In which Severus is pwned by sad bunnies. Er, badgers.
Chapter warnings: whumpage, language, tenseplay (last time I'll warn for that), divination (relax; it'll be over soon).
chapter title in tribute to excessivelyperky's The Birthday Present.
OH AND! Severus's opinions about stay-at-home-mothers exclusively reflect his really stellar Slytherin talents in the diplomacy department and not the opinions of the author don't hunt me down plzkthx.
While stuck inside for months, stewing, with nothing much to do but obey an officious cousin or dull the nightmares and the roar of OUT, OUT, OUT with drink, probably the one thing you can do to drive yourself the craziest the fastest every day is read the paper.
So, naturally, Sirius did. Obsessively. Every column. Even the adverts, definitely the comics even if he didn't have context for the jokes, and especially, in even cold-war time, the obituaries. Everything.
SCORPIO: This is a week for recovering lost things and not recognizing what's right in front of you. Take advantage of your boss's good mood! Make some time to look up old friends and re-examine old ideas.
CAPRICORN: Take heart: the week will end. In the meantime, try to relax, rest up, and take one moment at a time. A calm, mindful, observant attitude may be your best helper. New challenges may bring up old wounds, but patience will see you through, if you stay in the moment.
PISCES: A loved one's troubles may tempt you to get involved, but staying out of the middle will be best for your mental health. Preserve your strength for future challenges and remember why your friends are your friends. Have faith, or even enjoy the ride!
"So," Remus had summarized with a bit of a smile, looking over his shoulder, "I should really stay out of the way when you try to hit on Emmy Vance again. With a recording omniscope."
"No, save the 'scope for Sniv," Sirius had grinned, pointing. "Enjoy the ride, it says here; can I get on, too?"
"Why not," Remus had chuckled, looking a little depressed around the eyes.
The ride started in a burst of green floo-fire. It was not, in fact, funny.
It should have been. At first he'd thought it was, and he couldn't quite manage to feel sorry for the man, but… well… he hadn't seen Snape unconscious since school, and it had looked very different then. Back then he'd looked slack, like anyone else, but with a hint of scowl, and you could see that he was going to come up hexing and spitting like a wet cat, and quite possibly biting.
Now he looks… exhausted, with grooves worn into his face. Free of the voluminous black teaching robes and thick-soled boots that it had taken Sirius days to stop snickering to himself about in odd moments last year, he looks his actual scrawny size in the belted blue Infirmary gown. Not vulnerable, exactly, but blasted and sanded down like some old ruin. Still scowling, but more miserable than hostile, all burn-shiny-pink with grey undertones and bruised-looking with scorch marks and splash marks. His hair is limp and singed and damp, and that yellow-green oil-slick sheen it usually sports has been replaced by the blue highlights that really black hair (like Sirius's own) gets.
He still looks like he'll come awake snarling, but now it's the look Moony gets when there aren't any humans around to attack but the one inside him. He looks at least sixty—which, Sirius realizes suddenly, he always does, but his completely unwarranted hauteur usually stops everyone noticing. The three of them aren't even pushing forty, really, which is a more horrible than a hopeful thought.
"What happened?" Remus asks Dumbledore, who's carried Snape through the floo with Snape's arm draped around his shoulders and is now easing him into a mobilicorpus. He sounds a little awed.
"Fifty billion fucking points each from fucking Ravenpuff," is probably what Snape growls slurrily without waking up, his painstakingly acquired WWN accent and venomous civility eaten alive by the old northern burr. Manchester or Cumbria or someplace like that, only more pinched. He remembers Narcissa being indignant about Snivvy and his lack of floo having to take the overnight all the way down to London just to take the Express north again to Scotland, remembers scowling as she and Rosier and (later) Reg filthied themselves by drilling an embarrassed but determined Sniv with variable patience, out on the grounds, surrounded by green grass and the notebooks spilling over with crabbed handwriting they were doubtless getting access to in exchange.
Cissy, he recalls, had at least got the boot in by making him read out Nature's Nobility for his accent's sake. This seemed to have become something of a joke for Sniv and Reg in later years, though, complete with Slughorn-plummy tones and pious gesticulation. It had gotten them…what? Thumped? Hexed? Dissension in the silver-green; James had been delighted; but what had happened?
He has a flash of memory though; of hearing that voice speak in that way, of delighting in the little climber's roots showing. It is on the funny side, the way his native voice is nearly a dark poisoned-silk echo of Hagrid's bluffer, cheerier, more westward tones. He can't remember, though, why that thought had felt, before, so viciously satisfactory.
Dumbledore coughed in amusement, patted Severus's limp hand reassuringly, and told him, "Naturally, my boy," adding, to Remus, "I do hope that didn't take."
"Why's he here?" Sirius asked, summoning belligerence. It helped, even if the object of his vitriol doesn't seem to have been Harry, for once, that Snape even wanted to lash out at helpless schoolchildren in his sleep.
"Ah, well, we've had a bit of a to-do, you see," Dumbledore gave every sign of explaining, although you couldn't rely on that with him. "The infirmary's quite full, and he can't rest in his rooms due to the state of the dungeons. Obviously this is not the ideal location, but I can hardly send him home, since no one lives there during term."
Sirius swallowed that unhappily. He'd have liked to say it's wasn't fair that he should be saddled, without even being asked, with providing hospitality to the one person he hates almost as much as Pe—as Wormheart (Voldemort is a dark pall over Britain in a weird pseudo-reptilian body who Sirius has never met personally, too sick and alien and foul to be hated as one hates people), but he had offered up his home to the Order. No matter how much repellant the thought, Snape is a contributing member. In a last-ditch attempt, "If Madame Pomfrey can't look after him, shouldn't he be at St. Mungo's?"
