And now that we've mentioned Sinistra, forget her. She'll crop up later, but not for a while. Transitions, transitions... (sigh).
In the meantime the Sues multiply yet again. Not that Sinistra won't be a Sue, but first you have to meet Luna's dad. Oh, yes. Hooray for Sues.
The offices of the Quibbler were in an old warehouse that had been left dingy in an almost studied sort of way. Graffiti artists had long been using it as a canvas for all manner of comment, a practice the editorial board encouraged as an expression of democracy. The façade peeled in many places. The gilt logo of the Quibbler was cobbled together from letters of different sizes and shapes which constantly had to be replaced due to their popularity as souvenirs with the college-age crowd. A previous owner had assembled a graveyard of gargoyles — pinched from other buildings — on the roof. Homeless bundles nursed their wine against its periphery, though only one or two of them would be there at any given time.
Muggles who passed the building thought it just dodgy enough to be a front for the Mossad (or the CIA, or some Libyan terrorist network), though the logic underlying these thoughts was hard to pin down and probably wrong. Perhaps it had something to do with the clean hair of the homeless folk.
Inside the scene appeared to be one of happy anarchy. So many languages were spoken on certain floors that one might have thought oneself at a marketplace in the Third World. Flora and fauna of kingdoms magical and mundane graced the interior. Lovegood's staff ranged the gamut from little old ladies (some with cats, present) to Hogwarts dropouts to aging tenors to millionaires and Muggles. ("They fit in perfectly," he had explained to the Ministry when asked about the Muggles. "Some of them wear robes. They think we're quite normal.") More than one hidden genius, dissatisfied with the world outside, had found his way to the bosom of Mr. Lovegood and his endless understanding: he allowed holidays whenever one's religion dictated them regardless of whether said religion had more than one adherent.
The downside of running Noah's Ark, however, was that one was constantly being investigated by authorities. As a result fully half the staff had jobs centred around procuring the necessary permits, stamps, signatures, and goodwill required to keep the enterprise afloat (and as inconspicuous in its workings as possible). A number of brilliant minds devised ways for the things that got written by the Quibbler's vast network of familiars, paid and unpaid, to find their way into the building unobstructed, as very few people with access to the warehouse actually wrote anything. A key department merged the magic and Muggle editions of the Quibbler into a single physical entity that would read as either magic or Muggle depending on the eyes of the beholder. A legal team lived in the basement. For all its cacaphony the Quibbler was remarkably organised.
And in fact one could be forgiven for thinking that Lovegood presided over a particularly ersatz intelligence apparatus. He did nothing to disabuse anyone of the impression. The Quibbler simply made sure it was considered an intelligence apparatus of the insane.
Snape's dislike of all things Lovegood ostensibly had its roots in two old grievances: Lovegood's contribution to the Levicorpus disaster, and his lack of contribution to the near-disaster of the werewolf bait. The Hogwarts-only predecessor of the Quibbler had been the staircase leading to the Divination classroom, where writing appeared on the walls and disappeared when it had outlived its interest, or at the end of the week. Dumbledore had turned a benign eye to it when it had been pointed out by professors displeased with having the pattern of their underpants be made a matter of public discourse.
"Now, now, Maskelyne. You know the forces of Divination are mysterious. If they have chosen to speak to this wall, who are we to disagree?"
"But Headmaster, I do not wear… I mean, purple lizards!"
"Yes, the forces of Divination are mysterious like that," the headmaster had smiled.
Interspersed with the blatant mythmongering, however, had been nuggets of truth so pointed they could make one's hair grey, and did. The victims typically pretended these nuggets too were as absurd as the wall's claim that a Tessaresdecatite was loose in the Charms classroom, but it was impossible to erase their influence completely. Had Silvia Berthoud not been sent home after the wall tipped everyone off to her addiction to a certain Egyptian drug? More than one friendship had grown strained. Revenge had been plotted against the anonymous author. Notes of protest had been scribbled on the wall, but they'd disappeared as if into quicksand. Snape had become convinced of the Wall's importance one afternoon when it came out with a long list of Dark paraphernalia hidden around the castle, three items of which had belonged to him, and which - he was sure of it - he had hidden very well.
The Wall had had no discernible agenda. It had seemed to think some things unfair, but also published things it thought humourous or educational, such as the Guide to Playing Records without a Record Player. Snape had figured out the identity of the culprit on the basis of that very essay, having discovered Lovegood doing his Arithmancy homework by wandlight in a broom closet while The Marriage of Figaro spun merrily over his head. Proof positive: the essay had appeared the very next day.
