Disclaimer: I'm not kidding when I say that I'm not J.K.
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Vie des Poulets
Chapter 6
Severus laid out the limp figure of the girl on the lush pink chenille bedspread and hastened to clog her nostrils with a bottle of ambergris. The potent substitute for a smelling-salt woke the frizzy-haired teenager with an epitomical start.
"Ah!" she gasped, and Snape smiled coldly.
"Now we're even. But let's not come to further blows, shall we? I should hate to have a relationship akin to that of the Three Stooges, sans one."
"Of course," agreed the faint-hearted girl vaguely, still shaken by her near-asphyxiation escapade.
"And I'm sorry, I did not mean to hurt you," he continued, gently helping her sit up against the high stack of pillows on the bed. Droopily, Hermione could do no more than nod. Having the wind knocked out of her left her utterly (though temporarily) incapable of anything.
At this point, he leaned towards her, in an almost sexual manner, but then whispered quite faintly in her ear: "Going to see about disabling some of the cameras etcetera on the basis that we don't want puerile observers. Will quell as many as possible." Then, standing straight, he took her hand, touched it tenderly to the bridge of his nose, and left the room. Hermione heard the door of the flat close behind him.
Left to her own devices, Hermione could not stir. The new light upon the situation was penetrating, and she had now amassed an incredible piece of news. Me, queen of England! What on earth! It's crazy, absolutely crazy! Not as though I'll have a ton of political clout--but say, that is a lot of financial power! Not to mention respect and prestige! Never in a thousand years would she have contemplated the possibility of her being in such a state.
Now is the time for me to take all the things I've told myself 'if I were in charge...' and do them, she thought, for better or for worse. She then began to dwell upon her favorite Machiavellian question, Is it better to be feared or to be loved when in power? Voldemort seem to think it's best to be feared, and I think that's to his detriment. To not have love is to be unwhole. Which, it's already been proven that Voldemort is unwhole; he split himself literally up in pieces with the whole Horocrux thing. To show so little regard to one's own self must be indicative of any observer that he thinks no more of anyone else. He'd indifferently, coldly, gladly split up any subordinate's soul--if he could endure it, why, anyone could! Or at least everyone else deserves no less than that suffering. I really wonder if he's started horocruxes with anyone else. Immediately, her mind went to Snape.
But no, that's ridiculous. Why, the splitting of one's soul is what leads to immortality--of a kind--and would Voldemort risk the splitting of anyone else's soul as competition? Followers of a powerful personality are a dime a dozen. There would be no need for him to produce eternal followers. Except, perhaps, those who are more talented than others. Again, her mind went to Snape.
So let's requalify the question Hermione decided, Point one: How does Voldemort view the splitting of the soul? As an ultimate kind of suffering (negative), as the ultimate test of endurance (positive), or as both (positive/negative)? Point two: what action does this view entail?
She thought about that for a minute or two, then began to construct a mental outline.
A. Splitting eq. Negative
a. Entails?
B. Splitting eq. Positive
a. Entails?
C. Splitting eq. both
a. Entails?
At this point, she remembered that she was originally trying to answer the question, Is it better to be loved or feared, and so she made revisions to that effect.
A. Splitting eq. Negative
a. Entails splitting eq. punishment, which eq. demonstration of fear for more effective rule, which eq. Pro Fear and Con Love.
B. Splitting eq. Positive
a. Entails splitting eq. honor, which eq. demonstration of honor for self and/or others, which eq. Pro Love and Con Fear.
C. Splitting eq. both
a. Entails splitting eq. both honor and punishment, which eq. both use of fear and love in rule, which eq. Pro Love and Pro Fear.
She then added a last tier.
D. Splitting eq. Neither
a. Entails splitting eq. neither honor nor punishment, which eq. neither love or fear in rule, which eq. Con Love and Con Fear.
It was at this point, however, that she got bored of this exercise, and drifted to a well-deserved sleep.
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She awoke with the burst of light that accompanied the opening of her bedroom door. Hours had passed, and the natural light had abandoned her, from whatever source it came from. Her bedroom was incredibly black, save for the brightness that shone in from the bit of the living room that she could see. Her dark-haired 'husband' was looking in upon her.
"I didn't mean to wake you," he said in a muted tone. "I've brought rations, though, if you're hungry. Si tu as faim" he added in afterthought, to practice his French.
"Olives?" Hermione remembered his entreaty not to eat anything but.
"And some maraschino cherries. I personally detest them, but brought some on the chance that you like them."
"I do, actually. But not necessarily in mass quantities."
