AUTHOR'S NOTE: This next section is more about Snape than about anyone else, partly because he's the coolest HP character ever and deserves his own section, and partly because in the grand scheme, this story as a whole is more about him than about anyone else. Here's your first taste.
AE
Chapter 12: The Picture and the Penseive
PRESENT: LATE SEPTEMBER
While, admittedly, Meli's career as Rasa was still somewhat new, she had been at it long enough to have figured out typical responses from the people she sought to help. She had never yet encountered a person who hadn't had some idea of why Voldemort was targeting them, nor had she offered her assistance to anyone who had seen fit to delay for any reason that was not perfectly understandable: collecting or destroying documents and items that would be of disastrous use to Voldemort, snatching up a stuffed bear for a crying child, or recovering items that might help in their escape. Although her charges were often frightened, she had never found them completely insensible—until now.
Mr. Aldarion Everett had no clue why Rasa appeared on his doorstep at all, much less an hour before dinner, and he seemed quite unaware of the existence of Voldemort, to say nothing of the possibility that he might pose a threat to the Dark Lord. This might have been reasonable had he been a Muggle, but Everett was a fully trained wizard from a well-known family. It required a great deal of time-wasting explanation even to get Meli past the door, and then she spent further precious minutes convincing him to leave and leave now. To his credit, Everett perked up and sped up once she succeeded in impressing upon him the urgency of the matter…but when she returned to the ground floor after rigging his boiler, she found that he had sped in rather a different direction than he ought to have done. She heard his voice floating down the stairs, and it sounded as though he was trying, quite unsuccessfully, to un-ward something.
She dashed up to the first floor and found him in front of what appeared to be an ordinary bedroom door. His Latin pronunciation and his jerky wand motions betrayed him as either frantic or nowhere near lucid.
Meli caught him by the elbow in mid-swish. "Mr. Everett, we have to go!"
He looked at her with a countenance of panic. "No, you don't understand!" he insisted. "There may be something in here that we don't want found!"
Looking at his eyes, Meli had the disturbing epiphany that he was lucid now for the first time since her arrival. Whatever madness had overtaken him before, he was in his right mind at the moment, and that right mind was in earnest. "What's behind this door?" she asked calmly.
"My sister's bedroom," he replied hurriedly. "She was a very powerful witch—she kept things—"
"Then why doesn't she un-ward it herself?" Meli interrupted irritably. She had been given to understand that Everett had no family.
"She's dead," he answered simply. "Warding this door is the last thing she did before she died."
That was very interesting. "Have you tried apparating or portkeying in?" she inquired.
He shook his head. "One doesn't usually think to apparate room-to-room in a house," he pointed out.
"Good point." Meli drew her wand, then, with no problem at all, apparated to the other side of the door.
Miss Everett had plainly died some time ago. Everything in the room was covered with a thick blanket of dust that nearly obscured all color. There was a great deal of what was probably forest green, and every furnishing that was not cherry wood was now-tarnished silver. She had probably not gone out intending to be gone long, for the room still looked half lived-in. The wardrobe door was slightly ajar, and a bureau drawer was half open; atop the vanity were several items that seemed to have been abandoned while their owner was still using them: a hairbrush, a hand mirror, a tube of (now melted) lipstick.
It was the bureau-top that drew Meli's attention most fixedly. This, too, bore items that, had Miss Everett returned, would immediately have been put away: a memorable white mask, a framed wizarding photograph, and a Penseive.
The white mask was self-explanatory; Meli didn't have to see the black robes tossed on the bed to determine Miss Everett's extracurricular activities. Of far more interest to her was the silver-framed picture that lay rather than stood beside the Penseive.
On clearing the dust from this, she found that the two moving figures were both Hogwarts students, both in Slytherin robes, neither smiling (though they didn't look unhappy). One was a girl, whom Meli judged to be about five feet, eight inches, with shoulder-length blonde hair and steely gray eyes; the other was well over six feet tall, with longish greasy black hair and glittering black eyes.
Severus and Tinúviel, she realized with a shock. She was standing in Tinúviel Everett's bedroom.
She had met Tinúviel only once, a very long time ago, and though she had never again seen the face, she knew that Tinúviel had seen her often enough, peering out at her from behind a white mask whenever the Inner Circle gathered. This had been the first Death Eater whose presence had not turned the back of Meli's neck cold.
