The Puppetmaster of Hogwarts, Chapter 16
Sorry, just started up school today. Updates will be a bit more sporadic, depending on the homework load.
The house on Spinner's End was rumored in the neighborhood to have been boarded up for as long as many families in Cokeworth could remember. Some others remembered the last family in residence: a rough and cruel alcoholic, his battered wife, and their odd and standoffish son, but many had assumed that the son had moved out as soon as he could, or had been packed off to relatives when his parents died.
It had become almost something of a legend now, for those few people who still remembered the mill days, before the old factories had shut down and the ghost town had regained some semblance of life. Some swore that they could see flickering lights inside the old building, on occasion, but no one ever went in and no one ever went out, so the people said that it was home to the ghost of the old drunk, doomed to haunt the earth forever in penance for his wife's murder. Others said that it was the wife, rather, who lived in the house alone, driven mad first by her husband and then by solitude. Children dared each other to throw rocks at the darkened windows or to go up to the door and ring the doorbell, but no one ever came out, and after a while the lure died away, and the house was left to the tenderer mercies of the bats roosting in its attic and the weeds growing up from the cracks in the pavement step. The story had mostly even been forgotten, by this point, just a little small-town "hant story" that grandparents told small children to scare them, or that children told each other at sleepovers by torchlight when the feral cats screamed in the night just beyond the curtained windows. Indeed, the house had long fallen silent; no "spooks" had been reported or even rumored for years, other than the occasional troublemakers rigging paper phantoms in the general vicinity to scare the more gullible of their compatriots.
It was not quiet tonight. The neighbors were woken by a pounding and a sound like that of gunfire, as well as a strange cracking noise that had no viable source. Heads popped out of windows to see that the formerly "abandoned" house was lit up like a Christmas tree with eerie colored lights, greens and reds and purples, flaring in the windows. The sound of shouting and the hurrying of feet could be heard, and then screaming. One of the neighbors grabbed his gun, and another called the police, but by the time the constables arrived, all was still. Too still. They approached the door, still boarded up. There was another loud bang from within, and one of the constables reached for the door with a skeleton key, prepared to pick the lock. In the same instant, there was another explosion, and the door fell outward nearly on top of them, battered down with a rusty protest of hinges and a wail of dry plywood. Unheard in the yard, several pops heralded the appearance of several more men on the scene, men that might have been constables themselves if not for the strange clothes and the fact that they seemed to be armed with sticks instead of pistols.
Then the muggle police heard a sharp voice behind them, just as they were silently dialing for backup, and three hands flew instantly to pistols. The command issued, however, momentarily stopped them from firing.
"Excuse me, gentlemen, but we can take it from here," said a tall, dark skinned man, dressed in what seemed almost like robes.
"By whose authority?" asked the man in charge of the city constables, suspicious.
The other flashed a badge, and somehow the constables were suddenly aware that these men were from a secret governmental agency, better equipped to handle this then they could, and they felt a sudden, inexplicable urge to turn the case over to the strangers.
"Very well, sir," their commanding officer stated, at last, letting the others by. The man had rushed inside in an instant, followed by his second, a young woman who seemed to have hair dyed a lurid pink. The Cokeworth police stared after them a moment, before suddenly remembering some paperwork that really did have to be done. And then they were hurrying away, inexplicably trusting the team that had come to take over and too busy thinking of their paperwork and the shrapnel which had stuck them in the faces and upper bodies when the door had blown up. Meanwhile, the neighbors still watched, entranced. This was probably the most interesting thing they had witnessed since Old Lady Hopkins adopted a fox thinking that it was a puppy.
Kingsley Shacklebolt and his younger accompaniment Tonks (or at least it seemed like the young auror, although had Kingsley been looking more closely, he might have noticed something off about her) entered the old house, disillusioned and with silencing charms layered over their standard auror uniform so as to preserve the element of surprise. Not that they even needed to, as it turned out. The sounds of footsteps or creaking floorboards would hardly be noticed with the melee up ahead...
"Damn it, come on, Lestrange! I don't care that you want to torture the traitor, the aurors are coming!" snarled a male voice- Lucius Malfoy- from the bowels of the dilapidated old building. "Just kill him and get over here!"
"You can just kill him yourself and then bring our Lord the body then, and hope you survive the night. I wouldn't want to be you," Peter Pettigrew's sniveling voice replied. "I say stun him and let the Dark Lord figure out what old Snivellus deserves."
"Besides, I want to play with him! I didn't get a chance to with Twillings, after all..." Bellatrix almost whined. Kingsley felt bile well up in his throat.
"That was your own fault, bitch. Come on! I don't want to be caught."
"Our Lord will understand if we go to Azkaban in his name!" shrilled the woman, sounding perfectly mad.
"I have a son, I'm not risking it. You can, if you want."
"Traitor! Unfit for our Lord's service!"
The aurors crept around the corner to see four Death Eaters, Lucius Malfoy, Peter Pettigrew, Bellatrix Lestrange, and another unidentifiable one, surrounding a crouched and panting Severus Snape. Kingsley was about to cast anti-apparation warding and just stun all the Death Eaters before they were noticed, but at that moment there was a flash of green, and Snape wobbled and crumpled lifeless. Something about the way he fell didn't seem quite right to Kingsley, but there wasn't really any time to think about forensics, and it was abundantly clear that the Potions Master was dead. He stepped forward, Tonks at his side, anti-apparation wards up and wand blazing, but in that same instant, a stunner came flying out of nowhere- one of his own stunners which had simply hit the wall and ricocheted (or so he had thought) and he crumpled instantaneously. Tonks grinned and lowered her wand in the same moment.
