He doesn't want to get out of the bath.

In the bath, he knows he's clean. If something seems to cling to his lips and slide over his skin like a gossamer hand, he may scrub at it until it goes away. The water, twice drained, begins to run cold, despite charms on the boiler (stupid Muggle contraption). He casts a gradual warming spell upon the water in which he sits, until it's as hot as he can stand and his submerged limbs turn lobster-red in stark contrast to sallow hands and spindly, spidery knees.

The lavender-scented foam has long since given way to a slick froth over the surface. He feels a pang of shame at not having luxuriated.

Eventually, the house-elf comes to find him.

It isn't Skurry. He has a momentary vision of a headless body, skin shrunk close in death, tottering through the open door - but no, it isn't Skurry. It's Mippy, whom he hasn't killed yet, and she looks at him with strange dismay that makes him want to cry.

"Isn't you clean yet?" she should say. She doesn't. Instead, she takes one of the towels and approaches him, obviously choosing her words. "Time to get out," she says.

He pokes his toes out of the water, studying them. They look pickled, white and shriveled... A dead boy's toes. He could argue. He could tell her that when he closes his eyes, in the red darkness there, once again it all goes wrong and he feels it wet on his face and warm gobbets tumble into the too-loose neck of his robe-

He opens his eyes wide and looks down. His own little-boy body (when will he grow up?) glistens raw pink from an hour of scouring. One of his nipples seems to be bleeding. He touches it lightly, sticks his finger in his mouth. Blood, yes; but he feels it, the sting that makes blood happen, and that makes all the difference. It gives him, in fact, a peculiar satisfaction.

Silently he stands up. The tub begins to drain and Mippy wraps the towel around him, tending him, as she hasn't done since his Dad decided he was too old to be coddled. Passively letting himself be dressed, he listens to her homely mutterings, looks down at her large blue eyes and imagines them gone, the stump of tongue blindly probing from a black and gaping throat. He wonders when he went mad, and then thinks maybe all grown-ups are like this. Has he grown up, at the tender age of nine?

Mippy ties the dressing gown at his waist and pats him on the back, a gesture evidently meant to propel him toward the door. "Master Severus must eat," she says.

His stomach lurches at the idea. "Master Severus isn't hungry."

"Master Severus must still eat. How about a sandwich?"

"There's nothing in this house I'd want in a sandwich."

"Not even your Uncle Darwin's marmite?" she says coyly.

He stands there looking at her, picturing the thinnish stuff that ran down Skurry's leg as he floated him carefully across the kitchen stoop. Politely he says, "No, thank you", they haggle a bit and eventually he finds himself munching a chocolate tea biscuit with a vague sense of unreality, as though the world has reversed itself. The house seems otherwise deserted. He knows the truth. They're hiding- from him. He's joined the ranks of the Dark.

And one of them leads him downstairs now, brittle fingers linked with his... Doesn't she know he could kill her? Doesn't he know he could fling her small body over the banister, send Conterus after her, and not even the Ministry would punish him for this?

"You're a bit dim, aren't you," he says through a chocolate mouthful.

"Mr. Snape would say 'don't talk with your mouth full'," she says, turning her blue eye on him. "How is Mippy dim?"

He blinks slowly at her, thinking of his father (feel nothing, reveal nothing). "You don't see it. I'm bad," he says, matter-of-factly. The mere admission leaves him feeling somehow desolate.

"You is not bad," she answers.

"I'm a Dark wizard."

They have reached the kitchen. A slight, acrid taint still hangs in the air. He wonders whether it is worth burning cinnamon, or whether this would lose him points in the future inspection. The stone floor gleams dully, eyelike chips of mica winking here and there; glass shines. The impressionistic splatter is gone from walls and cabinet doors.

"Looks better," he says grudgingly. Mippy plants herself in front of him, hands on hips.

"How can you possibly be a Dark wizard? You is only nine years old!"

His brow furrows in a frown, the best he can do toward a glare of searing contempt. "Consuoris is a Dark curse."

"Master Severus didn't cast it-"

" 'Master Severus' ballsed up casting it, so 'Master Severus' is a bad Dark wizard!"

"You will listen to Mippy," she says sternly, stumping over to the stove, and opens its door on cold ashes. "Stand up straight- and don't say 'ballsed', it isn't couth... Mippy has an idea." She turns around with the skull in her hand, and the world flip-flops again, though the taste of chocolate remains in his mouth. Random details make themselves known- seared flesh clinging to cheek and brow ridge, the withered cusp of an ear- and he holds the last biscuit tightly, hoping it will keep the world from flipping yet again into some still more terrifying version of itself. Mippy wraps Skurry's head in an old dishtowel. It seems so mundane, wrapping a head. He doesn't know whether to laugh hysterically, faint, or wait with apparent calm to receive it from her. He does the latter, and she beams up at him. "Mippy thought you might find it useful."

"U-useful?" he echoes, with only the slightest hint of a stammer. The skull is dreadfully light in his hands. He tastes chocolate and bile.

"Like niffler's whiskers," she says. "Like bones of flying horse."

"I don't have a crucible large enough."

Mippy's face falls. "Skurry always liked to be useful."

Useful. He tries to reconcile the word with his image of a living Skurry, a Skurry who could like things, and sees instead his own hands, his wand, reducing the skull to manageable fragments (Contero!), peeling away the cooked-hard flesh. It seems, then, the world does turn- slowly- and once it has settled he knows he will find a way. Everything has its uses...

Perhaps this is what Grandfather is always talking about.

"Yes," he says rather blankly. "All right..." Points his wand at the stove's open door and casts Evanescus, emptying it of the reeking ash. Before he knows it, Mippy has taken his wand from him, which shows he isn't up to snuff. No one takes a wizard's wand- least of all a house-elf.

"As for Master Severus being a Dark wizard," she says, poking him in the sternum with it, "Unicorns aren't bad."

He snatches the wand back and glares down his reddened nose at her. "A single hair is not an endorsement."

His father's words, less powerful since he can't muster his father's voice. Mr. Snape's in-laws were all been perplexed by Master Severus' wand pairing. As one of his cousins said, "Unicorn? How drippy!" Four months later, said 'drippy wand' removed said cousin's thumbs, vindicating both Mr. Snape and his son's supposedly Dark heart.

 "You is only nine," she hisses. "You can't be a wizard at all until you finishes school. You is not Dark yet- and in two years, Master Severus will spend most of the year away from home."

He stares at her blankly, seeing himself reflected in her eyes, a white boy-face with eyes like tunnels, revealing nothing, going nowhere.

"Two years is a long time," he says.

She takes his hand again, pulling gently, leading him back upstairs and to sleep. A tremor bespeaks her silent agreement.

Two years is a very long time.