Mippy runs a hot lavender bath in the guest-wing's only ghost-free bathroom, routes a few of the Old Man's own afghan-sized towels onto a chair by the tub, and goes to shoo her master into it. Of course he's in the kitchen, hunkered morosely before the cold stove's open door. He hasn't even removed his boots yet.
"Out of that!" she squeaks, flapping her arms like wings. "Mippy says get out of that and into the tub right now!"
Startled, he slams the door on his hair and stands up quickly. "Ow! Merlin's-"
"Master Severus had better not say 'balls'," she warns him.
"I was going to say-" Rather unsubtly, he focuses on her enormous eyes. "Er, 'eyeballs'."
"Much better." A twiggy finger points imperiously. "Outer robe and boots."
He shudders, pulling the robe's loose cuffs down over his fists. "I'm cold," he says flatly, after a moment.
She bites her lip. "Just boots, then," she says, more gently. "And may Mippy brush you, so you doesn't get dirt on the rugs?"
With a barely perceptible nod, he sits down on the floor to unbutton his boots- always a very solemn procedure. She brushes him magically, trying not to touch him at all. A stubborn plaque of mud remains beneath the outer robe's collar. "You has mud in your collar," she says.
"I'm-not-a-complete-prawn-so-just-get-on-with-it-please."
It's still moist, home to two somnolent sowbugs and one bristling, deep-orange centipede. She crushes the centipede in her fingers, not wanting him to know what has been riding against his skin, and drops the sowbugs on the floor. Master Severus hunches his shoulders nervously. "What are you doing back there?"
"Wiping Mippy's hands," she says, wiping Mippy's hands. "You is very muddy."
"Can I get up now?"
Good thing his father isn't here, she thinks. Asking a house-elf for permission! A moment later, he realizes his mistake and stands up quickly. "When Master Severus comes downstairs again, Mippy will have dinner ready," she says to cover the moment.
"'Master Severus' will be too busy cleaning the kitchen to eat." He does his best to tower over her, though now his boots are off the top of her head comes up to his chest. Lowering her eyes in stifled amusement, she sees his socks don't match. Skurry really was skiving off, she thinks, startled. Her master looks down also and sees the socks: one black, one blue.
"My socks don't match!" he bursts out, standing on one foot to rip off the blue one. His bare foot touches the floor, still lightly streaked with Skurry's blood, and jerks up again. "Oh, Merlin, I stepped in it- I've been sitting in it-" he yelps, and runs for the foot of the stairs.
Evidently, his tolerance has been reached.
"Mippy will clean the kitchen." She uses the soothing, singsong voice left over from early years of night terrors. "Master Severus will take his bath. Go on..."
He stands on the second step, clutching the boots and blue sock to his chest, and regards her unblinkingly. "Where will you be?"
"Mippy will be right here. Cleaning the kitchen," she adds, since he seems to be unclear on the concept.
"Until I'm done?"
"Until Master Severus is done."
"Where are the other house-elves?"
Hiding from you, she thinks. "Working," she says.
"Will they sneak up on me?"
"Certainly not."
"Tell them not to." She nods. He relaxes a bit- enough to muster a faint scowl. "And don't look in the stove."
"Mippy will not look in the stove while Master Severus is bathing," she agrees.
"Or while I'm getting out of the bath."
"Or while you is getting out of the bath."
He peers at her suspiciously, wrinkling his nose. It makes him look like a nearsighted eagle. Mr. Snape's son, despite her lies. What a family of barristers!
"Mippy promises," she says, quite slowly and clearly, "not to open the stove at all until you comes back, and then we will open it together."
Finally, he blinks, and turns to climb the stairs, holding a filthy boot in each hand. Flakes of mud drop onto the risers. She decides against mentioning it for fear of prompting another debate, or, worse, a complete collapse. It's only a little dirt. Instead, she shouts across the kitchen, "Call Mippy if the water gets too dirty!"
"I know how to drain a tub, Mippy," he grumbles, crossing the landing.
His footsteps are utterly silent.
