Sigh. Have you any idea how hard it is to write a chapter by a deadline you promised to meet when the plot changes four times!

Well, here is the said chapter from Hell. Enjoy, and thanks for all the reviews last time.

It was not often that a man was attacked by an overlarge bird of prey in one fireplace and forcibly slammed into the back of another over a mile away. But then, Severus Snape was having an incredibly bizarre weekend. He hit the sooty bricks with a wheeze and collapsed down the wall until his feet found purchase at last and he halted with most of his body only a foot from the ground. The owl's wings brushed against either side of the sheltered outdoor fireplace. Her talons cut through the robe, undershirt, and flesh of his upraised forearm. She flared up, hulking and screeching. He was being loomed over, he realized, and he did not like it one bloody bit.

"Damned bird!" he snarled. He powered himself forward and out of the tri-wall enclosure using his free arm and what little leverage his legs had. She thrashed but did not let go of his arm until he swung around violently with the intent to bash her into the bricks of the public Floo station. She foresaw her imminent meeting with the wall, however, and instead used the momentum of his swing to propel her into the air and leave him staggering.

After regaining his balance, Severus sagged and leaned against the fireplace for support. 'How could this weekend get any worse?' he groused to himself as the owl screeched above him.

He had no idea.

—

'Of all the nerve!' Nibble was hooting as she hovered over the man and boy. 'He tried to Floo without me—tried to abandon me…" Her wings grew heavy at that thought until she shook it off and swooped to land on a lamppost. To drown out the whispers that stubbornly lodged in her mind, she cursed loudly.

Fenrir looked both terrified and impressed as he regarded the vehemently hooting owl above him. "Does your mother know you know that?" he asked after a time.

To the amusement of a few bystanders, the squawking bird shut up immediately.

—

Unfortunately for the reclusive professor's nerves, the weekend after Halloween was the shopping event of the year. The streets of Diagon Ally were paved with sale-hunting witches and towering heaps of packages with legs. The congestion was worse than the Hogwarts stairwells at dinnertime. The usual intimidation tactics failed to grant Severus any breathing room. It was all he could do to keep Fen from being trampled when the store they were passing by announced a price cut.

The feeling of stepping into the quiet, unhurried atmosphere of Madam Malkin's was similar to that of finding the one patch of cool shade in Hell. In his relief, Severus failed to notice that the boy at his side was suddenly tense enough snap in two if looked at. Instead the man watched Madam Malkin wander out of the back room looking completely unflustered and even a bit bored. The witch worked on commission, so she had no sale items for the shoppers to swarm. It was through the party season and the back-to-school rush that she made her living. She seemed pleasantly surprised to see Severus and his young charge.

"Yes?" she asked expectantly. "Can I help you?"

He stuck to the bare minimum of necessary information. With a gesture to the boy, he explained, "Fenrir was recently made a Ministry ward. It's been arranged for him to attend Hogwarts. He will be needing school robes,"—Fen twitched—"a set of everyday robes,"—he twitched again—"trousers,"—and again—"shirts, winter over-wear…everything." Not that anyone was noticing, but the small boy in the shop seemed to be in the throes of an epileptic fit.

Malkin's round face pinched with thought. "A Ministry ward?" she repeated in a questioning tone. "I don't do work for many of those." Severus doubted she had ever done any. He studied her frown. "If you don't mind my asking," she asked at last, "how much gold did the Ministry allow for the boy's…outfitting?"

"Oh. They were supposed to give me a spending limit?" The innocent air with which he asked question fit him about as well as a three-fingered glove. He pulled out the enchanted parchment and allowed her to see the glowing Ministry seal. "Whatever amount you think is prudent," he told her flatly. "Where do you want the boy?"

—

The elf formerly known as Dobbin had just discovered his personal Hell: being sewn into clothes. He managed to ignore the possessed pins and snaking needles for the most part, but the feeling of cloth being pulled ever tighter against his skin made him writhe. However, as he started to squirm, the Madam shot him her fifty-eighth admonishing look. He ducked his head to hide his pained grimace. He vaguely recalled a small Draco Monster tugging at tiny, constricting shirt cuffs and absolutely bawling. As a House Elf, he had understood the child's horror at being forced to wear clothes—and uncomfortable ones at that—but now he had complete empathy for the boy.

He wondered which human had invented clothes. Surely it had been a professional torturer.

