Severus had just got the calming potion up to its first simmer when he heard the crash upstairs. Hastily, he moved the cauldron off the fire onto a waiting tripod before running upstairs. Calming potion needed to be repeatedly heated and then left to cool and thicken, or it would explode, but it hadn't been the right time to cool this one yet, and he hoped this batch could be salvaged. He suspected that all three of them were going to need frequent access to it – in addition to the medicines he regularly had to brew for Konstantine (you couldn't really call them healing potions if they couldn't actually cure him, just keep his symptoms under control, but at least he was better about remembering to take medication regularly than Remus Lupin had been), the ones he now needed to provide for Vader, his own treatment for nerve damage caused by repeated experience of the Cruciatus curse (come to think of it, Vader almost certainly had similar injuries from being repeatedly electrocuted), and all the other products he was supposed to prepare for the benefit of everyone else on the island…
All these thoughts skittered through his head too fast for him to register them consciously as he rushed up to Vader's bedroom. Konstantine was standing against the wall on the far side of the bedroom, glaring killing curses – no, that was the wrong metaphor to use of a muggle – glaring plasma arcs at Vader, who glared back with eyes that had reverted from the blue they had been half an hour ago to a furious yellow.
'What is going on?' hissed Severus. He hadn't meant it to come out sounding so aggressive. Calm, he reminded himself furiously. You're the most nearly sane person here, by virtue of being merely neurotic rather than outright psychotic, so you're supposed to be defusing this situation, dammit!
'This man tried to kill me!' retorted Vader.
'Is either of you injured?' Severus asked. 'More injured than when I left you, I mean?'
They both shook their heads.
Oh, the joys of the afterlife! Instead of breaking up fights between teenage wizards trying to use spells they don't understand, you have to break up fights between shell-shocked war veterans with a tendency to throttle anyone who startles them. Severus wanted to snap, 'Detention and minus fifty House points to each of you!' but you can't do that to adults. Merlin, he was tired. And Darth Vader had regained consciousness only three hours ago! What was it going to be like coping with this situation day in, day out?
'Konstantine, did you try to kill him?'
'Felt like it.'
Severus wanted to retort that feeling like killing someone was not the same as intending to kill them, let alone actually attempting to do so, or he would have been serving a life sentence in Azkaban before his first week of teaching was out. But – well, for normal people there's a difference between feeling angry and actually killing someone. With these two housemates, it was a different matter.
'Was there any particular reason?'
'He read my mind.'
'Do you mean he was reading your mind before you suddenly decided that, having insisted on adopting him and nursing him back to health, you were in fact going to murder him? And that this was the reason for your abrupt change of policy?'
'He looked at my memories. Saw things he shouldn't.'
Ouch. Severus knew precisely how much that hurt. 'Do you need time to calm down?' he asked more gently.
'Yes – Professor.' When Konstantine had first arrived – or at least, once he was recovered enough to manage anything more coherent than a groan – he had insisted on addressing Severus as 'Professor' almost all the time, for want of any other honorific. Now that they had settled into being friends, he mostly didn't bother. But at the moment, if he was taking refuge in formality, it meant he was struggling to control his temper.
'What are you going to do?' Severus asked.
'Cross-trainer for an hour. Then have something to eat, and take a calming potion. Then look for Cheiron.'
The Rock was full of places to run, climb, or swim, not to mention the gym where Konstantine usually worked (at the moment, he was on a year's leave while he helped Darth Vader settle in). The exercise machine in his bedroom was something he resorted to either when it was too dark to go out but he couldn't sleep, or when he was in such a foul mood that he didn't want to risk meeting anyone. On the other hand, he seemed to be only moderately upset. Not, 'Work out until I'm exhausted, take a sleeping potion to knock me out for twelve hours, then decide whether I can face talking to anyone,' upset, or, 'I need to vent to you because there's so much angst building up that I can't keep it bottled in any more,' upset.
'Good idea,' Severus said, as encouragingly as he could manage. 'I'll stay with our guest here for a while.'
Konstantine left, and a few moments later they could hear the rhythmic clank-thud, clank-thud of an exercise machine being put through its paces. Severus turned his attention back to the truncated Sith lying on the bed. 'I should explain some house rules,' he began. 'Firstly, murder is not allowed here – though admittedly, as it is physically impossible to die in this place, that rule is somewhat redundant. Secondly, there is to be no non-consensual mind-reading. That is to say, I will not use Legilimency on you, you are not to use it on us, and Konstantine will not subject you to muggle interrogation techniques.'
'As you have just said, he cannot kill me,' rejoined Vader smugly.
'Precisely. Do you really want to find out how much pain a sadistic sociopathic torturer is capable of inflicting on someone who cannot die? You would not enjoy it. Konstantine, on the other hand, would enjoy it far too much, and then feel guilty about being the sort of person who enjoys hurting people. And I do not want to expose him to that, because most of the time, when he's not in homicidal maniac mode, he is…' there were plenty of words you could not tack onto the end of a sentence like that, such as, 'a really nice person.' Severus made do with, 'mostly trying to be good.' He felt ashamed of using his friend as an attack-dragon to threaten Darth Vader with, but it wouldn't do to let Vader underestimate Konstantine just because he was a muggle. Make it clear that we're all dangerous, and that if the three of us can live at peace, it's because we choose to do so.
