The Pureblood Prince
Chapter 50
Unhinged
From one overbearing manor house to another: it was as if Severus had never left the Malfoys. He was soon stalking down the colossal drive of the Princes, the manor slowly obliterating out the late-morning sunlight above him.
The door was not locked when he gently pushed against it, Severus slowly opened it and entered, breathing in the now familiar scent of old leather and overabundance.
"Hello?" he called, his voice radiating around the marble entrance hall.
There was only one person, perhaps two, he had expected to great him, and they were either going to be his grandmother or her house elf.
He certainly wasn't expecting to be faced with his irate-looking mother when he poked his head around the dining room door.
And he certainly wasn't expecting Hagrid to be right behind her.
"Mum… Hagrid?" he mumbled. 'Quite flabbergasted' would have been an understatement.
The moment he saw her he knew that this must have been a set up: Serafina and Eileen had planned this somehow… just how he was not quite saw… but seeing Hagrid standing in the Prince's dining room – that certainly had thrown him. Had he been hired to stop him from trying to escape?
"Hello, Severus," came the voice of Serafina from a shadow in the corner of the room. Severus did not acknowledge her presence, he merely kept looking back and forth from Hagrid to his mother, willing them to start talking, to deliver an explanation.
"Your mother stopped by yesterday," Serafina continued from the corner, Eileen merely continued to glare in his direction from the table. "She was concerned about my treatment of you-"
"Don't you put words in my mouth" Eileen gave her mother a dark and ominous warning without bothering to look at her either. Her eyes were still very much trained on Severus, her thick dark eyebrows that so very represented his own were so low that she looked positively wrathful. It was probably one of the oddest scenes Severus had ever found himself in… for one, he had never in his life been in the same room as his mother and her own mother at the same time, he had no idea what to expect from either of them; but he also had never been in same room as his mother and the Hogwarts gamekeeper at the same time either.
He didn't quite know what else to do but stand awkwardly and wait for her to talk. Or at least for Hagrid to explain just exactly what the devil he was doing here.
With what looked like a painful amount of effort, Eileen stood up and into the light. Severus gave a sudden jolt. He had never seen his mother look so… witch-like in his entire life – she was actually wearing robes, black robes that swept the floor, and a cloak with a heavy hood which she had swept her long hair into.
This sudden shock turned to ice in his belly, however, when he saw her face in the clear morning light.
One of her eye sockets was purple, and there was patches of light bruises all over her. Her lip had a thin, red crack running down the outer edge of it, as if it had only just healed from being split open. She looked like she hadn't slept in a hundred years.
"You still have marks from him?" Severus whispered deadly, utter fury mixed with extraordinary guilt now struggling in a battle with his confusion - and winning by a mile. Eileen knew immediately what he was referring to and put a hand to her face what seemed like unconsciously.
"That doesn't matter anymore!" she replied angrily.
"I don't care what doesn't matter to you - it matters to me! I want to know what that bastard did!"
"The bastard is long gone, so it doesn't matter."
"What?" Severus asked, frowning heavily and trying not to feel too enthusiastic too quickly. It was impossible, however, for his calculating mind not to put two and two (or this case three and three) together and not come to an excited conclusion.
The robes, the dismissive attitude to Tobias, the look about her… perhaps this time she had truly meant it. Coupled with Tobias had told him when last they had met...
"Yes, I left him, and for good." Eileen finally relented, waving it away like this piece of incredibly significant information did not mean everything to him… did not make him shake with excitement… "but we're not talking about your father anymore -"
"And he's still there, in our house" Severus kept on at her, refusing to let anything about this go. Serafina and Hagrid merely stood back and observed the discussion from opposite sides of the room: Hagrid certainly looked far more interested than Serafina did, however.
"Presumably," Eileen said with a shrug.
Oh, I know he is mother. I saw him with my own eyes before I drove him out...
"Where are you staying then?" he pressed.
He was sure that she didn't mean to do it, but her eyes flicked very briefly toward the half-giant standing next to her like some Queen's guard. Severus followed her gaze and frowned.