"Do you intend to get up?"
Hermione considered. Her drowsiness was ebbing at the prospect of food, though she was unhappy at the idea of nothing but cherries and olives.
"Do you have coffee?"
"Yes."
Hermione stiffly moved her legs off the bed. She had slept like a log, and her joints cracked when they moved due to her inflexible period of insensibility. "I'll be coming."
"Fine."
With that indication, Snape waved his wand, which lit the lights in her chamber, and closed the door discretely.
After a brief stop at the loo, Hermione took off the fancy dress she had been wearing since who knows when, and instead put on a gauzy muslin dress from the closet that she perceived to be apportioned to her. She would wash in the vast bathtub after something to eat.
When she left her suite, she heard the drizzling of a coffee-maker in the living room, and found Snape pounding with a well-used mortar in the laboratory.
"Sparrow meat," she surmised, squinting at the thin tenderized strips that he was grinding with spices.
"Get used to small fowl," he said rather testily. "Pigeon is only marginally better."
Though she said nothing, her silence spoke for her disgust.
"Be glad there are no house-elves around, before you start squawking."
At this, Hermione's stomach dropped. Would he really go to such lengths?
"That was a joke in rather bad taste," he apologized quickly, then, as if in attempt to distract her, he muttered, "Oh! For the love of god, I'm so glad to be able to cook with the lights on!"
Hermione looked around, trying not to think of the large globe eyes of house-elves floating in a bowl of stew. "I imagine the surveillance upon us has been significantly reduced?"
"A couple hundred galleons later, a promise of a safer future for the superintendent's children, and we are in the clear."
"Completely?"
"Completely. Though the reports are still being filled out for inspection by inquiring minds, they are being completely bullshitted."
Hermione sighed, though was surprised at his profanity. "That's excellent!"
"Mostly. That's just the Interior Monitoring Service that's been lifted. I've had an inkling for a while that that could be infiltrated, since the cracking of one lower bungling idiot some months ago. I suppose when one is living with people all the time, violating their every privacy, one must realize the inhumanity of the regime at large."
"So wait. Are they just lifting the monitors for our flat, or for everyone?"
Snape shook his head, and sneezed over his shoulder. "Oh, no, I wish it could be for everyone, but as it stands, only us and a few other allies have been protected from the spies."
"So who are these allies?"
Putting down the pestle and tipping the ground sparrow-meat into a broth that boiled in a heated cauldron, Snape remarked, "Some of them you may know, some of them you know under different names, and some of them you don't know at all. That's all I can say, really. All in all, they number near fifty households, and include, among others, that of the Weasleys (what's left of them, anyhow), the Longbottoms (all two of them), the Abbotts, the Tonks, and the Blairs. At least, those are the ones you're most familiar with."
"Oh, what Weasleys are alive?"
Snape shrugged. "Percival Weasley is the alpha male of the clan, now."
"Ugh. I don't want to deal with Percy for a while; Ron has biased me against him" Hermione commented dryly, then inquired, "However, the Blairs you refer to are the family of the late Prime Minister?"
"That's right."
"I see." Hermione digested this information. "So, you said that we still have others to deal with besides the interior monitoring people. What do these others number?"
"Your questions are beginning to irritate me. That's seven in the past five minutes."
"Please?"
Snape sighed, and Hermione could tell that his jaw was clenched. "Besides the Interior Monitor Service there is, in our vicinity, the London Home Food Company (which is not a company at all but a government organization), the Sewage and Sanitation Cooperation (which is easy to evade, just don't put non-edibles or medications down the toilet and we are scott-free in their books), the Honest Age Floo Network (which limits conversations and transportation and such), and the Station for Unpatriotic Activities (which only tunes into conversations when the V-word is pronounced). There are a number of others that the common man must deal with, additionally, such as the China Cup Communications Commission which monitors the volume of decibels in homes to prevent 'noise pollution', the Garden Act Commission that makes certain that people with yards keep them nice and tidy, and a good many others. One thing that I can say for this government--there's jobs aplenty for every able body."
Hermione could tell, at this point, that Snape was getting sarcastic and unpleasant, but there was a question in the back of her brain that had been nagging her since she woke up.
"Prof--, erm, Severus, may I ask, why aren't we allowed to prepare our own food?"
He said nothing, but as he was chopping olives, it became clear that the force he utilized was more than he needed. Hermione noticed multiple scars on his left fingers, as though he spent a lot of time chopping angrily in the dark.
Maybe he had not heard. Hermione asked him again. "Why aren't we allowed to cook?"
She received no answer.
