A few months after the Malfoys married, Narcissa set about imposing her personality on her new husband's family home
Warning: Some nasty implied violence. And some cheesy melodrama.
Author's Note: I said at the end of Chapter 10 that this would be the final chapter. It's not true! There was just too much to cram in! Sorry about that. I imagine one more after this, then perhaps an epilogue.
A lot of this chapter refers back to elements from "Salvage What You Can" - Malfoy's death, Severus' arrest on suspicion of murdering him, the nasty young auror Phelps and his auror father's unfortunate death years before, etc. If you can't stand to re-read the whole cheesy lot of it (I wouldn't blame you one bit, it's rather embarrassing going over the old stuff,) the main bits are in SWYC Chapter 11.
Thanks once again to everyone who has been so nice and has stuck with me over the years, SN xx
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"Please," added Remus, pulling back the covers to invite him back into the warmth. "I need to know what you did. Tell me."
Sighing, Snape nodded once and carefully manoeuvred his bad leg back across the bed.
"I can't refuse you that," he whispered miserably. "I'll give you the whole story on one condition."
The lay side by side on their backs in, not touching. When Remus turned his head, Severus did the same so they were face to face.
"What?"
"That you extinguish the light. This is a tale of darkness."
xx
A few months after the Malfoys married, Narcissa set about imposing her personality on her new husband's family home. The furniture in her bedroom and study had been far too dark and dreary for her taste, so she and Lucius had ventured up to the attic storerooms one afternoon to see if they could find any more suitable pieces. Amongst the detritus of damaged artwork, doxy-infested curtains and ancient keepsakes had been some nicer furniture requiring only a little restoration, that she considered much more suitable.
Among her favourites was a lovely 18th century desk. Unfortunately, every one of its drawers was crammed to bursting point with parchment and crumbling documents.
"They could be important," she said.
"They've been up here all this time and no one's bothered with them," Lucius reasoned. "Let's just clear out the lot and burn them."
"What if they're of historical importance to the family?" She placed her hands on her hips and gave him a look he had never seen until after the wedding.
Thus, Severus found himself coerced into helping Lucius sort through the paperwork. It had not been unpleasant. The two young wizards holed up in the attic with some bottles of beer, chatting as they divided all the jumble into "Important," "Useless," and "?". After four hours, the "?" pile was by far the largest of the three.
"Most of it's not written in English," tutted Snape.
"It'll probably be an Eastern European language," commented Lucius with little enthusiasm. "The stuff we can understand is the correspondence of Sophia Malfoy, the family's greatest brain, so the rest are probably her professional notes. She never married and spent most of her adult life at the Conservatoire of Magical Excellence in Hungary. She was an internationally celebrated developer of wandless magic, as well as a brilliant potioner. They say most European institutions and even governments used to owl her for advice."
"Wow," said Snape, his eyes sparkling. He had just been accepted at the IMP to study for Bronze Standard and was unbearably smug about it, believing his hitherto unsuspected genius to have finally been recognised. No amount of cuffs round the ear from more senior Death Eaters or even the particularly sharp one from an exasperated Dark Lord had dampened his pompous joy. In Sophia Malfoy, he fancied that he had found a kindred spirit.
Her diaries, once he cracked the secret code she used, provided a fascinating insight into the life of a true intellectual. He read years and years of amazing projects and intrigues with the top strata of Continental society until he reached the last, unfinished book, when shortly after her 91st birthday, a very intriguing thing happened.
"Met potioner, F., old dorm-fellow of Z's from Durmstrang, disguised as hag because believes Magi-Police following him. Says has developed immunisation to spattergroit which can be activated by wandless spell at first sign of epidemic. Clearly mad as a bumblebee."
Several days later, she had changed her mind.
"Coded owl from G. at Ministry, asking if I know work of Z's mad friend F. Also asked if it was poss. to brew potion able to lie dormant in body until spell makes it work. Replied evasively, then wrote to F. asking to meet again."
The hairs rose on the back of Snape' neck as he realised the potential of such a potion. Skipping through another week of less interesting entries, he arrived at the next development in the tale.
"Sat up all night with F. discussing his research. Bugger me soundly. It IS poss. and he's cracked it. Potential enormous, but he hadn't thought of poison/murder aspect. Fool. Says he's been boasting to brewing rivals so not exactly secret either. No doubt government will be interested."