Dumbledore had been dismissive of the news, Malfoy marginally more so. "Lovegood? My dear Severus, one would need to be brilliant to engineer something like the Wall, and I assure you Lovegood is perfectly ordinary. My sources indicate that Dumbledore himself is behind it. Just the sort of thing the old man would find amusing, no?"
"How do you do it?" Snape had demanded upon cornering Lovegood once in the owlery. "How do you get inside their bloody offices?" And then in an unforgivable moment of weakness he'd added, "Teach me."
Lovegood had been, and remained, the calmest person Snape had ever met. "I'm afraid the cardinal rule of journalism is to never reveal one's sources," he'd replied without the merest hint of malice.
He'd also frozen Snape's hand without the merest hint of malice when Snape, irked by his manner, had wisely reached for his wand.
That had been in Snape's first year. By his third he had noticed that the Wall was keeping score of the Snape-Marauders love affair, a detail so strange he at first thought he was inventing it. But there it was: his wand had accidentally brushed a spot on one of the steps and it had spread into a miniscule image of Potter hexing him. A quick check of the other marks had yielded similar results. He'd actually skipped Potions that day, instead spending the afternoon in trying to unravel the Arithmancy behind the thing, because — a miracle — the Wall seemed to believe that he was ahead. Thereafter he'd checked the step after each encounter with the Gryffindors, and each time a new set of marks had appeared. He'd even tested it a few times, resisting the impulse to retaliate when Black made his eyes water, for instance, to see how the Wall would record the encounters — and had apparently earned himself points for self-restraint.
Peculiarly enough, Lovegood had been gone by then. To the best of Snape's recollections he'd only been at Hogwarts during Snape's first year, but Snape didn't entirely trust those recollections. Perhaps he'd been a Sixth Year. Or perhaps he had been a Seventh Year after all. Or perhaps he'd taken his NEWTs early. In any case Lovegood had been much older than him.
Which made it all the more peculiar - but wasn't everything Lovegood peculiar? - that he'd been so around. Seventh Years didn't talk to First Years. And yet he'd appear out of nowhere when Snape was alone and talk to him about Kafka for no discernible purpose. Typically he would not even acknowledge Snape in the hallways for months afterward, contriving to not hear if Snape wanted to talk about something of import, until he'd appear again, out of nowhere, and talk about Borges or Wilde or Ecclesiastes. With perfect calm, this, and for no discernible purpose. Ever.
"What do you want from me?" Snape had once asked him.
The question had not interested Lovegood enough to provoke a reply, and Snape wouldn't have understood the fine theoretical concepts like "reinforcing behaviour" that Lovegood had been working on at the time. He also wouldn't have believed the simplest answer, which was that Lovegood rather liked Snape, or at least had positive feelings for the boy - much the same way one likes certain half-forgotten books on one's shelf and, on impulse, picks them up from time to time to re-read a passage or two.
The Wall had continued to operate (according to principles unknown) for several years before it became silent and white. It was eventually replaced by the Quibbler; a pestilence yet more intolerable as its back issues did not vanish at the end of a week.
Snape had just managed to put Lovegood out of his mind entirely — his attention being occupied with Potter and Evans and the rest of the school, and their occupation with him, and the horror of it — when Annie Snodgrass, second-year Gryffindor and keen fan of the Quibbler, emitted a shriek at breakfast:
"You guys, look at this! There's been a lynching at Hogwarts!"
Annie Snodgrass often shrieked. Shrieks, in fact, were her preferred form of communication. They typically concerned Rufus Wormwrite, a singer as popular with the editorial board of the Quibbler as he was with hormonal females, but Potter and Black (as well as a rotating cast of other boys) were shrieked over often as well. So it had taken a moment for the importance of this particular shriek to sink in.
"No, seriously…" Her mouth had opened into a very wide and delighted cavern. "We had a lynching! Four Gryffindor boys... Wait, hey, Potter - wasn't that...?"
Word of the goings-on at Hogwarts rarely leaked to the world outside, which is why a small crowd formed around Annie Snodgrass at once.
"What's a lynching?" Pip Robichaux had asked. She was a first-year and short on vocabulary.
"It's like an orgy, stupid," Annie had begun as Snape slipped out of the Great Hall.
Lovegood's two-page spread had touched on everything from Kristallnacht to Jim Crow, mentioned Freud, hinted dark hints about the Inquisition, and concluded that the four Gryffindor boys — two of whom were described as being from unrespectable but respected old families — ought to be put on trial at once, with a stint at the Eymerich Correction Home (known as "Azkaban Jr.") as punishment, particularly since they had a prior record of such misdemeanours. It was a masterpiece, as dense on details as it was on hyperbole. Snape had not put his wand away all week. Neither had the Gryffindor boys, some of whom, for the first time in their lives, had discovered their family loyalty. Worse, Snape's mother had sent him a Stinger so vitriolic that three doses of rose-balm had failed to put down the swelling.
