Chapter 1: Our Daily Pills
Chapter Text
"I'm looking for the least possible amount of responsibility."
Lester Burnham (American Beauty, 1999)
As it happened, it wasn't terribly difficult to be sectioned in a Muggle hospital.
Not if one was a wizard and told the truth.
Certainly, Snape could have renounced his outlandish declarations, claimed to have been magically impotent, or rather that he was entirely ordinary. That is to say, non-magical... he could have lied.
Yet, Severus Snape found that he'd had quite enough of lying to last him a lifetime. Why shouldn't he tell the truth for once? It was his, after all.
His truth.
In the beginning. It hadn't been a conscious decision. He'd arrived in the operating theatre, after having activated his emergency Portkey, raving mad. Or simply raving, as the case was. He wasn't saying anything that wasn't, strictly speaking, true. Though, he certainly had lost his filter in the aftermath of the attack on his life.
For weeks afterwards, he'd barely been conscious, and had floated in the in-between, not quite here, not quite there.
He suspected that the doctors and nurses attending to him had continued to question him, even under sedation, as he vaguely had the notion that he'd told anyone who would listen all about his life of spy craft, his twenty years of teaching, his single, disastrous, term as headmaster. When he was finally fully awake again, he overheard some of the night nurses calling him "The Headmaster" outside his door. They were laughing at him.
He'd never been so unbothered by others' laughter at his expense.
It hadn't occurred to him then. He'd recanted his ravings while lucid in order to be given back his effects. He had needed his wand, after all, and spending any more time than was necessary in Cokeworth's back-water hospital was torturous in the extreme. Yet, months later, after having sat on his arse recuperating on his own in Spinner's End's solitude, he'd had the most curious impulse.
He had warded his home. It was already Unplottable, but he reinforced his spellcraft and preserved it in all of its decrepit... well... whatever the opposite of splendour was, anyhow. Much like one might preserve a mausoleum by closing the door on it forevermore. Then, he collected his disillusioned wand holster and hid his wand on his person as effectively as he could manage—hoping that it would be the one thing they'd allow him to keep, if for no other reason than that the Muggles couldn't find it on him. He had then apparated away.
The southern countryside was gorgeous in late August. Warm, not too wet, and as green and lush and idyllic as some of the terrible paintings his mother used to favour—though hers were generally reproductions. Likely they were sold up the Thames by artists that made their meagre livings forging William Turner landscapes on Portobello Road. Whatever the case might have been, they were cloying rubbish, where the real thing was invigourating and refreshing.
He'd made to put down his roots with haste.
It was quite simple, really. All he had had to do was to walk into the lobby and turn himself over.
Was he an imminent threat to himself? Oh, almost certainly.
Did he suffer delusions? Well, that depended on a great deal, didn't it? Was it delusional to think that there was a band of murderous wizards out for his blood after he'd betrayed their merry crew over his unrequited love for a ginger witch he'd known once upon a time?
Was he a threat to others? Oh, not now, ma'am. But he had killed fifty men in his time. Or there abouts.
Really? Like whom? Wizards mostly—he'd killed the great warlock Albus Dumbledore, didn't they know? There were other names too: The magical historiographercumice cream shop owner Florean Fortescue, and—
How? Well, with his magic wand, of course. How else?
But why? Naturally, at the behest of a dark sorcerer called Lord Voldemort.
If his matter-of-fact delivery of his answers threw them for even a moment, they didn't let on. They merely led him to their long-term psychiatric ward, took his clothes in exchange for hospital issue pyjamas, and assigned him a room with another man of indeterminate age.
His roommate was already asleep when he joined him in their small, shared space, and he followed him quickly to the land of nod. They had given him a small paper cup with pills that he strongly suspected to be sedatives.
'At last,' he thought, swallowing them gratefully. 'Give us this day our daily pills.'
And it was so. Were he any other man he would have cheered. As it was, he rejoiced in his heart. Who knew one could feel so celebratory while being so gloriously fuggy-headed.
There was no Dark Lord to placate. No Albus Dumbledore to answer to and appease. No school governors to work around, and no mutinous professors to watch out for. There was no filing to be done, or marking. No dunderheads to teach. There was nothing but the beautiful blank wall that he faced on his tiny single-wide bed. Egg-shell white paint had never looked so appealing, nor had 200-thread-count cotton sheets ever felt so luxurious.
Snape smiled. A true smile. His first in years. And then he slept. And slept, and slept some more.
Chapter Text
“There's a man who leads a life of danger
To everyone he meets he stays a stranger
With every move he makes
Another chance he takes
Odds are he won't live to see tomorrow
Secret agent man, secret agent man
They've given you a number
And taken away your name”
Secret Agent Man – Johnny Rivers
Doctor Melvin Granger was a man of very good humour.
Everyone said so. Usually while making valiant attempts at not spitting out the frothy mix of spittle and prophy paste he was working onto their teeth with a small, spinning brush.
He’d almost made the mistake of choking a man once from a mistimed joke. He’d since walked it back a bit. In any case, he wasn’t one for the usual knock-knock fare. His was a more dry, reactive type of wit.
The exact sort of affable drollness that came in handy when one volunteered his time at clinics serving the homeless, working on the teeth of those being held in prison, or in the sterile halls of psychiatric wards.
No, he didn’t laugh at their expense. Never that. Neither would his wife, who often joined him in his charity ventures. Janine Granger was too soft-hearted to ever do such a thing. It was more that he was able to meet any patient wherever the patients found themselves, and he didn’t make a habit out of arguing over trifles—it was far more fun to always agree, at least in principle.
