Severus Snape saw the Sign of Contact just as he was leaving a dingy little apothecary in Knockturn Alley—the kind of a shop where the owners didn't take too close a look at their patrons. The message board to the left of the dubious establishment was as 'respectable' as the rest of the businesses around. One shouldn't be surprised to find advertisements there, offering sexual favours that catered for the most whimsical tastes or smuggled and forbidden magical items offered for barter.
The Sign stood out immediately. It was a watery, cerise piece of... paper? Parchment? Severus couldn't tell and supposed no one else could. The desire to stay away from any forays into that place was not unusual.
The distinct transparency of the message did not leave any room for doubt as to its origins, even though Severus had never seen one before. In fact, he shouldn't have seen this one, either, but, taken over by curiosity, decided to ponder it later.
As was usual for Signs, there were only a few words scribbled on it. It was quite an innocuous one, in fact. Some woman asking to tell her daughter that she'd be watching over her. No name or any other mention of said daughter's identity. Must be someone gone only recently.
Severus sighed. The initial excitement of discovering his new ability had worn off and left him angry. He shouldn't have been surprised. He shouldn't have forgotten either, for that matter. But then something else occurred to him. It'd been almost ten years since his ordeal, and this was the first sign he'd come across? Surely the Contacts weren't that rare. Or were they? Severus found that he couldn't tell for sure, and it made him even more irritable. And he couldn't even remember having a Reversed Transition. He'd never bothered to find out, casting the information aside as useless, but oh, how it would have come in handy now. But that would mean paying a visit to Longbottom, the misfit who'd dragged him out of that hell's cove and shoved his almost-corpse to St Mungo's. Since it would also mean disclosure, it was a measure of last resort.
Or maybe he should just read up on the subject more. Fingering his wand, his hands stinging with a desire to blast something into pieces—the more pieces, the better—Severus marched to the Apparition point.
Strangely enough, the second Sign of Contact was left on his doorstep not two weeks after he'd spotted the first one. Ironically, he discovered it the very morning after a bottle of Ogden's cheapest had finally forced him to reconcile with his new 'talent', find it hugely overrated and decide to think nothing of it come morning.
The message was another pile of gibberish. It was the fact of its appearance that Severus found worthy of thinking over. And after such pondering, he was worried. Avery once told him that he and his 'kin' tended to draw them. Inadvertently, they always left messages somewhere close to where those able to read them dwelt, in order to warrant their notice. He'd always liked Avery. Well, maybe 'liked' was quite a bit of a stretch, but Avery had a straight-forwardness about him that Severus was inclined to appreciate. They also shared a certain mix of practicality and cynicism-in-general approach towards life, and they had both found the unnecessary, buoyant violence of their peers a despicable waste of time and magic.
To say nothing of the fact that Avery had always piqued Snape's interest with that ability of his. He had never been in the middle of Death Eater politics, and Severus was willing to bet an arm that Voldemort had tolerated Avery's inactivity and carelessness, when it came to the Cause, merely because of his rare gift.
Yes, it would be nice indeed to have a few words (and maybe a few drinks) with Avery. However, a visit to Avery had the same limiting quality: disclosure. A pity. Severus wouldn't have minded seeing a familiar face and being himself at the same time, for once.
Almost a month had passed, and quite uneventfully so. Severus's worry about his new manifesting 'talent' was put on the backburner. The ability couldn't be used as a free business plug—few people ever wanted to pass words to the other side. And even if they wanted to, this communication was a one-way street. One couldn't find or call the dead. It was always vice-versa.
Besides, with autumn's onset, Snape's concerns shifted to realms more mundane. Perhaps the stress, accumulated over all these years, had caught up with him now that he was finally getting accustomed to the relative safety of his existence and could afford to relax. Maybe an old wound or five and all those rounds of Crucio were saying 'hello' and bringing their regards from the past. He tired easily and went on needing at least nine hours of sleep daily, and that was saying a great deal. Strengthening Potions didn't have a lasting effect, and even that lessened as his body got used to their continuous ingestion. His sleep was fitful at best, plagued by disjointed images and dreams so vague he couldn't even tell whether they were proper nightmares.
Just about when Severus was ready to sit down and admit that he might need help outside his scope of knowledge and range of abilities, the third Sign of Contact popped up. In his very own herb garden, stuck under a brightly coloured pebble next to a bed of calendula flowers.
And this time, it wasn't some lost sodding soul wishing to pass on their pathetic shout-out to the living. No, this time, the fancy, elaborate scribble with arrogantly swirling letters, a sure sign of undying optimism on the verge of craziness, was immediately recognizable.
As soon as Snape registered the words in the missive, he recoiled with a sharp intake of breath, casting the translucent piece of... whatever they wrote on aside, as if it were a seemingly harmless bug that had turned out to have a sting with a hefty amount of poison.
He closed his eyes, willing his mind to concentrate on a potion, simmering in his cellar lab, on a stuffily-sweet smell of blooming night stocks—anything. But no, the paled writing, as if washed out by age, stood in front of his inner eye in fiery letters, no matter how he wished for it to go away.
'What have you done, my boy?'
The message was not signed—they seldom ever signed their notes for some reason—but it didn't need to be. This particular handwriting would be engraved in Snape's mind for as long as at least a single particle of his being existed on any plane.