"I be that potion mixin', spell castin', dragon ridin' wizard

Got a 3 foot hat with a 6 foot beard, and its only gettin' bigger

Put a staff up in my hand, and I'll shrink you down to size

All I need is a tail of a newt, and some platypus eyes"

"Straight Outta Mordor" – The Wizards

The day had begun on the wrong foot, and seemed to stumble along like it was determined to continue hopping on that same accursed appendage.

Severus had felt an acute sting of disappointment when he'd found out that he'd be missing his chance to visit Marcus that morning by Hermione's side.

Yes, he was planning to go by himself later that evening, whether they allowed him in as a visitor or he had to sneak in. It simply wasn't the same, however. And the aggravation of having his plans dashed only seemed to feed into the frustrations the day held in store for him.

Going into the office meant taking his Jaguar. Once he'd settled himself behind the wheel and started the engine, he realised that the tank was on E, and he had to stop by the petrol station for a fill-up that cost him an additional thirty minutes out of his morning.

It had been months since he'd taken the car. He almost had forgotten that he enjoyed driving every so often.

Once Marcus was home he would have to install a baby-seat in the back and take Hermione and Marcus out for a spin, he considered as he leaned against the door, watching the numbers on the filling station tick upwards.

Once he reached the office, things weren't much better.

In his absence the team had been attempting to paper over a number of glaring problems with both the plot and certain operational challenges. When he was presented with an itinerary he nearly growled, and pinned both Terry and Charlie with his most deadly glare.

"Why didn't you get in contact about any of this?" he demanded, tapping the forty-item long list. "Some of these are nearly game-breaking, why wasn't I told?"

"Told us you were busy, didn't you—" Charlie began.

Snape's head shook violently from side to side, causing his hair to whip about his face. "Not too busy to send in my new scripts! Not too busy to fix problems that could crash the fucking game—"

Terry's mouth twisted into a grimace. Her laugh lines deepening like trenches that bracketed her mouth. "Come on, Sev, now you're exaggerating."

"I'm not!" He brought his fist down on the conference table, causing their drinks to wobble. Charlie stilled his tumbler with his hand and glared at Snape, wiping his palm, which was now wet from his beverage, on the leg of his jeans.

"I never exaggerate," Severus growled. "And this not only affects the game: it's a full-scale security risk. All of our computers are going to have to be re-imaged. That'll take down everyone at once while we're dispatching the update. Client-side we'll have to take down the server—"

"Take down the server!?"

"Yes," he hissed, "or else we risk all personal data being stolen from our servers. Who the hell opened that email?"

Neither Terry nor Charlie said a thing. They glanced back and forth, communicating silently.

"I need to know," Severus ground out, his voice pitched low with his impatience. "Was it someone on one of your teams? Or was it on the other dev team? Please tell me it wasn't someone in billing—"

Charlie winced with sympathy.

Snape raised an eyebrow. "Charles?"

The man shook his head, his expression sheepish. "No—" he began, but he didn't have a chance to finish. Soft crying startled both men and they looked up in unison to see Terry wiping at her aged cheeks.

"I'm sorry, Sev... I really—I thought it'd be a good opportunity,"

He was momentarily at a loss for words. It wasn't that he'd never seen Terry cry before. She cried plenty. Usually when she was in her cups and overly emotional. He'd never seen it at work, however.

"And... and the email said that they'd offer us solutions for work-flow problems... I didn't think that was so bad, y'know..."

Snape dropped his head into his hands and dug his finger-tips into his eyesockets, pressing until he saw stars. "—Fuck."

"And we sent a few emails back and forth—it all seemed above board, you know? I was going to present it to you and Dec at the next all-hands meeting—"

He groaned unintelligibly into his palms, feeling a mighty headache manifest, "—fuuck—"

"I didn't expect—"

Snape looked up sharply and pinned the crying woman with a black glare. "What part of not downloading unauthorised documents to your hard-drive from unknown email addresses is so hard to understand, Teresa?"