The couple had started a tradition of choosing a location each summer for a nice holiday stay, and while away, they pledged a certain number of hours—however many were necessary to meet a need—at whichever shelter, or clinic, or long-term care facility they could find in whatever small, out-of-the-way village they chose.
It was a rather new tradition. Adopted in the summer of ’98, after their daughter had revealed herself to them in Melbourne and reminded them of themselves. And her. And magic. And a number of other shocking surprises.
In the silence that had followed the revelation, and the restoration of their memories, Dr Melvin had waited several beats, before pronouncing that he’d always had a suspicion: after all, what else could explain his natural affinity for magic tricks? He then made a show of ‘separating’ his thumb from his hand at the knuckle.
Janine had not been amused. His daughter had cried a bit, but he was reasonably sure it was out of relief.
“Mel, really!” His wife had looked like she was on the verge of slapping him.
“Oh, Daddy,” Hermione had choked, looking caught between more tears and laughter. “That’s so... that’s so stupid!”
It had taken a few weeks to thaw the ice out a bit, and once they had done so, they decided that what they needed most in the world was a family trip, like the ones they’d taken when Hermione was a young girl, and as soon as they had managed to settle back into their original home in Canterbury, they vacated it almost immediately in search of a small sea-side town and a community in need of their services for the summer.
It had been five years since that fateful summer where their daughter had returned to them. In that time, they’d enjoyed sojourns to Skegness, the Isle of Man, Backbarrow, and even Holyhead (where Hermione had gotten them seats to see their first Quidditch match).
This year, they had excitedly made plans to summer in Thengaldene, a small, ancient village located in the Cotswolds.
There wasn’t much there excepting the local greengrocer, a small bed and breakfast where the Grangers planned to retire nightly, and the public house. The main reason anyone might choose to repose in Thengaldene was for the scenery and to marvel at the ancient architecture and some of the old houses that surrounded the village green. Beyond that, there wasn’t much to recommend it for travel.
Being that Thengaldene was so small and remote, the Doctors Granger had decided to offer their services in the closest sizable city, which, as it so happened, was Cheltenham.
The first portion of their planning always involved reaching out to different organisations and scheduling their time—one or two days a week for the duration of their holiday. In Cheltenham they managed to line up a steady work stream for the summer at some two to three charitable organisations.
It wasn’t terribly out of the ordinary for it to take a few weeks to see everyone who needed dental work in one organisation, and then, near the end of the summer, they would need to schedule to come back and see one-fourth to one-half of the patients, as the case often was, in order to get around to performing surgeries that required additional preparation.
Sometimes Hermione would join them for a week in one location, when she could get time away, to assist them in their volunteer work. Usually in the capacity of a dental hygienist: a qualification she had earned very early out of Hogwarts (having easily passed through the certification process after a lifetime of watching her parents in their practice).
It wasn’t a career, but she enjoyed volunteering her time. This summer—the summer of ’03—was different only in the amount of time she had to offer past her normal commitments. It was, unfortunately, far less than Melvin had been able to see his daughter in previous years.
The balding man sighed lightly, his hands sure and practised as he laid out his instruments for the next session.
That was the way of it, he supposed. Children grew up and moved on. Sooner or later you scarcely saw them at all. With Hermione, that had always been the case. At least, since she was eleven...
Sometimes he had to fight the feeling that the very gift of her magic had stollen his precious, bright-eyed daughter away in the night. Stolen her, and replaced her with a worried, oft-times stressed adult woman who was aged before her time. Whose warm, brown eyes had seen more horrors in her twenty-three years than his own had seen in his sixty-seven.
In the moments where he could observe her without her knowing, he often thought that she didn’t look all that different from the war veterans he saw on occasion. She was haunted: by guilt, by terror, by worry, by sadness. The four horsemen of a troubled conscience.
He wished she were there with them now. Instead, he knew she was fulfilling her duties elsewhere. Likely looking like her aging kneazle-cat had been taken hostage and shot in front of her very eyes (though, in fact, Crookshanks was doing splendidly) as she attended to her veritable mountain of responsibilities. At least when she volunteered, she looked at peace. When she spent time with her parents, out in nature or wherever they had chosen to venture off for the summer, she was occupied with the here-and-now and not the there-and-then.
“Dorcas!” Melvin poked his head outside the open door. “Is that autoclave finished running yet?”
A moment later came her reply, shouted back to him from another room a ways down the hall. “Give it another minute, Dr Granger! I ran your wife’s instruments first!”
“Thank you, Dorcas!” He called back, grinning. Janine always finished faster than him. She didn’t spend quite as much time jaw-jawing with her patients. Dr Janine Granger was fastidious and economical in the extreme. A pragmatist of the highest order. Dr Melvin, on the other hand, preferred to spend a bit of time chewing-the-fat with each person. In his way, it was how he paid attention to their individual needs. Likewise, Janine’s fast, no-nonsense approach was her own way of achieving the same end.
Dr Melvin checked the paper he’d push-pinned into the corkboard on the wall. It was nearing the end of the day, and it was still the first week at this volunteer site, though the Fogarty Wode Psychiatric Care Centre was the final port of call before they repeated their rounds for their scheduled dental surgeries. He anticipated that they’d be there for another week, attending to routine cleanings for the residents.
“Knock-knock,” Dorcas announced as she entered the room behind him. Dorcas was a stout, older woman. Probably of an age with himself, or perhaps another ten years older. She had short, coiffed hair that was dyed a shocking maroon, and skin that was mottled with early liver-spots, but she was a kind, bright woman, of cheerful disposition, and she’d been with the Doctors Granger for nigh on twenty years.