The following day:
"Got warning from G's wife that F's lab to be searched by Magi-Police. Just enough time for him to shrink notebooks and owl them to me. Hate breaking law but Minister too dense to understand, especially with polit. situation as it is."
Severus read on avidly as things became more dangerous for Sophia and "F."
"F. and I both under surveillance. Have duplicated all his work and spelled locked into my desk. Know I ought to forget this whole business but too interesting. Great-nephew Draco coming for visit tomorrow, intend to shrink desk and persuade him to take whole lot back to England hidden in his peri-wig. Have put duplicate of diary in with other notes, so all future entries appear in other copy as well as this one."
"Awful news. F. vanished. Home and lab destroyed. Don't want to ask contacts what happened. Afraid I already know answer."
"2 figures loitering outside in street day and night. Suspect Ministry spying on me."
"Told everyone who'll listen am going back to England for Georgiana Prince's wedding and short holiday. Need break from all this. Also time to sort through F's notes. Still no trace of him. Think he must be in their dread secret prison."
"Was not permitted to cross border, escorted home. Uniformed guards at front and back of house, floo blocked, owls impounded. Must destroy this diary, too incriminating, but other copy should be safe in Manor by now. Friends in useful places will get me out of this and I can get back to England and continue F's research there."
The rest of the pages in the duplicate diary were blank. Frantically, Snape searched through the rest of the documents, looking for something dated later than that frightened but nevertheless optimistic entry, but there was no more word about Sophia until Lucius drew a letter from the official family archives in the cellar. The director of the Conservatoire of Magical Excellence had written to William Henricius Malfoy informing him that his sister had been found dead in her house in Pest by her neighbour. She had apparently died peacefully in her sleep and the director offered condolences to the family on behalf of herself and all those who had been lucky enough to work with such a brilliant witch, etc., etc.
It was dated one day after the final piece in the final journal.
"Shit," said Lucius.
"Assasinated!" whispered Severus with a shiver.
"Just because of some stupid potion," Lucius shook his head. When Severus began to try and explain the importance of the discovery in the excitable tone which indicated his imagination had been fired by something, Lucius' face grew grim. "Oh no! Don't you dare!"
"But, Lucius, this thing is huge," he reasoned. "If I can just look at the notes…"
"Yes, huge enough to have the great Sophia Malfoy murdered by the state, despite all her amazing contacts and precocious intelligence," he drew his wand and pointed it at Snape's chest. "An insignificant little brat like Severus Snape will be no trouble at all to bump off. The merest hint of you meddling with things you are too young to understand and you'll be in Azkaban, if you're lucky! Promise me you won't read those papers!"
"Lucius!" Snape pleaded, crestfallen.
"You're not a schoolboy any more and this isn't a game!" Malfoy shouted. "If you fall into Ministry hands they'll find your Dark Mark and that will be enough to get you the Kiss, regardless of your having messed with illegal potions. Now, promise me!"
Pouting with disappointment, Snape promised.
xx
Remus had forgotten to breathe during the last part of the narrative and when Severus paused, he took such a large gulp of air it made him splutter.
"Are you all right?" Snape whispered, concerned.
"Fine, fine. Just enthralled," he managed. "That is a tremendous story."
"Indeed," sighed Snape. "Sadly, it does not end there. Should I continue?"
"Yes, please," the werewolf replied. "But before you do, will you answer one question that I've wondered about for a long time?"
"Of course," said Snape.
"Well," Remus swallowed. Now he finally had the chance to find out, he wasn't certain that he wanted to know. To buy more time, he reached over to the bedside table for a sip of water from the glass Severus had brought up with him. When there could be no more delaying, he asked the question he had avoided thinking about ever since they got together.
"You and Malfoy…" he began, with some trepidation..
"Yes?" murmured Snape.
"It's just, well, he never seemed the sort of man who would associate with anyone unless there was something in it for him, yet I've always had the impression that he was, um, very protective of you. Now you say he warned you off the incantation-activated potions like that; letting you mess around in his secret family papers, which kind of hints that, that, the two if you, er…"
"Lupin, what are you trying to say?" It was too dark to see, even for a werewolf, but there was an icy edge to his lover's damaged voice, which Remus didn't like to hear. He sighed. Deciding that it didn't really matter anyway, he caved in.
