Chapter Two: Duty, Dignity, Decency
(Author's note: For pictures of Snape, as I write him, click the link to my deviantART page, located on my profile page)
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. May, 1998. Night of the Final Battle
I: Hermione
Hermione lifted the knife to her forehead but then paused, paused, looking down at Snape' sweaty, bloody, dirty lifeless face.
"I thought this would somehow make me feel better, you know. Mutilating myself and saying goodbye to at least the next seven years of my life. But it doesn't. And it won't will, it? If you were alive, you'd tell me I was being a sentimental fool. Nothing can change the fact that you're dead. It's my fault. I should have come to you, sooner. How will I ever explain myself to them, Snape? What will they all say, when they ask me if I'm glad you were one of the good guys and I say that it makes no difference to me? That I'd rather have you alive and evil than good and dead? What good are you to me dead, you bastard? What will I do, without you? Even in 7 years? Or 25? I never thought you'd be the one to die. Even when I was a kid, you were like an indestructible monolith. What was there on Earth, in the Muggle or Wizarding worlds, that could kill a Snape? I thought I had more time. Why did I think I had more time? What was I waiting for? It doesn't matter now, though. Because you're dead. And you can't hear a word I'm bloody saying.!"
Tears began to roll out of Hermione's eyes.
"Who can I find that could ever begin to replace you? Queen Guinevere, she went to a convent, after Arthur divorced her. Maybe I'll join the Orders, after my seven years. There was no King, no man greater than Arthur. And there can be no Wizard, no man, greater than Severus Snape."
She cried, bitterly and a few of her tears had splashed onto Snape's face.
Angrily, Hermione rubbed her eyes with her fists and chastised herself.
"Stupid old fool! What are you crying over, Hermione Jean Granger? He'd dead, and that's all. You blew it. " She told herself.
She noticed the clean streak that her tears left on Snape's filthy face.
"Gods, I wish I had brought a little soap and water! How could they leave you here like this? Doesn't anyone care, but me? They never did, did they?"
Hermione pulled the sleeve of her robe up over her hand, to wipe off her dead Master's face.
To her surprise, he did not feel cold.
On the contrary, his skin was warm, and clammy.
No, hot and clammy.
Like he had a fever and he was sweating.
Fever?
Sweating?
If he had a fever and he was sweating, that meant he was still alive.
Hermione put her hand under the makeshift bandage on the Headmaster's throat.
On the uninjured side, she felt a weak but steady pulse under her fingers.
Wildly, Hermione laughed.
"Snape, you old bastard, you're not dead! You're not bleedin' dead! Maybe there's a happy ending for the likes of us, after all! Snape? Snape, it's me! It's Granger! Can you hear me?"
She was shouting, why, she didn't know.
If he was in a coma, her shouting couldn't bring him out of it.
There was one thing that might work.
She rummaged in her pockets, and came up with a vial of Prince's Reviving Balm.
Her eyes watered halfway down her head, even putting the tiniest drop of the noxious stuff on her finger, but when she rubbed it under Snape's nose, it had the desired effect.
He gasped and coughed, and his eyes fluttered open.
They were full of pain, and confusion, but they locked upon hers.
One thing about Snape, he had Rasputin eyes; dark, hypnotic and compelling, like the powerful wizard known to Muggles as the Mad Monk.
He could seize you with them and hold you fast to the spot, such that you couldn't escape.
Snape could make grown men cry with a single look, and if Hermione had a pound for every time she saw him turn a student to a pile of jelly with just his pitiless gaze, she'd have quite a nice piece of change.
But he had never looked that way at her, and he wasn't looking that way at her, now.
"Can you hear me, Granger?"
Snape had not spoken to her, but she heard him just the same.
Telepathy was possible between Master and Acolyte, but only if their bond was sufficiently strong.
Hermione suddenly felt as though no force in the vast and infinite universe, was stronger.
"I hear you, Snape."
"Don't take me to St. Mungo's. Those quacks will murder me. Take me home. My Mum and my grandfather are both Third Degree Masters in Magick of the Arts and of War. If anyone can save my miserable life, they can."
Spinner's End. Vauxhall, Liverpool, 1998
The sun rose, and set again before Hermione finally got a chance to smoke a cigarette.
She stepped out onto the porch of Snape's home in working-class Vauxhall, in their native Liverpool, at the last house on Spinner's End, along the banks of the muddy Mersey.
Home again.
Hermione's father, Dr. John Granger, a prominent dentist only now recently returned from a mysterious vacation with his wife, Olive, that he could not quite remember, was now a successful man with a comfortable home in middle-class Woolton, but he had grown up in Vauxhall, and lived at Spinner's End.
John Granger was about ten years older than Toby Snape, but they were both lifelong residents of the End and Vauxhall, and they often spent time together at the local.
Although John Granger was a dentist, he was the only medical man that Toby Snape trusted; it was to John Granger's office that he brought himself and his son for any medical problems, from lumps and bruises to colds and flu, even the occasional stitches or broken bones that he did not trust to the vagaries of Wizarding healing.
The Snapes were often in John Granger's office.
They were THAT family, and on a street like Spinner's End, that was really saying something.
Eileen Snape was reputed to be some kind of gypsy, or witch.
She never worked, but whatever it was she did, witch or gypsy, when people who lived on the Spinner's End got sick, they went to see Eileen; she was better than the National Health.
She was a beautiful woman, uncommonly so, but mean as a snake, an ill-tempered junkie who spent most of her money on dope, and most of her time on finding a new yobbo to get drunk and high with, and shag.
None of them could touch the heights of villainy of her husband, Toby, a sailor who spent much of his time when he wasn't at sea engaged in drinking, fighting and the occasional petty crime.
Toby and Eileen couldn't see to live with each other, nor could they live without one another. They were as notorious for their fights as they were for the enthusiastic way in which they made up.
Somehow, in the midst of it, they raised up their son, an unpleasant lad saddled with the unpleasant name of Severus Snape.
And being smart enough to go off to some fancy boarding school when he was just a boy didn't stop Sev Snape from living up to his full potential.
He was the terror of Vauxhall as a teenager, having his mother's intelligence and his father's brutality.
A wiry, thin, whipcord-taut heavily tattooed yob of a drunken junkie in long greasy hair and a greasy goatee, enforcing the iron will of some heavy or the other, selling every kind of dope you could think of, paying you in your own blood if you couldn't pay him; raising six kinds of hell day in and day out.
His neighbours weren't too surprised that when he grew to be a man he sobered up, settled his act down and became a professor at that school he went to, but without really ever surrendering his reputation as a real villain of a Scouser hard nut.
Men like Sev Snape were too tough and too smart to die from the excesses of their misspent youth; as there would be no leaving a good-looking corpse for the likes of them at any age, they'd live long lives, ossifying into tough old men hard as diamonds who could reduce some punk chav to jelly with a withering look.
If anybody in the neighbourhood saw Sev Snape being carried into his garage, unconscious and covered in blood, it wasn't the first time, and they were pretty damn sure it wouldn't be the last.
Hermione was glad they were all so bloody sure, because after what she'd seen, she wasn't.
Hermione staggered down to the rusty chain link fence that marked the terminus of Snape's property, and watched the muddy Mersey roll by.
A motion light came on, along the side of the house and Hermione looked at the backs of her hands and saw they were all covered in blood.
Snape's blood.
The sight hardly alarmed Hermione.
At his request, she had flooed Snape's mother and grandfather from what was left of Hogwarts Castle, and they had been waiting in the garage that Tobias Snape had built in the back garden of the house at Spinners' End, to some interesting specifications, to serve as his wife's lab.
They came with a thick slab of a man, shorter than Snape or his mother.
He was probably only five feet six or so, but you wouldn't notice it, because he was so powerfully built.