She settled the tray of cleaned instruments down and began removing them to the lime-green paper he’d prepared with a gloved hand. “Is this the last batch for the day?”
“It’ll be the last batch for the week, Dorcas. I’ll clean these myself when I’m done here. Our Hermione will be joining us next week, I expect. I can’t thank you enough for coming with us this week and traveling all the extra way—”
“No trouble, Doctor, none at all!” She replied, her voice bright and still busy with her task. “Of course, it helps that you bought Hector and me tickets to the football club’s practises—he’d follow me anywhere for a trip to a stadium.”
Melvin chuckled. “It was the least we could do. We pulled you away from the grandkids this year, after all.”
“Oh!” She admonished as she finally made to leave, inspecting everything and making sure it was how Dr Melvin preferred it. “Think nothing of it.” She gave a wry, slightly irritated twist of the mouth. “Susan’s been absolutely insufferable lately. Last time we took the kids out she had a whole list for us. Like we’d never raised a child before. The way she carries on, you’d think we’d never even seen one, let alone raised herself and her brothers.” Dorcas huffed. “It’s driving me spare. If she wants a bit of time, just her and Jonathan, best that Hector and I back off a bit. Maybe she’ll feel she has better luck with a babysitter this week.”
“Surely, you don’t mean that?” Melvin asked, his expression apologetic.
Dorcas merely sighed. “I don’t know. It hardly matters. We’ll be back home this weekend anyhow, and I still have plans to take the babies to the zoo next week. We’ll see how well she liked using the babysitter this week rather than Gran,” she patted her breast softly in reference to herself.
“I’m sure you’ll have a lovely time at the zoo, Dorcas. Give Hector my best, will you?”
“Definitely. Would you like me to send in your last patient?”
Melvin smiled brightly at his dental assistant. “If you’d be so kind! Safe travels—”
“Yes, yes. Thank you, Doctor.” Dorcas made a motion as if to shoo him away as she chuckled, even though it was she who was leaving the room.
Melvin took the small amount of time he had left to flip through the thin dossier he’d been provided by the Fogarty Wode Centre. Thankfully, none of the residents here required sedation or to be accompanied by orderlies while receiving care. He’d seen some of that when volunteering at a prison a few years earlier, as well as at a facility for higher risk individuals. Fogarty Wode only housed low-risk patients who needed fewer supports and interventions.
He checked the paper on the wall once more and matched the number on the docket to the patient file.
Number nine. Middle-aged male, forty-three years old. Four years, or there abouts, of in-patient care, interrupted by a brief intermission where he’d been released from the hospital in Preston, after having seemingly recovered. Some six months later he’d presented himself to the psychiatric care facility in Gloucester and had summarily been transferred to Fogarty Wode a few months after that.
The time of his last dental check-up was indeterminate, so Melvin surmised that he’d not ever seen a dentist while he was in residence. Or possibly ever—in the small questionnaire where Dr Granger knew that patients routinely provided their own answers on their health history, patient nine indicated that he simply couldn’t remember ever having had his teeth looked at. Though, given the nature of the establishment, the doctor didn’t know whether to take that at face value or not.
A slightly lilting, low voice coming from the doorway interrupted Melvin’s reading.
“Good afternoon, Doctor.”
Melvin glanced up in time to see patient nine step into the room. His movements were easy and unhurried, and he seated himself immediately in the dentistry chair at the centre of the space.
Dr Granger offered the man his usual relaxed smile and greeted him in turn. “Good afternoon, Number Nine,” he started, falling back upon custom and adopting Sean Connery’s vocal talents as an ice-breaker.
Number Nine smirked at him, revealing a mouth of higgledy-piggledy, yellowed teeth. Melvin didn’t wince, but it was a near thing. He had his work cut out for him, clearly.
“That’s Double-O Nine, Doctor.”
Melvin chuckled. Oh, he did enjoy the ones with a sense of humour.
“Then I suppose that makes me Dr No, Agent. Though I do hope you’re not planning on killing me until after your cleaning?”
“Certainly not,” 009 responded, his smirk widening. “I killed my last man in ’98, after all. I’m out of the business. Besides, my teeth need cleaning more than my belt needs another scalp. There’d be no sense in my killing you.”
Melvin nodded back, but he felt his smile weakening into something tepid. If he hadn’t known any better, he’d have taken 009 at his word...
“Just as well,” he announced, wiping his palms on his white coat. They had grown inexplicably sweaty. 009 was looking at him with a gimlet eye that spoke of a more intimate knowledge of their subject matter than he was strictly comfortable with. “Anyway, I always preferred to be called Melvin, so you may call me that, or any variation there-of. And what can I call you, Secret Agent Man?”
“Snape. Severus Snape.” 009, or Snape, evidently, quipped back. Something about the name tickled at the back of Melvin Granger’s mind... It was oddly familiar for such a singularly unique name. It seemed to scratch at that place where memories were slow to be recalled; the murky part of his brain that he felt sure hadn’t been so murky before his daughter had gone and tampered with his memories several years past.
“Good to meet you, Agent Snape,” Melvin smiled, holding up his small dental mirror. “Though I’m afraid you might not agree after we’re through here. Now, if you’d oblige me in opening wide, we’ll begin the routine interrogation—ahem—dental cleaning.”
This earned a snort. Despite this, Snape gamely allowed Melvin to clip a small bib around his neck—a neck that was covered in a large, web-like scar—and did as he was bid; dropping his jaw to reveal one of the worse mouths that the doctor had seen in his tenure.
Melvin said nothing to that effect, not wishing to offend or embarrass his patient; however, if Snape felt ashamed of his bad teeth, he didn’t show it a bit. His beetle-black eyes were trained above him, slightly to the left of the blinding overhead lamp the doctor was using.