Glancing at her watch, Meli swung immediately into action. Yes, Aldarion Everett's sister had been a powerful witch, and there was no sense in leaving anything behind from which Voldemort might benefit. She slipped the picture into her pocket, then cast shrinking and covering charms on the Penseive before putting it, too, in her pocket.
On a sudden impulse, she quickly opened and rifled through the bureau drawers. In the back of Tinúviel's sock drawer, she found a small box, about the right size for holding letters. This, too, she shrank and pocketed. She found nothing else of interest in the bureau or the wardrobe.
The mask and robes she left. If they survived the blaze, Voldemort's followers would find them before the Aurors did; if they didn't survive, all the better. Meli didn't know what she had stumbled onto, but it was something best kept off of the Ministry's radar—which meant also giving Voldemort no reason for suspicion. With that thought, she tossed a vial of one of Snape's incendiary potions at the vanity table, then apparated back out to the corridor as it exploded into violent flames.
Everett was still waiting anxiously when she reappeared.
"I heard you looking," he said quickly. "Did you find anything?"
"Nothing of consequence to You-Know-Who is in there," she answered. "Now come on. We should have been well away by now."
She pulled him down to the ground floor, then pointed her wand in the general direction of the boiler room. "Execute."
There was a deafening explosion that rocked the house, followed immediately after by the rushing sound of a ball of flame expanding rapidly outward. Everett was too shocked to react, so Meli caught him in a bear hug and disapparated.
ooo
Once Aldarion Everett was settled into his temporary quarters in a deserted wing of the castle, Meli returned to Dumbledore's office to file an official report of the evening's activities. The Dicto-Quill dutifully recorded everything she said without comment, but Dumbledore watched her carefully and seemed to recognize that she was leaving out more than unimportant details. Once her report was completed and the Dicto-Quill set aside, he eyed her and raised his eyebrows.
"Was there something further, Rasa?" he inquired.
Meli cleared her throat. "I wasn't sure if it should go into the record, sir," she admitted. "If you think it best, I'm perfectly willing to record an addendum, but I wanted to run it past you first."
"By all means," Dumbledore replied, and he listened attentively as she described Everett's detour and the room beyond the warded door.
"I still have the items I removed," she finished, drawing them out of her pockets and restoring the Penseive and the box to their proper sizes. The contents of the Penseive, once uncovered, swirled and shone in the light of Dumbledore's office; Tinúviel had placed several memories in it before being called away to her death. "I'm not sure whom to give them to, sir," she confessed. "To you, obviously…but Severus might have some sort of claim, as well."
She hardly knew why she thought so. Perhaps it was because Snape was a Death Eater, perhaps because Tinúviel had obviously been his friend, perhaps something else. What struck her most, though, was that Snape was not the sort to stand for a photograph at all, much less with another person—unless that person was very important to him.
Dumbledore's countenance was thoughtful as he considered the three items on his desk, then he nodded. "Yes," he murmured. "I believe Severus has the claim here." To Meli's puzzled look, he replied with an eye-twinkling smile, "You see, I have some idea already of what Vi kept in both the box and the Penseive, and while Severus may know about the box, he knows little, if anything, about the Penseive."
Meli eyed him narrowly. "Is this something he ought to have known about?" she asked, an edge to her voice.
The twinkles faded from Dumbledore's eyes. "Perhaps," he admitted. "But Vi thought it too dangerous for the matter to come to light. She had little concern for her own safety, except that it was tied up with Severus', and it is still possible that the knowledge would endanger him…except that enough time has passed that Voldemort no longer feels the need to resort to legilimency with Severus."
An odd idea formed in Meli's mind. "You mean there was a time when Voldemort did that regularly," she hazarded. "Not only with Severus but also with Tinúviel."
Dumbledore nodded.
"And Severus never knew she was a spy?"
The headmaster clasped his hands thoughtfully. "I believe he may have guessed," he allowed. "But he was never expressly told so."
"And did she know about Severus?"
He shook his head. "She probably guessed, as well, but she never asked, and I never told her."
Meli stared at him. "Because it was the safest possible arrangement?" she continued, making an effort to curb her sarcastic tone. Wasn't that what he had so lambasted Snape and Zarekael for, after all—suppression of important information? If he could lie by omission for the sake of others' safety, he had no moral authority with which to condemn those others for the same act.