As soon as the older auror had crumpled senseless and the other had ceased to be a threat, "Bellatrix" straightened, while "Lucius" walked over to help Snape up. "You ok?"
"Been better," the Potions Master wheezed in return, clutching at his side. Just because the flower-fertilizing charm that Hermione had found wasn't the killing curse didn't mean it hasn't hurt when it had tried to fertilize him. Unfortunately, it would hardly have been authentic if they hadn't at least tried to make it look as though they had cast the killing curse, and that charm was the only thing that they could find on short notice that caused a similarly colored light when cast.
"Sorry sir," "Bellatrix" said uncharacteristically, as she cast a counterspell and a general healing charm. "'S that better?"
"Much. Now let's get on with this."
"Bellatrix" grinned, then reached into a pocket in her robes and handed her Professor a bottle of a light pink potion. "What's the plan again, Hermione?"
"Pettigrew" pulled out a notebook. "Your bit is done. Professor Snape, um, we'll need your help to give Harry a fabricated memory to use as testimony. He'll wake up King and then they'll go in and give the powers that be core samples and hair from all of the 'Death Eaters', along with taking Professor Snape's 'body' to the morgue. Then once the papers and reports are all filed and so on he'll make sure the portkey worked and took Snape back to the Chamber. If it has, we reconvene there. If not, he takes him back under his invisibility cloak and then we reconvene there."
"Sounds good," said "Bellatrix" and "Tonks" at the same time.
"Harry, how do you cast the Dark Mark again?" "Rookwood" interrupted.
"The wand movement is like for a regular animated firework, but you add a loop and curl at the end of the slash, like so, and the incantation is 'morsmodre'."
"Like so?" asked "Rookwood", imitating the wand motion with the tip of his finger.
"Yeah."
"Rookwood" grinned, but it was a bit uneasy. "Ok, I got this. Merlin, I never thought I'd be casting a Dark Mark like I was a ruddy Death Eater..."
"Don't talk about it, do-!" "Bellatrix" said, pausing mid-sentence to stun Kingsley when he groaned. "-it," she finished, while "Rookwood" sighed.
Meanwhile, Professor Snape had by this point finished helping "Tonks" fabricate a memory of the fight for the aurors, and so gave the bottle containing the altered memory back to the boy-turned-auror and was now looking at the phial in his hand, rather apprehensively. After all, even with the fail-safes that he had built in to the plan for his own sake, he was still putting his life in the hands of a group of adolescents who, until recently, he had treated like thestral shite, mood-altering potions or no. And then he rubbed the hidden portkey he was wearing one last time, glanced around at the serious faces of the polyjuiced students around him, and swallowed the cocktail of potions in his hand to the very last drop.
He fell instantly, face suddenly waxy, eyes glazed and half-open as it took affect. Everyone but Harry, who had seen death before (and knew that the onset wasn't exactly accurate, even if he would look quite dead in a few minutes) and Hermione, who was documenting the effects in her notebook, turned away in horror or disgust.
It had clearly worked, however. The polyjuiced students stared at each other, and then at his prone body.
"Alright. Let's get a move-on." That turn of phrase sounded decidedly odd from Peter Pettigrew, but the others only nodded, knowing that it was really Hermione talking.
"Lucius" and "Bellatrix" disapperated, knowing that they were no longer needed for the colossal plot, while meanwhile "Pettigrew" gave "Tonks" last minute instructions and scribbled a few more notes.
"Tonks" just nodded along, listening. "I know, 'Mione'," "she" said at last, gulping down an extra dose of polyjuice just to make sure it would not wear off at the auror office when "she" was turning in "her" report. "You've told me all this like a thousand times; I'm not going to forget."
"Make sure that you don't," Hermione returned. "His life is depending on how good your acting skills are."
"I acted like Dumbledore's perfect pet for four years straight, and the Dursleys perfect servant years before that. I think I can handle being an audit I know well for like half an hour, especially since Snape's death is not really a high-profile case."
Hermione nodded reluctantly. "Just make sure to be safe."
Harry resisted the urge to make a smartarse remark. "I will, thank you. Now I better get cracking. Glamour yourself, because I'm going to wake Kingsley up."
Hermione nodded and backed into the shadows, while Harry 'enervated' Kingsley and Ron cast the Dark Mark in the sky above Spinner's End, where it writhed, green and hideous, in the sky. And both aurors were shortly on their way to the Ministry of Magic with a body on a conjured stretcher, "Tonks" filling her superior in on what he missed on the way, while the neighbors wondered at the odd and terrifying fireworks in the sky.
Half an hour later, with Kingsley's awkward questions and congratulations deflected, the aurors office navigated, reports written, and a few memory spells cast, Severus Snape was officially deceased, all the papers were in order (bequeathing all of his assets to a T. R. Prince, except what little would be expected to be sent to his colleagues and few select friends) and the body had been claimed from the ministry morgue by a family member who wished to remain anonymous. And the actual Professor Snape was waking up in the Chamber with a headache that felt rather like a herd of Madame Maxine's winged palaminos on too much firewhiskey, surrounded by the others.