“You’ll have to let me know if you feel any sensitivity when I touch something. I’m going to have a press around all of your teeth. Just raise your hand if one is bothering you.”
009—Snape, Melvin reminded himself again—gave off a muffled noise that signalled his agreement, and thus Melvin set to work, using a stainless-steel instrument to gently prod around Snape’s teeth.
There were a number of visible cavities that would need filling, a few teeth that needed to be crowned-off, and near the back of his mouth were four, crumbling, impacted wisdom teeth, wedged so tightly against his second molars that all of the teeth, top and bottom, were shunted forward, causing his incisors to overlap a bit like shark’s teeth. The bottom incisors were worse off than the top, as his canines on the upper half had evidently come in after having been impacted for a long while. Probably because he had lost his canine baby teeth last. They were turned away from the lateral incisors and created a small gap and an obvious snaggletooth on both sides.
Melvin considered this all with no small amount of pity. The upper portion at least had an impression of symmetry, he conceded. On the other hand, the bottom front was rather hopeless. It looked like some medieval cemetery where the tombstones had begun to crowd one another out. Luckily for Snape, though he suffered from a class one malocclusion (a sort of cross between a posterior crossbite and overcrowding), he wasn’t suffering from anything as unfortunate as a severe over or underbite.
It was, in all, a salvageable situation. Though much of the yellowing couldn’t be reversed without the man undertaking additional interventions on his own. The Grangers’ volunteer clinic didn’t cover for cosmetic services like enamel bleaching. Melvin suspected a nasty mix of bad genetics and likely tobacco use accounted for the colour.
It was strange that Snape didn’t budge even once when Melvin had pressed the sharp tip of his instrument around some of the blackened cavities. Most patients needing crowns would have objected strongly. Either Snape was numb and lacked nervous sensation in those areas of his jaw, or the man had an extraordinarily high pain tolerance.
“You’re not feeling that at all?” Melvin asked, prodding once more, beginning to grow concerned with the lack of response. He removed himself from Snape’s mouth so that he could answer.
“I felt it.”
“No numbness?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Hmmmm,” Melvin began to gather his supplies to continue with the cleaning, marking on a small diagram where he’d noticed work that needed to be done. “I’m afraid I’ll have to schedule for a part two, Double-O-Nine. And perhaps even another session or two after that. Those wisdom teeth are going to have to come out, and you have a fair few teeth, mostly your molars, in need of drillings and crowns. I’m afraid our best option is going to be local anaesthesia. Are you comfortable with that?”
Snape gave a lazy smile, which, for some reason that Melvin couldn’t understand, struck him as uncharacteristic—even though he didn’t think he could have possibly known the man well enough to be a judge of his character—and only hummed his assent.
“I imagine there will be some pain afterwards.”
“Unfortunately. I’ll leave a prescription with your nurses here for a low dose of oxycodone.”
Snape nodded in a benign fashion, his lips twitching with what looked to be amusement.
“There’s nothing much I can do for your spacings without some significant orthodontistry—which we’re not trained for, I’m afraid—but if there’s any pain or additional crowding coming from your wisdom teeth pushing the others forward, that should be relieved. And those cavities have got to be smarting a fair bit. We’ll nip those in the bud.”
“My thanks, Doctor—”
“Oh, call me Melvin,” he urged again. “Or Mel, or something—that’s what my wife and acquaintances call me, after all. Only my assistant Dorcas insists on calling me ‘Doctor.’”
At that moment, as if she’d been summoned, Dorcas reappeared at the door. Dr Melvin gave a small start. He’d expected her to have been long gone by now...
“Doctor, a moment?”
“Ah, that’s my cue,” Dr. Melvin joked, waggling his eyebrows at Snape and drawing a letter Q in the air.
“That’s not your Moneypenny, Doctor Melvin?” Snape asked, evidently having mistaken Dorcas for his wife.
“Ah no, never that. That would be my wife, Janine. We’re partners in practice, you know? Moneypenny, perhaps even M, is far more fitting for one’s wife,” he chuckled, removing his latex gloves as he rose to greet his assistant.
Dorcas scowled at him in irritation. “Doctor, please—"
“Coming, Dorcas! I won’t be but a moment, Double-O-Nine.”
Melvin shuffled out to converse with Dorcas outside in low tones, leaving Snape to his own devices, sitting, as he was, under an excruciatingly bright lamp and looking a bit like an idiot with his spit-bib still clipped over his sternum.
He blinked slowly. Laying entirely inert. Idle.
Halos were burning themselves into his retinas.
It was a very good thing, Snape considered, that he’d grown quite accustomed to playing the laughingstock. Even a bit of an idiot at times. Four years ago, he would have been in a full strop over his current position. Or, at the very least, he would have felt mildly humiliated. Currently, he felt no shame whatsoever.
It was as if anything resembling that emotion had been excised from him along with Nagini’s venom.
Life was just far too short for such nonsense, really.
He shrugged his shoulders in a bit of a stretch, deciding to make himself comfortable if nothing else.
He’d mellowed out considerably since he’d presented himself at the emergency services desk a few years before. Sure, it took a bit of shuffling around, but, ultimately, they’d never thought him mentally competent enough to release on his own into the general public.
Confessing to the murder of around fifty men, none of which the authorities could even confirm the existence of, would have that effect, it seemed. He’d endured a round of interrogation by a contingent from Scotland Yard even—they’d dispatched one DCI Peter Cairns to question him over his confession—but no matter where or how hard they looked, they couldn’t find evidence that any of the people he’d named had ever been born, much less had died or disappeared under questionable circumstances.
