Yet Another Snape Meets the Dursleys Story: by rabbit
Disclaimer: Still not mine. Still belongs to JKRowling. Still. Much thanks to Jinx who helped a lot with the final draft.
Chapter 23 : The Escape
Summary: Storm's brewing...
************
Petunia Dursley struggled to open her eyes. Her arms were stiff and aching, and her mouth was sour, and there was something ... something she was meant to be doing. Somewhere in the distance she could hear Vernon snoring. She tried to make sense of that. He seemed so far away. Had he gone to sleep downstairs? Or was she downstairs, and he upstairs in their room?
A deep breath, and a shudder, and at last the gumminess gave way and she could open her eyes. She was sitting on the floor, gripping... bicycle handlebars. There was no bicycle attached to them. How odd. Why --
Memory returned in pieces, like falling leaves. She was trapped, in Potter's room, that was it, and she was going to get out.
Blearily she looked up at the wall she'd been working on. It was marred, but not much more than that. The damage, and its necessity, made her angry. This was not the first wall she'd ruined in her escape attempts.
The first hole she'd made had been in the closet, going into Dudley's room. Her effort had gone pretty well, until she'd struck wood and realized that it was directly behind Dudley's big bookshelf, which if pushed over would have landed directly on the computer desk. Destroying Potter's wall was one thing; destroying Dudley's new computer another.
And by then she'd been so hungry that she had decided to risk eating the breakfast that had been pushed in through the door flap. It was, much to her surprise, still hot, and much tastier than she'd expected. There'd been a certain piquancy to the eggs that she'd found hard to resist.
Fortified for her second attempt, she'd decided to go straight into the hallway. That had meant wrestling aside Potter's warped bookshelf, which had been a dreadfully exhausting task, and then her first few blows had revealed a support pillar, so she'd had to move to one side and try again, and then... somehow... she'd gone to sleep. Right there on the floor, amid all the dust and splinters.
Impossible. Probably that awful freak had bespelled her again. That seemed to be his answer to everything. Well, she had an answer to that. She was getting very, very tired of being frozen or tied up or otherwise assaulted!
She made herself move, rolling onto her knees and then dragging herself upright by bracing herself on the bookcase. She shivered as trickles of sweat ran willy-nilly across over her skin. It was hotter today than yesterday, with a thick sultriness to the air that promised another storm. She looked out the window and saw storm clouds climbing up to swallow the descending sun. Unnatural weather. They must have something to do with it, somehow. But a good thunderstorm would keep everyone inside, and give her and Vernon a chance to deal with that horrid freak, who richly deserved whatever he had coming to him.
She gripped the handlebars firmly and swung them zealously at the wall. The crash startled her backwards, and she stared at the crater she'd made, the handlebars still ringing faintly and her hands tingling from the blow. That hadn't happened before. She'd never heard a thing.
The unnatural silence of the morning had dissipated, then. Her breath sounded very loud now as she waited, listening hard. It wasn't fair that you couldn't even hear the freaks, once they'd decided to be quiet. Worse that you couldn't hear yourself. But since the silence was gone, they might have heard her.
From the parlor she could hear Dudley's alarmed voice, and then Potter's halting reply. Harry still sounded sleepy or ill. She kept listening but heard nothing that might be the nasty stranger's menacing baritone, or the shrill obsequiousness of the person Harry had been talking to in the kitchen.
At last she decided that no one was coming upstairs.
Good. Carefully, she adjusted her grip on the handlebars, thought about the wall and the noise for a little while, and finally tried dragging the raw end of the handlebars down the wall. It left a deep scratch and hadn't made too much noise. Downstairs she could hear the boys arguing, and for once she encouraged them silently.
Smiling like a fox, Petunia lined up the handlebars for a second run. Very nice indeed. Her escape would take longer this way, but it would be quieter, and she knew now just how very thin the walls actually were.
Now it was only a matter of time.
****
"What is it, Dudley?" Harry asked, propping himself up on his elbows. His cousin's exclamation of alarm had woken him up from a particularly spectacular bad dream, and the repetitive music of the videogame had him half convinced that he was still asleep.
"I thought I heard something upstairs." Dudley said.
A particularly loud snore from overhead rattled the ornaments on the shelves. "If it wasn't loud enough to wake up Uncle Vernon, it's probably not important," Harry said, and then reconsidered. "Unless it's Professor Snape waking up..." He found his glasses and jammed them into place, then pulled himself off the couch and ran a hand through his hair in a useless attempt to look more alert.
"I haven't finished Oliver Twist!" Dudley exclaimed, abandoning the videogame controls and heaving himself toward the table and chair.