How very like Mum, Snape had thought bitterly; punishing me for not defending myself by depriving me of the use of my hands.
Stingers were considered child abuse, and therefore illegal. Snape's own loyalties had made it impossible for him to go to Madam Lovelace at the infirmary, so he had suffered in silence and slept little, maddening himself instead with choicy thoughts of torture aimed at Lovegood, the Gryffindors, and society at large. He had perversely earned a bit of admiration in his own house, however, for having connections in the press.
His disconnection in the press had even had the nerve to send him a note with instructions on how to get into the old warehouse should the need ever arise, knowing full well that Snape - then and for several years after - would not have the skills necessary to get into the drain.
Snape felt the wards on the sink skim his robes, prod his eyes and fingers, then force his mouth open and run themselves over his teeth. Brilliant. There was only one version of the Polyjuice Potion which took full account of biometric data, and the recipe for that one was even more restricted than Moste Potente Potions: a single copy resided in the Liquid Patent Office at the Ministry, a single copy was encoded in one of Snape's notebooks, and a single copy was in a drawer in what had been Dora Lovegood's study. The Wizarding world had had to keep up with the Muggles, after all; at the time Moste Potente Potions was written anthropometry would have seemed laughable. So the transformational charms, the tooth-straighteners, the Polyjuice — all were no more precise than a first impression; and all regularly cost lives on the Floo Network. Incompetence was as much a fact of the magic as of the Muggle world.
The good editor was in his office, reading letters from his flock. After the death of his wife he had apparently taken to religious headgear - a fact Snape noted with some discomfort. He had also traded the thin grace of his youth for a structure of lines and shadows: still graceful, but with ominous depths holding the bones together; skin thin and architectured as a spiderweb. Small parentheses had appeared around the mouth. The glasses framed the same light eyes in deeper sockets. Yet the forehead was taut and clear. It appeared Lovegood wasn't worrying himself overmuch, at least not habitually.
"Professor Snape. Good evening."
Simon Lovegood was a Hufflepuff: a decision the Sorting Hat had made before the little blonde boy had gotten anywhere near the chair.
"You're a Hufflepuff," his future wife had intoned, towards the end of their first conversation. She had been a Ravenclaw and a year ahead of him. She had also been blunt in matters of import.
"Yes."
"Don't you think the Sorting Hat made a mistake?"
Simon had allowed a tendril of smile to escape the corner of his mouth. "I don't."
She'd scrutinised him. "Why's that? You know what they say about Hufflepuffs in Ravenclaw."
"Gutta cavat lapidem," he'd replied. This was not what Ravenclaws said about Hufflepuffs at all; but it was the sort of drop that wore away stones of prejudice where Ravenclaws were concerned.
"Well..."
She'd thought about this for a time, which Simon had noted with complaisance. Then she'd said, "Well, I suppose it works. We call you a wastebasket taxon — if we're feeling kind — but from taxonomy via paleoanthropology we get to taphonomy, to erosion, and to gutta cavat lapidem — not quite the same thing, but with a bit of imagination..."
This had been her peculiar genius: to take a thought and let it domino into other thoughts until Mongolia had become a Potions ingredient. It later helped save lives. At school, however, it had been very annoying. Few people could stand Dora Eitmann other than those who were so self-absorbed they didn't listen to what she said: it was just too much effort trying to keep up with her bridgeless hops and jumps.
"If I ever had a band," she'd added touchingly, just before she fled down the staircase to class, "I'd call it Wastebasket Taxon. You know I have a guitar made from the skeleton of a Codswallop?"
Lovegood had reacted as calmly to the coup de foudre as he did to everything else. His thoughts were an endless series of permutations of various eventualities, constantly being recalculated; he'd simply erased the futures that did not account for love and a wife from his mind and started learning Dora. She'd liked scarves and democracy.
"Your daughter, Lovegood, is becoming a nuisance."
The cleaning charms had missed a spot on Snape's shoulder, which Lovegood discreetly caused to vanish while waving two teacups toward the samovar in the corner.
"She has been a nuisance since her first day — it seems to run in the family — and she has lately become too much of a nuisance, and I strongly suggest you do something. The consequences could be grave for reasons that have nothing to do with me."
"Have a cup. I forget - do you drink it the Russian way, with a spot of jam alongside?" A flick of his wand brought an array of possible jams into the air between them. "I recommend the kvetchnfruit; it turned out beautifully this year."
