l. dinner with a dungeon bat
The fire barely had an opportunity to settle before the two Slytherin girls realized Professor Dumbledore had abandoned them in the kitchen with a fuming Severus Snape.
Harriet glanced at Elara as the Potions Master continued to stare at the hearth, expression blank, though Harriet thought he'd gone paler than usual, the outrage seeming to billow outward from his body like a humid cloud. Elara didn't look nervous like Harriet did; she looked more annoyed, which Harriet guessed the other girl was entitled to. The headmaster had foisted an unwilling house guest onto her.
Snape spun around and both girls jolted in their chairs as if he'd thrown a curse at them. He dipped a hand into one of his many pockets, and Harriet thought they were going to be hexed for sure this time—and yet, Snape didn't pull out his wand. Rather, he held out a closed fist toward Harriet, and when she did little more than stare at him like a frightened bird ready to fly, Snape sighed.
"Don't just sit there like a brain-dead fool—take this, Potter."
Hesitating, Harriet extended her hand, palm up, and Snape opened his fist over it, letting something about the size of a matchbook drop into her grasp. "Oh, hey!" Harriet exclaimed. "It's my trunk—."
She had only a second to move out of the way when Snape flicked his fingers and the trunk returned to its proper size, slamming down on the table with an almighty bang. Harriet glowered as Snape smirked like he was proud of himself, though the look disappeared as swiftly as it'd come when he looked to Elara again.
Both Harriet and Elara gulped.
Snape pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger and mustered some measure of patience—or most likely tolerance—before he dipped his hand back into his pockets, retrieving a battered pocket watch. He considered the watch with a baleful glare, then flicked his wand toward the mantel. The carriage clock there, covered in cobwebs and decidedly older than Harriet great grandparents, suddenly appeared from under its grubby coat and began to tick once more.
"I will return at seven this evening, at which point a bedroom had better have been set aside for my usage, Black."
Elara just glared.
"You will stay in this house—not one toe outside of it—until I've returned. Rest assured, what patience I have has been utterly decimated by the Headmaster, and I've none to spare on you two dunderheads today."
"Err," Harriet asked, still somewhat dazed by the Headmaster's proclamation and the sudden, overwhelming relief of not having to return to the Dursleys. "Where are you going?"
Snape gave her an incredulous look and didn't bother to answer; rather, he walked straight to the hearth, scooped up a handful of Floo Powder, and said an address in such a quiet undertone, neither Elara nor Harriet heard what he'd said. The man disappeared as Dumbledore had—though with considerably more furious cloak snapping.
The soot hadn't had a chance to settle before Elara whacked Harriet's arm. "Ow, hey—!"
"What are you thinking, asking the great bat where he's going? Who cares?" She let out an aggravated sigh and sank into her chair again. "Our Headmaster's crazy. Or well on his way to senile; can wizards go senile?"
Harriet shuffled closer to her friend and, uncertain of herself, touched Elara's shoulder. "I'm…sorry," she muttered, eyes on the floor. The Headmaster asked too much of Elara; it wasn't fair for the other girl to not only open her home to Harriet, but to bloody Snape as well—and whoever else Professor Dumbledore deemed necessary to come ferret through the Black family antiques. Harriet didn't like feeling like this; still scared, anxious, unsure if she'd inadvertently destroyed or irrevocably strained the first friendship she'd ever made.
Elara blinked and seemed to drag herself from her darkening mood, meeting Harriet's downcast eyes. "No," she said slowly. "No—I want you to stay here far more than I care about Snape or whatever rubbish the Headmaster thinks needs to be gotten rid of. Honestly, my grandmother cursed everything right down to the nails in the floorboards."
Harriet smiled and the tense mood in the stuffy kitchen lightened. The horrid night prior was catching up with her, all the running through the woods in the dead of the night, tossing and turning in an unfamiliar bed, causing the bespectacled witch to slump against the solid table and let her head drop onto the top of her trunk with a heavy thump.
My trunk.
"Bloody hell," Harriet said aloud.
"If Hermione were here, she'd scold you for saying that."
"Never mind that—my trunk, Elara! I left it in the tent with—you know!"
"And?"
"And Snape just handed it to me! Which means he—he was the one who—!" Found the dead wizard. In the middle of the woods. Merlin.
Neither girl knew what to say to that sentiment, and so, by mutual assent, they ignored it. "Let's take the trunk up before Kreacher tries to help. He's not, um, very helpful, really, when he's in a mood."
The trunk wasn't heavy, not when one took it properly by the handle and thus activated the Featherlight Charm on it. Harriet dragged it up to the third floor where her bedroom and dozing snake waited, first door on the right, with Elara's just past it, the landing and hall also holding a linen closet Elara warned her away from, a study the older girl had been concentrating her efforts on recently, a bath and another bedroom. Harriet glanced at the empty bedroom, then at Elara, brow raised in question.