"Alas," he was informed sadly, "we can't rely on the Mark remaining quiescent during his stay. Even if we could, I'm afraid too many of the older healers and management personnel remember the effects of his earlier work in the last war. He isn't treated well there, no matter how many of the interns and younger mediwizards have learned to respect him." There was a moment's pause, as everyone mentally translated respect him into soil their pants at his very shadow.
Dumbledore added, reflective and twinkling, "It's also possible that he may have annoyed some of the hospital's in-house brewers at the last meeting of MESP. The Most Extraordinary Society of Potioneers," he explained, seeing Sirius's blank look.
Oh, just possible. Looking willing to be diverted, Remus asked, "What did he say?"
Dumbledore coughed again, and told them, "According to an old friend, he waxed a trifle bitter and unpatriotic, more than a trifle publicly, over the latest census." In response to Remus's look of rapt and expectant amusement, he went on in gently entertained despair, "It seems that Britain, with very few exceptions, has only turned out one Potions Master every twenty to forty years since industrialization, and that over ninety percent of new professional potions makers this year—and, indeed, significant percentages of new tailoring, interior-decoration, and catering workers-are empty-nest witches making a second or third career of skills they've practiced while spending eleven or more years exclusively as homemakers."
In response to everyone's baffled looks, "I gather he derided the national character of our children as devoid of steadiness, patience, and discipline—this, naturally, was tailored to appeal to their mothers, many of whom were present in the capacity of commercial brewers, in a request for instruction made to the Chinese chapter. I'm afraid it's likely that the rant on the folly of women who think they can let their hard-learned skills languish to be picked up unrusted later and the husbands whose laziness and presumption encourages wives to so waste themselves didn't help as much as he may have hoped it might."
Remus was stifling a laugh behind his palm by this point, and choked out, "Oh, dear."
"I'm told I owe Alessia Medici a bottle or ten of Pomona's cider for saving him from the lynch mobs," Dumbledore agreed, twinkling. Sirius made a face in disgust as they silently laughed uproariously together from behind bland faces. "Again." He shook his head, adding, with a gentle smile, "MESP does seem to bring out the worst in him; he's always complaining their entry requirements are negligible and and their peer-review system is lax."
"Myuchull bluddy admrashun ssiety'f plonkers," Snape slurred. "Mos' inept ssiety'f 'splosions waitin' t'happen."
Dubledore patted his hand again, and otherwise ignored him. "I understand him to be a perfect gentleman at the International Association of Master-Brewers. Of course, all but eight of their members are over seventy-five."
"Did the, er, Chinese chapter at least agree to help him?"
"Alas." Dumbledore hadn't just sobered, but was looking actually disappointed. "It seems they were all agreed in crediting their success to a stronger and more respected tradition of herbal medicine and their students' dread of disappointing their parents."
This drew a new, albeit much quieter, line of cursing from the slumped Slytherin. They all watched him curiously for a while, but he didn't seem to be going to stop anytime soon. Eventually, it became clear that he was complaining about the parents of everyone he'd ever taught, ordered possibly chronologically or by egregiousness, but not alphabetically. They all looked at each other in a silent mutual acknowledgement that he could potentially go on this way until doomsday and ought to be ignored.
Sirius sighed, and muttered, "Well, I'm not bathing his fevered brow," in defeat over the stream of vitriol. It was starting to sound like the last thin streams of molasses pouring out of the bottle, ever more quiet and sluggish.
"Perhaps not," Dumbledore conceded serenely, containing his twinkle. "I shall send… let me see, not Dobby, no, and the regular castle staff would only be disturbed… I could send Winky; family-raised elves do fade serving whole communities. However, she wants supervision, and I understand that the wine cellars here are fully stocked."
Sirius saw no reason to react to that.
"In return for her help, please keep her out of them and keep Kreacher away from her, will you?" When he assented, Dumbledore thanked him with another one of those 'my boys.' He never could understand why that usually seemed to deflate Snape into mollified grumbling; it always made him want to growl.
"But what happened?" Remus insisted.
"Do you know, we're still not entirely sure." Dumbledore took his little rimless spectacles off to clean them (not, thank Merlin, with his beard, as they'd once speculated, but with a handkerchief that was an only moderately violent blue-violet with pearl-grey doves zipping over it in enchanted flight). "He was summoned last night, and it does not seem to have been an entirely restful meeting." Remus winced, while Sirius shifted restlessly. "In fact, he thought there might be a sequel to it; keep an eye out, will you?
"But, to return to the matter, last night would have been the late Mr. Diggory's birthday, and his House decided to hold an extended celebration in his honor. I suspect that firewhiskey may have been involved. Pomona tells me that she warned Severus in advance that his fourth through seventh-year classes were not likely to be in top form; at this point I can only speculate that she underestimated the difficulty." His cornflower eyes lose their starriness for a moment and chill over, as does the room. "I shall know more before long."
Sirius and Remus look at each other, sharing a moment of profound gratitude for having had nothing to do with it. That look wasn't as bad as the last time Sirius had seen those eyes harden more in anger than in sorrow, but once was more than enough. Truth be told, he can't even remember what he'd been thinking, to have opened himself to this wizard's anger even in ignorance, let alone the rest of it.