"Do not play Dumbledore with me," said Snape, unamused.
"I'm not; I'm cold," said Lovegood. The jars flew back to the shelf behind him in a graceful arc. "She rather likes you, you know. I'm sure she's not trying to be a nuisance intentionally."
"Of course not. She is completely devoid of intention, attention, and all the other qualities that make people human; but she does know how to talk. This has proved unfortunate more than once."
"Has it? I was under the impression that out of all her teachers you're the most tolerant of her comments."
"Tell me more," Snape hissed, "because this is a very odd impression to be under. Though of course if you get your impressions from her it's hardly surprising."
Lovegood regarded him with an expression gotten from her. (Snape twitched. He'd be smiling like her next. Azkaban was surely preferable to staring at this inanity.) "Well..."
"Are you also under the impression that gandywooks and silverillipedes abduct Filch from time to time?"said Snape helpfully. "Or that McGonagall puts brandy in her tea? Or that Dumbledore spends his nights at Madam Rosmerta's?"
"Well, unlike most of the staff you actually hear her," Lovegood, said, bemused.
"How lucky for them. But I don't suppose you've told her to ask Flitwick if he hails from a long race of jellyfish or something."
"You're right, I haven't."
"How negligent of you."
The jar of kvetchnfruit preserve was back in the air, where a little silver plate and littler silver spoon rose to meet it.
"I've discovered a reference to his having some goblin blood in him, however, which I'm not sure I believe, but no jellyfish."
"You of all people dare to be the arbiter of bloodlines," Snape said softly. The rims of his nostrils had gone white. Lovegood did not appear to find this worrying at all, though if Snape had turned to a student with a similar expression the student would have withered into nothingness at once.
"What are you saying, Severus? Are you part goblin?"
For the second time and in a similar rage Snape found himself drawing on Lovegood, but this time restrained himself before the wand was out of his sleeve. In their previous such encounter he had been sent flying across Knockturn Alley in a full-body bind. He'd been foolish: to draw on a more experienced older boy knowing his disadvantage was bad enough; to do it knowing his wand was quivering with emotion was unforgivable. The lesson had been learned, of course. To all appearances Lovegood did not move an eyelash. To all appearances Lovegood had not moved an eyelash then, though the first thing Snape had noticed after the spell had hit him was the wand that had not been in Lovegood's hand. Snape's curse had been partly blocked and more than partly mis-aimed.
"I think it a poor idea to waste your new lease on life in cursing everyone," Lovegood had said to him, gently. And he'd turned and walked away.
It had been a betrayal of the grossest magnitude when the werewolf debacle had gone unremarked. Snape hadn't been sure what he'd expected of Lovegood, but surely those desultory conversations had been indicative of something - a loyalty without obligations, perhaps, if not a friendship; an allegiance of sorts; a nod of belonging. If the step with the tally was not meant as encouragement, what was it?
There was simply no way Lovegood could have not known. The Wall had known everything. It had had blades of grass in its employ, or insects; it had reported goings-on in the Forest; it had had sources inside the Lake. It had somehow overheard conversations happening in the girls' bathroom at the Three Broomsticks. It had reported the composition of the liquid that Potter had poured into Evans' pumpkin juice with startling precision. In Snape's world the Wall (or was it Lovegood?) had become, quite literally, the Big Brother of proverb.
He had seethed quietly, vowing to strangle Lovegood on the first possible occasion, and working out a very nice curse for the purpose.
As far as anyone could tell, however, Lovegood had disappeared off the face of the earth after finishing school. The vow had had to wait. Snape suspected-- a suspicion that had only gotten stronger over the years-- that some sort of military stint had been served, perhaps one featuring code names and champagne and people known as "agents", but of course there had been no way to tell. In any case it had been a surprise to discover Lovegood in Knockturn Alley one summer, looking normal, perusing some unintelligible bit of graffiti and adjusting his glasses as if he had never done anything wrong in his life.
Feeling very mature, Snape had proceeded to deliver some scathing remarks (which, mercifully, he no longer recalled) and had drawn his wand in the fever of a delusion in which he, at fourteen, brought all the forces that had ever wronged him grovelling to their knees. His wand had described an operatic arc. He had even expected a thunderclap to sound in the background, for emphasis.
We must excuse him.
No, we really must excuse him. Instead of reporting the danger of keeping unleashed werewolves about the school, the Wall had focused on Ten Ways to Trip a Poltergeist, Billy Hogarth's alleged crush on Moaning Myrtle, an amusingly-shaped balustrade in the Astronomy Tower, McGonagall's toenails (and the medicinal uses thereof), and a retrospective of Israeli cinema.