"Just look busy," Harry suggested, reaching down to turn off the videogame and switch television channels. He settled on something that looked educational, a program about deep sea exploration, and moved the cushions around so it wouldn't look like Dudley had been watching as well. As he moved the last cushion, he unearthed a plate with a few cake crumbs on it. "Dudley!" He waved the evidence at his cousin.
"I was hungry!" Dudley whined defensively. "It was just a piece of cake. It wasn't even very big!"
"I thought you didn't want to die!" Harry said, straining his voice in attempt to shout quietly. He couldn't believe that Dudley had fallen back into his old ways so quickly. "If you keep cheating on your diet -- "
"I don't want to die of starvation, either!" Dudley shot back, shifting backwards on his chair and twisting his pencil in both hands. He had an expression that Harry didn't recognize at first. "And I don't want to die. But it's dinner time, isn't it? And really, Harry, it wasn't a very big piece. It wasn't!"
Belatedly, Harry realized that Dudley was looking ashamed of himself. With difficulty, he made himself stop and think before he said anything more. It was getting late. The light from the windows was fading, dimmed by evening stormclouds. And even if Dudley deserved a yelling at, it wasn't really Harry's job to keep him on his diet, after all. "All right," he said, with only a small exasperated sigh. "If you say so. It's your diet, Dudley, and you know what you need to do."
Dudley's big hands were still turning the pencil, but his shoulders settled down a little. "Well... I had a sandwich too," he confessed. "Maybe I should skip dinner."
"Maybe." Harry said, but Dudley looked so miserable at the possibility he relented. "Or maybe you should, uhmmm, just exercise some -- do sit-ups or something, later, but have a proper dinner now," he improvised. "You can't have got any nutrition from the cake."
Dudley brightened. "That's true," he said. "Exercise makes up for food, doesn't it?"
Harry laughed, "Of course it does," he agreed, and with a wary glance at the stairs settled back on the couch to resume his pose of an invalid watching television. Dudley took the hint and started re-reading what he'd written so far.
Neither activity was very exciting. Every so often they looked up at the ceiling, listening for more signs of life. After a few minutes, Harry switched off the television so he could listen better.
"Nothing," Dudley whispered. "Maybe he's not awake yet."
"I wouldn't count on it. Snape's sneaky," Harry warned.
"Do you want to go up and check?"
Harry considered it. "No," he said. "Dobby can check when he wakes up." He turned the television back on, but the divers' lengthy explanation of a new gadget couldn't hold his attention. He got up and looked out the window. The storm was coming in faster now, clouds chasing one another towards the sea. Maybe that was what was making him restless. It always did Hedwig. He should check on her. Which meant going upstairs. He knelt on the couch and twisted round to turn up the larger light, and found her perched sound asleep fluffed like a snowball atop it. "Well, the weather's not bothering you, anyway," he said gently, leaving the light and his owl alone. He turned back and knelt on something hard and slippery: the dessert plate Dudley had left. Harry decided he was more hungry than annoyed. "You finish your paper, Dudley, and I'll make some dinner. For everyone," he decided. "They can't sleep forever."
"Do you want me to help?" Dudley asked, looking eager to abandon Oliver Twist again.
"Better not. You've only got about fourteen more inches to go, you know. And if you don't give it to Snape he's likely to have you cleaning the floor on your hands and knees." Harry grinned at Dudley's appalled grimace and went into the kitchen. It had been a long time since he'd had a chance to cook properly, and much to his surprise, he was looking forward to it.
*******
Scrape.
Scrape.
Scrape.
Slowly, surely, Petunia was carving the outline of a doorway into the second layer of plasterboard. She timed her efforts to match Vernon's snoring from the guest room, a rhythm she knew all too well. Downstairs she could hear the yammering of the television, and the rattle of pots against the stove. Outside she could hear the distant clumping of thunder and the rustling of the leaves the wind spun through the trees. She started to smell ham frying, and then the starchy steam from the rice cooker. It had to be Potter down there. Dudley would have asked permission first. Not that Dudley should be cooking, and probably he would be set back days with his diet but after all her poor baby's delicate nerves were under such dreadful stress –
It was just as well, she determined, rising to the occasion. Stay down there, and stay busy, she willed the boys. Don't come up and see what's happening. Stay just where you are and we'll come rescue you.
God knew what the horrid freak was up to. With any luck he'd had a heart attack from stress; he had looked dreadfully ill.
Another scrape, this one imagined marking the freak's ugly face, and the line in the plaster was suddenly so deep that she could see half a dozen small holes that went all the way through into the hallway.
She made herself stop, 'til she could breathe normally. This was the danger point. She wanted to just burst through the wall, but doing that would make too much noise.