The rest of the meeting was spent dealing with the fallout from the phishing scam Terry had fallen for and devising a way forward. It had taken twenty minutes to calm the woman down. She felt terrible about her part in the security breach, and though she accepted the blame, it seemed as if her real anxieties were surrounding whether Snape and Charlie could personally forgive her, and it took far more reassurances on both of the men's parts than they were comfortable with to convince the poor woman that, no, they didn't hate her, and yes, the problem could be fixed.

Charlie did far more of the comforting than Severus did. Nevermind being in his wheel-house, comforting a crying woman was nowhere near the vicinity of it. Particularly when he truly was murderously angry about the sheer amount of work she'd created for him.

He'd assumed many of the duties of the network administrator when their last one had left, as they'd agreed not to replace him.

Fixing Terry's mistake would mean taking the WWWW offline temporarily, in addition to Galdrvale's downtime. They didn't have the manpower to delegate the packaging. He'd have to do that himself too.

And that was only item one on the agenda. The rest of the day didn't go much better.

They covered a number of plot-holes that the forums had begun to complain about, Severus having to promise to come up with a solution for the confusing lapses in continuity, and discussed the release timeline for the next expansion, ultimately realising that it would be impossible to have a firm date they could commit to until at least 2008; news which would surely disappoint and aggravate the players.

This was all before they'd called in the catering for their meal around one.

He'd not had any say in what they ordered. Tuna and corn sandwiches.

He stared at the wrapped sandwich like it'd offended him on a deeply personal level, because really, it had. The meeting paused while he begged off for the loo. In truth he was raiding the vending machine two levels down for a handful of candy bars.

Hermione wasn't there, Snape justified to himself. He could have a Flake Chocolate Bar if it damned well pleased him. And it did. The haul came back with him to the conference table where he refused to share, even as the other two stared plaintively at his mound of confections.

He loomed over them much like a dragon over its hoard. His flared nostrils promising flames for anyone who so much as dared to look at his candy covetously.

The meeting drew on for another few hours. At forty items it was likely he'd have to come back at least twice that week for follow-ups, and that was just to get through the list they'd generated.

Damn Declan. Damn him to hell—the blighter hadn't even bothered to show up, and he'd near-enough allowed the ship to sink in Snape's absence.

Perhaps the man was wiser than he thought, Severus mused, to not have shown his face that afternoon. Had he, Snape surely would have felt tempted to rearrange the man's features with a judicious application of his knuckles...

Through the long and monotonous droning of Terry's latest report on player satisfaction a shrill claxon rent the air.

They all stared at one another for a moment before fumbling for their phones all at once.

It was his. Declan's number glowed brightly on the back-lit screen.

Snape accepted the call and pressed the phone to his ear, starting in before he had any intention on listening to the man's lame excuses.

"You, Davidson, are a blackguard of the highest order. What is it? This had better be good—"

He didn't have time to finish his invective against his partner, as it sounded as if the phone was being handed off. The voice that greeted him made his blood run cold.

"Severus—Severus, it's me! Someone's coming... I don't know, there are wards! They set anti-apparition wards and I can't leave,"

Hermione's voice was tinged with obvious panic. He didn't know that he, personally, had ever heard her speak with such abject terror. How had she gotten ahold of Declan's phone? His mouth had dropped open with his confusion, the smog of uncertainty clouding his faculties for critical thinking and decision making.

When he finally managed to speak, it came out far from the usual, reassuringly measured speech that he normally employed.

"Hermione?! Where are you? How are you calling from Declan's phone?"

In the background he thought he heard Declan himself crying aloud in delight over something, though he couldn't make out his words.

Hermione's next words were slurred and slow, as if they were coming from a faraway frequency that was breaking-up from bad reception. "D—d—e—ath E—a—ters... H—h—os—pit—al..."

Death Eaters. Hospital.

'Fuck. Oh fuck—oh fuck no.'

He heard someone shout a hex, Petrificus Totalis, over the phone. Who it had hit was anyone's guess.

"Hermione? Answer me, now goddamnit! Where in the hospital are you? Hermione!? Damn it all woman, tell me NOW!"

There was no response. But he did hear a rustling sound. Like the receiver was being smothered, and seconds later stifled words from voices he didn't recognise.

"Think—crinkle—him?—crackle—certainly lost—crinkle—touch, hasn't he?"