"Nothing. Go on with the story."
xx
It was Snape's first raid as a Death Eater. He had been in Voldemort's service behind the scenes for almost a year as the great wizard recognised that his mind was worth more in a library or laboratory than his clumsy, excitable young man's body was in the heat of battle. Eventually, he had relented and allowed the studious boy to accompany his former classmate Rupert Wilkes on a minor mission to intimidate - but not really harm - the elderly parents of an auror, who lived on an isolated Scottish farm. They were supposed to set the barn on fire, scorch the Dark Mark into the side of the house and press their masked faces against the windows; just a junior's raid to remind wizardkind that the Dark Lord knew where everyone lived and held the power of life and death in the palm of his hand.
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Remus gulped.
"Go on," he prompted again, trying not to radiate too much revulsion.
xx
It had gone wrong from the beginning.
Obviously, there had been some kind of emergency warning system in place, which meant that ten seconds after Snape and Wilkes apparated into the kitchen-garden, half of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement popped out of thin air all around them. Anti-appartition wards clutched tight around Snape's chest and ankles as he tried to retreat, so he focussed his mind on the mysterious and awe-inspiring way the Dark Lord was sometimes able to fly, without broom or other visible assistance. It was the adrenaline, he later discovered, which had made him fly in a lifesaving erratic arc above the heads of the surprised aurors, crash-landing out of sight behind a barn, safe but nursing a painful broken elbow.
Wilkes had not been so lucky.
Scream after scream sent tremors through Snape as he cowered behind the wall, horrified that the supposed good guys were using Death Eater tactics. It wasn't supposed to work like that. He could not make out all the words, but snatches of awfulness whipped towards him on the wind.
"Crucio!"
"That's for the Prewetts, you little bastard!"
"Not so brave now, are we?"
"Crucio!"
"Do that one which makes the eyeballs explode!"
"I'll teach you scum what happens when you mess with my Ma and Pa! Crucio!"
Snape's mouth filled with bile as he recognised Alastor Moody's voice. The Dark Lord ought to have warned them which family they were messing around with, surely to Merlin?! For a crazy moment he considered trying to do something to help Wilkes, but he could hear at least six different voices, cursing and mocking, and he had never been good at spellcasting with his left hand…
"Oh, Phelps, that's vile! There's guts all over my new boots, thanks a lot! Now, what should we do with the body?"
"Hang it from a lamp-post in Diagon Alley as a warning to the others."
"Hah hah hah hah!"
xx
Not having felt like eating dinner, there wasn't much for Remus to vomit, but he kept heaving anyway, clutching the toilet bowl as though it would steady him. Snape carefully bent his bad knee and crouched beside him, rubbing his back.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I shouldn't have told you these unpleasant things. It all happened a long time ago, just one incident out of…"
"Please shut the hell up, Severus," gasped Remus. "You know why I'm being sick."
Snape's hand stopped stroking and fell away from him.
"I know he was with them when Wilkes was killed, but he gave me a different version of what happened. He said there was a fight and Wilkes fell off the roof of the barn and impaled himself on farm equipment."
"Remus…"
"Don't try and deny it. Sirius was there. You heard his voice cursing, didn't you? One of a mob of seven aurors torturing one solitary man to death. Don't lie to me."
"Remus, please…"
"Severus!" He looked up at the other wizard's ashen face, old and weary in the bright bathroom light.
"You must never tell Harry," Snape pleaded, hanging his head in defeat. "They were both there, both…participating. Sirius Black and James Potter."
xx
Lucius' evening had not been much better.
A female Death Eater whose name neither of them had known had not completed an important task Voldemort had set her, through no real fault of her own, Lucius thought very quietly to himself. The Dark Lord decreed that those who failed him through incompetence and laziness did not deserve to live. The witch should be made an example of.
Malfoy had been unable to recount exactly how she had met her eventual end, but if even he, the most smooth and unshakeable Death Eater was three-quarters of the way through a bottle of Old Ogden's before he could even describe the edited version of events, Snape knew it must have been every bit as horrible as Wilkes' death.