"Israeli cinema? You report every time a First Year gets his pumpkin juice spiked as if it were the end of civilisation; I almost got killed --"
Lovegood had been unperturbed.
"I have a certain fondness for Israeli cinema."
Snape, unlike his earlier self, took a breath — keenly aware of the careful calculations the other man was making — and forced himself to relax. "My apologies."
"Think nothing of it."
"Your question was vile."
"My apologies," said Lovegood deliberately. The wand remained pointed at Snape.
"And your daughter's question was vile, an incitement to violence even."
"From Luna? No."
"In certain circumstances," said Snape. "In certain company."
With a very subtle inclination of his head Lovegood conceded the point, then caused the wand to disappear. "House Slytherin does consider pedigree important."
"And House Ravenclaw considers primitivity fascinating," said Snape, again turning purple with vitriol. "Need I remind you that a number of people in her House and Year have parents with a record of experimenting on goblins?"
"She was only curious, you know. I'd been researching goblin customs -- how they've been influenced by contact with Wizarding society and vice versa --"
"No doubt," Snape said, his voice sharp as ice, "for an article on how they drink the blood of innocent Wizardly babies."
There was a pause during which Lovegood did nothing more than keep his eyes turned in Snape's general direction: endless eyes, blue and endless as a midsummer day.
"I believe we've exhausted this digression. What has Luna done to make you throw sanity to the winds and actually come to see me?"
Snape summoned a modicum of calm and voiced his opinion that children, particularly stupid ones like Lovegood's, should not be privy to information about intelligence-gathering techniques, much less to an almost-built mechanism, and that it was dangerous to let her keep knowing what she knew, since lives were at stake, which was obviously not as important as the sighting of a Bibblinewt in Chipping Barnet, but given that Luna had absolutely no control over her impulse to announce things --
"I can't, Severus," said Lovegood flatly. "I cannot, and wouldn't, and will not perform a memory charm on my daughter; you knew that."
He did know it, of course. Anything of the sort would probably confine the child to St. Mungo's for the rest of her life. The trouble with Luna was that her mind was a much more haphazard affair than that of most people. It wasn't that she was forgetful: far from it. She just filed things away differently, folded thoughts into the shape of their least relevant object, so that a night at the opera might take the form of a paper crane. Obliviate wouldn't know where to look. Snape had once tried Legilimency on her: it had been like taking a swig from a butterbeer bottle only to find it full of motheaten lace. He'd been unable to get the taste out of his mouth for a week.
"Congratulations on raising a creature that is impervious to the skills of the Dark Lord," said Snape maliciously. "But the goblin episode was symptomatic. If you'd taught her the question you might have taught her the answer, and how, and when and where, and with whom to ask it, and when not to."
"I don't know the answer," said Lovegood, solemn as a child.
"Don't change the subject," said Snape. His fingers were twitching toward the hem of his sleeve. "At some inopportune moment she'll inform everyone within earshot that I keep a Tengu on life support in my laboratorium. Such comments have a way of being noticed and travelling far."
"And then being forgotten if their source is considered prone to believing absurdities. She's quite as likely to announce that Redbellied Wurstknockers have colonised Easter Island."
Snape felt a momentary vertigo. "Have they?"
"Maybe." A rather smudged telegram rose from the desk toward Snape. "One of my overseas sources swears to it. I was considering writing an article, though perhaps a feelie, or a film, would be a better medium--"
"Why do you fill her mind with this rubbish?"
Lovegood took a sip of his tea. "You're as bad as your master."
"I'm surprised you don't think I'm worse, given your propensity for gratuitous exaggeration."
"No, you misunderstand. He thinks himself above this rubbish too; you all do. He doesn't think about bread and entertainment - he doesn't even notice them."
"Bread and entertainment are luxuries," Snape observed drily, "when you're too busy taking over the world, and killing, and dying, and all those other things that don't involve butterflies."
"Exactly. He doesn't notice the pastimes of the hoi polloi except to laugh at them. A failure of imagination, of course, but one that works out very well for us."
Snape stared at him.
"Put your wand away, Severus; please."
He did so, wondering how Lovegood could have drawn first. "Do not presume to instruct me in the Dark Lord's imagination, Lovegood. His imagination is--"
"Limited," said Lovegood. "He has never taken an interest in the Quibbler."
For a moment Snape thought Lovegood truly was mad. "You expect the Dark Lord to take out a subscription? Is it the cross-runes you think will amuse him or the gossip about singers addicted to hellebore?"