Someone shouted an Expelliarmus and Snape felt his heart stutter to a stop. Hermione's wand had been taken from her.

He rose from the table and stalked around, pacing from one end of the conference room to the next, blind to the eyes of the other two developers on him as he desperately listened in for more clues.

His eyes were as wild as a hunted fox's.

If the Death Eaters had been shouting boisterous 'View Halloo's he'd not have been as alarmed nor so alert.

They had his wife. They had his business partner. Did they have his mother?

Would they find his son?

The house of cards he'd constructed for nigh on ten years was quaking at the foundations.

"Don't underestimate—shrkkk—No glamour. We'll have to wait—grsshhhhk—the Polyjuice to wear off. No matter."

Polyjuice?

Snape frowned at the receiver. It sounded as if they thought they had him...

"You know—crinkle—supposedly so bright, you sure are stupid—creeeeeeaaak—really think your marriage wouldn't be registered with the Ministry?"

Their marriage...

He'd not offered vows. Neither had she...

Snape hadn't even given the witch a proper choice in the matter. He'd abducted her like a Roman legionnaire taking a woman of Sabine. Shoved a ring onto her finger and made a wife of her through nothing more and nothing less than imperial fiat.

At what point had it been recognised by the Ministry as a legally binding union?

He listened as they explained how they'd located Hermione at the hospital, his eyes closing with agony that he'd not managed to keep her safe. Since when had Ministry jobs required tracking charms? Had she known that she'd signed on to that?

Finally the call disconnected and the line went dead, the tone after ringing in his ears as he brought his hand down to his side.

There was complete silence.

The other two occupants of the room were staring at him with obvious confusion and concern.

He felt like he couldn't think... how had he handled situations like this in the past?

Occlumency.

In the past he'd been able to strip his feelings and emotions, take away the panic and terror he was feeling and make decisions with a clear head.

At present, it felt like everything was crowding near the front, fear and apprehension colliding with his higher faculties for thought and planning.

He couldn't take the risk of using his shields without the possibility of it undermining his ability to act.

"Sev," Terry began, her voice hesitant, "was that Declan? What did he have to say?"

Snape didn't answer her, but resumed his pacing, using his measured steps to order his thoughts when his mental shields weren't fit for purpose.

Charlie wasn't nearly as circumspect. "Who the hell is Hermione?"

Snape was over him in two strides, hoisting the younger man by his shirt front and slamming him onto the conference table.

"Don't let me hear you say my wife's name with such disrespect again, Charles," he snarled in his face.

He released him where he lay on the table, staring up at Severus as if he'd never properly seen him before.

His brain felt like the Hogwarts Express if it had suddenly jumped the tracks.

They'd found her with a tracking charm. From the Ministry... There was someone else who might be able to do the same.

Snape pulled his phone out once more and searched his contact list for Potter's number, knowing that he'd keyed it in after the Auror had left the number with Hermione a month earlier.

The phone rang for several long minutes.

Perhaps he wasn't home. It was a weekday after all. He and Ginevra were likely at work—"

"'Lo? Potter residence." Harry's voice was uncertain. It was likely that they didn't get many calls at Grimmauld. "Is that you, Hermione?"

"It's me." Snape barked. "Why aren't you at work?"

"You called me at home to ask why I wasn't at work? Who exactly did you expect to pick up?"

"Never mind that, Potter, there's no time. Do you know about the tracking spells used on Ministry employees?"

There was a pause as Harry tried to keep up with the conversation. "Er... yeah?"

"Who has access to that information?"

"Well, I know we do in Magical Law Enforcement. I think there are a few other departments. The census operators—people who keep track of population statistics and the like. Why?"

"If you're not at work now, I need you to go into the office and find where Hermione is—"

"You don't know?!" Harry's voice was frantic on the other side of the call.

Snape sneered, "Would I be calling you if I did? She called me not ten minutes ago and told me Death Eaters had found her at the Royal London. I heard the whole thing—they'd found her using the tracker and I heard them take her, likely along with a muggle hostage. Time is material here, Potter—"

"You don't need to tell me that! How can I contact you once I find her? It can take a bit of scouring—"

"Send a Patronus telling me where to meet."