Children are supposed to thunder upstairs 'like a herd of elephants'. A shame and a waste, she thinks sadly. Maybe he's just tired... Maybe he'll be able to sleep for once, with his mother out of the house. She once heard him asking his paranoid aunt how to ward a room against Apparition.
Maybe she can stand guard.
Only after his footsteps have crossed overhead does she let herself begin, trying not to think about the smell- a thin, brownish sort of smell, like burnt leather and grief. She tries not to remember him sitting there beside the stove, legs folded awkwardly beneath him like a marionette with its strings clipped, where they had left him. Alone.
It's just a memory, one among so many.
She tackles the leaded glass cabinets first. It's strangely satisfying, working dried gore out of the hinges. Takes elbow grease, as Skurry would have said. Just a mess, she tells herself. Just blood and worse than blood in rivulets, pools and clots, soaking her master's robes and caught in her master's hair, a dark and viscous thread strung over his lips like some hideous scar.
It wouldn't wash away, of course. Memories never did.
Deprived of her dead friend's eyes, she found herself focusing, instead, on the eyes of this child- realizing, to her chagrin, that he was still a child- and suddenly, she wished she had the nerve to become visible, so he would look back at her. So he'd look at something, anything, just to make sure his eyes and mind still worked.
He didn't look.
He started to cough, face buried against his knees. The cough turned into dry retching, with nothing left to bring up anymore, and when he finally lifted his head, sight and sense had returned. He clawed the false scar away from his mouth and pronounced a summoning charm. Milk and liquor bottles, jam jars, the tiny crystal confections that had held his mother's perfume- collection bottles, the tools of salvation- his trunk upstairs was full of them. The boy who couldn't catch a quaffle caught the bottles easily and arranged them according to size.
"Obtempero," he said quietly, tapping his wand against the floor. It made a tiny spattering sound, like one more droplet falling.
He raised his left hand and traced it across an invisible surface, as though smudging a chalk line with his thumb, and the fluid between flagstones stirred. It began, almost sheepishly, to retreat from him into the marbled puddles behind it. He opened his hand and drew something unseen toward him (the fabric of his lost mother's skirt? The fabric of reality?) The coalescing pool writhed, seemed to roll over- grew long, narrow and bright, leaving a colorless liquid in its wake- and, reminding her of the Old Man's pet snake, stretched itself out lazily on the stone floor.
By age five, her master had become adept at calling water up out of drains, saliva from his sleeping father's mouth, and pumpkin juice out of the pitcher at breakfast, impressing his alchemist aunt, but few of the People Who Mattered. Now he coaxed with slight, repetitive gestures the colorless liquid into two streams. One, slower and less transparent, paused to examine bumps in the stone. The other eagerly climbed the recycled gin bottle. A moment later, the crimson snake crept up and into the milk bottle's mouth.
From pumpkin juice to blood...
Still, his face was tranquil.
Unheard by human ears, she thanked every god she'd heard of- and Merlin, for that matter- for collection bottles, while the other house-elves murmured in horror. They'd seen him do this before, of course, but never to one of their own.
Feathers from his grandfather's owl, the eyes and claws of his cousin's rabbit, ash from the pyres of his father's horses, even his pet niffler met eternity as the contents of pouches, bottles and jars. She remembered the look on his mother's face when she found him clipping locks of Erichtho's fur. It was wistful, verging on tender- until he exchanged the scissors for tweezers.
"What are you doing, Severus?"
"Plucking eyelashes." It had been nearly a year since he'd last called her 'Mother'. He held his trophy up to the light, then dropped it into a small, silk bag made to hold calligraphy nibs.
"What next?" she sneered. "The poor thing's teeth?"
"Whiskers, then teeth," he answered impassively.
"And then what?"
Her master looked up, ebony eyes meeting obsidian. "Why do you ask when it will only upset you?"
"I am not upset," she snapped. "I am angered by your lack of respect for the dead."
After a moment, he bowed his head low over the small, cold body, as his still-braided hair could not hide his face. "I respect Erichtho," he said, very softly.
She left him then, white teeth and white hands clenched.