The legs that stuck out from under his kilt looked like the trunks of hundred-year old oak trees; his arms were equally massive and his broad chest was a solid wall of granite and coarse ginger hair, sticking out in all directions from his white wife beater undershirt.
The leonine head that sat on top of it was equally fearsome, without benefit of a neck and crowned by thick, coarse ginger waves and wreathed in a ginger beard at the end of a lantern jaw.
With a mouth set in fierce determination under the beak of a bird of prey.
He held Snape down, as Eileen Prince, a tall, supernaturally beautiful, willowy woman with black hair and black eyes took the mithril knife, glowing blue with Elvish fire from the cheekily goatish-looking fellow whom anyone might recognize from his portrait at Hogwarts as the retired Potions Master from Hogwarts, Severus Prince.
Of course Hermione knew the Princes, she had worked with them for years.
Eileen had asked her to come closer, and hold a mithril bowl close to Snape's head, as she unwound the bandages from around his neck.
The sight and smell of the wound made everything Hermione had eaten all week rise into her throat.
"I'm going to be sick. I'm going to be sick!" she cried.
"Ellie, didn't you give our Hermione some of the Cast-Iron Stomach potion? Don't be ashamed. We've all had a draught, or we'd be sick, too. Here you are. Take two gulps." The former Potions Master suggested.
Severus Sr. had already made her put on protective robes and he cast a spell over her that she recognized from her study with Snape in Magic of War; it was a Master's spell, complex and protective.
She took the vial from him, drank two gulps, and handed it back.
Hermione only understood why all of this was necessary when Eileen cut into the hideously swollen, infected, and already partially necrotized flesh that had once been her son's long, sinewy neck.
Snape had been mercifully unconscious, but his eyes snapped open and he let out and he let out a sound that would have been a scream, had his vocal cords not been paralyzed by the bite.
His body jumped like that of a fish fighting for its life on the end of a hook, and it was all the ginger Scotsman could do to hold him down.
At the same time, a horrible torrent of venom, pus, blood and gore burst out of the incision in a foul-smelling gush.
Hermione caught it in the cauldron.
That was the worst bit.
It made the part where Eileen cleaned out the inside of the wound and scraped away the flesh that that venom had eaten away look like an anticlimax.
Then, she and Severus Sr. administered a course of potions and spells that would have been unrecognizable to a witch or wizard who wasn't at least an Acolyte in Magick of War, and Magick of the Arts.
In addition to the usual fever reducing, blood-replenishing and strengthening potions.
As Snape's Acolyte, Hermione did the spells with them, and gifted Acolyte that she was, mixed up the new batches of potion, in- between.
Because they had to repeat the whole ritual four more times over the next 22 hours or so, as the wound kept filling up with venom and poison and infection.
Finally, at the end, there was precious little of Snape's neck and shoulder left in that area where he had been bitten.
The poison had eaten away much of his muscle and flesh, and Eileen and Severus Sr. had to remove the rest of it, right down to his bones.
Which looked both greenish and spongy.
Eileen and Severus, exhausted, took a short rest while Hermione de-boned Snape's neck, shoulder, left arm, and a few of his ribs on the left side.
She had to inject him with the Skele-Gro.
The Scotsman was dozing, fitfully, in a chair and Hermione woke him.
She was surprised to see him home; Toby Snape was usually to sea until June, and for a short voyage in November, and then after Chrimble, to sea until the middle of March, and then to sea again from the middle of May until the middle of June, or so.
Maybe he had stayed home more, during this last year of war.
"Toby. Wake up, then."
Eileen still chastised Hermione for calling her "Mrs. Snape" all the time, and she always called Severus Sr. "Mr. Prince" and Aphrodite "Mrs. Prince", but nobody ever called Toby either "Mister", or "Snape."
He was "Toby" and his son was "Snape" and that was an end to it.
"Huh? Wot?"
"He's going to wake up when his bones grow back; you'll have to hold him down, because it's going to be horrible painful."
He got up.
"Is this the last of it? You might as well let him die than to make the lad suffer like this. It's about killed me." He replied, in a thick Scouse accent, thick as Snape's.
"Don't say that, Toby." Hermione replied, sharply.
It was a warm spring night, but Hermione shivered as if it was still January.
"I'm sorry, our Hermione. You're a good lass, aren't you? Even though me stupid son 'asn't done well by you at all, 'as 'e? Our Sev's never brought you to West Darby, to Ellie's parents. It's a nice place. Not like this crumbling old shack our Sev clings to. He's like as not afraid Dr. John will twig to it and kill him, I expect. As if your John was an idiot and didn't know. Still, I'm glad he kept the old place. When Eliie and I have our rows, it's back here I go. Sometimes to Sev's scowling face. He likes a bit of mystery, my boy do. But there's no mystery to him. Magick and all that shite aside, he's my son, sure as if he'd grown out of the top of me head. That's why he's stayed alive so long, and it's why this won't kill him. He's a Snape." Tobias said, proudly.
"There's nothing to twig to, is there?" Hermione protested.
"Bullshit! You can't hide behind all that magick lot with me, Hermione Granger. I'm just a man, aren't I? You're here because that's your man lying there half-dead, and you'll do what needs to be done, even if it's give him your blood to see him well, again. Just because he's not done anything about it, because you're just a kid, that doesn't mean nothing's there. Come on, then. Let's get this over with. God willing, Sev'll live long enough to 'ave 'alf a chance to remedy 'is mistakes. Pay you back for your devotion in summat more than meanness."
Hermione wasn't sure what to say to that.
Finally, after the Skele-Gro, Eileen applied a salve to the wound made of athelas leaves and various other ingredients that didn't exist anymore unless you knew where to find them.
They would accelerate the speed at which Snape would heal.
When the flesh had grown over his bones again, raw and pink and new, Eileen and Severus Sr. carefully bathed Snape, finally cleaning all the blood and mud and horrors off of him, and bandaged him.
His father picked up his grown son and carried him back to the house and put him to bed.
Hermione took the opportunity to go into the toilet in the garage, and do all the puking she had wanted to do for 24 hours.
It was a bad business, all her crying and puking, but no-one discovered her in her moment of weakness, at least.
Hermione finished her cigarette.
She went back into the house and went upstairs, took a shower and put on clean clothes.
Her father had driven her car, a 1979 Mini with magical modifications, over, after Hermione used a complicated packing and travelling spell to pack what she needed and load the boot.
Severus and Eileen and Aphrodite had the shop to run, and Toby was to ship out in a few days.
Eileen would help, but Hermione would be doing the lion's share of looking after Snape, in his convalescence.
She didn't mind.
After all, an Acolyte's place is at her Master's side.
Hermione slept for a whole day.
And awoke to discover that while she slept, and despite his wishes, Snape's mother had decided to admit him to St. Mungo's.
Just for good measure.
Especially since he wouldn't wake up.
Still, it was considered a medical miracle by the staff there that Headmaster Snape had survived, even with the expert treatment of two Third Degree Masters.
He was partially paralyzed down the entire left side of his body, the side on which he was bitten by Nagini.
His medi-witches and wizards didn't expect him to survive the week.
If he did, he was expected to be confined to a wheelchair, at best, and, at worst, to remain a drooling vegetable for the next hundred years or so of his natural life.
During the most dire phase of his hospital stay, the week in which Snape did not regain consciousness, Hermione, his devoted and newly-vindicated acolyte did not leave his hospital room.
Not even to attend Fred's funeral, she sent her condolences to the Weasleys by floo.
Explaining that Snape could either regain consciousness, die, or do both at any moment; and she had promised him that she would nurse him when he was sick, and be present at the hour of his death.
Harry told her later that Ron had a huge fit, and that Arthur had grabbed him by both his arms and explained to him that Fred had already gone to his reward in paradise, and that funerals were more for the living than the dead.
And as such, Ron who was alive and well, needed Hermione less than Snape did.
Because it was probable that the Headmaster would soon be among the dead.