No, he was going about this all wrong, he realised as he started to calm down, and Cheiron's bits of advice like, 'Don't believe everything you think,' kicked in. Vader was already frightened, he had just been trying to defend himself from someone in whom he sensed aggression – and if Vader hadn't been restraining his own aggression, Konstantine could have been slumped on the floor nursing a crushed throat, rather than angry and alarmed but physically intact. Merely pushing him away had been a more Jedi thing to do than Sith.
'I think all three of us need time to calm down,' he said, settling into a chair beside the bed. 'Personally, I wish I could go to my room and read until I felt better, but one of us ought to be here to keep you company, and it should be the one who is a capable enough Occlumens to defend himself from psychic attack.'
'I did not psychically attack him!' protested Vader. 'He was refusing to exercise any control over the thoughts and memories that he broadcast!'
He was genuinely outraged at an unjust accusation. Severus remembered, aged twelve, being beaten for making the teachers' dining-table disappear in the middle of breakfast, and being far less upset about the physical pain (he was used to getting that at home, after all) than about how unfair it was being punished for something he hadn't meant to do, when no-one had warned him that thinking angrily could make something like that happen!
'At least the woman in the pointy hat only used a stick, and not Force lightning,' remarked Vader.
'Now you are being deliberately invasive. And obnoxious. And if I were in your situation, I'd do the same,' admitted Severus wryly. 'Maybe we should change the subject. You may ask me any question. I do not guarantee that I will answer.' And I'm pulling my mental shields a lot tighter, thank you for letting me know they were loose.
'Very well.' Vader considered for a moment. 'The stick in your sleeve has the presence of an almost sentient being, even more than a kyber crystal. Is it a focus for the Force?'
'You could say that,' Severus replied. 'Most of the wands we use on my planet are made of ordinary wood, with a core from a magical animal: hawthorn with dragon heartstring, cypress with thestral hair, and so on. I could not bring my old wand with me when I died and appeared here, any more than you could bring your armour or your prosthetic limbs. But this wand,' he held up the sliver of wood where Vader's bloodshot but returned-to-blue eyes could focus better on it – is sapient pearwood, from a planet which has such high levels of magical radiation that a number of the trees are naturally magical.
'In some areas, they even use the wood to make Luggages – sentient travel accessories,' he went on, pleased to have caught Vader's interest. 'Apparently, they make very loyal pets, follow their masters everywhere – including across time travel and alternative dimensions – eat their masters' enemies, and do laundry. They can even breed – the young are born the size of handbags and grow from there. So I don't know whether my wand will be able to reproduce by budding, or whether it needs to meet another sapient pearwood wand.'
'Where did you get it?' Vader asked.
'It was a present from a wizard who comes here for a holiday sometimes, when life on his world becomes a bit too exciting. His Luggage had picked a fight with a bigger suitcase and lost, and it had a few chunks bitten out of its lid, so I used this splinter as a wand to cast a repair spell on what remained. The original owner didn't want the splinter back – in his world, wizards use long staffs, not little wands under a foot long.'
'You know wizards who use different styles of magic. Have you learnt much from each other?'
'I hardly think I'd learn much from that wizard. He's virtually a squib, not to mention being selfish, cowardly, so stupid he can't even spell the word "wizard", and a hero who has repeatedly saved his world from destruction.'
'He sounds – inadequate,' said Vader, after pausing to search for a sufficiently vehement expletive. Coming from someone who routinely murdered his officers for incompetence or failure, it probably was the worst imaginable insult.
'I like him,' said Severus firmly, and was surprised to realise that he meant it. 'It's probably just as well that Luggages don't live in my world,' he went on. 'Our Care of Magical Creatures teacher would probably try to introduce one to a third-year class, and then have to explain to the parents that it di'n't mean no harm, i' was jus' defendin' itself, eatin' little Ferox, 'cos he was tryin' to carve his initials in i's lid.'
Vader wheezed with laughter, which turned into a brief coughing fit. 'Never let him get his hands on a sarlacc!' he finally managed to say.
'Hagrid is exactly the sort of man who would buy a baby sarlacc in a pot from some random stranger he met in a pub,' said Snape. 'He and the Herbology mistress might have to share custody of it, though.'
A gentle snore told him that Vader, exhausted by the day's proceedings, had fallen asleep. Tiptoeing out so as not to disturb him, Severus pulled the door almost closed and made his way downstairs.
Author's note: Snape's memory of being beaten as a child for accidentally thinking the teachers' dining-table into nonexistence was taken from another fanfic, but I can't remember the author, I'm sorry. It might well have been Whitehound www. fanfiction u/889650/whitehound, but I can't remember which story. At any rate, I would strongly recommend any of Whitehound's fanfiction.