"Oh, do have a cup of tea," said Lovegood, ever placid. "I simply think that if one is going to take over the world one ought to pay attention to the things that make the world go round, like bread and entertainment. And tea. There's often more to them than meets the eye."
"I see. You believe the Dark Lord needs a pair of Bendy Lenses, detach along the perforated line, free with next Tuesday's issue at participating retailers only."
Lovegood disregarded this and beckoned at one of his bookshelves with the tip of his wand. "For instance, this —" a thick book tumbled out of a shelf, caught itself before hitting the floor, and flapped labouriously to the desk in puffs of dust — "is my copy of the treatise on mercury by Paracelsus. I believe you know it?"
There was a slight change in Snape's manner: an alertness, a bristling.
"I have had occasion to consult it in the past."
"So did my wife. I believe her copy is — yes, knocking at the door."
A similar volume staggered through the air and barely missed Snape before coming to an erratic halt in front of him. Snape kept his eyes narrowed upon Lovegood, who busied himself with another cup of tea.
"Perhaps you'd like to glance through them."
"I'm acquainted with the treatise on mercury," Snape demurred. "It's indispensible, though aimed more at a Muggle audience than at us. For all the good that it did Isaac Newton."
"As I'm sure you're aware, these two copies are identical in every respect but one. There is a spell, I believe…"
Snape considered the implications of this. His memory of the conversation would need to be re-knit anyway, but the dangerous moments in it were multiplying at an alarming rate: tugging on associations yet untouched, tangling threads that up until then he had managed to keep separate. On the other hand, these purposeless conversations had an odd life of their own.
"Sic. In every respect but the --"
No: Lovegood was not casting any charms. Nevertheless a disturbing suspicion had seized Snape's insides, which was -- even more disturbingly -- confirmed a moment later when the latest issue of the Quibbler sidled up to him from the corner of Lovegood's desk.
"In every respect but the words," Lovegood supplied.
Again Snape wondered how he got himself into these discussions. ("I don't want to know," he protested, or might have protested, but Lovegood gave no indication of having heard.)
"Our main story this week is about Clavius Konigsberg, mysterious prince of Pythgania, and his rumoured affair with Juliette Françoise-Messaline Arlequine d'Ablis de la Roche-Robécourt. Interesting material: you might want to peruse it. The photograph is most flattering to Madame Françoise's legs."
And it was. Snape let his mind go blank for a moment, then contemplated Blaise Zabini's mother, who was laughing a silver laugh on the arm of a dark and transparently very rich man. Her dress robes were cut very tight, and a breeze — most likely designed by Messrs. Vorris & Vox for a substantial price tag — teased the slits of the robe along a lovely length of skin. The caption featured three exclamation points and an appreciative whistle.
He forced himself to read the article, struggling to Occlude this new information while doing so. It didn't work.
He then gave up and traced a fidgety pattern on it with his wand. It didn't work. After another try, and a quizzical look at Lovegood, and three other versions of the pattern -- which made the Quibbler wiggle and giggle, claiming that it was ticklish -- he narrowed his eyes (Lovegood deflected the hex) and muttered "Sic," with a tap, to the page.
In an instant the photograph, legs and all, had melted and Snape was staring at a detailed wizarding map of the Malfoys' residence.
"Notice the date has changed?" said Lovegood, like a child who wanted a pat on the head. "It's a built-in Legilimency aid. We did, in fact, publish a much less detailed plan of this house on that date, in the regular part of the issue... the architecture digest, I believe."
This was a disaster: the Quibbler, evidently, was a broadsheet organ of the resistance. Snape hadn't known this. He didn't want to know it. It was almost painful thinking how much of his memory would now have to be repackaged, unassumingly, so that he did not know it the next time the Dark Lord turned his awful eyes into him.
"This is a disaster," he said aloud.
When he turned the page he further learned that the Quibbler's "Lovestrike!" page was not, as he had previously supposed, a way for people of minimal intelligence to meet other people of minimal intelligence for moonlit walks on the beach. It was a way for people called "the Inquisitor" and "E" and "Shadayim" to meet whomever they were supposed to meet and exchange whatever goodies they were supposed to exchange: that very night (he learned) "Sword" would model for a certain figure-drawing class, and on Sunday next he learned that "Wormwood" would be selling old phonograph cylinders at a certain antiques fair in Wales; presumably their contacts would develop an itch for sketching nudes or scratchy songs from the Twenties. The only thing mitigating the dreadful nausea Snape felt was a vague smugness at how conspicuously these characters had named themselves. He'd been subtle. They were just begging to be branded as spies. They had not, as he had, outgrown the sort of impulse that drives a kid to label himself "the Half-Blood Prince."