And that was without consideration for his other ridiculous, yet utterly truthful, admissions.
After some time, they had moved him to Fogarty Wode. He didn’t seem violent. He had never so much as argued with a nurse or orderly, preferring to go where he was ushered, take whichever drugs they handed him each afternoon, and to even willingly participate in all therapy, group or otherwise.
He was a source of much consternation and confusion. If it wasn’t for the things that came out of his mouth, they’d have sworn he was functioning completely normally, aside from post-traumatic stress (that couldn’t possibly have come from the so-called ‘wizarding war’ that their patient rambled on about), the odd bout of depression, and, in the early days after the supposed war, anxiety-driven insomnia.
Snape had observed all of the head-scratching with nothing short of delighted amusement. Perhaps that was why he felt far less snappish and irritated in recent days? Perhaps it was the sleep he finally got to enjoy? Or could it have been the free drugs?
He shrugged again against the stiff reclining chair they’d brought in, rotating his scapulae and shimmying in place, looking a bit like an overgrown tom cat as he did so. His hands came up to rest under his head.
A dental appointment was certainly more entertainment than he usually was provided on any given Wednesday, he thought, contentedly.
His normal routine consisted of tea and toast topped with rubbery scrambled eggs, an hour of group therapy, free time in the early afternoon (that he usually spent watching re-runs of Yes Minister or whatever else was airing in that time-slot), whichever lunch they happened to be serving that day, his daily cup of medication, then art therapy—in any and every form that happened to take, usually at the discretion of some craft-crazed volunteer—a little more time in front of the television, supper, and then finally he would be reunited with his best friend in the whole world: the single-wide bed he occupied for a solid eight hours a day, never a moment less.
That was a normal day, in any case. One where he didn’t decide to un-retire his black locust friend from the holster he kept strapped, as ever, to his arm, and to take himself on a bit of an excursion to the outside world, if for no other reason than to stretch his legs and his magic a bit.
He was a patient, but he was no prisoner. Never again would he allow himself to be a prisoner, he had long ago decided.
He was roused from his musings by Dr Melvin bustling back into the room, looking slightly flustered and annoyed.
“All’s well, Doctor?” Snape queried, his tone mild and his expression one of polite curiosity.
“Melvin,” the doctor insisted once more. He sat back on the swivelling stool and scooched back beside Snape, the wheels, which needed oiling, emitting a faint screech in protest. “Everything’s fine. Dorcas merely forgot to have me sign off on some of the paperwork. Volunteering practically pays in paperwork, you know?”
Snape answered him with a blank look.
“Perhaps you don’t... In any case, let’s finish your cleaning.” The doctor donned a new pair of gloves from the box on the rolling cart beside him.
What followed was something akin to a mild form of torture. Not only for the constant prodding and scraping his cavities were subjected to, but also because Dr Melvin kept up a steady stream of commentary and conversation that Snape had no means of responding to.
“Now spit,” Melvin commanded, after some five minutes. He turned away to wipe a bit of plaque off of his scraping tool and continued talking. “You know, it’s likely not professional of me to comment, Double-O-Nine, but you don’t seem like the kind of man I’d expect to meet in a psychiatric centre. Is it too much for me to ask why you’re here?” He made to shove the instruments back in Snape’s mouth but Snape forestalled him with a raised hand, for once wanting to get a word in to the, until now, very one-sided conversation.
This was his favourite pastime of all. He refused to pass up an opportunity to put anyone on the wrong foot with his outlandish confessions.
“They didn’t tell you?” He quirked his thin lips in a predatory smirk.
Melvin shook his head ‘no’ and lowered his tools to his lap, looking insatiably curious.
“How remiss. I’m quite dangerous, of course. I killed fifty men, or thereabouts.”
Oh, how glorious—this was why he enjoyed himself so much, really. The look of complete shock on the doctor’s face was beyond priceless. He was slack-jawed.
“... Y-you don’t say...”
“Oh yes,” Snape continued, his grin shark-like. “But don’t be alarmed, Melvin, I’m not incurably murderous. As I told you before: I haven’t taken a life since ’98.”
The doctor was white as a sheet by now, looking as if he couldn’t decide whether this was psychosis, pathological lying, or an actual admission of guilt.
“What’s... er... what’s stopped you?”
Snape barked out a laugh. “Why—it’s in the name, isn’t it? Double-O-Nine. The license to kill. Being a spy is not without its dangers, nor its responsibilities.” He drawled, utterly glib.
Melvin’s eyes were shining. He looked like he wanted to smile, perhaps now having decided that it was all an elaborate, if inappropriate, joke. Possibly one that he himself had instigated by opening with the Sean Connery voice. “Of course.”
“Yes, so naturally, when the war was over, and I was able to dispense with the pretences, I didn’t need to kill anyone anymore. I’m not a monster, after all,” Snape quipped, remaining facile despite the disturbing truths he was providing.
Taking a moment to readjust his grip on one of the stainless steel tools he held, Melvin shrugged his shoulders once to loosen them, readying them at the corner of Snape’s mouth as he waited for his patient to open once more. Then, thinking better of it, he drew back and readied another question.
From this vantage point, he peered down at his patient with open curiosity, “Where were you stationed? I’m not aware of any wars ending in ’98.”
‘Well...’ Melvin thought for a moment to himself. There was the war his daughter had told him about... But that wasn’t likely. Having woken up after the fact, the reality of it seemed far away from him. Utterly inconsequential. Possibly a bit trumped up, in truth.