But she could do it. Across. Down. We'll save you, Duddykins. Scrape patiently, deeply, carefully, on either side of the "doorway" to make the holes large enough to put her fingers through and get a grip. She succeeded, and cautiously poked a finger through, wiggled it twice, and drew it quickly back. It was still attached and not turned green or black. Breathing hard, she set the handlebars aside and carefully took hold of the defined section of plaster, rocking it back and forth, thrilling with victory as it began to break loose. Bits of plaster tumbled down as the section worked free, falling like warm snowflakes onto her hair and her nose and her triumphant grin.
*******
Harry grinned as he worked. He was rather pleased with himself. He never had a chance to cook at Hogwarts, and it was fun now not having Aunt Petunia ordering him about the kitchen. Harder, too, in some ways. He hadn't remembered to thaw the Sunday roast beforehand, so it was sitting in the sink with warm water running over it to hurry it along; Aunt Petunia always said that the microwave ruined a good piece of meat, and he hadn't wanted to fetch Snape's wand for a thawing spell. That was all right. They could always eat the roast last, or just before the pudding.
Not that there was that much else to eat first. Harry had been surprised to find so little in the refrigerator. Probably that had to do with Dudley's snacking. Aunt Petunia might dote on Dudley, but she was realistic where his appetite was concerned.
Harry had scrounged everything he could and then looked through Aunt Petunia's collection of cookery books for ideas of what to do to use up the leftover ham, three eggs, and the tag ends of assorted bags of frozen vegetables. He'd already made a respectable green salad from the last of the fresh vegetables and lettuce while he was waiting for the rice cooker. He had a feeling that maybe he shouldn't have cooked up all the rice at once, but he wasn't going to let that worry him. There was always rice pudding. He set some of the rice aside in a small pot and mixed the rest in with the ham and vegetables in the frying pan, stirring until the distribution of bits looked about even, then returned to flipping through one of the books.
No luck. Rice pudding required milk. In fact, a discouragingly high percentage of the recipes called for milk or cream. Wait, we had evaporated milk for the coffee -- He found the can where it had been left on the counter, but it had an evil smell now and Harry decided that evaporated milk could turn on a hot enough day. He opened the back door and set the can outside. Nevermind. When Dobby was awake, they could send him to fetch some milk, even if they wound up having the pudding as an evening snack. Harry thought that sounded nice -- kind of cozy, really, although it was strange to think of anything "cozy" and the Dursleys' at the same time, but then again everything was all turned upside-down anyway. He resolved to give Dudley plain rice with his dinner so he could share the pudding later.
There'd probably be plenty. There was a lot of rice, which Harry hoped made up for what seemed to him not a lot of actual food. Uncle Vernon was likely to be hungry. And Snape might wake up hungry as a bear. Harry stirred the rice once again, turned down the heat, and opened up the cupboard to rummage around again, hoping for new ideas.
There wasn't much in the cupboards, either. And come to think of it, the grocery sacks he'd unpacked for Aunt Petunia this summer had all been light, with not much in them. He supposed she'd taken to buying no more than what she needed for a few days at a time. That seemed strange.
Or maybe she only bought what she could carry home. She wouldn't send Harry to the store anymore, and she certainly couldn't send Dudley, and Uncle Vernon was bored by shopping. Harry shook his head, reaching back behind a box of salt on the bottom shelf to pull out half a bag of walnuts and a rather stiff bag of marshmallows that had been obscured in the back. He thought of the apples in the refrigerator bin. There was still some mayonnaise. He could make a fruit salad, like Dobby had made for Dudley's second breakfast. That would help round out the meal. And here was a tin of lima beans, which was odd because no one liked them. Perhaps they'd been bought by mistake.
Maybe Dobby liked lima beans.
There were still four potatoes in the bin, though. Harry smiled at them. He knew how to make chips. As lovely as the food always was at Hogwarts, it always reached the tables at just the right temperature to eat, and Harry had a weakness for chips that were too hot. He always had taste-tested several chips to find out whether or not the rest were ready, even if it had meant biting into a not-quite-ready-in-the-middle chip for starters so that Aunt Petunia wouldn't find out he could tell when they were done just by looking.
Harry went back to the cookery book, stopping at a recipe for a "Vegan" spice cake that didn't require milk, or eggs. That would work for dessert, or for breakfast tomorrow. If he couldn't manage to get out to a store it would have to be all right to eat spice cake for breakfast. He read the ingredients list again to be sure, and decided that if got the batter ready now, he could put it in the oven with the roast, since the roast was going to be late anyway. They might have that for breakfast as well. OR maybe he could send Dobby out for eggs.
Something rumbled outside in the distance and Harry glanced out the window. The storm was definitely getting close – it was getting quite windy and dark outside. He'd best get out all the ingredients and get cooking. And light a candle in case the electricity went out again.
