xlviii. a most sullen house-elf
Harriet woke to the ugliest creature she had ever seen poking her in the face.
The strength of its miniature glower could've matched Professor Snape's, had the creature been more than three feet tall, stooped, and covered in sallow, sagging folds of flesh. It wore a pillowcase of all things, the hem tatty and impatiently stitched, nose bulbous and red while white hair sprung from its large ears in thick bushels.
"It's awake," it croaked.
Harriet flung herself backward, away from the creature, and slammed her head into a solid wood headboard. Stars burst before her eyes. "Ow!"
The lumpy, hunched thing grinned nastily at Harriet. "The blood-traitor's daughter is telling Kreacher to check on the half-blood."
"Who—?"
He—or Harriet thought it was a he, a goblin of some kind, maybe? A very rude goblin—hopped off the bed and landed on the floor with a solid thump. Below, Livi stirred the bed skirt and hissed with menace, causing the creature to round his eyes and back away, glaring at the scaled tail poking out from the fabric. He disappeared out the door, leaving it ajar, and Harriet flopped back onto the mattress.
Right. I'm at Elara's house, in her bedroom.
She stared at the ceiling for a long minute and didn't move, didn't do much of anything aside from breathe and let the memories from the night before float through her head like gross, mucky water. Harriet felt like she was drowning in that water, so she squeezed her eyes closed, then opened them wide, taking in such a sharp breath her chest ached. It's okay. I'm okay. It's okay.
Harriet studied the room, the funny posters mostly hidden behind tacked up parchment and the garish Gryffindor colors, Elara's trunk open at the bed's foot with its tidy contents open for inspection. Harriet thought of her own trunk and cursed herself for an idiot as she sat up, pushing the pads of her fingertips into her shut eyes until she saw stars. How could she leave the bloody trunk behind?
Livius slithered out the open door after the creature, his scales creating the softest rasping sound as his belly rubbed on the old floors, and Harriet hissed, "Don't go scaring people."
"Sss…."
Sighing, Harriet wriggled her way out from under the counterpane and fumbled for her glasses on the nightstand, knocking her wand off in the process. The stick clattered on the floor and Harriet, swearing under her breath, dropped to her knees to look beneath the bed, pushing aside the blanket Livi had made an impromptu nest from so she could snatch up her wand and strap it and her brace to her wrist. She wasn't going to forget it again.
She glanced at the blurred edge of her shadow, softened by the weak light, and whispered, "Set?"
No response came, which didn't surprise Harriet, really; Set chose when to make his presence known and not a moment beforehand—typically manifesting just long enough to save her life or throw said life into mayhem. She wished he'd stop throwing things at Parkinson, no matter how loathsome she could be at times.
Rising, Harriet shut the door and shuffled out of her borrowed nightgown, pulling on her clothes from the day prior even as she shuddered and grimaced when the weight of the old shirt settled on her scrawny shoulders. She'd almost forgotten about Kevin until he poked his head out from the pocket and hissed his irked defiance.
Harriet sidled out of the room and into the dark hall, peeking about the gloomy space with hesitation before following the thumps of movement to the next door down. Elara stood by the hearth inside, going through a crooked dresser with what looked like an old fireplace poker, dropping moth-eaten trousers and ancient shorts onto the floor while watching Livi from the corner of her eyes. She seemed vaguely wary—and Harriet guessed she should be, given that Livi killed a man last night.
Livi killed somebody. What will happen to him when they come for me? Will they kill Livi? Should I tell him to run away?
"Harriet? Are you all right?"
Harriet blinked and found Elara had turned from the dresser to study her, poker hanging uncertainly from a sooty hand. "Yeah," Harriet said. "I—." She cleared her throat, swallowed, and tried again. "Morning. What—what are you doing in here?"
"Oh." Elara looked at the poker as if she hadn't realized she was holding it. "Well, you'll need a room to sleep in, yes? I thought you might like this one next to mine, though there are others, if you prefer. No offense; you kick like a horse in your sleep."
Harriet couldn't help but snort. "I'm sorry."
"It's fine." Elara went back to poking through the drawer. "The house is, um, old? I told you this before. My relatives were—well, frankly, most of my relatives were mad, or close enough to mad. There's a fairly good chance someone's either left a nasty hex laying about and it's gone to seed, or they cursed their pants to chew off your fingers."