“You wouldn’t have heard of it. It was terribly boring for me most of the time, actually. Or annoying,” Snape groused. “One would think that being a spy would mean an exciting lifestyle of Bond girls and martinis on yachts, but mostly I was rescuing dunderheaded children from exploding cauldrons on themselves during the day and attending inexcusably tedious rallies at night. The truly unfortunate bit being that interspersing the usual propaganda, I was expected to engage in a spot of torture or blood sport.”
Melvin’s mouth grew dry as his brain began to itch at that uncomfortable spot at the back of his memory once more.
Exploding cauldrons...
Unbidden, the memory of himself gripping his small daughter’s hand as she dragged him into a dusty, antiquated shop arose before his eyes.
“Come on, Daddy! It says here,” she brandished a thick, creamy bit of parchment with florid green ink before his disbelieving eyes. “I need a pewter, standard size two cauldron. Potages’ must be the right shop...”
“Odd. I’ve never heard of a spy having to work with children routinely.”
Snape scowled and seemed to be thinking of something rather far off, if his distant gaze was any indication. “Most spies don’t have a day job.”
“Oh?”
“I’m not sure which was worse. The teaching or the killing.” The dour man quipped, his tone sour. “That was a joke…” he paused, “… perhaps.”
009 no longer seemed to be acting disingenuously, rather, his irritation indicated he was being completely honest.
“What did you teach?” Melvin fished, a strong suspicion beginning to grow within him.
Hermione scowled into her porridge. It was her first summer home after a year away. A timid barn owl had only just left, dropping yet another creamy parchment envelope onto their kitchen table. She had pulled the contents from it with barely concealed excitement and placed her list of supplies for second year to the side only moments earlier. Now she was looking at a second sheet with obvious contempt.
"What is it, Chickadee?”
“I got all O’s! All O’s except in Potions!”
Melvin Granger wasn’t exactly sure what an ‘O’ was, but he tried to comfort his daughter the best he could, even so. “That’s rather good, isn’t it?”
“I know I should have earned an O in Potions, Dad. He gave me an E! An E! Can you believe it?”
Janine came over from where she’d been preparing tea at the cooker. “Who gave you an ‘E,’ sweetheart?”
“Professor Snape, Mum! I wrote you about him, remember?” Her mouth twisted into an angry grimace. “He bloody well hates me.”
“Hermione!” Melvin admonished sharply, “Language!”
“He does!” She insisted, her hair beginning to frizz with magic. “I bet he would have given me an ‘A’ if he could have gotten away with it—my exam was perfect, Dad, I know it was…” Tears began to gather at the edges of her eyes. “Professor Snape just hates me…”
His patient smirked at him, like he was telling a grand joke that Melvin wasn’t included in. It wasn’t a nice expression at all.
“Potions. Though for one year near the end I taught Defence Against the Dark Arts. That was before I killed our headmaster and took his place.”
The man said it all with as much nonchalance as he might have had he been discussing the weather.
Melvin stared at him a beat, his expression indifferent, and then indicated that Snape should open up his mouth again as he broke out the prophy paste and a spinning brush.
Snape began to frown after a moment or two. Perhaps out of frustration at the doctor’s lack of reaction. He looked almost as if he were going to sulk over it. As might a child deprived of a favoured toy.
Smirking inwardly, Melvin systematically worked his way from the incisors all the way to Snape’s molars with the spinning brush, perhaps pressing harder on the cavities than he ought to have. Eventually he had his patient wincing a bit. ‘There you go, Hermione.’ He thought with a bit of satisfaction.
Once he was as close to the back of Snape’s mouth as he could get, Melvin cleared his throat.
“So, you’re the bellend who made my daughter cry when she got her exams back after first year.”
Snape’s eyes, which had only been half-lidded before, sprang open, and he surged forward reflexively, choking himself on the brush. Melvin withdrew immediately, letting the wizard choke on spit for a moment before leaning him forward and walloping him between the shoulder blades a few times.
Where before Snape had been holding his jaw slack for the sake of having his teeth cleaned, it was now hanging quite freely due to his utter shock. He worked it mutely for a moment, but, in the end, could find absolutely nothing to say in response.
Melvin gave his patient a smug smile. “It’s quite alright, Professor. My daughter did just fine in life, even with an Exceeds Expectations on her record.”
Finally, having recovered himself a bit, Snape frowned. “She cried over an Exceeds Expectations? I rarely gave out a score that good! What kind of thin-skinned swot did you raise, Doctor?”
This time, Melvin’s broad smile spoke of his immoderate pride. “Hermione Granger.”
For the second time in the appointment Snape appeared struck dumb. It wasn’t a good look for the man.
“… Fuck.”
“Beware of pretty faces that you find
A pretty face can hide an evil mind
Ah, be careful what you say
Or you'll give yourself away
Odds are he won't live to see tomorrow...”
Secret Agent Man (reprise) – Johnny Rivers
Notes:
A/N: “I killed fitty men” – Cotton Hill (King of the Hill) xD
Chapter 3: Welcome to Thengaldene
Chapter Text
“In the summertime, when the weather is high
You can stretch right up and touch the sky
When the weather’s fine
You got women, you got women on your mind
Have a drink, have a drive
Go out and see what you can find”
In the Summertime – Mungo Jerry
Thengaldene in early July was bright and sunny, startlingly verdant, and, as Hermione had decided within moments of stepping foot into the tiny village, rather boring, as holiday destinations went.
Boring was good. Boring was relaxing. Boring meant she could unzip her restrictive, wool pencil skirt, remove her nylon stockings, doff her matching wool jacket, and retire her utterly ridiculous barrister’s wig for the nonce (and the wig truly was a horror. All the more so for it being a magical barrister’s wig, which was even more tasteless and ostentatious than the Muggle version).