Indeed, Hermione was not Snape's only visitor; his family visited him every day.
Severus Sr. brought his grandson a present of a handsome walking stick; the kind in which he could hide his wand.
He didn't seem to think Snape was going to be in a wheelchair, or dead.
Sibyl Trelawney visited him on Tuesday and Thursday.
She seemed confident that he would get well, and discussed the diet she had prepared for him with Eileen.
Who agreed it was a good idea, but that you'd never get Sev to eat any of it.
Lucius Malfoy even took time away from his grimly busy new position at the Ministry as Chief Special Prosecutor to visit his oldest and best friend, twice.
Harry's attitude towards Snape had changed, completely, after having seen Snape's memories; he also visited three times.
But, Hermione literally refused to leave his side.
She bathed in his bathroom and slept in a rollaway bed in the room; she ate her meals there; no one could persuade her to so much as go outside and get a little fresh air.
After a week of same, Hermione was beginning to look a little ill, herself.
Fortunately for both of them, Snape continued to surprise the experts.
Hermione had fallen asleep in a chair, by the bed, when she was awakened by the sound of the toilet flushing.
She opened her eyes and saw that the bed was empty and the walking stick was gone.
By the time she had got to her feet, Snape was making his way out of the bathroom.
Leaning heavily on the cane, which he gripped awkwardly in his awkward left hand, dragging his left leg.
But, he was walking.
"What the fuck am I doing here? Never mind, you can tell me once I'm gone. Now, how am I to do this? Granger, let me lean on your shoulder, I need both me hands to put me shirt on."
He looked at his boots in despair.
"I'll help you with those, Snape. Just until you're better."
"Granger, you're barking mad. No one's done that ritual in a thousand years. You look horrible and you smell worse. Go home. If I need you, I will call you."
"No, Snape. I won't go. You need me. I'm your Acolyte. You are my Master. I took an Unbreakable Vow, remember? I told you the terms of it in my letter. Unless you flay the tattoos from my body and plunge the ceremonial dagger into me heart, I will never leave your side, again."
"You don't men that literally, do you, Granger?"
"Until you're well I bloody well do!"
The Headmaster sighed.
"I'm not all as sick as these fucking idiots at this slaughterhouse of a hospital made out, am I? I'll bet they had you convinced I was going to be a drooling idiot in a wheelchair."
"You're still going to need me."
"Why? I can write with my right hand, too. And do just about everything else. Well, my shoes are going to be a bit dodgy. And shaving is right out. Alright, maybe I will need a little seeing to. For a few weeks, or something. The first thing I want you to do is hold the bloody door open. I'm checking myself out of this shithole."
"But you need more care!"
"I may. If I do. I'll get it from Poppy Pomfrey. At my school. With my little bastard students. Where I belong. Where I can trust the healer. Here, I've never seen these boots before."
"They're made of Nagini's skin. Neville brought them for you. Neville Longbottom. You should have seen him, Snape. He killed Nagini, just like he was a wizard warrior from the Wars of the Ring!"
Snape held out his right foot, then his left, and looked at the boots.
"Now, all I need is a bit of Tom's hide to bind my spell book in. Did anyone make sue his body was subjected to the ritual to kill the demon in him? If not, we'll have to dig the bastard up. Yesterday."
"Lord Malfoy, Harry, and I took care of that. Harry's been to visit you, three times. He left this gift for you."
Snape opened the box Hermione handed him.
On top of the packing material was a bit of parchment.
Snape,
Because an Acolyte should never be parted from his Master. Even by death.
Potter
Snape removed the packing material.
In the box was a human skull, fashioned into a mug, with the hand fashioned into the mug's handle.
It has been coated in pewter, and edged with gold.
On the underside, in gold leaf, was engraved "Master Magus Magnus Tom Marvolo Riddle , Lord Voldemort, son of Lucifer, the Light Bringer. 31 December, 1916 – 2 May, 1998. Burn in Hell."
The way the mug was constructed, the skull was still screaming in the final agony of it's unfortunate owner.
Snape held the mug out, like Hamlet had, with poor Yorick.
"And you were worried, Tom, that this war would part us, forever. Now, we'll drink together, and have a smoke, you and I, every day. Until the day I die."
Snape smiled at his own joke, and if he could have, he would have laughed.
"Nice to see that little bastard Potters' finally begun to appreciate me, everything I've done for the little sod. Carry this for me, Granger. Now, lets' get the fuck out'r here."
You could have knocked the night nurse over with a feather when she saw Snape walk up to the main desk.
Impatiently, he motioned for a quill, and parchment.
There was a chalkboard where the nurse's duty times were written, and the healers'.
Snape picked up the chalk, and wrote out a message, slower than usual, and in blocky capital letters, but clearly, with his right hand.
"Leaving. Don't want dismissal potions. Will make my own." He wrote.
"But, Headmaster Snape, your healers! They'll want to see you. This is…well, it's unprecedented! It's a miracle!" She protested.
Snape rubbed out what he had written and wrote another message.
"Miracle that won't be in the Daily Prophet, tomorrow, if I leave now. I'll see them all in Hell, but not if they see me, first. Ta."
Snape grabbed hold of Hermione's hand and quite abruptly, Hermione found herself outside Madame Pomfrey's Infirmary.
"That was illegal." She told him.
"Fuck 'm! It's my fucking world, now, innit? I'm the Conquering Hero. And the Last Man Standing. I'll do whatever the fuck I like." Snape grumbled.
Hermione knocked on the door, and Madame Pomfrey eventually opened it.
The Infirmary was less crowded than it had been the night of the Final Battle, but it was still full.
Most of the patients were students, and Snape's entrance caused quite a stir.
"It's the Headmaster!"
"He's alive! He really is!"
"Look, he's walking!"
"Three cheers for the Headmaster!"
"Hip hip…"
"HOORAY!"
"Hip hip…"
"HOORAY!"
"Hip hip…"
"HOORAY!"
Snape was somewhat taken aback by that, Hermione could tell.
He looked at Hermione, and she laughed to herself.
"Erm, the Headmaster lost his voice, temporarily. But he and I have a telepathic connection. He just said that come next year, he just bets none of you will be cheering for him." Hermione explained.
That got Snape a big laugh.
Hermione also explained to Madame Pomfrey that Snape had just walked out of St. Mungo's, refusing further treatment there.
"I'm not surprised. Why do you think I've kept so many of our wounded here to recover? If they would have let me have Glideroy Lockheart, I would have had him back to his miserable old self in six months. A year at the most. Let's get you to a bed, Severus, and I'll have a look at you."
Hermione was not surprised that Madame Pomfrey led them through the ward to a private room.
Well, a semi-private room.
She wasn't even that surprised to see who it was Snape would be sharing the room with.
Muggles didn't understand most of the magical world, but they did have a good handle on werewolves and vampires.
They had a great many superstitions on how to kill them, especially werewolves.
Silver bullets, knives or swords.
Consumed by fire.
Removal of the heart.
Decapitation.
With the exception of that nonsense about silver items, the Muggles had it right, for once.
It was extremely hard to kill a werewolf.
After the Battle of Hogwarts, before Hagrid and his burial detail had even seen to the dead, they decapitated Fenrir Greyback, cut out his heart, and then burnt the head and the heart separately from the body on three separate pyres, until there was nothing left but ashes.
Just to make sure.
Because, as any advanced student of the Dark Arts, whether a practitioner or prohibitor knew, a werewolf could seem dead, dead as the proverbial doornail, but not actually be deceased, at all.
Werewolves had amazing powers of physical regeneration; they had to, in order to survive transformation.
A werewolf who was horribly injured could lie in a state like hibernation for days, weeks, months, years, perhaps, while his ravaged body repaired itself.
And then, on the night of the full moon, when his power was at it's zenith and his body was fully repaired, he would arise, alive and well.
Even from his grave, six feet under.
That was why Fenrir Greyback was so utterly destroyed.