"Trouble ish, Sevs, that once they start, there's no way out 'cept an 'orrible agonising death, and no one can help you because they dare not, like you with Rupert and me with whatshername."
Snape cautiously rotated his elbow to make sure that Lucius had managed to heal it properly in his drunken state.
"I'm scared," he admitted in a small voice.
"You'd be an idiot if you weren't," nodded Lucius. Suddenly more coherent, he leaned over and started at Snape with gleaming grey eyes. "Now, you're a bright lad. What about Aunt Sophia's potion?"
"Eh?"
"What if you could brew a painless instantaneous poison, which could be ingested safely beforehand, then activated with a wandless spell should we fall into the wrong hands. Whoosh! All over. No torture, no dementors' Kiss, no writhing on the ground soiling oneself as they draw out your agony for hours until your life finally whimpers out. That's not a fitting death for a man like me, I want to go quickly and with dignity."
Severus backed away, convinced Malfoy had gone mad.
"Don't be a fool! You can't just play around with poisons like that, even if Sophia and her mad friend managed to do it back then. It's too dangerous!"
Lucius pounced on him before he could make it to the fireplace and escape.
"More dangerous than what we've both witnessed tonight?"
xx
And then, Remus knew the answer to another, different question he had been deliberately not thinking about.
"You translated the Hungarian notes and succeeded in making the incantation-activated poison. Malfoy took it, but he was never captured or threatened with an unpleasant death so he never had to enunciate the spell to end his own life. Not until many years later, when his final appeal failed and they were about to give him the Kiss. You went to visit him in Azkaban one last time, then…"
Severus gave a mirthless laugh.
"He had forgotten the word. Can you believe it? He finally needed the emergency escape plan we had put in place twenty years earlier and he couldn't remember the spell. The Azkaban guards were recording our conversation but it was easy enough to communicate subtly and he ended his life painlessly a few hours before he was supposed to be executed. The problem came a few days later when those idiot aurors turned up and arrested me."
Remus shuddered as he remembered that night of helplessness and devastation, then glowed with pride as he recalled how so many different people had come to Severus' aid, belying the cantankerous old veteran's insistence that everyone hated him. Harry, Neville, Minerva, Pansy Parkinson, Kingsley Shacklebolt, to name but a few. Some had even lied on his behalf to try and convince the overzealous Auror Phelps that Snape could not have murdered Malfoy.
"The thing I dreaded most was Veritaserum," Severus rubbed the bridge of his nose as he reminisced. "If they had asked whether I brewed a poison and gave it to Lucius, bringing about his death, then the answer would have been yes."
"That wasn't murder!" exclaimed Remus. "It was his decision to take poison back in the '70s and his decision to activate it!"
"I don't think Phelps junior would have given me chance to explain that we had been using illegal methods because we were cowardly Death Eaters, afraid of being attacked by either side. Besides, he might have asked if I killed his father too."
There were too many revelations happening at once for Remus to deal with and part of him wanted nothing more than to put his fingers in his ears and have a nice lie down, so he could forget that the man he adored had done such unpardonable things. Wonderful things too, later on, but could they ever really cancel out what had come before? He remembered visiting the Weasleys for emotional support after Severus' arrest and hearing Percy's description of his old classmate, William Phelps, who passionately hated any suspected Death Eaters because he believed them to have been responsible for his father's death, although that had been officially recorded at suicide. He had jumped at the first opportunity since qualifying as a junior auror to get his hands on Snape.
"Auror Jeremiah Phelps was there when your friend Wilkes was killed, as well as Sirius and James?" he murmured slowly.
"The ringleader of the torture," came the reply, from between clenched teeth.
"Ah. Do you think that's why Phelps senior killed himself? Remorse?" asked Remus.
Never before had Severus face shown such searing agony. Unable to bear the sight of his lover's suffering, Remus reached out to comfort him, to tell him that it was all right, that no more conversation was necessary that evening, that they could forget everything and go on as if nothing had happened. Jerkily, Snape batted his hands away and visibly struggled to regain control for a couple of minutes.
"He didn't kill himself."
Five minutes of ringing silence later, he added, so shamefully that Remus feared such intense self-loathing would cause his body some terrible harm:
"We had to test the potion before we took it."
xx