She’d been casting cooling charms about her person every ten minutes for weeks now, just to manage, otherwise her laundering bills became unaffordable. Magic wasn’t any good at removing pit stains, it seemed—or at the very least she was pants at it. She had a rota of only two skirt sets that were appropriate for work; expensive ones that she felt she’d paid way too much for... but it had been needful. As the youngest barrister in practise in the wizarding world, she felt she needed to be taken seriously, which required her to dress the part.
Unfortunately, her stiletto heels weren’t quite agreeable for stomping around a village with streets so old that they were, for the most part, still paved with old stone, and with hills that undulated such that she had to hike her way up a steep incline to reach the inn she was to share with her parents for the duration of her stay.
By the time Hermione reached Hogget House, she had sweat through her blouse, and the hair she had taken pains to coif around her wand for an hour that morning was frizzing out beyond her control. It could only have been worse if—
“Oh, of course...” She cursed softly, turning her heel to inspect her stocking. It had a run up the back where it had rubbed against the stiff leather of her shoe. She was also quite certain that she felt the beginnings of blisters forming. A rather miserable way of starting off a holiday, all things considered.
Approaching the stout, detached cottage, constructed of beautiful Cotswold limestone, she rapped her knuckles on the solid oak door, taking the moment before it opened to reposition her over-stuffed duffle on her shoulder.
‘At least I managed a Featherweight Charm this morning,’ she thought with no little irritation.
The door was opened by a stooped, older gentleman who looked as though he could scarcely see her. She was summarily ushered inside as he insisted on providing her with tea, even against her protests that she would happily do without.
The witch shuffled from foot to aching foot as she waited for him to return with the tea service, and she barely resisted the urge to wrest control of it from him when it looked like it might have been too heavy for him to manage on his own, but she didn’t want to risk offending her host.
As it happened, her parents hadn’t yet returned from one of their day trips to some site in the surrounding countryside, so she took the opportunity to sit with the elderly man and to rest her feet for a few moments.
Mr. Skaggs, it turned out, was delightful company. Though he was frail of body, he didn’t lack for wit, and he was a bit of a dreadful flirt. Hermione found herself grinning and laughing more than she had in weeks as he regaled her with tales of his life and waffled on about Thengaldene gossip (there was a surprising amount of it for a town which looked to have a permanent population of no more than fifty).
He was a widower of some ten years and had a bit of a shrine going in the sitting room devoted to his late wife, whose idea it had originally been to open the inn. He’d continued to operate it in her honour, he explained, and his sons came by to help whenever they had the time.
“And of course, you’ll have heard of Thengalstol. I expect that’s why you’ve come?”
Hermione shook her head, one hand propped beneath her chin as she sipped her cooling tea. “I’m sorry, I’m not familiar—”
“Quelle surprise!” He barked, his pronunciation abominable. “It’s the main draw of our little village, I’d say. Most of our guests are here for it!” In spite of his wife having died a decade earlier, he was evidently still in the habit of referring to their establishment as a joint enterprise.
“What is it?” She asked, turning to set her cup back on the tray and reaching for an egg and cress sandwich.
“It’s the old manor that sits down in the valley, about a mile off. Dalton insists that it was named for the village, but I suspect it was the other way around.”
Mr. Dalton, Hermione had learnt, was the owner and operator of the pub that sat at the corner of the main street in Thengaldene, and he was something of a hobby historiographer, though from the way Mr. Skaggs told it, he was a pretentious fart that didn’t know an old ale from a porter.
In all likelihood those would have been fighting words, had Mr. Skaggs ever had the guts to say so to the barman himself, Hermione thought, amused.
“I’m old enough to remember when there was a family that still lived there—though I was but a boy myself,” Mr. Skaggs continued, taking full advantage of his captive audience.
“They had a daughter around my age. Not quite a pretty girl, if I’m being frank,” he admitted with a grimace.
Hermione frowned, though she wasn’t sure whether it was because she found his comments to be distasteful or whether it was out of sympathy for the long-gone girl, now likely a woman in her seventies or eighties by her reckoning.
“Did they sell the property? I imagine the tours are rather magnificent to pull in so many visitors,” Hermione remarked, brushing a crumb from her skirt with a flick of her wrist.
“Thengalstol isn’t open for tours, my dear—no one can get in. You can look but can’t touch,” he chuckled as he wagged his gnarled pointer finger.
She frowned. The old manor didn’t hold any inherent interest to her, but with such a piece of information being withheld from her, she felt compelled to find some kind of answer. It was odd that there should be any sense of intrigue over a mouldering old manor house. It wasn’t as though there weren’t enough of those tucked into the countryside.
“No one ever did find out where the family went, but they weren’t heard from again or seen about town after the mid-fifties, I think. Not that they were seen often before that, mind you.” He gestured again with a single, skeletally-thin digit in the air to emphasise his words.
“It’s not much. And there’s hardly anything to go on to suspect anything went wrong, but it’s as close as we’ve got to a proper ghost story, so we tend to like to play it up a bit,” he grinned, waggling his eyebrows.
Hermione was preparing to ask for more information when there came a knock at the door. She went to rise up and answer but Mr. Skaggs waved her down.
“I’ll get it, my dear. Don’t you trouble yourself.” He heaved himself out of his chair in a way that made Hermione want to cringe, the clicking of his joints was so audible, and shuffled back to answer the door.
A moment later, the witch could hear the familiar voices belonging to her parents greeting the old innkeeper with their customary cheerfulness.