"Oh no, Professor—you can't interfere—"

"THE FUCK I WON'T!" Snape roared, startling his two muggle coworkers who had been watching his breakdown with trepidation. "Just try and stop me, Potter! You send a Patronus telling me where to find my wife or I'll have your innards for potions ingredients!"

The line clicked dead. Whether that meant that Harry had agreed to his terms or not was open to interpretation.

Two sets of eyes stared at him. He felt the back of his neck prickle at the scrutiny.

Snape's top lip curled into his familiar snarl. "What?" He asked, voice savage.

Both Charlie and Terry recoiled from him. Either from the pure venom he was channeling though his acrid gaze, or from the wide radius of the spittle flying from his mouth.

"Nothing to say?" This was said in a snide approximation of a real question. "No further questions—"

"You got a wife, Snape?" Terry asked. Had it been Charlie again he likely would have slammed him once more into the table.

As it was, Terry was the one person on the team capable of calming him down. Largely because she never meant any harm, even when she managed to be rude or offend him. Malice wasn't in the woman's nature.

He nodded once, his eyes fixed on the wood grain of the conference table. He wasn't used to feeling so helpless. He had no way of knowing where Hermione was. No recourse for finding her besides Potter.

Charlie seemed to have recovered himself and ventured another question, though this was a decidedly safer one than the one about Hermione. "What's a Patronus?"

"The patron spirit system."

"That's fictional—"

Snape's eyes flashed at him with obvious impatience. "The spirit system is, yes," he drawled. "The Patronus, however, is all too real."

Charlie scoffed. "I don't believe you. If you ask me you're out to lunch again—"

Snape's voice, when he spoke to interrupt him was dangerous and as still as the pristine water that obscured a churning riptide. "Again?"

Charles must have mustered his courage and affixed it to his sticking place. "Declan told me how you met."

"Did he now?"

"It don't matter none, Severus," Terry broke in, looking between the two men with undisguised apprehension. "Declan didn't mean anything by it,"

"Oh, didn't he?"

"No—"

"It's immaterial, Teresa. If I have the presence of mind later to confront Declan over his regrettable lack of discretion, it'll only be because I'm lucky enough to have Hermione home with me." The wizard deflated, his shoulders slumping from their defensive rictus.

Charlie sat down across from him at the table. Both of them had stood at the onset of his mania.

"You expect me to think Galdrvale is real—"

"Don't be a dolt. Galdrvale is no more real than Narnia."

"But patron spirits are?" Charlie asked, rolling his eyes.

"Among other things," the wizard answered evasively.

Then came the dreaded words Snape knew he'd hear one day, if ever the day came that he'd tell someone the truth about the inspiration behind his creation.

"Prove it."

"Come on, Chuck," Terry soothed again, her gaze flitting nervously about the room. She settled a hand on Charlie's shoulder in warning, "when did you ever know Sev to lie—"

"And you'd take him at his word on this? It's a fat crock— you and I both know it. Snape's nutty as a Christmas fruitcake—"

His next words were utterly unintelligible and concluded in a strangled, panicked aspiration of his own saliva. The man's eyes watered as his face flushed an angry maroon.

He stuck his fingers between his lips, tugging in vain at his tongue which had affixed itself to the roof of his mouth. When he finally gave up out of sheer desperation and looked to Snape it was to find the tip of a curled stick pointing between his eyes.

"Perhaps that's why I always preferred a nice Battenburg,"

"Christ! What did you do to him?!" Terry cried, looking in Charlie's mouth as he turned to her out of hopelessness, miming that something was wrong with his tongue.

"Langlock," Snape told her. "A spell of my own invention, actually. Comes in rather handy with dunderheads that don't know when to stop running their mouths,"

Terry gulped and looked at her friend with wide eyes. "Let... let him go, Snape."

Snape flicked his wand, cancelling the spell. Charlie gasped for breath and drew in loud gulps of air.

"He could breathe, you know? He's being dramatic," Snape complained.

"How was I supposed to know!? I was panicking, wasn't I?" Charlie sputtered.

"Breathing through your nose was always an option. And your tongue shouldn't block your airway, anyhow."

Silence stretched between the three. Both Terry and Charlie looking at Snape with newfound apprehension and confusion.