Her sarcasm slipped through anyway, to judge by Dumbledore's expression. He took it calmly enough, though he did bow his head a bit. "I am not infallible, Meli," he told her. "My judgments are not always as wise as I could wish. In this case, however, it was not my judgment alone that kept one from knowing about the other. Each asked that the other not be told, and each asked not to be told about the other."
Meli felt her brief flash of resentment die down. It was good to feel defensive in a friend's behalf, but she tended to forget sometimes that her friends were also shrewd, thinking adults. "I apologize, Headmaster," she said quietly. "Whether or not you know everything about the situation, I most certainly do not; that's something I have a tendency to forget from time to time—generally when it's most important to remember it."
"It's quite all right," Dumbledore assured her, a bit of his twinkle returning. "We are, none of us, infallible." He paused, then changed the subject. "Perhaps we should call Severus and hand over Vi's effects."
Two minutes later, Snape stepped out of the fireplace, fastidiously shaking ash from his robes as he did. He paused when he saw Meli, unsure if this was a stranger or Rasa in one of her many disguises.
"It's me, Severus," she assured him, with a tiny smirk. "I've just come from disappearing someone."
He narrowed his eyes in amusement, then turned to Dumbledore. "You asked me to come up, Headmaster?"
Dumbledore nodded, but before he could say anything, Snape's eyes came to rest on the desk and widened in shock. "Where did you get this?" he demanded, looking first to Dumbledore, then to Meli. He crossed to the desk in two strides and picked up the picture with suddenly trembling hands. Within the frame, his younger self gazed back at him and furrowed his brow.
Meli glanced at Dumbledore, who nodded fractionally, then she took a deep breath. "I was dispatched this evening to disappear Aldarion Everett before Voldemort did," she told him. "When he learned that I intended to blow up the house on the way out, he insisted on trying to recover anything from his sister's room that might survive the inferno and prove useful to Voldemort. She had warded the door…last time she left…so I had to apparate in." Snape's face had gone even paler than usual. "I checked through quickly, but these were the only things that seemed they could be of any value, to Voldemort or to anyone else." She pointed to the box and the Penseive. "As for the picture…" She shrugged lamely. "It seemed wrong for anyone but you to consign it to the flames."
Something in her last comment caused him to start and look at her narrowly, as if to see how much more she knew of the situation. He recovered, then turned his gaze back to the items still on Dumbledore's desk. "Tinúviel kept a Penseive?" he said hollowly.
Dumbledore nodded slowly. "Yes," he replied. "She never entered Voldemort's presence without first leaving certain memories behind—and some remained always in there. She confessed that she had not developed adequate enough skills as an occlumence to risk it."
Snape stared at him. "And how would you know about anything Tinúviel did as a Death Eater?" he asked.
The headmaster's countenance saddened. "I know because she reported to me, as you did," he replied.
"And I asked you not to tell me," Snape recalled numbly.
The two men seemed to have forgotten entirely about Meli; she felt like a sneaking eavesdropper, but she could think of no way to excuse herself without further invading.
Her conjecture was proven correct, however. Whatever the full story might be, Tinúviel Everett had been very important to Severus Snape.
It was a long moment before Snape spoke again. "And did you…ever tell her…about me?" he rasped. His mask was crumbling, and beneath it Meli saw the anguish of a man bereaved.
"She also asked me not to tell her," Dumbledore answered softly, a faint echo of grief touching his own voice and face. "But I believe she may have pieced together clues left lying before she made that request of me."
A small ray of hope brushed Snape's bared soul: at least there was a chance that she had not died believing him to be her enemy. Meli was glad for him, but it unnerved her to see the marble Potions master so affected. She had seen him angry, amused, nettled, frustrated—but never so clearly and deeply grieved.
Dumbledore permitted Snape another moment of silence, then rested a hand on the rim of the Penseive. "Based upon Meli's report and my memory, Vi was preparing to report to Voldemort when she died. Most of what you would wish to know is probably in the Penseive, and there may be more in this box."
At the mention of Meli's name, Snape looked up in surprise; he had indeed forgotten that she was there. She made no reaction, however, and he turned his eyes to the items still on Dumbledore's desk. "You want me…to take them?" he asked, sounding a touch bewildered.
"They are more yours than anyone else's," Dumbledore replied. "And I don't doubt that Vi would want you to have them."
Snape moved as if in a daze, slowly picking up the box and the Penseive and somehow balancing the two, along with the picture, in his hands as he returned to the fireplace. Had Meli not tossed in a handful of floo powder, he would probably have burned up in the flames without once noticing them. He disappeared in a green swirl of fire instead.