*****
The lovely smell of food was beginning to be absolute torture. Dudley turned up the television to drown out the clattering in the kitchen. A sudden louder crack of thunder reminded him that he wasn't usually allowed to watch television in a lightning storm, but he was clear across the room from the set, so it wasn't the same as if he were playing a videogame.
He'd rather be playing a videogame. He cast a dark look at the book and his unfinished essay. Drat Dickens anyway. Every time you thought he'd got done with the story he made someone else do something mean to Oliver.
The deep sea diving program had ended and they'd gone on to a rerun of a program he'd seen a dozen times. Dudley left the set on anyway and sat down to measuring his taped pieces of paper to see how many more inches he had to go. Ten.
He felt saved when someone knocked urgently at the door. Dudley cast his pen aside gratefully. It was probably Piers, who hadn't the sense to come in out of the rain until it lightninged, and who hadn't really believed them this afternoon anyway. No problem. Harry and he could handle Piers -- Harry could give him some of that nasty candy he'd talked about.
That would be much more entertaining than Charles Dickens.
****
A crack of thunder very close to the house startled Petunia into stepping backwards, and a piece of the plaster the size of a dinner plate came with her. She caught herself and listened, clutching her prize, but no one seemed to have noticed her success over the thunder and the loud gabble of the television.
Cautiously, she looked into the hall, fighting against a sneeze and then giving in as the thunder grumbled again. No one was going to hear her over that, nibbling through the walls like a mouse. Very warily she put her head forward to peek 'round the edges of the hole.
Potter's trunk was in the middle of the hall, where everyone would trip over it. The guest room door was closed. Her bedroom door was open. She could just see the shape of someone under the blankets in the bed at the other end of the room, defined now and again by the drape of the curtains flapping in the wind.
The window was open. Vernon never slept with the window open.
And the boys were downstairs.
That disgusting freak is sleeping in our room!
She growled, low in her throat, startling herself as much as the thunder had. But only for a moment. Teeth gritted, she latched hold of the torn plaster and ripped loose chunk after chunk, breaking nails on both hands, hissing threats and epithets the whole while until she'd made a gap large enough to climb through.
She lost a shoe on the way and stopped to retrieve it, the dust on her cheeks streaked with angry tears as she reached back into the broken room to get her footwear. The handlebars gleamed nearby and she took those up, hefting them in her hands as she stalked down the hallway.
*****
Harry had the chips in the deep fryer, and the cake batter in the tube pan. The roast was still solid at the middle, so he was working on chopping up the apples. A crack of thunder nearly made him cut himself, and he lost part of an apple to the floor. But the lights stayed on, so he shook his head and went on working.
The rhythm of the knife against the cutting board half-obscured the knocking from the other room, and it was only his cousin's call of "I'll get it," which attracted enough of Harry's attention to make him realize that they were about to get more visitors. "But Muggles would ring the bell!" he realized a moment later, and headed for the kitchen door with the knife in his hand. He got there just in time to see Dudley opening the door to three tall, cloaked figures wearing white masks.
Death Eaters!
***
Petunia crept grimly across her bedroom, clutching the bicycle handlebars and trying to breathe quietly through her nose. That horrid man had ruined the bed, splitting it into two pieces and rearranging the room. He was lying in the half under the window, shrouded now and then by the curtains. In the glimpses she got by lightning, the flashes glinted strangely off of his skin. No doubt he'd been rained on. Good.
Something crunched underfoot, startling her. She looked down and saw a flattened flake of something. After a worried moment she decided it was cereal.
They'd made a mess in here, she realized during the next flash. Thoughtless, all of them. Potter was always making messes.
Of course it was going to cause a worse mess when she hit the intruder with the handlebars.
Much worse than a smashed piece of cereal. She'd have to hit him hard enough to be sure, and he'd probably bleed. He'd probably bleed a lot. Rugby players did.
If she could just prevent him from waking up, Vernon could dump him somewhere. In a ditch. A very rainy ditch.
She tightened her grip on the handlebars. They were slick from her palms.
She hoped to God this worked.
On television, they always hit the back of the head. How could you hit the back of someone's head who was lying on his back?
Probably they don't want to mar the actors' faces if they hit too hard. She'd have to hit hard. She rehearsed her reasons to herself and tried not to think about the blood.
He's in our house, in our room, in our bed –
And now she was standing over the bed, and he hadn't woken up. The wind pulled back the curtain and she stared down at the man. Snape lay still, as white as the sheets. Whiter. And... glittery.
It took two lightning flashes to comprehend, and another to be sure: a thin chrysalis of ice had formed over him. What was he going to turn into now?
I should have brought a wooden stake! She raised the metal bar, which no longer seemed heavy enough.
Someone screamed and her heart stopped. Downstairs -- Dudley!
"I'm coming, baby!" she cried, and swung with all her strength.
Beneath the ice Snape's eyes slid open.