"Is there a reason that we aren't--"
"--I heard you, now shut up."
Hermione, though she lacked patience, did so. Fastidiously, he continued in the preparation. Finally, as he dumped the little green bits into the cauldron, he remarked, "It's complicated and nasty."
"How much so?"
"So much that I don't want to talk about it."
And that, as Hermione realized, was that. When Severus Snape was pestered and flustered, and particularly hungry, he clammed. He did not, in essence, respond well to being bombarded with questions.
Dinner was nothing more than the thin soup de piaf as prepared before Hermione, with the maraschino cherries. Severus did prepare breakfast 'bread' afterwards, using the sopping coffee grounds from his morning coffee, a decent amount of sugar and cream that, he explained, was sold for coffee, and a single egg from a carton of Mixed Quail Eggs which were commonly used in potions. These were mixed, and the result was baked in a clean, warm cauldron for two hours, and it served as a decent-tasting cake in the morning for breakfast.
"Flour is very expensive, and rather hard to get; it is used so little except as a thickening agent in potions that it is nearly impossible to purchase in any respect save in the smallest of quantities. Crushed sporophytic grains are far cheaper, are easier to produce, and are universally acknowledged to work just as well. The only time this would be a hindrance to anyone is in the preparation of food--even spores from ferns are distinctly disgusting to the taste."
They had drunk the broth from red mixing bowls, which Snape assured her were colored so to prevent him from using them in proper potion production, and everything was washed and dried and put away at this point. The maraschino cherries had also been eaten, from the jar, as they were.
"So," Hermione began to query again, "We're simply not supposed to prepare our own food."
"That's right."
"But why? Won't you tell me now?" She sensed that once Snape had eaten, he was a lot less a bear. "I see that you can get coffee, and potions ingredients, and things to make drinks, but why can't you get proper foodstuffs?"
"Because we are supposed to eat what we are served."
"And what is this?"
"Two minutes, and you can see for yourself."
Good as his word, the clock above the door to the laboratory struck four o'clock, and as it did, a delicate bell chimed in the dining room. Hermione looked to Severus, and his lips were drawn. Without a word, he walked out of the laboratory.
There was a golden hue about the dumbwaiter in the dining room, and it was towards it that Severus walked. As she approached, Hermione could smell the faint aroma of buttered croissants, warm chicken cordon bleu, aromatic cheeses, and a fine red wine. Instantly, she was salivating; dinner had been scant, and now the smell of really good food was tempting.
Snape, however, seemed not to be affected. In the most businesslike of manners, as though he were dealing with a nuisance of a brat, he opened the dumbwaiter, pinched the edges of an enormous tray, and carried it to the table.
It was the most beautiful food that Hermione had ever seen. Her nose had not deceived her; chicken cordon bleu, croissants, and cheese were on the enormous platter, but these were supplemented by a gorgeous array of fine meat-and-cheese pastries, little sandwiches, chocolate eclairs, and a concentration of Belgian chocolates that resembled little tanks surrounding the border of France.
"Fuck this French crap."
It seemed to get Snape really seethingly angry, and without a word, he pitched the tray upside-down with wandless magic, letting the food splatter on the fine hardwood table. Then the dumbwaiter behind him glowed once more, and a large bowl of chocolate mousse materialized within it, only this landed upside-down on the carpet.
After this demonstration of ire, however, Snape was immediately apologetic. "God, Granger, I'm making a total ass of myself. Just, don't touch this, all right?"
He had to pull his wand from his sleeve and cast quick spells to clean up the mess. Hermione watched, wishing all that food had not been spoilt. If it had not, she might have forgotten his warning and grabbed an eclair or two.
After putting all the food--some squashed, most of it past the ten-second-rule--back in a congealed mass on the platter, Snape marched it to the loo, where he dumped as much of it was decent into the toilet, and flushed it multiple times until all the food had disappeared down the pipes.
"That was just supposed to be afternoon tea," Snape said when he emerged from the bathroom. Hermione's jaw dropped.
"Oh, and you know what was in those meat pastry things? The ones you were so coveting?"
Hermione's eyes widened. "House-elves."
Snape's face momentarily tightened, but then he laughed bitterly.
"No, Granger. Human flesh."
She had snagged one that had rolled in her direction, and when he missed it, she had immediately stuffed half of it in her mouth. Now, a moment later, she felt dreadfully sick.
"You ate it already? Oh, for Merlin's sake."
There was no time to move anywhere but down; her knees buckled and she fell to the floor, expunging the only cannibalic delicacy she ever had tasted.
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