Meli looked somberly at Dumbledore. "I would never in my life have thought that anything had happened between Severus and Tinúviel Everett—or any woman, for that matter," she told him quietly.
The headmaster shook his head. "My dear Meli," he sighed, "that is entirely the point: nothing did."
14 SEPTEMBER 1979
Tippy was an unusual house elf no matter how you cracked it. In every respect except for English grammar, he had proven over and over again that, compared with his fellows, he was an excellent servant but otherwise extremely odd. It started with the fact that he still worked for a family that had rewarded him by giving him clothes a generation before, and it went downhill from there.
After Tinúviel's graduation, she had returned to her parents' house, where she lived with her father and brother, a small assortment of house elves, and Tippy. Within six weeks, Severus had learned to keep a beater's club or some other blunt object ready to hand, for Tippy would often come to him for help when Tinúviel got into a nasty situation with her father, whom St. Mungo's would not accept into the closed ward but who was becoming dangerous in his progressive insanity. It was not uncommon for Tinúviel to barricade herself in the pantry or a closet while her father screamed outside; as the weeks turned into years, it was not unheard-of for her to be so badly beaten that Tippy would flee to Severus for healing potions. Aldarion generally came out better than his sister did, but he was unable to help her. After the first year, Severus stopped asking why neither of them fought back, and he stopped offering to get Tinúviel out.
Aldarion had been a loner at Hogwarts, and Tinúviel had had only one friend. It was, therefore, always to Severus that Tippy went for help.
Technically speaking, Tippy's master was Maeglin Everett, but the house elf, perceiving that that gentleman was bordering on (if not wholly in the territory of) criminally insane, chose to defer instead to his master's children. It was in this way that he was simultaneously loyal and disloyal to his family. When Tinúviel told him to get help, he followed her orders, as a good house elf should do, but the following of those orders required him to rat on Maeglin—hence, the beater's club. Severus had become quite skilled at sorting words and phrases out from among the sounds of whacks and ouches that accompanied them.
On this occasion, however, Tippy came without being told to, and he beat himself nearly to a pulp while spilling out as quickly as possible what had happened. By the time the story had poured forth, Severus knew that he was too late to save Tinúviel, and there was only one thought in his mind as he gave Tippy new orders.
I've lost her for good, and I never once told her…
"I can't be the first one there," he told the house elf tersely. "Where's Aldarion?"
"Master Aldarion is visiting his aunt," Tippy sobbed.
"Right." Severus gritted his teeth. "Go to Hogwarts. Drag Dumbledore there if you have to. You have ten minutes."
Tippy nodded curtly, then disappeared.
Those ten minutes were among the worst of Severus Snape's life. Had he left as soon as he'd heard, he would still have arrived too late, but it killed him from the inside not to be doing something, however futile it might prove to be. He couldn't let Tinúviel die, even though it had happened before he knew about it.
He paced furiously, he checked several times to be sure that he had his wand, he made certain that his watch was working properly. It seemed that the entire decline and fall of the Roman Empire could have taken less time than those ten minutes. At last, though, they ended, and he apparated, appearing in the first floor corridor of the Everett mansion.
Maeglin Everett lay stunned on the floor, doubtless the work of Dumbledore, who knelt nearby. Severus caught sight of a booted foot and a black robe, saw the distraught Tippy hovering a few feet up the corridor from Dumbledore…
The headmaster looked up, his eyes not twinkling but shining with unfallen tears. "I'm sorry, Severus," he said quietly. "There's nothing I can do."
"May I…see her?" Severus asked, his throat tightening.
Dumbledore nodded and stood, moving to stand near Tippy.
"Oh, God."
A carving knife lay where Maeglin had probably dropped it after making a deep slash across Tinúviel's throat. She had bled out long before, the carpet soaking up the life that flooded from her. Dumbledore's white robes bore some stain of it, but they were not soaked through.
This is not real, Severus thought numbly, even as he closed the distance between him and the body of his best friend. I'm going to wake up any moment now and know that it was all just a nightmare.
Waking didn't come, though. He arrived at her side, knelt there as Dumbledore had done, looked on the face paled with death…and waking wouldn't come. Her short hair (cut to jaw-length just the week before) splayed around her head in a bloodied golden halo, and her hard eyes looked blankly past Severus and the mortal world to which he still belonged.
