After the pair had left Hogsmeade, Padfoot slunk back to the broken collection of milk bottles. He divided his time between carefully licking drops of fat cream off the larger glass shards and making bewildered looks at the floo.

Through the student mutterings that came of a weekend, he had learned of Snape's position as Potions professor and Slytherin head. This information conjured a picture of Snivellus á la Slughorn, albeit a slimier, tatty version. He had taken great joy in picturing greasy, gangly boy from memory transfigured into an obese bottom-feeder; it had been the second time he genuinely laughed in some twelve years. But this Snivellus was…different.

Where were the shabby outer robes with nothing underneath? This Snivellus had layers and layers buttoned snugly shut. This Snivellus still didn't have an ounce of fat on his bones, but he didn't shiver the slightest bit in the freezing chill. Padfoot looked balefully at a tiny pool of the thick creamy milk where it sat in an iced-over depression of the street. Hunger and the fear that putting too much cold in his insides would kill him battled until he plunged his head down in desperation. He lapped it up and held it in his mouth and looked back at the floo, waiting. This Snivellus stood tall. This Snivellus made his cold, aching guts churn with hate, but also…

Envy.

Oh, that chafed! To want, even for a brief second, Snivellus' lot. It wasn't fair. This Snivellus walked free, and he had his wand, and had warm clothes and enough food.

Food.

Wormtail, he decided then and there, he would eat. Just gobble up. Disgusting, more than likely, yes, but the blood would be hot. He swallowed the milk, debating where he could shelter that was almost. Almost warm, but never really. There was no almost about the hunger; it was always there, worse and worse and worse, and the child had looked so tasty.

Dismayed, he shook himself. Drops of ice melt flew off his sodden fur. He was not that hungry. And any child Snivellus would want to protect couldn't be that good anyway. Probably snake meat. He looked towards the woods. A snake. Oh, if only.

One of the unbroken bottles had almost half of milk left inside. He wondered at the wastefulness, dipped his head to the side, and closed his jaws around the bottle's neck. Where to now? He needed to change back, needed to try to get dry, try to get warm enough to be able to risk sleeping. Part of him wanted to damn his mission—his reason—and just sleep. Let the cold stop his heart, a voice whispered. Let it end. Come.

That thought last wasn't his voice. Fear flooded his sluggish veins. He darted for the shadows, plastering himself to the alley wall.

Come to me.

It came down circling with the falling snow. He knew it by many names. It was the coiling darkness, the biting cold. It was silent screaming. It was demon, tormenter, predator—Dementor. Where are you? it asked. Most people couldn't decipher the creatures' whisperings in their souls, but he had been fluent for years. The words sent phantom caresses of his face. It was playing.

The Dementor undulated in the air above High Street, silk and smoke. A breeze carried it to the store window of Zonko's. It twisted, its covered head revolving at an angle unnatural, to peer through a gap between the drawn shade and the window's frame. Are you here? No? It flowed backwards, closer.

There were several ghostly hands now, warm hands running up and down Padfoot's flanks. Warm, actually warm. He slumped against the wall as his eyes rolled up in bliss.

Come. To me. I felt you. You were here.

He cracked open an eyelid, wondering whether to move. It felt so good.

The Dementor had reached the village center and was hovering over the dark mantle of the public floo. I know you are here, it crooned. Don't be afraid. Long, slender fingers, white as the milk in the bottle, reached out its insubstantial cloak to clutch at the brick and mortar. Slowly, it pulled itself down. Its garments billowed up into the sky, twisting with the wind as its limbs crawled towards the cobblestone road and then across it, head inches off the ground. Come to me. Flesh and blood and soul, you were—here.

It froze in the spot where Snivellus and his little snake had stood a short time ago. It arched up and turned its head, almost a full revolution. Come, now!

A vein of ice shot through the warmth that cocooned Padfood, and he shivered. The bottle in his teeth clinked softly against the brick.

In an instant, the Dementor twined in around itself, and against the wind, it tore into the alley. The illusion of warmth was shredded. The cold and wet rushed back into him, forcing out a yelp. The bottle fell from his jaws, and then the Dementor was on him, slamming him against the wall. Fingers blindly groped at his body as his heart shuddered and he could only whine in terror. Then, with a snarl, it snarled and released him, then reached up and began to ascend, clawing its way up the wall. Bits of brick and mortar dust crumbled down onto his belly. He didn't dare move. He didn't dare breathe.

Reaching the rooftop, it let loose a howling shriek that must have chilled every soul for a hundred miles. A wind from the north howled back. The Dementor released its hold and arced into the sky. Ten minutes later, Padfoot turned and struggled up on all fours. Something had cracked when he met the wall. The bottle.

It was in pieces. A little milk was collected in a curved shard, but the rest appeared to have slid down into a crack between the alley street and the building's wall. His tongue darted forward. Some of the milk ended up in the curl of his tongue, but so did blood. He had sliced himself on the glass. He licked the shard clean anyway, savoring the cuts as they came. Blood, even the blood of a half-frozen, half-dead stray was warm.

Then there was no more milk with the blood, and then no more blood, only the fear and hurt left by the Dementor. He shuffled down the alley, groaning, and cursed Snivellus with every pitiful little thing he had. The man had lured the Dementor out to the village, to him, and then left for someplace warm and safe with not a care in the world.

XXX

The time was later back in Diagon than in Hogsmeade, easily over two hours after dark, but it was much warmer and a legion of lampposts were burning merrily. Severus was not feeling anything near merry. In fact, he was trying—and failing—not to envy Black. The man was, no doubt, holed away someplace safe and remote, laughing at the world but at him in particular. He after all, was the one charged with the task of finding lodging for the night for himself and a passably pretty, rumpled and frightened boy child that was only kept from vanishing by means of a solid grip on a small elbow.