Snape looked at the other occupant of the room, and scowled at Madame Pomfrey.
He raised his hand, pointed at the chain coming out of the wall and blasted it to smithereens.
Them he turned and started mentally shouting at Hermione.
"Slow down, Snape! The short version is, he wants to know why you've got Remus chained up, when you know he's a Centurion in the Knights of Albion, and he has complete control over his transformations and has fully integrated his bestial self with his human self."
"He's beside himself with grief, Severus! I had no idea what he was going to do."
The huge bull werewolf sitting on the bunk snapped a wolfish grunt.
"I'm not going to run out and eat all my students, that's for damn sure. Hello, Toby. You look like shit."
It was barely recognizable, coming from a werewolf's throat, but still the voice of Remus Lupin.
Poor Remus.
It takes a lot to kill a werewolf, after all.
"He says you look like shit, too, Moony."
"You don't have to translate, Hermione. I can hear him."
"You can? How?"
"Mind your own business, Granger. How many deaths is this, now? I've lost count."
Remus counted on the five fingered pads of his paw.
"Let's see. The first was when I was in 3rd year. You and I made a little bit too merry over Christmas? Remember? We found that case of two hundred year old firewhiskey, and we ate about three hits of that bad acid you cooked up yourself, in your corner of old Slughorn's' lab."
Snape actually smiled.
"I remember."
"I fell out of Gryffindor Tower. I thought I could fly. That time was funny. The time I OD'd on, I can't recall if it was heroin, Purple Doom, or Dragon's Fire, in the prefect's bathroom, that wasn't so funny. You know I bit me tongue in half, and swallowed part of it? And your grandfather told me that since I was a werewolf, it would grow back at the next full moon, and he was right. Then, there was that Muggle werewolf I was living with, in me punk phase, when I had the six inch Liberty spikes. She slit me throat from ear to ear with the remains of the bottle of Jack Daniels that she fractured me skull with. Left the bottleneck sticking out of me neck, too. And finally, I hung meself in the Shrieking Shack three days after Sirius was convicted. So, this makes five. That was when I joined the Knights. After the 4th time."
"Not to mention I'm not sure all the students know about the Knights of Albion." Madame Pomfrey added.
"Don't know? That was third year stuff! Remus taught it to us, himself! The Knights of Albion are an ancient fraternal order of shape-shifting or hybrid beings. Animagi, were-wolves and other were-animals, both wizards and Muggles, fauns, satyrs, merpeople, centaurs, veelas, that sort of thing. They have committed themselves to working for peace and harmony between witches, wizards, Muggles and hybrid and shape-shifting beings. The highest ranking member is the Doge, then the Centurions, then the Knights, and there are thousands of members in the lowest order, the Yeomen, who have renounced their predatory or anti-human nature. They secretly work in-concert with Muggle and Wizarding society, and in the case of shape shifters, have learned to control their transformations and their behavior in their animal form, just like animagi. Their symbol is the Eye of Horus, commonly tattooed on the palm of the right hand. Everybody knows that." Hermione recited.
"Lovely, Granger. A-plus. Go and sit down. Now, did they bury you, then, Moony?"
"They did. I woke up six feet under. In a coffin. It took me almost the whole night of the full moon to claw my way out. "
"That had to be hell on your nerves."
"Me nerves? I was a poor, misbegotten emotional wreck of a boy, and I'm the same as a man. I've lived a wretched life of poverty, addiction, lycanthropy and melancholy, with occasional peeks of happiness. Only you would just call it "me nerves." Honestly? I don't know if me nerves are going to hold. I have Teddy to think of, and Harry, and me own apprentice, of course, hell, all me students, and the rebuilding of Hogwarts. But, still, it hardly seems worth it. I should have bit her. At least she'd be alive!"
"Alive and completely psychotic, maybe! Your apprentice, the Killer Queen, she's already psychotic. You don't need two in your life, do you? Besides, you and I both know that the older you are when you become a lycanthrope, the more likely it is to turn you into a demented murderer. And you know the Knights' rules. You created her. You would have been responsible for destroying her. Besides, you left it up to Tonks. And she didn't want to be bitten. She knew the risks, either way. And she chose not to become a werewolf."
Remus put his head in his paws.
"What are we going to do, Snape? Hogwarts is in ruins. The Whole Wizarding World is all helter skelter. Nobody knows what's going to happen next, and everyone's terrified. What in the name of the Great God Pan are we going to do?" he fairly howled.
Snape turned to Hermione.
"We'll have to sort that out, won't we? And there's' no time like the present. Granger, go back to the house at Spinner's End. Do the marketing, and the laundry. I'll be back, soon."
"But I can help."
"No, you can't. Albus, rest his soul, put enough of the burden of this fucking mess on the shoulders of children. After you've finished up at Spinners' End, go home to Woolton. Take some time off. You'll have enough to do when I'm back in a few days. Leave the mug."
As Hermione left, Snape took Lord Voldemort's skull out of the box, and, using a spell she couldn't even begin to fathom, caused a six pack of butterbeer to seemingly appear out of thin air.
He cracked one open, poured it into the mug, and drank.
"Come on, Moony. Let's you and me have a fucking drink. This is the only thing we can drink, innit it? To the death of our enemies. May we see their survivors driven before us, and hear the lamentations of their women."
The bull werewolf rumbled a laugh, took the skull of Tom Riddle in his paw, and drank, deeply.
"I'll drink to that. Fill' er up, again, Toby." He snarled.
Wizarding Liverpool. Late June, 1998
II: Snape
Smaug's Belly was a pub in Wizarding Liverpool, located not on the well lit and wide main thoroughfare, Crooked Lane, but rather in the dark and twisted labyrinth of Wormwood Mews.
Wormwood Mews were the kind of a place that made Knockturn Alley look like a day care center.
And there was no lower, more wretched hive of scum and villainy in it, indeed, in all of northern England, than Smaug's Belly.
Snape, however, was a yob and a villain, by birth and inclination, and also a scholar, an eccentric and a mystic, which just about covered all of the Belly's regulars.
Some thought it was off that Snape should spend so much time at the Belly, considering he'd had his last drink in 1980, but considering they held WAND meetings (Wizards Against Narcotics and Drinking) in the back room, he wasn't the only one.
"Hello. My name is Snape, and I'm a fucking villain of a no-good Scouser yob."
That got a laugh.
Snape had been sober since 1980, and he really didn't need to go to WAND meetings, but he went, sometimes, anyway.
Sometimes just to see who was still sober and alive.
After the meeting, he had a game of darts with some of the lads.
On his way to the public apparition point, he went round the corner to Occam's Bookstall, and had a look around.
Once he was back on Crooked Lane, he went into Prince's Potions, and talked to his grandfather, Severus Prince, for awhile.
Them he checked the stockroom, went down to his so-called Bunker to check on his lab and his panic room, them made his way to the public apparition point, to apparate back to Spinner's End.
No one walking down the End, a working-class street in a working class neighbourhood, would have known that the man making his way down the pavement was a great man.
At least not outside the neighborhood, where it was well known that to fuck about with any one bearing the last name "Snape" was tantamount to suicide.
Indeed, perhaps, in his world, the most powerful man alive.
Barely alive.
He looked more like an ordinary hard nut of a Scouser perhaps 35, perhaps 45, typical for that neighbourhood, some kind of villain, no doubt, who had either been made to see their error of his youthful yobbo ways in prison, or from a woman, or the church.
Either that, or he had risen through the risk of men on the fiddle that he was now the one who played the tune.
Dressed in a pair of black Levi's that were about three years older than the most celebrated of his students, and a black tee shirt that had fading Motorhead tour dates from 1978 on the back, the tall, wiry , rawboned man slowly made his way to the last house on Spinner's End.
A house along the banks of the muddy Mersey, which, when at high tide, very nearly rushed right up to the rusty chain link fence around the property.
