He stepped over the threshold with his arms outspread, savoring the moment, holding his walking stick out with one hand and flexing the leather-gloved fingers of his other hand, taking a deep breath of the musty air in side.
"Ahhh," he sighed. "Pity you can't choose your in-laws. What a bloody heap." So saying, he kicked aside a wooden chair, shattering it and sending the splinters scattering across the room. His hawk flew through the open door behind him, alighting on his shoulder and surveying the room with eyes as cold as the silver eyes of his master.
A wavering moan came from upstairs, followed by the sound of something hitting a wall. Smiling nastily, Lucius whistled under his breath, knocking his stick into the walls as he walked slowly up the steps. Shrugging his shoulder roughly, he sent the hawk flying ahead of him.
Dea worked as quickly as she could, not hearing the walking stick but instead hearing the sounds of Remus's change in the next room.
Severus said nothing as she shored up the last of his injuries, but kept his head turned away from her, his eyes on the wall. Even unconsciousness would be better than this, he thought, more merciful than the bright, keen awareness that was settling over him with her wand and her words. Better than the images he'd unintentionally grasped from her mind. His mouth was set in its customary thin, hard line, and he stayed silent.
She never heard the impossibly large, sentient wolf slip in, only felt it when he closed his teeth on the hem of her robe and tugged.
He wanted her to go. Of course he did, with the threat of Malfoy lurking outside. But she shook her head. "Remus, let go. I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving him here."
"He's fine," Severus said of himself, the sneer apparent in his voice, the defensive mechanism back in place. "So you can leave him here."
The hawk swooped past the doorway, bringing Remus's head and attention to it with a snap.
Lucius saw as the predatory bird saw, the three gathered in a room like ducks in a row. Its visions crowded his head, swooping and dipping.
"I see you," he cooed softly, his voice sliding through the hallway. "Onesies, twosies, threesies-three, I see a birdie in a tree."
Knowing the voice, remembering the words from her dream, Dea's throat locked tight in fear. She'd thought him outside, still stumped by the riddle of the Black house. But he was feet away, drawn there by her ignorance. Drawn there by her arrogance.
"Hide, Remus," she hissed, then turned to Severus. "Can you move?" When, stubbornly, he didn't answer her, she shoved at him rudely. "Now's not the time, Severus, please! Can you move?"
The Potions Master said nothing but turned his haunted eyes back to her even as the wolf pressed its body against her side protectively. He sat up, sliding from the bed and standing, nausea swamping him in a wave, his vision blurring. It had been too long since he'd stood, since he'd moved, and his inertia was shot.
"Go," she hissed, drawing her wand upright.
"I'm not leaving," he said snidely, fixing his eyes on the doorway where he knew Malfoy would appear in an instant. "Because really, Dea, what are you going to do? Scourgify him to death?"
The hawk swooped again, and this time Remus moved for it, partly out of instinct but mostly out of strategy. The movement, he hoped, would draw fire, and in drawing fire, give Amadea and Severus a chance to escape. In one powerful lunge, he had the hawk trapped in his jaws. He bit down and shook his head from side to side, filling the hallway with feathers and bringing a mindless shriek from Malfoy.
"Filthy!" he screamed, and Dea's mind skittered hysterically over the notion that he sounded a great deal like Mrs. Black. "Filthy abomination!" He pointed his wand, running down the hallway after the wolf and waving feathers out of his face. But the wolf had turned into another room—which one?
Severus slipped his hand back, onto the bed where his wand lay, and grasped it firmly in his hand. He'd failed already in the final mission, and the last thing he wanted was to do it again. It was the mark, he knew, of a Slytherin.
Failure was not permitted.
As he walked forward, reeling from the hours of inactivity, the sheer exhaustion of the past several days, he could feel her fingers slip ineffectively on his robe, hear her voice, tinny and pleading in his ears.
And the timing was perfect, for Severus stumbled into the doorway just as Malfoy ran past, the loyal Death Eater's long strides faltering when he saw his former comrade standing in the doorway.
"Avada kedavra," Severus shouted, and this time there was protection for Dea, protection for himself, and though it pained him to admit it, protection for the werewolf that had bravely drawn fire.
Protection he hadn't been able to give before, when the bastard had struck her down with his ostentatious walking stick.
Lucius never saw it coming, his eyes torn between the disappearing werewolf and the dark figure at his side, he'd never dreamed he'd be taken down in such a way.
Malfoys weren't ambushed. They weren't surprised.
It was the last thought he had before the green light hit him, and he knew no more.
~~~
Now they came. Less than a day later, when a corpse lay stiff in the house's basement, his face still stamped with a grimace of rage, they came. It was all over by the time they started streaming through the doors.
"We didn't know—"
"Disturbances all around town, Death Eaters wreaking havoc all over—"
"They were creating too many distractions, we didn't know what was going on here—"
"We did, we just thought we'd let you handle it." That comment, predictably, came from one of the Weasley twins, whose jesting was offset by his pallor.
The remaining Death Eaters, as it turned out, had been more organized than they themselves had thought, their uncoordinated efforts at causing chaos keeping all members of the Order busy—too busy to know what was going on at their headquarters.