A rosy picture the two of them did not make by any stretch as they entered the Commons. The boy's state was previously mentioned. As for himself, he had emerged from the floo all but screaming dark and threatening wizard at 2 o'clock. As he unwillingly exuded this persona, he stood awkwardly, casting glance at first the east end of Diagon and then the mouth of Knockturn, debating the merits of arrest by zealot Auror and slow death by unhygienic mob.

At that moment he was leaning towards the mob. Reason: the two Aurors emerging west Diagon. They were of the Bully Boy design he'd come to know all too well. Also, unless the standards of physical fitness for law enforcement had become so lax that cripples could wear the Red, the slight wizard staggering along attached to his heavier-set partner at the shoulder was drunk out of his gourd.

The faint twitter of Gobbledygook at his back was not making his nervousness any better. The feeling of being watched by fourteen Goblin sentries on Gringott's battlements made the desolate state of Hogsmeade's High Street strangely comforting in retrospect. The sounds the creatures uttered were downright gleeful, and given the nature of Goblins, that indicated either an imminent rebellion or imminent human suffering. The market was all wrong for rebellion, so Severus's nervousness was understandable.

All he needed was for the brightly cad streetwalker leaning against the lamppost at the mouth of a Knockturn to notice his death-grip on Svartálfar. Then he could be looking at slow death by unhygienic mob pending arrest by drunken Bully Boy Auror as Goblins watched on with unadulterated delight. He glanced up behind him. The sentry patrol had somehow instantly doubled, and there had to be another thirty of the gruesome creatures poking their heads out of various hidey-holes in the bank's monumental front face. All of them were staring down at the Commons with rapt attention.

This was exactly what he meant about life. It was karma; it had to be.

Then it happened, and Severus could only blink. There was a twinkling of light from up on the wall of the bank that neatly coincided with the lumbering Auror tripping over nothing and going down on top of his smaller companion. The Goblins burst into cheers and bursts of excited Gobbledygook over the brawl that immediately ensued between the two upstanding members of the Red.

For a brief moment, Severus's mind reeled at the thought of an inhuman being having the ability to work a wand adeptly enough to execute a tripping hex from over thirty yards. Then he turned to practical matters and decided that stopping to think about it wasn't worth dying over. He grabbed his change from the floo mantle, moved his grip on Svartálfar to a more friendly-looking spot on the boy's far shoulder, and left while he could.

His decision of Diagon or Knockturn was made for him by the escalating brawl, which lay almost directly between him and the dark side alley's entrance. The Leaky Cauldron it was. And if a few silent cleaning and cheering charms happened to hit the boy as they moved down Diagon, who in his right mind was going to begrudge a Slytherin his attempts at self-preservation.

XXX

Up on the battlements a Gringotts—a place very few humans could claim to have been and fewer could claim to have not been pitched off of—Bill Weasley watched in a stupor as his old Potions professor made his way down Diagon, small child in tow. He really needed to cancel the eagle eye charm, but being struck dumb was making that rather difficult. Then a Goblin clapped him soundly on the back, and he came back to reality very quickly in order to catch himself on the shallow stone barrier between him and sixty feet of free fall. He immediately cancelled the charm, returning his sight to a state where he could see things less then twenty feet away from his face, and moved away from the edge of the wall. He took the ribbing of clumsiness from the Goblins, accepted a pint mug from the stoutest in his group, Beak-something, and took a seat at the fire.

Frankly, when Bill had worked up the nerve to ask one of the bank managers for a raise and was told it could be his should he pass a test and entertain the Goblins, this was the last thing he had expected. Labyrinths, yes. Getting locked in an arena with a dragon. Rodents of unusual size!

He had never guessed he would be playing random pranks on passerby and giggling over it with Goblins like little boys in a tree fort. And he would have never, ever, ever thought he'd see his Potions NEWT nightmare walking by with a an arm slung around a little boy every bit as pale as dark-haired as him. It…

Bill gulped down the pint, and if the Goblins had done something to the drink he was already too gone to notice.

XXX

Mercies of mercies, when Severus quietly asked Tom the Barkeep for lodgings for the night, Svartálfar was doped just enough on cheering charms to smile shyly and not edge away from him but also sober enough to not grin like a bespelled loon. Still he was expecting trouble. He just didn't dream it would crop up in its chosen form. The hunched wizard took one look at Svartálfar and assumed the boy was his son.

The term, he believed, was poleaxed. Unable to speak, he had the room key in hand and was heading for the back of the tavern with the boy before he brain could even begin to contemplate the sheer absurdity of himself with a child. At the base of the stair that led to the lodgings up above, he decided he didn't know whether to be relieved or affronted by the assumption. Yes, he supposed there was a more-than-passing resemblance to him in coloring and thinness, but the same could be said of him and the Dark Lord or even Harry Potter.

He froze momentarily halfway up the stair.

Both of which were wholly sickening and horrifying thoughts that would haunt him to his death.

XXX

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XXX

Heading this off, NO, Fen is not Severus' son or brother or even half-nephew. Nor does the possibility keep coming up just because I want to see how many Weasleys I can drive off the deep end at the mere thought of the man reproducing. It's the coloring that's the same, and there is a reason for that, one which I will get to sometime in the year 2012 at the rate I'm moving this story along. But hey, no new OCs were introduced. And considering the first draft of this chapter, you all should be seriously proud of me for that.