"It… it doesn't matter!"
"Of course it does!" Severus replied cantankerously. "You should have told him to get out! Why didn't you curse the living daylights out of him? Make him terrified to ever set his stupid foot in that stupid town again? Make him pay?"
He was so furious that he was shaking for an altogether different reason now. So she just walked out, did she? Tobias would now never get comeuppance for pummeling her to a pulp, or for anything he had ever done to them…
Eileen sighed sadly.
"I'm sorry that I didn't exactly have the foresight to think about those things at the time, Severus," she spoke as if addressing a complete novice on life. One more look at the cuts and bruises on her gaunt face suddenly made Severus feel rather ashamed of himself… she had a knack for that.
A small cough radiated from behind him, and Serafina finally stepped out into the open.
"You will be pleased to know that your mother will always have a home here," Serafina stated rather formally and coldly. "She need only ask."
"Thank you, but I'd rather live in the seventh circle of hell" Eileen bit back aggressively, her head finally snapping around to her mother and then returning speedily back to her sons. Serafina gave a rather impressed snort and sat herself down.
"Well, then, Severus" Serafina addressed, "I think we ought to get a few things out in the open, don't you? Your mother has been awfully worried ever since your disappearance and I only think it fair to come clean…"
He wished the damned woman would stop talking. The ice in his belly felt like it was expanding into his chest. He knew what Serafina was trying to get him divulge… but he was not quite sure that the news of her only son becoming one of He Who Must Not Be Named's inner circle would be overly welcomed by her right now. Severus merely shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
"And this is why you brought me here…" he said quietly to his lap, not able to look his mother in the eye anymore.
There was a deafening silence; everyone seemed lost in their own thoughts. Severus continued to stare into his lap, where he was currently wringing his hands red raw.
"He did it for the most noble reasons he could, Eileen…" Serafina explained, which only made the whole thing sound ten million times worse to him. Severus closed his eyes and flinched. Why did she have to say that? Why was this happening?
Another long silence. Severus could hear Hagrid shifting from where he stood next to his taciturn mother.
"And what did you do for noble reasons, Severus?" Eileen finally implored weakly. He shook his head. He could not answer her.
"If it was so noble of you then why are you so ashamed of yourself? Why can't you look at me?" she continued asking just as quietly – although now her voice shook somewhat. She knows… Severus thought. She already knows and she wants to hear me say it…
Her heard his grandmother step forward, her heels clicking upon the stone floor. He expected her to come out clean and say it in no more than five words in her usual candid demeanor, but the footsteps were getting further and further away from him, towards the entrance hall.
"Missy," she called from the doorway. "Ask these visitors to state their business before you let them in!"
She sounded rather disheveled, contrary to her usual conduct. Severus heard Eileen scoff from the other end of the table.
"Magnificent timing for guests…" she murmured.
"We can go somewhere else?" Hagrid suggested gently, it was the first time Severus had heard him speak since he had arrived at the Manor and again, it took him by surprise. Severus could not help but raise his eyes again, curiously. Hagrid bizarrely had one of his hands on his mother's shoulder, which, bony as it usually was, looked ludicrously tiny in his grip. At the sight of Severus looking at them with an extremely perplexed countenance, however, Eileen swallowed cumbersomely and quickly maneuvered herself out of Hagrid's reach.
Before Severus could decipher the meaning behind this incredibly odd behaviour, there was a wild commotion at the door.
"I didn't say you could enter my house!" Serafina was shouting. Mother, son, and half-giant all turned quickly toward the noise.
"I'm afraid we have paperwork to circumvent that, madam, here…" there was a pause. "I think you'll find that all in order. No point anyone apparating away – we've put an anti-apparition charm on this entire area."
Serafina's protests suddenly became very muffled. All the colour drained from Severus's face.
They sounded like Aurors.
He looked up in a panic at his mother, who, he found, looked rather inseparable from him. She was stark-white, her eyes wide – unable to hide the utter terror held within them.