"Well, Charles? Was that enough 'proof' for you? Do you need more?" Snape baited him. "After all, my wife's been kidnapped—probably, Declan too— but the best thing I can do with my time is obviously to sit here proving myself to you," he snarled, pulling a clipboard with an itinerary for their meeting to him from across the table. He tapped it once with his wand and transfigured it into a mouse, which scurried away from him across the polished wood, causing the two muggles to jump in surprise.

"Perhaps a mouse isn't flashy enough?" He mocked, the question rhetorical. Rising from his seat with a glower he directed his wand once more at Charlie where he sat in his chair, ignoring the man's terrified flinch, and levitated the man's seat two feet in the air, causing his coworkers to shriek.

Charlie gripped the armrests as tightly as was possible, drawing his legs up to the seat to try and stay stable and in the chair itself, or perhaps to draw himself away from the source of the magic. "PUT ME DOWN, SNAPE!"

"Gladly."

The chair dropped to the ground, dumping Charlie arse-over-tit, sprawled out on the floor.

Apparently having had enough, Terry stalked around the table toward him. She was a small woman, and seemed smaller still given her age, but she advanced on the wizard with a dangerous glint in her eyes, drew a gnarled hand back and slapped Snape across the face with it, sending his head flying back.

"That's enough! Bullying Charlie won't get your woman back any faster," she shouted at the much taller wizard, doing her level best to loom over him even with the obvious discrepancy in size and power.

Perhaps it was merely Severus' lot in life to be cowed by women who never measured higher than five foot two, granted Eileen had a few inches on both Hermione and Terry. Nevertheless, he felt a stab of shame at his actions.

Charlie couldn't defend himself against magic... and really—he'd not helped the situation he was truly upset about. He looked back at the muggle man who had stayed down on the floor, evidently out of a desire to avoid his further notice.

"I apologise, Charles."

"U-up y-yours, Snape..." the man whimpered from his place on the floor.

Snape shook his head and sat back in his chair, pressing the heels of his hands into his eye-sockets in an attempt to black-out the world. It had been half an hour since Hermione had been taken.

An impatient voice interrupted his pity-party. "What's the plan, Sev?"

He turned to look at Terry who had crossed her arms over her chest. "What makes you think there's a plan? I've no plan—I called Potter, he's trying to find her..."

"Your entire job is devising creative ways for players to wiggle their way out of miles of manure. You're telling me that when the pin hits the shell you can't do it to save your own damn wife?"

Snape slammed a fist down on the table, "I can't invent new spells on the fly that are capable of meeting needs such as ours at this moment—the players have called me on my writing before and they weren't wrong. The questing system operates with a certain reliance on a Deus Ex Machina, in the game I can invent new things that can 'save' our players that appear seemingly out of no-where. That's not possible in real life,"

"You invented that tongue thing,"

Snape shook his head, though his lips quirked in appreciation. Terry seemed to think he was all-powerful now that he'd revealed himself. "That took months of research and applied testing, and it's old. I wrote that spell when I was fifteen."

Charlie worked his way up and set the chair back on its' legs, taking a seat. He glanced between the two and made a hesitant offer. "You said something about tracking on the phone—"

"I did," Snape nodded, "but tracking is finicky. I personally didn't apply a tracking spell to Hermione, and therefore I can't access any that have been cast on her. They're not mine and won't respond to my magic. Furthermore, the spell on her sounds as if it's a result of a contractual agreement, and not a spell that was directly cast over her person. She probably didn't even think about it when she signed the paperwork for her job, as it was simply a base-line requirement."

"Why is that bloke on the phone able to find her then?"

"He works for Magical Law Enforcement,"

"There are magical fuzz? And here I thought the regular Filth are bad enough,"

Severus glanced at Charlie, quirking a raven-black brow with obvious impatience. "Quite."

"You think these other blokes that took her also work for law enforcement?" Charlie mused, warming to the topic.

He'd had his fair share of run-ins with the local police over petty disputes (and an incident in which he'd been caught drink driving). If there was anything that was capable of distracting him from his ire over Snape's mistreatment, it was his natural affinity for forming elaborate conspiracy theories surrounding applications of the law wherever and whenever it was enforced.