There was a moustache and goatee beard on his long face, ending in a lantern jaw and a pointed chin, and a cigarette dangled from the thin lips presided over by a great beak of a nose.
A pair of dark eyes, black as a shark's, the hypnotic eyes of a Rasputin, a Svengali, darted around at all times; the man walked warily as he made his way.
Even the heavy tattooing on his arms, and the fresh tattoo on his neck, structured around two large, deep puncture wounds made him seem quite the type for the neighbourhood.
During his long illness, he'd lost at least 20 pounds off of his thin frame, and had only gained half back, making him look like nothing but hard, flat muscle and taut sinew stretched over thick, raw bones; making his appearance seem all the more foreboding.
Scowling, he leaned heavily on a walking stick as he made his slow way up the street, dragging his left leg, slightly, holding his left arm against his side at an odd angle.
A month earlier, he had been completely paralyzed all down his left side.
The drag in his left leg and the stiff numbness in his still close to unusable left hand and arm were the remnant.
As was the fact that one of his greatest weapons had been taken from him, increasing his wariness.
There were many who feared the fists of the son as much as they had those of the father, but worse, much worse was his sharp, sardonic bray of a voice, nasal, but not shrill.
It was made all the worse for its deadly force by the thickness of his Scouse accent, and a terrible weapon it was.
His muteness was terrible loss to the man in the snakeskin boots; he walked with his knuckles white from clenching against the cane and his weak left hand balled into a fist.
Three of his knuckles were bruised, from using his clenched fist for the purpose to which it was intended.
He could have used his wand, but using his fist was more satisfying, now.
His favoured hand wasn't capable of complicated tasks, but he could still use it to fight, if he had to, not to mention the shiny metal cleats on the toes and heels of the snakeskin engineer's boots.
Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, as they propelled him down the block.
Still, all temporary setbacks, he was told.
The sound of some faintly ridiculous British rap group assaulted Snape as he approached his house.
He expected it to be a shit car full of teenage chavs in baseball caps and track pants, a lot of young punks looking to put one over on him while he was down.
A look down his nose told him he was right.
He gave them a sneer.
"Cat got your tongue, old man? What are yer gonna do now, yer can't say nuffin' to us, then, you fuckin' ugly old cunt!"
While the moronic passengers were still sniggering at the idiot driver's unoriginal provocations, Snape smashed the windscreen with his cane, pulled the driver over the bonnet of his shit little Japanese jam jar, picked him up by the throat in his right hand, and then threw him on the pavement.
Snape but his boot on the boy's neck and glowered at him with his best "Fifty points from Gryfinndor" stare.
The boy began to gibber and babble in terror, and another boy got out of the car and ran down the block.
He returned with a bald man sporting a handlebar moustache, a square headed fellow in a holey vest with a beer gut, but thick arms and legs as if they had been hewn from stone.
"That's my boy, Sev. He's a naff little punter, but 'e didn't mean you no 'arm."
John Frum had lived on the Spinners' End estate since he was a boy.
He worked on road crews as a laborer eight months out of a year, and spent the other four on the dole.
He had been at the local that night in '76 or '77 that half of Vauxhall saw Sev Snape beat three men twice his age and twice his size to bloody pulps.
Not an unusual occasion.
But one of them shot him in the back as he was walking out.
John would be among those who swore that Sev grinned at him, pointed his finger, muttered some foreign word and the bloke's throat tore open as if it had been cut through with a power saw.
And he believed that Sev Snape had dragged himself all the way home before passing out on his own doorstep, where his crazy family was able to put him together well enough that he was back at the local within a week.
Snape raised an eyebrow and scowled.
"You know 'ow it is when you're young and stupid? Gotter prove you're a man, yunno? Sometimes yer gets a bit too big for yer trousers, don't cher? Lemme take 'im 'ome."
Still scowling, Snape lifted his foot off of Bill Frum's neck.
John hauled his son to his feet, slapped him in the face, opened the back door of the car and shoved the boy in.
"What the fuck's the matter with you lot? Arskin' im wot's 'e gonna do if 'e can't talk? Break you in fuckin' 'alf, that's wot!"
John got in the driver's seat and drove off, laying tire all over the road.
Snape smiled to himself, and ground a few pieces of the broken glass under his feet.
You've still got it, old man.
Reaching the old house, Snape fumbled in his pocket as if for a ring of keys as he approached the door.
Instead he produced a wand, from inside the walking stick.
He had little need of it, at his stage of development, but he had cast the spell on the door such that it could and would only be opened by him with his wand.
He paused and looked over at Granger's Mini.
Speaking of having it, there's a witch I'd like to give it to.
Who knows, it might put both of us in a better humor.
Snape had expected Granger to give up the ghost, by now, and go searching for some wizard, any wizard, who knew a way you could be released from an Unbreakable Vow.
She could have asked him.
Snape, a Pendragon, knew of two ways.
Neither were pleasant, pretty, or fun, but they existed.
And it hadn't been easy on Granger, the last month, with him being close to an invalid and her having to look after him.
But she weathered the worst of his evil moods, ad although she didn't do it quietly, she didn't show the slightest inclination to waver from her vow, to abandon him.
Snape knew he could have been a worse bastard about it.
For one thing, he'd be within his rights, not beloved, politically correct, or admirable, but within his rights to demand sex from her.
But that would be something tantamount to rape.
Nonetheless, Snape was tempted.
It was a long, hot summer, and the temporary paralysis of his third leg had lifted long before the rest of his body caught up.
The house at Spinners' End had precisely two air conditioning units, one in each bedroom, and they had been extant since the late seventies.
It was a bit of a bad business, Granger sweating in vests and shorts and him lying about in his y-fronts, which was his usual state of dress in long, hot summers when no one was about.
Temptation was right under his nose, every moment of every day, and Snape got the distinct feeling that if he wanted Granger, he wouldn't have to resort to making demands based on her Unbreakable Vow as Acolyte to her Master.
Pulling her into his lap would probably do the trick.
It seemed, however, somehow morally suspect to Snape, to take advantage of the situation they were in.
Like an abuse of a position of power.
He had decided, then, to leave it up to Granger.
And if she made advances to him, well, even if it was morally suspect and an abuse of power, he was only a man, wasn't he, and who could blame him?
He had never said he was a paragon of decency; there was only so far he was willing to go.
II: Hermione
Snape limped in through the front door, scowling horribly.
Hermione decided he had either lost money on darts, or someone had put him on the spot about being a hero, again.
He took off his smelly, sweat-stained tee shirt, tossed it at Hermione, picked up a teacup on the table, handed it to her, snapped his fingers and pointed at the kitchen.
She knew that was Snape's charming way of telling you his laundry needed doing and he wanted her to put the kettle on.
"Sev, be civil, you bastard, our Hermione's here to help you. No one else bloody well has been!" his mother rebuked him.
Snape scowled, kicked off his boots and tossed them aside, yanked off his socks and dropped them, then took off his jeans and flopped into the couch, in his grubby grey y-fronts.
Lately, he looked like a combination of a Scouser yobbo villain, wasted from some binge or the other, and a Wizarding Warrior from out of a book.
She supposed he actually was a little of both.
Hermione looked at him with defiance.
"Did you see what he was up to, then, our Hermione? Its' little wonder your Sibyl calls you Toby, you're that fucking villain's son as sure as if I had nothing to do with it! You're the Headmaster of the foremost school for witches and wizards in the world, a hero and a statesman, and you still have to act like a fucking yobbo Scouser, showing the neighbourhood chevs that you're still the big man? Or did you do that for Granger's benefit? Because she wasn't looking."
He picked up the piece of chalk hanging on a string from the blackboard mounted on the wall, in the boxy block lettering that was the only thing he could write with his right hand.
"It's a good job. She'd be all over me flies."
"Fuck off, you! If you had the last cock in Britain, I'd take a deep breath and swim to Oz." Hermione snapped.