At that time it would not have occurred to him that his contact in the Order had been married to Lovegood. It would also have not occurred to him to Sic an issue of the Quibbler, for the equally simple reason that the Quibbler was rubbish. A failure of imagination, as Lovegood had so helpfully said.
"Our circulation is higher now than it has ever been," Lovegood was saying, "and we even have a foothold in the international market."
"Enough."
"There is something to be said about hiding things in plain sight," he went on. "We don't even bother to code half of it. Nobody Serious reads the tabloids..."
They regarded each other for a time.
"So all this rubbish—"
"It's very democratic rubbish."
"I dislike democracy," said Snape with a sneer.
"Almost all of it is true, as it happens; though we make sure much of it is unverifiable — Redbellied Wurstknockers and such — so that it seems to be rubbish, if anyone who's too good for rubbish cares to look. And it's all delightful, don't you think? People find it delightful. Even when there's some doubt about whether something we print is strictly speaking true, people find it delightful to believe in delightful things."
There was no sarcasm in Lovegood's manner, no sign of a frown; no excitement, no tension; not even this fabled delight: just the clear expanse of forehead and the glasses and clear eyes and the wisps of whitening pale hair.
"Of course, delightful things might be completely beside the point, if the point is Freedom or World Domination or something Serious like that," he went on, "but I've found the best defense against Serious Things to be delight, really. Don't you think?"
"Spare me the philosophy."
The samovar abandoned its place in the corner and careened onto the desk between them, spilling tea, of which Snape finally accepted a cup, and steam, which momentarily fogged Lovegood's glasses.
"As to Luna, you've noticed she's impervious to the skills of the Dark Lord. The things she says are usually true, but so unimportant and so uninteresting to Serious People that they don't notice her at all. They think she's crazy. You yourself came to me the second you needed to communicate something important to her."
"I almost get the feeling," Snape muttered, "that you're using her as a sort of experiment."
"Not at all. I treat her as an equal, as I've been trying to explain to you. Nobody else does. Really, who do you envision believing her? The only recorded mention of your pet is from an opium-dazed traveller who devoted much of his manuscript to Monopods. A physical impossibility. Or hogwash, as Hermione Granger would say."
Evidently this failed to satisfy Snape, whose lips tightened into a forbidding line.
"Forgive me if I'm wrong, but bored housewives believe that Cornelius Fudge keeps no less than three veela mistresses. Hogwash, as Hermione Granger would say."
"Mm... you'd be surprised. Fudge is quite the -"
"Never mind that!" snapped Snape, exasperated. "I don't want a twelve-year-old imbecile with no concept of self-censorship anywhere near my laboratorium. Whether anyone happens to believe her or happens to remember what she says is irrelevant, because she talks, and she's a liability, and all these ridiculous contortions -" he hurled the magazine at Lovegood - "are going to be completely useless if she gives me away. What do I have to do to make you understand that!"
Lovegood pointed out that twelve-year-old imbeciles were never anywhere near Snape's laboratorium until he gave them a detention, and that Luna would have had nothing to talk about if Snape had been more careful, and that he was not to refer to her as an imbecile, please. And Snape pointed out that he could refer to her as whatever he pleased, and that he would not have had to refer to her as an imbecile if she was not, in fact, an imbecile, which she might not have been if Lovegood had done a better job of raising her, which he might have done if he'd realised that the Dark Lord was not a joke and not a bit of sophistry but a very serious threat, and even though Lovegood refused to believe that Serious Things were serious they were serious anyway, and had to be taken seriously, and could that blasted magazine shut up?
"You hurt it," said Lovegood, calm as the Hogwarts lake, as he picked up the magazine from the floor where it was howling. "You shouldn't throw it like that; it has a weak spine."
"Stop that," whispered Snape. He wasn't sure what exactly he meant, though he knew he'd meant to say something very important before that digression on parenting. "That... legerdemind. Stop it."
"I'm not doing anything, Severus."
For his part Lovegood was pleased that Snape had forgotten to ask him how he'd come by the details of the case, but it was perfectly true that he wasn't doing anything.
"Well stop it anyway."
(He couldn't.) "I'm not doing anything, Severus; you give me too much credit." (He wasn't.) "You can't blame me for objecting to my daughter's being called an imbecile."
"Of course," sneered Snape, "it's far more important to focus on the spurious damage my vocabulary does to her, not the damage her vocabulary can do to me -- to all of us. There's very little standing in the Dark Lord's way --"
"You give yourself too much credit," Lovegood said placidly. "We're all doing our bit, you know."