Snape almost dismissed him out of hand, familiar as he was with Charlie's flights of fancy, yet something stopped him.

How had the Death Eaters gotten access?

They'd said they found evidence of their marriage in the ministry records... those weren't publicly available...

"That's a possibility," Snape replied at length, his words coming slowly. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed likely.

"Can't you file a report?" Terry asked, concern written on her aged face in the depth of the lines which bracketed her downturned mouth.

The wizard grimaced slightly and looked between his two coworkers. Friends. They were his friends, in truth. He could tell them...

"I'm not..." he began, finding the phrasing difficult. There was no good way to say it, really.

"I'm supposed to be dead." He drummed his fingers on the table, a manifestation of the anxious energy churning inside him. "And if they knew I wasn't, they'd kill me,"

Terry gasped, her tiny eyes going wide and round, "Kill you?"

"I suspect that that's what this kidnapping is really about, actually. It sounded as though they thought Declan was me—"

Charlie snorted, "How could they mistake you for Dec? No offense, Sev, but I've never met two more different blokes—"

Severus glowered at him, "Be that as it may—and I'm going to pretend that you didn't mean something terribly disparaging at the comparison—there are a number of ways that I could have assumed Declan's form through magic. And they know that not only could I, but that I have the unique skillset to blend in as a mug—non-magical person. They'll expect it of me, most likely. Being a spy for so long conferred a number of specialised skills... though in truth I never had cause for masking my identity. Aside from spycraft, being a half-blood also gives me an advantage in maneuvering through your world. They're well aware of that,"

Terry was looking at him now with barely masked admiration and fascination. "A spy, wowee..." she fumbled through her stack of paperwork at the table for her spiral-bound notebook, "You mind if I pick your brains a bit for my next book?"

"Really, Teresa, there could not be a worse time. Ask me again when this is all over," he snarled back, grabbing the notebook out of her hands and tossing it to the corner of the room.

She rose and stalked over to where he'd thrown her book, snatching it off the ground and smoothing the crinkled pages back into some semblance of orderliness. "When this is over you're gonna apologise for that, Snape." She said with a small sniff, hugging the book to her tiny bosom. She looked like she was on the verge of tears and was wriggling her pert little nose about as if trying to will herself not to cry. "Wasn't gonna ask you anything today anyhow... you need a plan," she said, flipping the cover open. "And me'n Charlie are gonna play 'Generals,'"

The wizard checked the clock on his mobile, noting that forty-five minutes had now elapsed from the start of the ordeal. He swallowed. What kind of help could two muggles hope to provide?

Then again... he didn't exactly have anyone else in his corner. It couldn't hurt to brainstorm with a couple of extra heads working on the problem. If Potter managed to find her, nothing said he had to use whatever passed for a plan amongst two muggle game-developers.

"What would you have me do?" He asked finally, looking between the two.

They worked frantically, trying to make every minute count. Severus had set his mobile in the centre of the conference table, willing it to ring. He waited on baited breath, for the first time in his life wishing to hear from a Potter, hoping to see the shimmery hide and twelve-point antlers that would herald news of Hermione's whereabouts.

Harry's stag Patronus never materialised, but through the desperate minutes ticking by on Hermione and Declan's fates, the three schemed around a shared sheet of paper torn from Terry's notebook.

The interruption that came to break their focus came in the sudden oaths that Snape swore as he doubled over his left arm and curled his hand into a white-knuckled fist. The summons hurt worse than he'd remembered.

The other two developers stared at him, not sure of what to make of his sudden fit.

"Alright there, Snape?" Charlie asked, dropping his biro to the table-top.

Snape's eyes rose to meet his, for the first time in an hour they looked hopeful. Hopeful and murderous. It was hard to imagine a more terrifying combination.

"Better than alright," he breathed, his lips curling into a truly gruesome smile, "I've just located my wife."

"You know who it be - It's that crazy ass mage

Walking out the goblin fortress with my loaded 12 gauge

I be flyin' on a dragon - you be ridin' in a rental

While you dance up in the club, I summon blizzard elementals"

"Straight Outta Mordor" (reprise) – The Wizards