"You did, didn't you? You joined him…" Eileen whispered, her chest rising and falling in rapid succession.
"And where is your paperwork might I ask?! I'm not letting anyone in my home without proper documentation!" Serafina was continuing to scream at the visitors. The commotion continued and Severus was left to await his inevitable fate…
"I couldn't refuse – I had no -" Severus stumbled to his mother, his mind racing and heart hammering. Before he could even consider whether his mother and Hagrid would have stopped him if he tried to run and hide, Eileen had quickly cut in without a single beat:
"Go," she said, her lips barely moving, but tears welling and swirling in her eyes. "Get out."
"Leenie, he's a… !" protested Hagrid quietly, but she shook her head.
If he had more time, he would have wondered whether it would be the last time he ever saw his mother, but it was all over in a flash. Eileen had quickly skirted around the table in a haze of black clouds and was halfway pulling him into an adjacent door when someone crashed through the door of the opposite side of the dining room.
"Stop right there!" a muscular man in a brown trench coat boomed, his wand trained on Eileen's back. "Release yourselves!"
Severus was so completely sure that she would have jumped to the side and let him be taken with such ease… a lifetime of being left to his own devices, to fend for himself and to never have to come to rely on any sort of maternal protection had led Severus to this steadfast certainty. But instead of being met with the wandtip of an Auror, Eileen's grip had tightened around his arms. She shook her head defiantly through her tears.
"He said move aside, witch!" another Aurors voice called despotically. Now there must have been two wands trained on the pair.
"Leenie, please!" Hagrid cried. "Don't get yerself hurt! Please!"
With one sweeping gaze over to Hagrid, who he found was wringing his hands and weeping like a man who was about the lose the love of his life, Severus quietly nodded in agreement.
"You're only making it worse, Ma."
But again she shook her head.
"No." She said fervently, her grip so tightly coiled around his arms that they were going numb. "I won't let you near him."
This sudden declaration of hers knocked Severus sideways. He found himself quite incapable of speech; he could only gape at her in utter shock.
"Get her," one of the men said to the other. In less than half a second there was a sudden bang, and long, thing black ropes flew out of one the Aurors wands, where it arched in mid-air and enveloped Eileen's body completely; one of the ropes snaked up her face and twisted itself around her mouth, gagging her completely.
Hagrid roared with distress and fury as she fell to her knees on the floor. But within another second he had also been restrained with what looked like invisible shackles. The other Auror swished his wand around the room and three sets of wands released themselves from Eileen's, Severus's and Serafina's robes and landed gently in his hand in a pile.
"DON'T YOU TOUCH 'ER!" Hagrid roared so loudly that the walls and windowpanes shook.
Severus, who out of every single person in this room had expected to be the one to be restrained, and yet bizarrely was left free, threw himself over his mother's huddled form on the floor.
"Release her!" he demanded, shaking with both anger and dread.
"Step away, sunshine, this ain't got nothing to do with you" the Auror retorted lazily, pocketing the three wands.
"I think you'll find it does!" Severus bit acidly, teeth bared.
Serafina paced behind them all, looking rather inscrutable in comparison to everyone else. Severus helped his mother to her knees and glared up at them all.
"Are you quite done restraining the wrong person?" he snapped.
"From the descriptions given I'm quite positive we have the correct suspect…" the other Auror answered, strolling over to the pair casually with his hands behind his back. "But we'll have to take her back to the Ministry for her trial, of course."
"Her trial?" Severus repeated, quite sure he had heard him wrong.
There was small cough behind them, and all turned to see Serafina standing quite proudly, and unashamedly upright. She dusted off her emerald cloak very casually.
"I'm sorry," she replied softly but confidently. "But I think you'll find you do have the wrong witch. There is a lot of black hair in this room: it has obviously confused you both."
Eileen was struggling against the ropes in his grasp – Severus took the momentary distraction coming from the other end of the room as an opportunity to loosen the piece of cord around her throat and mouth; she took a quiet, grateful gasp of air.
There was a sound of a piece of parchment being unraveled above them both.