"All of which," Snape returned to his earlier point, wondering why the man was so frustratingly obtuse, like Luna or a student,as to make him repeat himself, "will be absolutely irrelevant if she gives me away. All the bits we do. All of us."
"And if she does?"
There was a dense silence, during which certain negotiations took place, establishing that yes, Lovegood was serious, and that no, wands would not be drawn.
"I really think you're overreacting."
"Am I?"
"Well -- you didn't tell her what were doing. You didn't explain how the thing works. Even if she tells someone you keep a dissected Tengu stashed about your rooms, and even if someone believes her, and even if someone understands what that means, and even if word gets around --"
"You can't be serious," said Snape, for whom the very thought of word getting around -- any word, around anywhere - was a source of near-panic.
"You know better than anyone that it's not the gadgetry that creates good intelligence."
"No, Lovegood. No. It's bloody hard enough to keep them all off me without drawing yet more attention to what I keep stashed about my rooms!"
"It's bloody easier than you think. I regularly publish my own techniques in this - as I believe you put it - this rag, but nobody has stopped eating asparagus purely on my account. It's quite remarkable what people will believe - or won't believe, if you nudge them just right. You'll think of something. In any case."
Snape wasn't sure he'd ever allow himself to think again.
"Asparagus?"
"A healthy vegetable," said Lovegood. "The editorial board diligently promotes its consumption."
"Right." (At this rate he'd have to amputate half his mind by dinnertime.) "So, in the end, I'm to do nothing about Luna except hope that nobody thinks to notice her. Brilliant."
"Were you hoping I'd pull her out of school?"
"I was hoping the good fortunes of the resistance would bank on something more solid than hope, actually, though you've convinced me your strategy is failsafe. If only I'd known earlier just how easy it is to defeat the Dark Lord: do nothing and hope. Should I keep my fingers crossed while I'm at it?"
"Squeezing your thumbs works better, I find," said Lovegood, quite seriously.
"The better to make my hands useless."
Lovegood shrugged. "As you wish. You know, I think you're only here for reassurance, which I believe I've provided, amply. Now you'll have to excuse me--
He stood up, a small man whose robes hung on him like on a hanger. "Something in the Department of Conspiracies requires my somewhat urgent attention. Do make yourself comfortable, though."
Snape took him at his word and silently began checking the wards on every possible entrance to the office, including the Muggle wiring. He then scanned the room for recording devices, spyholes, addlers, scavengers, and anything that would bite him. He satisfied himself as to the lack of broadcasting charms. He was about to scan the room for the eighth time, in case the books' bindings were weak and images could leak out of them and tamper with his work, when Lovegood put a hand on his shoulder.
"Severus. It's safe here."
"Those photographs?" said Snape, his eyes feeling peeled with exhaustion. Luna, aged around five, was bouncing up and down on what appeared to be a very large mushroom spewing clouds of many colours, which her mother was turning into butterflies from the very edge of the frame.
"They're self-explanatory and they speak only to me," Lovegood replied, "and we both have work to do. I'll take care of the rag. My daughter will take care of herself." He waved a flask onto the desk from an obscure shelf and filled Snape's empty teacup with a dose of the potion. "You'll take care of this. I think hope is perfectly justified by so much precaution, nu?"
The potion was a noxious shade of yellow. Snape grimaced: an old friend.
"There's a Pensieve over in the cupboard; tweezers are in the drawer; bottles, cutting boards, pencils — feel free to look around."
"I will feel totally free to look around," Snape assured him. "With or without your consent. Didn't some conspiracy require your urgent attention?"
"Are you dismissing me from my own office? You are," said Lovegood, trying not to smile. "How peculiar, then, that the door seems rather disinclined to let me out."
And the door, indeed, was fused shut with several new wards. Lovegood might have been able to give it the requisite passwords himself --though he wasn't, of course, doing anything - but it was simply a matter of etiquette. Snape muttered at it, convinced it to open, silently changed the passwords again - he was so invested in all this, bless him. Yes, it was only polite to play along.
"Remarkable. I don't think I've ever seen half of those. You know, if you ever find yourself out of work you can always head our Security Team."
Snape gave him a look of utter loathing.
"Just a thought. Good luck, then --
"Enjoy your urgent conspiracy."
"I'm sure I will. It's an odd one, actually --one of my interns seems to believe I'll publish some sort of blood libel about goblins. I don't know where he got the idea."
"Don't you?"
"He's new, of course, but it's best to nip these tendencies in the bud."
"Is it?"
Lovegood stepped through the door with an noncommital wave, leaving Snape, smiling bitterly, to raise the wand to his temple alone.