Finally the pins and needles released him, and he hobbled off the platform, completely encased. Malkin nodded absently to herself as she double-checked a long page of measurements. "If you'll stop in again in a few hours, I should have the rest done," she told Severus. "Now, if you don't mind…"

He handed her the parchment, but watched over her shoulder as she scratched in the name of her shop, the purchased items, and their prices with her quill. The smooth, looped characters disappeared from the parchment one by one, and she nodded as her quill briefly glowed the same color as the Ministry seal.

"Well, everything seems to be in order. Have a pleasant afternoon. The boy can wear that outfit out."

Fen wondered what he had done to deserve this fate.

—

Nibble had made it a habit to wait on the rooftop of each shop that Severus and Fen entered, then lazily glide after them as they tried to force their way through the crowd's gridlock. After five shops, she had become so lulled by the routine that she neglected to notice where exactly she was following the pair until it was too late and—

"Athena!"

Underneath her feathers, she blanched. Oh no, not the Owl Emporium. She hazarded a look. Sure enough, there was the old shop that she had spent most of her childhood trying to escape from, and there—tethered to the outdoor roost, resembling nothing more than a golden, over-plump, overexcited chicken—was her mother.

"Athena! Hatchling, you've come home!" The joyous note to the mother hen's hoots lasted for all of two seconds. Then: "How dare you leave! Unbonded—and flapping about like a wild…wild hawk! You irresponsible, immature, thoughtless, unloving—!"

'Oh, Archimedes, kill me now…' Nibble pleaded silently.

—

In the latest shop, Fen stopped dead in the doorway as his belly flopped over and his knees threatened to collapse. He didn't know if it was the inherent magic of the place making him sick or just the sight before him. Wands. Wands on the table, wands jutting out of a pile of fallen boxes, and hundreds of the same, long, narrow boxes crammed into every available shelf, all filled, he feared, with wands.

He swallowed. The jig—as he had heard a human say once—was up. House Elves and wands did not mix. He circumspectly took a step backwards and out of the shop, but before he could lift his foot for a second step, Severus grabbed his wrist and dragged him in.

Such were his nerves, that when the owlish human appeared from nowhere, he all but jumped out of his skin. The wizard didn't seem to notice, but only smiled in a drowsy way and rolled up his sleeves. Severus nodded his head at the man and explained, "We're here to purchase a wand." He paused, and then firmly added, "The boy is of age."

The wizard tilted back his head. His spectacles gleamed unnaturally in the dim light. "I can see that."

Fen suddenly felt cold. This human was the first to notice that he was older than eight. He bit his lip. Humans and House Elves aged differently; House Elves were slower. He hadn't thought about it before, but that could be a real problem.

"Why isn't the lad in school?" the wizard asked suddenly.

After a time, Severus answered, "He was only found recently."

"Oh? I didn't think a child could fall through the cracks for so long."

The professor frowned at the shopkeeper's emphasis on the word 'long.' Yes, two months late was odd, but it was hardly a precedent. There were stories of teenaged muggleborns, untrained and sending out surges of accidental magic as easy as breathing. The Muggles called them hell spawn or possessed, and the ending of the story was rarely happy unless the Ministry stepped in. Fenrir Svartálfar, however, was hardly a teenager.

Fen had closed his eyes. There was a long silence, in which an odd prickling of the back of his neck grew almost unbearable.

"Mr. Ollivander," Severus said at last with a hard edge to his voice.

"Mnm?"

Fen whipped around to see the wizard bent over to study him through gleaming lenses. He repressed a swallow.

"Ollivander. We are here to buy a wand, not to—" but whatever Severus was going to snap was cut off when Ollivander frowned and grabbed both of Fen's wrists.

"Which hand, then?" he muttered. Fen curled both hands into fists. Severus eventually supplied that the boy wrote left-handed, but the standstill leading up to that divulgement was long and painful. After the words left the man's lips, the left hand in question was attacked by measuring tape. Ollivander nodded at the final verdict and pulled a box from the nearest shelf. "Here." The wand found inside was pressed into Fen's hand. "Give it a wave, then."

The boy paled. A thousand thoughts careened through his overworked brain. When he couldn't make a wand work, they would know he wasn't a wizard. But he had been accepted to a magic school, so he had to be magical. They would realize that a magical non-wizard was a non-human, starting them down a train of thought that was very detrimental to his health.

With a gulp, Fen flicked his wrist ever so slightly.

The wand exploded.