"Wrong witch? You Eileen Snape?"
"I… no…" Serafina faltered, clearly not expecting to hear anything remotely similar to that name and half as if she could not bear to have that surname associated with her. "But it is not Eileen you want to take to Azkaban. It's me."
"'fraid it's not you, ma'am" said the first Auror. "Though your wish to accompany us to Azkaban prison is flattering… we have evidence enough to apprehend one Eileen Snape."
"No!" Severus shouted from the floor. "What moronic cretin at the Auror Office gives you your information?"
The Aurors smiled at each other idly.
"Tracing an exorbitant amount of magic from the Muggle location the suspect in question resides, and turning up to find the house destroyed…"
Eileen looked up for the first time, yet was still gagged enough to be incapable of any speech so she shook her head.
"Of course there was an exorbitant amount of magic!" Severus continued on his furious, raged tirade. "She was defending herself with magic! I am sure I shouldn't have to remind you of appropriate exemptions to multiple clauses of the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy…"
"Very well, I grant you there is a case in that" the Auror conceded. "But now what would you say to first-degree murder of a Muggle by a witch?"
Eileen gave a terrible shaken sound behind her gag.
Just by looking around the room Severus could tell that this was the last thing anyone had expected to hear. Serafina was gaping at her daughter with eyes so wide that could have devoured her. Hagrid was shaking his head vigorously.
"We found the body of a Muggle man fitting the description of the spouse of the witch Eileen Snape this morning," the second Auror continued in a far more constructed, official tone than before. "The Auror Office confirmed the body's identity not long after: it belongs to that of the Muggle Tobias Snape – the cause of death confirmed to be the Avada Kedavra curse."
The muffled howl that followed this news pierced Severus's skull like a dirty, blunted knife. Eileen threw back her head – the ropes in her mouth wet with saliva and tears – and her whole body fell backward into his. He caught her effortlessly in his arms, though his belly panged with guilt.
They must have caught up with him, he thought. They caught up with him and killed him… and the Aurors think it's her, with little to no evidence to prove it.
The injustice of it would have been enough to make him scream at the top of his lungs, where he not currently riddled with so much guilt that he could almost feel it eat him alive. He could not bear the feeling of his mother weeping into the nape of his neck, knowing that the cause he had joined had ended up sealing Tobias's ultimate fate…
"For God's sake!" Severus ended up simultaneously yelling and pleading with them at the same time. "Undo these restraints! Let her breathe!"
The Aurors could barely spare enough effort to shake their heads. One of them reached into another pocket, and out of it pulled two halves of a broken wand.
Her old wand. The one that had been irreparably damaged by Tobias in one of his fits of rage.
"We found this back at the scene," he explained formally. "Rather convenient that your wand should be found in halves after performing the worst of Unforgivables, Mrs. Snape…"
"That's not how it -"
But a vigorous shake of Eileen's head was enough to stop Severus objecting. Despite this rather frustrating forced silence, he could not help but let a slither of relief enter him… surely with him as a witness, this piece of damning evidence would be wiped from the record… surely…
Because he could not, would not, contemplate her wasting away in Azkaban… not for this. Not for him.
Amidst Hagrid's silent weeping on the other side of the room, and Serafina's rocking gently back and forth with her head in her hands, Auror number two pulled out another piece of parchment – Severus could see it had been stamped with the official seal from the Ministry of Magic. He tightened his grasp around his mother, who had been wildly beyond any sane comprehension since they had mentioned Tobias's name.
"Eileen Snape," the Aurors voice rang out like a booming public address system. "You have been charged with the first-degree murder of the Muggle Tobias Snape. This, being the most serious of breaches of several Statutes of wizarding law, grants us, the Auror Office, immediate authority to transport you to Azkaban prison to await full trial at a later date."
Severus couldn't bear to hear anymore. Something caught in his throat, heat rose through his sinuses and the weight on chest became too much for him to hold in. Tears were soon silently trickling down his face, to the end of his hooked nose, dripping methodically onto his chest... so silently that not a single person had noticed.