Erichtho's eyelashes went into every one of his 'experiments' over the next few months, back at the small, gray house near Titchwell. Most of them simply fizzled; a few stank so badly that a specialist had to be called in; the last he set out in a sealed flask, warning Mippy not to touch it under pain, not of death, but "a fate so hideous as to beyond your limited imagination." Mippy, whose imagination wasn't at all limited, avoided his bedroom entirely.
On their next visit to his grandfather's, she caught him with a handful of test tubes in the breakfast room. He bore an eerie resemblance to his mother at that moment: black hair and pale skin, the sylph-like back (a child's, she told herself) bowed over an uncle's absinthe glass. She watched in silence as he crept around the table, switching tubes from hand to hand over a palm-sized Chinese teacup and a glass soup dish. The bound end of the queue slipped off his shoulder and into the dish before he could catch it, drawing a hiss of irritation between his teeth. Mippy took a quick step backward. His head jerked up.
"Another dish," he snapped. "Quickly." She twisted the frayed hem of her pillowcase and thought of slavery, but he mistook her hesitation for a different kind of fear. "Please?" he said, with ineffable sarcasm.
So, she brought it; he administered his poison with the surety of one who had done such things before; and she retreated to the kitchen, murmuring unheard pleas for mercy. The dish belonged to a feebleminded and frail elder cousin of his, who spent all her waking hours playing chess. Mippy thought he was fond of the girl. Eliminate Personal Ties- yet another step along the road to this untimely adulthood, along with his darkened eyes and whispering in the dead of night, when more wholesome children slept.
Reacting with the copper basin, the milk-blue potion turned viscid lilac and slid reluctantly down the drain. Perhaps a silver spoon would cause the same reaction, easily visible through a thin broth?
As the other house-elves bustled about her, preparing this and serving that, she began to wonder why she cared.
It wasn't her place to get involved; she'd only earn more curses that way. And the sooner this family finished itself off, the better.
Even the crippled ones.
Even the children.
Barely five minutes later, her dismay gave way to blank surprise when the chess-playing cousin slid silently out of her chair- and on upward, like a Muggle's toy balloon.
"Egnatia, what are you doing?" the girl's mother droned, dribbling clotted cream into her porridge. Her daughter hit the ceiling, mouth forming a surprised "o". She made a desultory effort to get down again, paddling her limbs, and then just floated. The "o" returned to its natural state: a pacific smile. As the alchemist aunt came up beside her, she took hold of a trailing, amethyst sleeve and in a stage whisper informed her, "You too!" The alchemist aunt patted her gently.
Master Severus didn't spare a glance for either of them. Hands clasped in front of his mouth, he was watching his uncle... who sipped absinthe and watched him back. Gradually the attention of the entire table turned to the absinthe-drinking uncle. He showed no signs of rising from his chair. Master Severus sighed.
"My Levitation Solution," he said when questioned, careful not to lisp in the gap from his front teeth. "Seriphion, distillation of elder pith, Aethonan ash, chalk, flying rowan cotyledons, niffler eyelashes, and I took hair from their combs-" a small finger pointed. "And his shaving brush." The earthbound uncle, already pleasantly inebriated, raised his glass in a general toast. "It's a signature potion, like polyjuice."
The alchemist aunt clapped her hands, bobbing gently against a stone corbel. "That's why it didn't work on Darwin," (who silently raised his glass again). "Common wormwood and seriphion don't mix."
The boy began to look crestfallen; the Old Man snorted. "Forget the seriphion. Who'd have thought of niffler eyelashes?"
Not caring about his teeth, for once, her master actually, honestly smiled.
"Next time," the Old Man growled, "you test it on me." And the boy positively grinned.
Now, straightening out the kink in her back, she surveys the gleaming kitchen. There will be no more burials today. She doesn't pretend to understand humans, the games they play with their cauldrons and wands, but perhaps something may be done with what remains- some small cure, or flight of fancy. When her master returns, she will ask permission to place Skurry's skull amongst the delicate skulls of rats, and half-calcined Aethonan bones.
She doesn't think Skurry would mind.
He, too, had liked to see their master smile.