Snape picked up the chalk again.
"You mean Bulgaria. Laundry needs doing. Put the kettle on. Bye Mum. Thanks for the melodrama. Saved me watching Eastenders. Hop to it, Granger."
He turned on his telly through magical means, and in the same way got a book from the bookshelf and his fags, and lit one with his wand.
"Is this what he does all day long? Make rude comments, pick fights with you and lie about in his about in his pants?" Eileen asked Hermione.
"Pretty much." Hermione answered.
She gave her son one more dirty look.
"Sev, you ought to have some shame! I know your father and I were never paragons of British decency, but you ought to 'ave enough sense not to lie about in your pants with your cricket set bulging out all ways, in front of a young girl! Your own Acolyte!"
"Maybe he's trying to seduce me." Hermione quipped.
"Well, my Toby, he never was a subtle man, either. But at least he lies about in a kilt! And a clean one at that! You're a sight, Sev. If you are trying to seduce our Hermione, I can't see her looking upon a future of you in your grubby pants and her in the kitchen banging pots and pans together as a marvelous life! And you do look almost well enough to come round to the shop. If you're well enough to loaf about at the Belly with that lot, well, the sooner you get back to work, the better. Then our Hermione can go back home, and have a rest!"
Snape reached for his chalk.
"I'll see to me own cooking and e own laundry when I'm well. I never needed a woman to keep me and I won't start now. And when I'm at the shop, you'll be at me I'm working too hard. Da's right. There's no making you happy."
"And you take after me for that, don't you? Remember that, Hermione. Well, I'm off."
After she left, Snape fixed his eyes on Hermione.
Snape summoned a smaller chalkboard, wrote something on it and shoved it at Hermione.
"Kettle. Lunch. Laundrette. NOW!"
"Oh, yes Master. Your wish is my command." Hermione replied, sarcastically.
She had to look after him, but she didn't have to suffer his bullshit kindly, so, she didn't.
Snape was, indeed, a horrible patient.
He had quite a few potions to swallow every day, and since he wasn't able to do his own compounding because he hadn't any use of his left hand and he was trying to re-learn everything with his right, Hermione usually did it for him.
Most of the time, Eileen was at the shop, so Hermione did the cooking, and generally looked after Snape, and she and Eileen shared the cleaning duties, and the chore of fending off the vultures of the tabloid press.
It angered Hermione, the way they had so hated Snape when he was at his best, and now, even though they knew he was a hero, they wanted to show this intensely private man to the world at his worst.
Eileen was never civil to them; she tore out of the house firing away with hexes and curses, shouting and cursing, and Hermione, who could also do much of her magic wordlessly, was even more ferocious, once casting sectumsempra on a fellow who literally tried to get his foot in the door.
His foot stayed in the door, but the rest of him didn't come with it.
None of them ever tried that, again.
For much of the month of July, Snape spent his time either in bed with his books and parchments, listening to his records, or parked in front of the television.
Hermione was surprised they had a telly or a record player, but then again, Snape was a Half-Blood, raised in the Muggle world.
There were bookshelves in every room but the kitchen; and Hermione spent any time she had not looking after the Headmaster in devouring them.
That was not much time.
She spent much of her days in Snape's private lab, missing up his potions.
She came to dread the sound of him laboriously making his way down the stairs, the stamp of his cane followed by the heavy tramp of his feet.
If she made the tiniest of mistakes he'd pour everything down the drain, and if he was in a foul enough mood, he'd throw the errant beakers against the wall, and Hermione had to duck and cover to avoid a shower of potions and glass.
Snape hated being mute, and he hated being nigh onto helpless, and much of his communications on the chalkboards hung all over the house were hateful, profanity-laden scrawls.
He had to take it all out on someone, and she was handy, so she bore the brunt of it, but not quietly.
He scrawled and she screamed, and railed against him.
Eileen didn't suffer her son's temper willingly, either.
She and Snape had had some terrible rows.
With her shouting and him scratching out his own vitriol on the chalkboards.
She was in the lab, slaving one afternoon, when she heard Eileen screaming something very apt at her son.
"I should have named you Damien! Everyone in the neighborhood laughed when I said you were Rosemary's baby! They didn't fucking well know you had your father's black heart, black as they paint, right from the start! You're my son, and I love you, but you're the Devil's Own, Severus, and you always will be! What I was thinking when I mixed the dark wizard's blood of the Prince's with your goddamned brute of a Muggle father! It was the drink, thinking, and that's all! Now you'll fucking well act like there's some decency in you, lad, or I'll hex you into last week! I'll send your father over here, and he'll make short work of you and this shite! You mind me Sev, or I will!"
Pouring and mixing as fast as she could, Hermione hoped Eileen would do it.
Eileen Prince and Tobias Snape had a rocky marriage, to say the least.
Toby was at sea five or six months of the year, and the union had been marred by abuse on both sides before they both got sober.
Not to mention the inability of either to practice monogamy, before or after.
They had, however, never even thought of divorce.
"What, leave Toby? I can't leave Toby. I love him, don't I? I always have. Sev and I, we don't always get on, either, but he's my boy. Our boy. I don't know what makes sty in this place, where so may horrid things happened. Maybe it's Toby. For better or worse, Sev is Toby's son, make no mistake. That's Toby's face, for one thing. The lantern jaw and the long, pointy chin and that beak of a nose. Toby's hair, too. Coarse and thick. Toby's build, too. Sev's tall, and thin, like me but he's got Toby's strength. His broad shoulders and heavy bones. All sinew and muscle. Toby' so ugly, he's good-looking, like. Not to mention Toby's temper. He has the worst temper. Rages like a fire. He's a very fiery man, my Toby. As fiery as his ginger hair. That isn't always a bad thing, if you catch my meaning. We Prince's we're known for our brains, both being smart and being mad. Sev's got that on one side and Toby's fire on the other. He's not like me. He's only composed and calm on the surface. Under, it's all a tempest. Now that he's ill, and he's frightened he'll always be an invalid, he can't keep it in. He doesn't mean to be so hard with you, our Hermione. But he's a hard man who's had a hard life, he's not like to know any other way."
"I know that, Eileen. I grew up here, too. We used to get on well. There are times we still do. When he's better, things will even out. Until then. I'll give him what for as good as he gives it to me."
"I'd best give you some ammunition then. Come on. We'll have a look in me scrapbooks."
Eileen had no one to share her memories of her son with, except the press, and not only was the Headmaster a private man, his mother didn't want them bandied about like a Golden Snitch.
Hermione, however, had come into the thick of things, so Eileen was glad to share them with her.
So many pictures.
Many of Snape and his childhood best friend, Lily Evans.
Snape and his mother, at all the important occasions in his life.
Some of the pictures of him, as a boy, making that sour face with his old school trunk, they were downright funny.
It was also weird, but funny, seeing him as a teenager, scowling, in his retinue of black rock band tee shirts and Levis, or leather vests and hiar bare chest, growing in coarse black hair and tattoos as the years went on.
Snape did look a right villain, with his hair down past his shudders and a belt with a big Death's Head Buckle.
He wa soften pictured with an immaculately dressed Lucius Malfoy, in various locations, and also Sibyl Trelawney, Narcissa Black, Arabella Baxter, and, oddly enough. Remus Lipin.
Not to mention pictures of him and his father.
Snape really was the old man all over again.
In most of the pictures he was looking at the fierce Muggle Scotsman with an expression that mingled love, awe and fear.
And, speaking of Malfoy, Lucius, AKA the Prince of Darkness, who had played an integral part, at the end, in Voldemort's downfall, was a regular visitor, often with his wife and son.
Hermione was still of mixed emotions about her former mortal enemies; she kept her distance.
Once, during one of Malfoy's visits, she was nervous enough to cause an explosion in the lab, and Snape gimped down the stairs in a fury, and actually drew his wand on her.