Charlie Weasley strode to Severus's side, his large, thick form nearly dwarfing Severus's thin one. Without a moment's hesitation, he extended a huge hand to Severus, his face earnest. "I owe you several apologies, mate."
"Yes, I tend to agree with you on that matter, Weasley," Severus said, smirking a little. But he extended his hand, knowing it would surprise the boy. Charlie gripped the thin, fine hand
enthusiastically, shaking it with an energy that made Severus's head ache. For one brief moment, he wondered if Dea would know how to heal the bones in his hand, then he was released.
He didn't belong here, no matter what his noble actions had been. He knew it as surely as he knew his own name, as surely as he knew the contents of his supply room back at Hogwarts. A lifetime of darkness had brought him up to the Unforgivable, to the flash of green that had ended Lucius Malfoy's life, and he didn't belong here because some part of him, much bigger than he liked to admit, had been pleased at that flash of green.
It had been lies from Malfoy which directed Severus to the Death Eaters, and Malfoy's sick glee that had uncovered the truth about Dea's family. It had been Malfoy who had stricken the tangerine lark flying through his house, sending her home bloody, bruised, and broken.
And when the evil, vile bastard had fallen dead in the middle of the hallway, Severus Snape had stood over him, dark hair straggling into his eyes, and he hadn't felt a bit sorry.
By the time people stopped entering the house, he'd been thanked dozens of times, congratulated for some odd reason, and turned into that which he'd always mocked—a bit of a celebrity. Order supporters who he didn't even know were treating him like a hero.
He wanted desperately to get away; of all those people who'd shaken his hand and spoken to him in the hours following Lucius Malfoy's attack, there was one who had not approached him at all.
She stood alone in a corner of the room, alone as she had been ever since he'd risen and killed Malfoy. Even as Lucius had struck the ground, her wand had fallen from her fingers, clattering to the floor of the bedroom they'd deposited him in, and she'd walked out silently, brushing past him as though he weren't even there. His adrenaline-addled mind had heard a door shut somewhere down the hallway, and when he'd gone looking for her he'd encountered Remus, his thick pelt shining even in the dim hallway.
No matter what their animosity, no matter what their history, the moment had been clear enough when the wolf put his paws at Severus's feet and laid his snout to them. And though they'd both longed to go to her, both longed to continue looking for her, neither did.
Now she stood by herself, regarding the assembled company with a faint smile written on her features. If he hadn't known better, Severus would have said she was pleased with herself and pleased with the way things turned out. But there was pain in those dark eyes, and he could see something in her he'd thought long gone—the wish to be invisible.
And the man whom Severus was certain was at the root of that pain, Remus stood across the room, looking none worse for the wear after his night of animalism. He carefully avoided looking at either of them but instead seemed to accept Harry as his charge.
Sparing a glance for the boy, the famed Potter, Severus knew with startling clarity why he felt he didn't belong.
What he'd done hadn't been brave; it was merely a matter of survival and a matter of revenge. Bravery was what he lacked, and as a Slytherin, brave acts were few and far between.
He thought perhaps he had one left in him before he retired gratefully to his dungeons, his potions, and his solitude. After all, only she had ever been able to touch that solitude, and he knew she would have other matters to attend to.
So he crossed the room to her, shaking his head slightly. "I see what you're thinking, Middlemarch. But you may as well forget it; you couldn't get away with it in a room like this."
She brought her eyes to his, dark meeting dark, and there was no surprise on her face, no confusion. "You're right about that. People as sharp as these aren't fooled by a watered-down schoolgirl invisibility spell." Rolling her shoulders, she risked a glance at Remus. After being ignored for several days, who could blame him for not talking to her?
"I was wrong." The words slipped from Severus's lips, spoken for the first time. A pureblood admitted no wrongdoing, his father would have said.
Those days are past, you overbearing wretch, Severus thought.
Now her brow furrowed in confusion, she shook her head. "Wrong?" She was just as much perplexed that he'd spoken to her at all—she hurt for him but didn't know how to say it, didn't know how to apologize for things he had seen, for things that hadn't been meant for his eyes.
"Your name. I was wrong in labeling it a misnomer." He raised his chin then, looking down his nose at her in a habit that would likely never be broken. "It seems you are beloved after all, Dea." And with that, he cast a long look at Remus. In his opinion, the werewolf wasn't worthy for her, Severus thought, but who was?
Completing the circle, she raised her hand to his face once more, marveling at how much it meant for a man as proud as he to take the step he'd just taken. "I never felt otherwise."
"Miss Middlemarch!" Hermione tumbled through the crowd, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright, and it was impossible to miss Ron standing behind her, looking equally happy. "We just got here! I wanted to say congratulations on a plan well-executed."
"Wicked job, Snape," Ron said unthinkingly, his eyes growing wide in his freckled face, the gulp that followed so loud as to be audible. "I mean… Professor Snape. Sir. Blast it all!"
"Professor Dumbledore wants to see you, Dea. Come on!" Hermione, ever the organizer, beckoned insistently at Dea, who threw a backwards glance at Severus.
He knew mischief when he saw it, and he suspected he wouldn't be seeing Amadea again that evening. Thinking as such, he brushed off his robes and Disapparated without anyone noticing he'd done so.
It was time to get back to the dungeons.