Yes, but I'd almost rather—"
"I'm afraid it's a requirement."
"Your funders sound like intelligent people," said Eileen, shooting a warning look toward Sev.
"It's my requirement," Minerva said. "An education is the most basic of resources. Remember that, Severus."
"Yes, ma'am."
He felt Eileen's glance of surprise. He was taken aback himself. Something about Minerva McGonagall and the chastening effect she had upon him forced the ma'am from his mouth. He had never used the term in his life and hadn't planned on it now. He was silent, ruminating over this unforeseen development in his character, while Minerva took up the other folder and wrote down Eileen's basic information.
"You understand, of course," she said, passing them each a separate sheet of paper, "that confidentiality is of the utmost importance. It is for your safety—and mine—and the safety of every woman and child living in the shelter. Signing that document means you will reveal our location to absolutely no one, either while you are here or after you leave."
"Of course," Eileen agreed. Sev could tell his mother was somewhat chastened by the seriousness of such a vow. He felt it, too, and experienced an amusing sort of adrenaline rush while signing his name across the bottom. They returned the confidentiality forms to Minerva, who stowed them in their respective folders.
"Now," she said briskly, stacking the folders sharply against the desk before laying them aside. She folded her hands and briefly scrutinized each of them. "You have injuries."
"Nothing to speak of, ma'am," Eileen assured her.
"Don't say that," Minerva said in a tone Severus found rather more severe than necessary. "You must never say that to anyone. There may come a time when you wish to seek an order of protection against your abuser, and when that time arrives, you will not want such comments floating about in the atmosphere. I can absolutely promise they'll come back to bite you in the—yes, well. Injuries."
"I suppose I got a bit bruised," Sev admitted. Gingerly, he tapped the scab on the side of his head. A hematoma swelled beneath it, and his burn still smarted despite the paste of honey and baking soda he'd applied before leaving the homeless shelter. The paste had worn off since, but his skin felt sticky when he pulled his fingers away.
"I don't know if I'd call Tobias an abuser," Eileen inserted delicately. "He's an angry man, but he is my husband."
"Mum, please."
"Well, we must give him his due," she argued.
"Ha!" he returned. Minerva gave him a muted, dry smile, as though she could read his thoughts. Tobias Snape's due was a roughly hewn stake smashed clean through his cold black heart.
"Shelter procedure is to photograph the injuries of every incoming resident," Minerva informed them, brushing deftly past their disagreement—as well as Eileen's initial one. "The photographs will be kept in your progress folders, which will be locked in our filing system. They will never be shown to anyone unless they can aid you legally."
"I'm sorry, progress notes?" Sev asked.
"Yes, progress. Our goal is to help our residents help themselves. We desire our residents' independence. Therefore, we will conduct periodic interviews with Eileen to determine her goals and in what measure she is progressing toward them."
His mother drew in a long, nervous breath at his side. Covertly, he reached out and clapped a hand atop hers—but nothing was covert in McGonagall's office, beneath her keen, hawk-like eyes. She noticed and tactfully pretended she had not.
Eileen cleared her throat.
"I have no injuries," she said.
A moment passed. Sev wriggled in his chair, twisted his spine, and got his mouth up near his mother's ear.
"Mum, what the hell? You're covered in scrapes and bruises."
"Down, Sev," she murmured, as though he were a dog, and it was just humiliating enough to work. He sank back into his seat, shaking his head.
"I recommend complete documentation, including photographic evidence," Minerva reiterated. "That said, you will hardly be the first to refuse. A new place is sufficiently unnerving without a total stranger firing a flashbulb at you. What about you, Severus?"
"Me?" He thought he shrank a bit.
"Yes. You. I should think you might agree to the injuries on your head being documented, in any case. You wouldn't have to disrobe for that."
"Disrobe?" How dare the woman utter the word in that casual tone? Disrobe. A nicer word for strip. A polite term to encompass the scrawny pallor of his bony white chest, curly smattering of sparse black hairs coming together on his abdomen to crawl their way toward his unwashed underpants. Disrobe? "Dear god, no."
Minerva smiled.
"I said you would not have to—"
"No, no. No." Disrobe was too fresh in his mind. He couldn't get past it, and suddenly he understood all too well Eileen's reluctance to stand on the other side of a merciless lens. He had worn the bump and burns as battle scars, but now they seemed more like stamps of shame.
"That's all finished, then." Minerva rose from her chair and pulled a heavily laden key ring from a deep pocket in her floor-length skirt. "For tonight, at least. These late intakes are telling on all of us. Unless you've an extremely pressing need for new clothes, I'd prefer to stick to the immediate necessities tonight: some shower gels and a toothbrush for the both of you."
"That would be fine," Eileen said. "And I hope you realize—you and Ms. Umbridge—that Sev and I are very grateful."
"Indeed." Leading the way, Minerva took them out of her office and showed them through the locked door Sev had observed. In the short, narrow corridor, she unlocked one of the white cabinets. The drawers inside were full of hotel-sized shower gels, soaps, shampoos, conditioners, and so forth. From another, she removed toothbrushes, still encased in their new plastic, and sample tubes of toothpaste.
"We accept donations, or we'd have nothing," she explained, rationing their hygienic items. She began to turn toward the door on the opposite end of the short corridor, and then had a second thought. Upon opening a second cabinet, she passed Eileen a box of tampons. "Better prepared than unprepared."
Sev wanted to cringe. It would have been highly immature of him, but this situation, being admitted in the dead of night under promises of confidentiality, had set his entire being on edge. Eileen colored a bit and slipped the box half beneath the hem of her shirt.
The next minutes whirled by in a blur. The three of them went out the corridor into the shelter's main body. Up a narrow staircase. Here were the bedrooms. Sev saw no one, but many of the doors were locked, and he wondered about the women behind those doors—what they had seen, what they looked like. What they had looked like when Minerva McGonagall pointed the camera at them and hid their dirty secrets behind the front flap of their progress folders. He hoped Minerva had taken their photos, at least. Asking a wounded pride to hold still inside a wounded body would have been too much, had Delores Umbridge held the camera.
Minerva showed them into a set of small, tidy bedrooms separated by an adjoining half-bath.
"I should warn you," she said, by way of Goodnight, "the shelter is going through a dry spell, but it can fill up rather unexpectedly. In the near future, the two of you might be obliged to share a room."
How perfectly dreadful.
Sev nodded. A moment later, he was in the strange, barren room, with its scent like too many sad, unwashed women. The odor of dead, stale air would have been preferable. On a dresser, he found a cellular phone, inactive but placed in case he should need to dial the emergency number. He smiled wanly and stowed it in a drawer, out of sight. He could hardly imagine any emergency more bleak, more claustrophobic, than finding oneself a resident of Gryffindor House.
A/N: Next up, we'll meet some of Gryffindor House's current residents. Thanks for reading!