Hermione got out her wand, and prepared to defend herself.
She would only let him go so far, and this was it.
"Alright, you bastard, if this is the way you want us to go, we'll go then, and I'll see you in Hell and I defy the Devil to keep us apart!" Hermione snarled.
Quick as a flash, Lord Malfoy was there, standing between them.
"Have you gone mad, Sev? No one's paying Granger to nurse your miserable old arse! Who do you think you are, your worthless fucking drunken Muggle father, who put most of those scars on your body? And you, Granger, it's about time for you to give up this mutual death wish. You're alive and so is Snape. That's all that matters. Who cares a monkey's how it was done?"
That seemed to chasten Snape.
He turned around and he made his way slowly back up the stairs.
Hermione started cleaning up, and Lord Malfoy insisted on helping her.
"Snape hasn't got a leg to stand on. You've no obligation, even as his Acolyte, to nurse him. Even with the Unbreakable. I was there when you took it, and at no point did you vow to put up with his churlish snarky bullshit. Not to mention he rewards you for your faith in him you by working you half to death, while you fantasize about murdering him, yourself. That is, if you don't resort to rape. Which I'm sure Sev wouldn't mind. You'd both better decide if you want to kiss or kill one another, and quit fucking about and do it."
"Well, I don't see why he'd got to be such a bastard! Eileen said they expect him to make a full recovery. Why doesn't he believe it?" she asked Lord Malfoy, as they worked.
"That's what Eileen thinks. His medi-wizards aren't sure. They said his voice will definitely come back. But he may remain partially paralyzed on his left arm and his left leg, indefinitely. They don't know. It's a miracle he's alive and walking, or that he can use anything on his left side, at all."
"We always thought that Voldemort put those scars on the Headmaster."
"Tom? He never touched Severus. Severus was his favorite. His Left-Hand Wizard. Almost like a son to him. No, that was that rat bastard father of his. And his mother. You think they're mad, now? There's a reason Tom Riddle fell for Eileen Prince. She was like a Devil in human form, when she was a drunk and a junkie. As for Toby Snape, he was less of a bastard, except when he went on one of his weeklong drunks, and then he'd turn into a real brute. Beat his wife and his son, mercilessly, and just about anyone else he could get his hands on. He spent a good bit of Severus' life at sea, or when he couldn't get a berth, in jail. Assault. Battery. Petty theft. That's the kind of man he was. Not bright enough to be a villain, he was just a fucking thug. An old pirate. The two of them have cleaned up their act, since they got sober, but if they were my parents, I would have never spoken to them, as long as I lived. Not Snape. He never wavered from them, no matter how brutal they were. And they always stood behind him, no matter how brutal he became. I suppose you've got to call that unconditional love."
When Hermione talked to Ron and Harry, she tried to explain to them about her duty to Snape.
Harry was interested; he even came to visit, since Snape returned from St. Mungo's, and looked at Eileen's album of pictures with her.
In the light of the newly-discovered letter his mother had written, Harry, tentatively, was starting to come around the house at Spinner's End.
He showed up regularly, once a week, but on different days and at all hours, in all sorts of conditions.
On one occasion he showed up drunk out of a pouring rainstorm at two in the morning.
Snape, who was still awake, let him in, and had Hermione make him something to eat.
Harry seemed to understand why Hermione was doing what she was doing.
"I'd like to stay and help Hermione, Snape. I really would. But the truth is, I'm just about as broken as you are. I was going to stay with the Weasleys, this summer, but I just can't live with their grief. I have too much of my own, you know?"
Snape got his chalk.
"We finally have something in common, Potter. We've sacrificed everything to this war, and what have we got to show for it?"
Harry laughed, mirthlessly.
"Not much. Look after yourself, Snape. I may need someone to look after me, one day. And there's no one else left. Who knows? You and me, we may end up having to look after each other. That's what my Mum wanted, after all."
Ron, on the other hand, had no idea why Hermione was spending her first summer of freedom tied to the ailing old Slytherin, and he was angry that he' saw her very rarely, and didn't care to hear anything about Snape.
"What about me? I lost my brother! I'm your best mate, and your boyfriend. What about me?"
"Ron, you've got your whole family. Snape has nothing. He has nothing and we owe him everything. Somebody has to pick up the cheque."
It was quite a payment to make.
For much of the month of July, Snape spent his time either in bed with his books and parchments, listening to his records, or parked in front of the television.
Hermione was surprised they had a telly or a record player, but then again, Snape was a Half-Blood, raised in the Muggle world.
There were bookshelves in every room but the kitchen; and Hermione spent any time she had not looking after the Headmaster in devouring them.
That was not much time.
She came to dread the sound of him laboriously making his way down the stairs to his lab, the stamp of his cane followed by the heavy tramp of his feet.
If she made the tiniest of mistakes he'd pour everything down the drain, and if he was in a foul enough mood, he'd throw the errant beakers against the wall, and Hermione had to duck and cover to avoid a shower of potions and glass.
Snape hated being mute, and he hated being nigh onto helpless, and much of his communications on the chalkboards hung all over the house were hateful, profanity-laden scrawls.
Hermione didn't bear it in silence.
He scrawled and she screamed, and railed against him.
Hermione knew that Snape was furious because he was so helpless, and that was why he railed at her , so.
But his meanness didn't make life any easier.
And it hurt her, deeply, more deeply than she cared to admit.
Everywhere in her life that she looked, there was Severus Snape, like a black shadow gliding out of a dark corner.
He had permeated every corner of her life, there was nowhere she could hide from the tyranny of his irrational rages, from the villainy of his meanness, from the certainty that no matter what she said or did that Snape would be all over her about it.
Like a wicked master with a wicked whip that had a wicked handle, laying both across her back in the summer heat.
Until her muscles ached down to the marrow of her bones, from which her flesh would hang in bloody strips.
Her frayed nerves were breaking; she had begun to dissolve in tears when she was out of his sight, and had come to dread every sharp word or curse than came from him as if they were blows.
Hermione would almost rather he had hit her, than to berate her, so.
And then, there was the relentless, oppressive heat.
It was a hot summer and there were only two air conditioner at Spinner's End, in the bedrooms.
They were probably as old as she was, and didn't work very well.
Hermione was always hot, always sweating and always tired, and Snape was always angry and demanding and mean.
And, of course, the frosting on the cake was the thick, viscous cloud of sexual tension that hung over them, making an unbearable situation even worse.
She often thought about what Malfoy said, about she and Snape deciding if they wanted to kiss or kill one another, and the truth was, sometimes she couldn't make up her mid.
Hermione was at the launderette, one Tuesday, glorying in the air conditioning and dreading returning to Snape's fucking sweaty hovel and his snarky villainy when she simply lost it, and started to cry.
Hermione hadn't really cried for Fred, or Tonks, or any of the dead.
She hadn't cried for the war, or for anything, really, and now it was all pouring out of her.
Which was terrible, because it was time to put the clothes in the dryer.
Hermione didn't know how long she might have stood there, by the washers, silently weeping, had Sibyl not showed up.
In the course of Snape's illness, Professor Trelawney had become Sibyl.
Her faithful attendance on Tuesdays and Thursdays improved Snape's temperament.
Sibyl was a sweet, gentle woman, and Snape was kinder to her, even when she made him do yoga and eat the vegetarian dishes she made for him.
Both of which helped his health, even he had to admit it.
Maybe it was because Sibyl had stuck by him since they were at school.
Maybe it was because she was more emotionally fragile than Hermione.
Maybe it was because he didn't want to give up a steady source of shagging he'd had since at least 1981.
Whatever it was, he wasn't half so mean to her as he was to Hermione.
Hermione had thought she could take it, but it seemed that she couldn't.
"Go and sit down, Hermione. I'll put the clothes in the dryer."
While the clothes were drying, Sibyl took her to a nice air-conditioned coffee shop, and bought her a glass of iced tea and a muffin.