"Tinúviel!"
It was useless to call her, of course, aloud or otherwise, but even Severus Snape had moments of illogic and emotional response, and if there was ever a time for such, this was it. Tinúviel was more than his best friend; she was his only friend and the only person, moreover, with which he'd ever wanted some kind of future. His family, especially on his father's side, he had been happy to set aside; Hogwarts and his tormentors there were gladly left behind. Even Dumbledore was an ally of necessity rather than of friendship, and he would be easily and blissfully forgotten if the war ever ended.
Tinúviel, though, was a dear and beloved friend. Severus would never have chosen to set her aside, leave her behind, or forget her, and to have the choice made for him by a raving madman with a knife—
There was nothing he wanted more in that moment than to have Tinúviel back. He closed his eyes so tightly that his head soon ached, and he gave himself up to that thought for one agonizing minute—
There was a movement in front of him. His eyes flew open, but rather than the intrusion of Dumbledore, Tippy, or some other party on his grief, the source of the movement proved to be Tinúviel herself. Somehow, impossibly, she had stirred, and now as he watched, she sat up before his eyes.
Severus turned to look at Dumbledore, but the older wizard was just as astonished as he was. Tippy had leapt several feet backward and was watching the scene through eyes the size of platters. He looked back to find that Tinúviel was still there, sitting up as though she had wakened from a nap. And yet…
"Tinúviel?"
She turned her head to face him, but her eyes were still glassy with death. There was no life in her frame, only a weird, hollow animation that mocked him as much as the rich red that flooded the carpet they both sat on.
Blood. Blood on the carpet, on his hands, on his clothing, filling his nostrils with its powerful, sickening scent…Tinúviel's blood.
Tinúviel's life.
He had animated her somehow; by wishing her to live, he had brought her back, but only partially. The being in front of him had her face, but it had no knowledge of her smile or her cares. This was a shell, and somehow he had animated it.
"Headmaster," he breathed. "I don't—how do I—?"
He had no idea how to undo what he had done.
Severus would never recall exactly how he and Dumbledore managed it, but they did eventually figure out how to lay the shell to rest. Tinúviel returned to her previous state, and Severus looked miserably to Dumbledore.
"I've delayed calling the Aurors," the headmaster told him softly. "But I can't delay much longer."
Severus nodded slowly. "Then I suppose I had better go," he replied raggedly. It wouldn't do for Magical Law Enforcement to find him there, after all; if they suspected him of anything and decided to search him or take him in for questioning, there wasn't much he could do to hide the Dark Mark on his arm. He tried to remember that he actually cared about such things.
He stood woodenly, then managed not to recoil when Dumbledore laid a hand on his shoulder. "For what it's worth, Severus," the headmaster said gently, "I'm sorry."
But not sorry enough to have helped her and prevented this, Severus thought viciously. And now that it seems I've got some ability at necromancy, you'll be wanting to use it—to use me. He let that sentiment shine through to his eyes, then tripled its nastiness by answering, with a sneering drawl, "Really."
He pulled away, making no effort to mask his sudden sense of betrayal, then disapparated.
ooo
Alone in his flat once more, he had time to consider that sense. On the one hand, Dumbledore had done nothing to actively betray either him or Tinúviel; indeed, hadn't he just saved Severus a potentially disastrous brush with the Aurors? He hadn't had to, after all—especially after Severus' sudden display of uncontrolled necromancy.
Or rather, it had not been absolutely required of him to protect Severus from the Aurors. He could have done his civic duty and let the young Death Eater fall into the lap of Justice…but the deepest Slytherin instincts Severus possessed told him that Dumbledore had not betrayed him simply because it was not in the headmaster's best interest to do so. Severus' best interests—if he had any—were important only insofar as they served Dumbledore's interests, and Dumbledore's interests at the moment included having a spy in the Inner Circle. And towards that end, Dumbledore would be only too happy to keep the Aurors away from him and even, for icing on the cake, to give the impression that he somehow sympathized with Severus.
As if he could, Severus thought bitterly. Dumbledore has more friends than Shakespeare had plays; he could afford to lose one or two. All I had was Tinúviel.
At first he thought to sit on the couch, but it all but faced the chair that Tinúviel had customarily perched on when she came to visit. The couch was out, then, and so was the chair. He tried the kitchen next, but it, too, was full of ghosts. At last he retreated to the one place in his flat she had never entered: the bedroom.