Harriet stared at the dresser in horror. Not a moment later, Elara found something solid inside the drawer and flipped it out from under the musty clothes, an old shoes landing on the floor with a heavy thump. The leather split from the sole and shaped itself into little teeth before the shoe came flying and snarling at Harriet, who leapt back, banging her shoulder into the door. "Ow!"
With a grunt, Elara swung the poker and stabbed the shoe, pinning it to the floor. It struggled, so Elara hit it again, and the shoe gave one last gasp before quieting. Elara prodded it a few times to make sure it was well and truly defeated before shoving it off into her discarded pile. "Biting Hex."
A thump and a squeal came from the window, and the two girls turned to see Livi partially ensconced in the writhing curtains, from which a cloud of miniature blue men with wings came screaming out of. Livi, unabashed, peeked from behind the fabric, tiny legs disappearing into his maw.
"Livi!" Harriet hissed, worried her snake had just evicted some kind of pet, but Elara only smirked.
"Maybe the Doxies will stop tearing the curtains to shreds now. The repellent they sell in Diagon Alley does not work."
Livi swallowed the Doxy whole and flicked his tongue in Harriet's direction, clearly dismissing her concerns.
Elara finished clearing out one drawer and moved onto the next, seeming in no particular hurry, both girls lost in their own thoughts as they best tried to approach the events from last night. "Why don't you use your wand?" Harriet blurted out.
"Pardon?"
"Your wand." She waved at the mess. "Malfoy was bangin' on about how stupid he thinks some families are to adhere to the 'no magic' thing in the summers because the Ministry can't tell if magic's cast in a magical home or something? This is a magical house, so can't you use magic?"
Comprehension dawned in Elara's expression, and she muttered a soft, "Ah," as she kept on with the poker. "That's a ward; Uncle Cygnus told me about it, and not every family has someone who can cast it or afford the wardsmith to make it. The Ministry's Trace is always active on wands, but in places like Diagon or Hogwarts or other public areas, they don't follow the spells. They can't really tell whose wand did what. If you were to walk into the heart of London and start casting, the Ministry would be notified because it's a Muggle area. Private dwellings can have the Untraceable Ward sealed on them, but the ward has to be keyed to an adult's wand, and well—." Here Elara shrugged. They were no adults at Grimmauld.
Harriet remained quiet for a time, stroking a finger over Kevin's head as the golem continued to pout in her pocket. "Who was that earlier that woke me up?"
"Woke you up?"
"Yeah, he—it? He?—came in and poked me in the face until I got up!"
"Poked you in the—?" Elara's confused questioning cut off with an abrupt scowl as she slammed the drawer shut. "Kreacher."
A loud crack heralded the sudden return of the wrinkled creature, and Harriet hit the door again, swearing when her elbow collided with the solid wood. The creature leered at Harriet before turning his attention to Elara, who glared down her straight nose and met the sullen imp glower for glower. "I said to check on her, not wake her, didn't I?"
The creature—Kreacher? If that wasn't an apt name, Harriet didn't know what was—tilted his head back and sneered, the folds on his wizened face quivering. "Kreacher was just checking. He had to check if it was still alive."
"Don't call her it."
Kreacher sniffed. "Whatever the blood-traitor's daughter wishes. Kreacher lives to serve the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black."
"I mean it, Kreacher!"
The imp sneered. "Of course, Mistress."
Harriet had never heard Elara swear, but she looked very close to doing so as her face flushed an angry red. "Clean this up," she said, pointing at the pile of discarded clothes.
"Of course, Mistress." Kreacher snapped his fingers, and the pile disappeared. "Does the blood-traitor's daughter or the half-breed need anything else?"
"No."
He tottered off after that, Harriet carefully maneuvering around him until she came to stand by Elara. The door slammed on its own with a loud bang!
"He makes me so furious," Elara muttered as she dropped the poker back onto the hearth's rack. Her hand was left sooty, and upon spying the mess, Elara's lip curled and she pulled out a handkerchief from her skirt pocket. "If I didn't think he'd quite literally murder me in my sleep, I'd give him clothes and be done with it."
"But didn't you just give him clothes…?"