"I know how you feel, Hermione. Toby's not an easy man when he's well. If he needs taking care of, he turns into a real Devil. I know. After Lily Potter threw up her hands in despair, I started looking after Toby. Him and Moony. Remus, I mean. Sirius didn't mind my looking after Remus. Poor Moony. He was so desperately unhappy for most of his life, and he was such a good man. A great wizard. A dear friend. He deserved better than he got. I've been looking after him the rest of the week. He's in such a bad way. But it's no change for me, really. They were both so fractured and so unhappy. Especially Toby. Nobody really gave a damn about Toby but me. He was awful about it, at first. He used to call me all kinds of names, and I think he suspected me of just being on the lookout for free dope and cheap thrills. But he came around. Toby's a good man. We both know that. He's just a hard, bitter man. And you fight him too much."
"I can't just let it go, can I?"
"You should. He doesn't mean it. I think I know why you two like to fight, so. You'd rather be doing something else, and fighting will do."
Hermione put her glass down.
"That's not true!"
Professor Trelawney was absently pouring sugar into her coffee.
"I suppose it's time we had a little talk. Hermione, Toby is my dear friend, possibly even my best friend. And he has been since before you were born. But we're not in love with each other. Toby lost the woman he loved when Lily Evans was murdered, and I lost the man I loved, Sirius, when he was sent to Azkaban. When he came back, we tried to patch things up, but he wasn't the same. Now he's gone. I hope he's finally at peace. I suppose what's between Toby and me is rather like what will be between you and your Quidditch hero, if your friendship endures twenty years on. I haven't given up on love. Or marriage. I can see myself falling in love with Moony. I'm already in love with little Teddy. But Toby has given up. On having any kind of life, at all. He never expected to survive this war. That's why he was pushing you away with both hands before. He didn't want you to suffer the rest of your life, like he has."
Hermione stirred her tea, compulsively.
"I would have. When I think about Snape being dead, it almost makes me ill. I was going to join the Orders. The way Queen Guinevere did when King Arthur died. No man could replace the Once and Future King. No wizard can replace the Pendragon Severus Snape."
She realized she had said too much.
"Hermione, love doesn't have to be, well, like a ball and chain. Forsaking all others so that you can sit in the kitchen with children tugging on your robe. It takes all sorts to make a world, you know. When you're young, everything seems like a huge, giant affair. Who you date. What he thinks. What everyone else thinks. None of that really matters. My point is, you are Toby's second chance at happiness. And it's blatantly obvious to me that you love him. And that he loves you. But Toby has a very low opinion of himself. He'll never say a word about it. Or lay a hand on you."
"You want me to make the first move?"
"If you want there to be a move, Hermione, you'll have to. Now, you go over to the launderette, and finish with the clothes, and I'll go and tell Toby he had better not be such a beast to you."
"Wait, Sibyl. What goes on with those two? Snape and Remus? I thought they were mortal enemies?"
"No. Snape and Sirius were mortal enemies. They had a duel once, and it was a nasty business. Wands. Blades. It came to blows, as well. They nearly murdered each other. It's hard times and bad habits between them, Toby and Moony, that's what. They were chain smokers at ten when they came to Hogwarts, and they were alcoholics at 13, and drug addicts at 14. Poor Moony is the most addicted wizard in the history of WAND. He did everything. Toby used to synthesize all sorts of drugs for Voldemort's purposes, and Remus would test them, to see if he'd got it right. Toby never charged him for anything, because he liked to have someone to get high on the hard stuff with. I'll admit to having a liking for red wine, and smoking too much weed, and doing Mandrax. And I was the poster child for free love. Sirius used to tell me that I was the Sexual Revolution all by myself. Well, I still think it's a better idea than monogamy and lies. But I never touched the hard stuff. Coke. Speed. Heroin. Purple Doom. Dragon's Fire. You'd have to be mad to mix Purple Doom with Heroin and mainline it. But they both chased the dragon. And whatever witch that would stay still long enough to let herself be caught. They're both brilliant men, but fractured. Moony moreso than Toby. Toby's a real hard case, but Moony's a gentle soul. Until he discovered the Knights, he could never come to terms with the beast in him. The werewolf, you know. And no matter what he did to himself, he just couldn't seem to die. His whole life, he never did get it together. Until he got married, Poor Moony. Don't worry about him, though. I've got five days a week to look after him. And Teddy. I've lost Sirius, and come so close to losing Moony and Toby both, I won't leave them. Either of them. And Teddy needs a Mum. Someone who loves him and supports him. Even though he's got his little problems."
"Is Teddy a werewolf?"
"Teddy, in the language of the Knights of Albion, is a hereditary Lycan. He's also a Metamorphagus, like his mother. The Transformations don't seem to bother him. You know he can change whenever he wants to? And his disposition is no different. He can join the junior Knights when he's five, so I don't expect any trouble. Neither does Moony. He wants to make sure everything's done for his son that couldn't be done for him, when he was a boy."
Hermione poured them both some more tea.
Snape was so inscrutable.
Maybe she could squeeze a few more answers out of Sibyl.
"Is there really an Order of the Satyr?"
"A what?"
"The Grand and Exalted Order of the Sorcerers and Sorceresses of the Satyr. The most powerful magical Cabal that doesn't exist. Founded by the Pendragon Severus Snape in 1975 as a kind of Hellfire Club with the informal motto" Those who live high together, die together" and the formal maxim "The Road of Excess leads to the place of wisdom." That's William Blake. But you know that. It's the only cabal of Sex Magi that requires at least Second Degree Mastery to be a member, and all its' members are Masters in the Third Degree. Remus Lupin and Lucius Malfoy are both Pendragons. And so is Narcissa Malfoy. Which means that all the surviving Pendragons in Wizarding England are in the same cabal. And Arabella Baxter was Snape's top Mata Hari during the War. Everyone knows the Witches an Wizards of the Satyr are the real power in all of Wizarding Europe. And they've all survived the War. The War that they and Albus Dumbledore strategized. But you already know that, don't you. Sibyl? Because you haven't just been hiding your beauty under all those ugly clothes. You may be, as Snape says, a little daffy, and a bit dizzy, but you and I both know you're every bit Cassandra Trelawney's heir. Don't we?"
"Do you want to be the seventh member of the Order, Hermione, and be a Colossus astride the world?" Sibyl asked.
Absently.
Hermione nodded, vigorously.
"Well, for you to do that there'd have to be such a thing as an Order of the Satyr. Which, there isn't." Professor Trelawney replied, all innocence.
"Someday…"
"Someday never comes, dear. And you can waste your whole life waiting for it. I pissed away almost twenty years, waiting for it. Think that over. Now, I'm going to go and talk to Toby. Why don't you take the afternoon off? You deserve it. Don't worry, I'll see to the laundry, too. It won't be the first time I've done Toby's washing, and I'm sure it won't be the last."
Hermione stayed at the tea shop for awhile, then made her way to Crooked Lane, and walked in and out of the shops and up and down the street, glad of the opportunity to do nothing much, for awhile.
She wandered into the Mersey & Mithril, Liverpool's answer to the Leaky Cauldron, and sat down at the bar to have a butterbeer.
There was a large poster on the wall, advertising a week of matches between the Sofia Horntails and the Liverpool Manticores.
The Horntails were Krum's team.
Looking over the poster, Hermione quickly guzzled most of the butterbeer, threw a few knuts on the counter, and made a beeline for the door.
It was Tuesday, already, and she hadn't missed a week at the Adelphi Hotel with Viktor since the summer after 4th year.
She wasn't about to start, now.
After all, even a good girl has to have some vices.
(Author's Note: Oho, what's this? Another rooster in the henhouse? Looks like if they pass this marriage law, maybe Hermione won't end up with who you think she may. Because that's not a rooster. It's a Raging Bull.)