Once there, with the door closed behind him, he fell back on his bed and willed himself not to think. It was harder this time than it had been the one time he'd tried it before; that time he'd shut down his brain almost immediately and kept it numbed for three days before Tinúviel—
He squeezed his eyes shut again, but that only returned his attention to the smell of blood—her blood. He had knelt in it, and it had clung to him when he'd stood again. The scent was overpowering, nauseating.
He rolled off of the bed and quickly changed, tossing aside the soiled clothes to be evanesced later. Some traces of blood had seeped through to the skin, so he washed his knees and shins as well as his hands before putting on a clean pair of trousers. He stared at his wash basin then, unwilling to discard the water and suddenly unsure about discarding his bloodied garments. This wasn't evidence of a murder, nor was it the blood of an enemy; it was Tinúviel's blood, and it deserved better than to be thrown away as rubbish. Just as Tinúviel herself had deserved far better than she'd received.
Severus pondered the basin calculatedly, although it could be argued that his calculations were influenced, or outright directed, by a dementia of emotion that rather skewed reality and, ergo, logic. After several minutes of chillingly clear thought, he retrieved his clothes and washed them in the basin. Then he placed his towel in the wash water, and, when it was sopping, put in another, larger one. Between them, the two towels absorbed all of the bloody water.
These he removed from the basin and laid out in the bathtub to dry. He hung his rinsed-out clothes on the shower-curtain rod, then returned to the bedroom.
He succeeded in not thinking long enough to fall eventually into a stupor, and when he woke from that, the towels and clothes were finally dry. He took them from the bathroom to the front room and laid them out in front of the hearth.
Next he started a fire in the fireplace. When it was going strong, he picked up the last pieces of Tinúviel Everett that were left to him, and slowly, one by one, he threw them into the fire. There was no way to bury blood, but cremation—or whatever subset of cremation this might be considered to be—was far more honorable than being poured down a drain. Severus considered, too, though not entirely rationally, that between Tinúviel's sense of humor and her awareness of her short temper, she would have appreciated such an end.
He knelt in front of the fire for an untold length of time, until it had spent itself and nothing was left of it but the embers. Then, and only then, did he finally lower his outward calm and allow the tears to flow at last.
ooo
The trial had been a mere formality, and, by the end, it had also become a macabre joke, much to Severus' disgust. Maeglin Everett had been lucid when they revived him and had confessed to everything. His barrister had immediately filed a motion to have the confession withheld because his client had been in a "delicate state of mind in the wake of his daughter's tragic, unfortunate, accidental death." The judge, perhaps missing the "accidental" part of the claim, had actually ruled in the defendant's favor.
That, of course, had necessitated the calling forth of witnesses, and the only available witnesses for the prosecution were Aldarion Everett, who had not witnessed the event; Albus Dumbledore, who had been first on the scene after the event; and Tippy, who could not be expected to testify against his master.
The prosecutor did his best, however, and to everyone's shock (including the despicable barrister's, who went for a sympathy move with the jury by affecting to keel over from a heart attack), Tippy acquitted himself quite well. Granted, his three hours in the witness box were extremely violent ones, made all the more so by the prosecutor's loan of a beater's club, but he spilled the entire story, giving details that only a true eyewitness could have observed and so effectively tightening the noose around his master's neck that even the jurors were uncomfortably aware of the snugness of their collars.
The barrister, having made a remarkable and ungracious recovery from his coronary difficulties, discovered the presence of mind to file an insanity plea. The prosecutor, who might originally have accepted it and struck a bargain, was by this time desirous of putting the barrister in his place. He therefore fought tooth and nail and carried the day, with the result that Maeglin Everett finished his days not in St. Mungo's but in one of the lighter pits (if such a thing truly existed) of Azkaban. This was far worse than most people thought he deserved, given that it was the barrister and not the insane man who would benefit most from the Dementors' company, but Severus, at least, was satisfied.
Tippy, who had been given clothes before Tinúviel was born, at last left his beloved station and went in search of other employment. No family was willing to have him, though, so he wandered aimlessly for a year or so—and then came to Hogwarts a mere two months before Severus was hired on as the Potions master there. The two had never precisely been friends, but Severus had a soft (well, a less hard) spot in his heart for Tippy out of gratitude for what little the house elf had been able to do for his best friend. And perhaps, too, he saw Tippy as one of the last surviving remnants of Tinúviel Everett.