Elara shook her head. "There's three more bedrooms upstairs and quarters in the attic. He can take one of those—or sleep with Kreacher in the boiler room. Whatever he'd prefer."
Harriet snorted, though a strain of guilt plucked at her middle; Dumbledore said "the matter" had been "taken care of," but what did the Headmaster mean by that? If Snape had her trunk, did that mean he had to…to take care of it? The sudden image of Professor Snape digging a grave with a shovel like in the movies filled Harriet's head and struck her dumb for a moment—not because it was terribly difficult to imagine Snape of all people digging a grave, but because he was doing it to hide a body Harriet's familiar had killed.
The headmaster never did say who had threatened her.
"Harriet?"
"Hmm?"
"Will you help me with…something?"
Harriet was already nodding before she asked what Elara needed her to do. In answer, Elara turned heel and they marched back out of Harriet's dusty bedroom and down to the second floor, entering a dim, hushed library.
"Be careful," Elara said as she turned the switch for the gas lamps. "Cygnus told me those volumes there, on the higher shelf, are dangerous."
Considering everything from the furniture to the shoes seemed to be dangerous in the house, Harriet paid particular attention to the shelves Elara indicated and stayed well away. Whatever those books did, Harriet didn't want to know. "What're we doing in here?"
The taller witch stopped in front of the hearth and sharply rapped on the frame of a portrait depicting a distinguished, snoozing wizard with a pointy beard and sharp, slanted eyebrows. A thunderous snort escaped him as he woke.
"Er—?! What's this—?! Brats! Don't you know better than to leave a man to his rest?!"
"Where are the family grimoires?" Elara asked of the wizard, her voice level but brooking no argument.
The wizard narrowed his eyes. "Now why would you be looking for those?"
"Because Uncle Cygnus told me they were in here and that they've been in the family since before we were a family." Elara sounded testy even to Harriet's ears. Today was already proving trying to them both. "I need to move them."
"And why's that?"
While Elara bickered with the wizard—a Black ancestor apparently—Harriet studied the portrait and tried to puzzle out where she'd seen the man before. It must have been at Hogwarts, considering the castle contained hundreds upon hundreds of old portraits and moving paintings, and yet Harriet could've sworn….
"Are you—," she interrupted, blushing. "Aren't you a headmaster?"
The wizard's distinct brow rose. "I was indeed," he sniffed, nose in the air, doing a close impression of Malfoy. "Phineas Nigellus Black—the most hated Headmaster to ever grace Hogwarts." He seemed particularly proud of that achievement.
Elara tutted. "I guess we've established how Professor Dumbledore knew you were here, Harriet."
Professor Black huffed but didn't deny the claim.
"The Headmaster wants to have someone sweep the house for Dark objects; I mean to move the grimoires somewhere safe," Elara explained, a hint of color in her cheeks as she admitted the less than legal state of her family's old magic. "The rest I don't care about, considering it either tries to eat, bite, strangle, or stab anyone who touches it."
"Strangle—?!"
"The curtains in the trophy room are strongly hexed."
"You've a trophy room—?"
"As enlightening as this conversation is," Professor Black drawled, doing a damnable impression of Professor Snape at his silkiest. "You're boring me. The grimoires are kept on the next aisle over, in a black trunk. Or so they were the last I saw them. Do be careful, brat—and if you're looking for a place to hide them, may I recommend the safe in the first floor lavatory? It is warded against…curious eyes."
The pair of witches found the trunk in question, though it proved far too heavy for them to lift off the shelf, let alone carry down to the lower level. Elara summoned Kreacher and he helped them levitate the heavy, sealed trunk down the stairs—though twice he leered at Harriet and muttered something about dropping the box on her feet.
It took the better part of an hour pressing and pulling and tapping about the cramped, dingy loo for Elara to find the large panel safe hidden behind a glamored section of tiles. Inside, they discovered a cache of Galleons, several snoring portraits of dour Black ancestors, what looked like three petrified heads, and a glittering centipede preserved in a jar. The girls spent another twenty minutes devoted to hefting the trunk inside the vault, followed by much sweating on Harriet's part and a bout of wheezing from Elara.
They tromped upstairs afterward and made a trifling attempt to clean Harriet's new room, though both witches were tired after their eventful evening and thus spent much of their time chatting and poking about through various cupboards. They broke for lunch around midday, then spent the remainder of the afternoon on the fourth floor, in a filthy game room smelling of mold and dead things. They played chess on a board where the enchanted pieces screamed bloody murder as they died. Elara soundly beat Harriet twice before they couldn't stomach the racket anymore.