"No. It's more an expression than anything, since you have to hand a house-elf clothes to free them. That's why Kreacher wears that grubby pillowcase."
"That was a house-elf?" Harriet had heard of them before—they came up in conversation often enough in Slytherin House—but she'd never seen one before.
"Yes. Probably the oldest and most sullen house-elf in all of Great Britain, really." She stopped wiping her hand and let out a frustrated sigh. "We should have breakfast. Come on…."
Elara led the way back into the hall and down the stairs, seeming to know the path well enough in the dimly lit passage, pausing only once to mutter about a covered portrait that Harriet didn't quite hear before they moved on. The kitchen was much as it had been earlier that very morning, the sconces coming on with reluctance, Harriet's Invisibility Cloak slung atop the shifted chairs. Elara fished out a box of tea from somewhere, and Harriet went about picking ingredients from the cupboard Charmed to stay cool.
They didn't say anything to one another until they were seated at the table, a plate of breakfast before each girl, Harriet's stomach still too tense to manage much else besides a bite or two toast. Finally, she plucked up the courage to break the silence. "What am I going to do, Elara?"
The older girl—usually so much more composed than Harriet—bit her lip and chased a bit of egg with her fork. "I'm not…not really sure. Like I said last night, I can write my solicitor. He can at least find out if the D.M.L.E has…issued a warrant? Though I wouldn't think they'd do that. I think they'd be more worried about your safety. Most likely."
The uncertainty in Elara's voice did little to spare Harriet's dwindling spirits. Her face paled considerably as she dropped bacon crumbles into her front pocket for Kevin's benefit. "Do they send little girls to prison in the magical world?"
"Don't be preposterous." Elara didn't quite meet her eyes as she went about making another cuppa. "What kind of society would put little girls in gaol?"
"The kind of societies that have blokes calling themselves Dark Lords who go about trying to kill babies?"
"You really shouldn't be so flippant about that, please." Elara stirred milk into her tea, and when she released the spoon, it continued to spiral in lazy circles. "What happened last night was self-defense."
"But what about Livi?"
"Perhaps…perhaps you could say it was a wild snake?"
"Would anybody believe that?"
Elara shrugged as she stood up from the table and gathered their dishes, bringing the lot to the sink. "They have the burden of proof, just like in the Muggle justice system."
"The what?"
"They have to prove your snake killed him. They have to prove you own a snake—and given that no one knows you're a Parselmouth, they're not about to believe you've kept a Horned Serpent around."
"Remember what Snape said at Halloween, though? That if he ever heard me say anything as 'brain dead' as needing proof, he'd have me dissecting cauldrons or something for the next six years?"
"Yes, well, Snape's a—." Elara dropped a spoon and it clattered against the cast-iron sink. "Not a very nice man. However, we have to worry about the Ministry, not Snape at the moment, so I think it'd be best if I wrote to Mr. Piers. He can probably tell us what to do."
Harriet hummed her assent, glumly kicking her feet back and forth as she gazed into her empty cup and tried to make sense of the lumpy tea bits left behind. Elara was a good friend—maybe even a better friend than Harriet deserved, as she hadn't slammed the door in her face when Harriet showed up at an indecent hour trailing all sorts of nonsense. Harriet's own flesh and blood would've never treated her half as well. They didn't even give her a bedroom.
Crackling from the hearth drew Harriet's attention. The cinders of old wood resting in its belly shifted and sparked, sending up a plume of green embers. She hadn't seen Elara light it, though she guessed it could have been that—Kreacher fellow, sneaking about.
"Elara," Harriet asked aloud, frowning.
From her spot by the sink, Elara answered with a preoccupied, "Hmm?", her hands slick with soap.
"Why's your fire green? I've only seen that in Diagon Alley."
"What?" Elara turned off the water.
"I said, why's your fire green—."
Elara whirled around. "Harriet, get away from there—!"
The other witch's shouted warning came too late, for she hadn't finished speaking before the flames burst high and licked the mantel—issuing forth the black-clad figure of a familiar wizard stepping from the simmering coals. Harriet knocked her teacup off the table and it shattered on the floor.
Severus Snape straightened to his full height, and, with a dismissive look at the mess, sneered, "Potter."
Harriet gulped.
A/N: Sorry for the late update! Real life is murderous.