At half-past six, Harriet and Elara headed back downstairs, walking side by side down the dim-lit hall to the creaking stairs.
"Where do you think Snape went today?" Harriet asked.
"I would guess he went to argue more with the headmaster," Elara replied, mouth twisting in a repressed grimaced. "I doubt he was successful."
Snape was not, in fact, successful with any further negotiations. At precisely seven in the evening, the carriage clock chimed and a heavy knock struck the front door loud enough to be heard in the kitchen basement. Both witches shared spooked looks, not quite forgetting Harriet's escape from the woods and the wizards chasing her, and so Elara sent Kreacher to open the door and let Snape in—if it was indeed Snape standing out on the porch. The wizard came stalking into the room some minutes later, a decidedly unhappy look on his severe face.
"Potter, what are you doing?" he demanded once he spotted the short witch standing at the cooker, and Harriet—leaning over the pot with her sleeves rolled back past her skinny elbows—eyed him with a puzzled look.
"Err—making supper? Sir?"
"Black, is there a reason you've set Potter to work instead of using your house-elf?"
Elara, setting out bowls on the table, frowned at Snape. "You can eat Kreacher's cooking if you want. I wouldn't recommend it," she said. When Snape narrowed his eyes, she swallowed and muttered, "Professor," before hastily setting out the spoons.
"And where am I to stay in this mouldering ruin?"
"There's, um, some bedrooms on the fourth level not in use. Sir."
Snape dropped into the chair at the head of the table and Elara nudged one of the bowls closer to him. When the Potions Master didn't react, she added a spoon and a cup to his setting and retreated into the kitchen.
"Unbearable grump," she muttered as she dropped a cutting board onto the counter and set in on slicing apart a loaf of bread. Harriet snorted, and both girls ducked their heads when Snape directed a sour glare in their direction.
Supper was finished soon, and while Elara set out the bread, Harriet brought the pot to the table and dished herself some stew. Elara served herself next, and then Snape, the three settling in to eat in awkward silence. Harriet had seen Snape eat in the Great Hall, of course, but she found it rather disconcerting to witness the event at such proximity. It was hard to think that any of her professors did boring, normal things like eat, or sleep, or exist anywhere outside the confines of Hogwarts.
The silence broke when Livius—smelling food—nudged open the basement door and came slithering into the room, startling Snape and Elara so badly the latter knocked over her water glass. Snape flicked his wand and cleared the mess before she could react.
"Sss..." the serpent hissed as he raised himself into Harriet's lap and proceeded to sniff her food. "What isss thisss?"
"My dinner," Harriet replied, dunking a heel of bread into the stew. Livi nosed the bowl hard enough to slop some onto the table and she cursed around a mouthful of food. "Hey!"
Livi snapped up a piece of meat and swallowed it whole. "Sss…don't likesss."
"Well, it wasn't meant for you!" Harriet growled, tugging on his horn, earning a miffed hiss in reply.
"Potter!"
Snape's exclamation brought Harriet's attention back to her tablemates. Elara was paler than usual, and Snape sat stiffly in his chair, knuckles white around his spoon, and Harriet guessed watching her tussle with a large, venomous snake was a bit off-putting.
"What?" she asked. "He's being a brat."
"Tell your pet to leave while we are eating."
Harriet sighed, wiping her mouth on her stretched out sleeve. "The professor wants you to go while we're eating."
Livi seemed disinclined to do as told and said as much, prompting a quick, furtive argument between witch and snake that ended with said snake leaving in a huff, though not before trailing over Professor Snape's boots. He stiffened and scowled at Harriet until Livi disappeared. Several minutes passed before the man moved.
"Regardless of the headmaster's mandate, I haven't the time—nor the desire—to babysit you two miscreants for the remainder of the summer. He's arranged for various minders during the day, and I will be here in the evenings. If you wake me, you had best be dying or prepared to do so. Am I understood?"
"Yes, sir," the two witches grumbled in reply, though the question was certainly a rhetorical one.
"You are not to leave this house without Dumbledore's chosen babysitter."
Elara scowled and opened her mouth, then thought better of what she meant to say when she caught Snape's eye. Harriet slurped her stew and their combined wordless condemnation prompted her to set the bowl back on the table and blush, fidgeting with her spoon.
Seeming to not know what else to say, the Potions Master curled his lip and strode from the room, leaving his half-eaten meal behind. The door snapped closed at his heels and Elara let out a puff of air, slouching in her chair. Harriet resumed her own dining.
"I can't believe we have to spend the rest of the summer with him," Elara muttered, head in her hands. "God help us both."
Harriet slurped her stew.