“Why, hello there, sunshine!” Melvin Granger cried as he set down a number of brown paper bags by a chair. Hermione rose to throw her arms around him, and then threw out another arm to rope her mother into the embrace.
“Hey Dad! Mum!” she cried.
Each time she saw her parents now felt like a blessing of the highest order. She’d thought that she may never have them in her life again after having sent them away, but she’d managed to convince a mediwitch from St. Mungo’s to accompany her as a personal favour from the Ministry for her war efforts, and between the two of them, they had broken through her enchantments and had managed to recall the Grangers’ memories, with only minimal mental scaring.
Janine pulled back to look over her daughter and tugged her jacket to and fro, as if fixing it for her. “We didn’t expect to see you. I thought you were going to meet us in Cheltenham for our rounds on Monday?”
“I decided to call it a week, and took the time off,” Hermione shrugged. “I can draft my case work from here and I don’t have any court appearances to make, even in the wiz—ahem,” she glanced at Mr. Skaggs who was watching them with a friendly and solicitous smile, “our world there isn’t official business conducted over the weekend. Courtrooms are closed Saturday and Sunday, just as most offices are.”
“Delightful!” Melvin crowed, thumping his daughter on the back. “And you’ll be ours for all next week, yes?”
“That was my plan.”
“Dear, didn’t you have plans with Ron tonight? I thought that was originally why you weren’t going to come until Monday,” Janine asked as she made to seat herself on the chintz settee and pour herself a cup of tea.
Hermione turned her head to the side to hide her grimace, though out of the corner of her eye she could see that her father had caught sight of it. Bother.
“Er... yeah. I decided to cancel. I’ve spent enough time at the Burrow and almost no time with you. I figured he’d understand...”
But of course, he hadn’t. Ron had thrown what Hermione could only term a ‘tantrum’ over the change in plans, and she felt grateful that she had contacted him by floo and had managed to cut off the connection when his language grew a little too colourful for her tastes.
‘It serves him right,’ she thought viciously. She’d been contacted that morning by a reporter for The Moon about the interview she’d allegedly agreed to over dinner that evening. She had to fish a bit for more details but had eventually discovered that Ron had set up a meeting with the reporter, whom he’d invited to dinner that evening at the Burrow.
It would have been their third joint interview since the war, and the requests kept coming.
The first she had agreed to herself, in the interest of clearing up misunderstandings and in order to set out her own narrative of events. She had joined Harry and Ron in the summer after the final battle to speak with a senior editor at the Daily Prophet under the strict agreement that their words would be recorded verbatim in the print edition, and that the questions asked would also be transcribed directly. She wanted no editorialisation.
The piece had been accompanied by other interviews conducted with the new Headmistress McGonagall, Kingsley Shacklebolt, who, at the time, had been running a campaign to be elected the new Minister for Magic, and a couple of Muggleborns who had been processed through Umbridge’s cruel system; their stories being considered important for contextualising the events of the preceding year.
It was the only time where Hermione had appeared in the press that she’d been proud of, to date, and she still had a copy framed in her chambers.
The second time in the press had been humiliating, but Ron had insisted that they go public with their relationship to the society page in Witch Weekly magazine.
She tried hard to forget that that article existed. She still didn’t know why she’d let him talk her into it, other than that he’d whinged at her for weeks beforehand that, given the public nature of their past, and the fact that they were watched constantly for any signs of having paired off with someone, shouldn’t they take the dog and pony show to the people rather than the other way around?
Hermione had regretted it immediately. It was around the time of one of her more important pupillage assessments and she hardly could remember what she’d said, or how she’d said it, and she’d come out looking like a snippy ice-queen while the author of the piece speculated wildly about what a catch like Ronald Weasley could see in a shrill shrake such as herself. Worse yet, in the next edition he was named “The Sexiest Wizard in Great Britain” and was given a whole three-page spread, along with the cover.
Ron hadn’t seen the problem. Rather, he’d been delighted by the article, and his new designation, and had enjoyed many people pulling him aside whenever he ventured into town to marvel over him and congratulate him.
That had been around a year earlier, and since then he’d been angling for another interview with Hermione, expressing now that she simply had to speak to the public. They’d want to know about her new career as a barrister! After all, he was so proud of her, everyone else would be too. Didn’t she want to be an inspiration to all the young witches out there who might look up to the youngest, and only Muggleborn, barrister in the wizarding world?
Hermione had told him in no uncertain terms that she’d rather eat her own wig.
He’d done a number of solo interviews, and a couple with Harry. He’d been offered brand deals with Cleansweep, and he was the celebrity spokesman for Quality Quidditch Supplies. He had his name and face on a line of cheeky prank products marketed by George in his shop and was routinely asked to come around cutting ribbons on things. None of it seemed to be enough, even though his full-time job by that point consisted of making appearances as himself.
Hermione would be damned if she’d let him rope her into that sort of life for herself, however.
She conducted serious business, and she represented very important interests, large and small. She had to maintain an impeccable image as a court advocate, and she couldn’t be seen to be chasing the tails of fame and fortune.
Hers was a life of principles, laws, ethics, and carefully considered contingencies and compromises. Where Ron accepted enormous boxes of clothing sent to him by all of the new up-and-coming magical designers who wanted their clothing seen on a member of The Golden Trio, Hermione had made a wisely planned purchase of exactly two couture skirt suits from a respected Muggle atelier and had paid handsomely for them—they’d cost a small fortune that she only had set aside from the money she’d been awarded with her Order of Merlin. Her white blouses she purchased from second-hand shops or off-the-rack at Marks & Spencer.
Where Ron’s hair had adopted a fly-away quality that mimicked Harry’s uncontrollable tufts and cowlicks, Hermione had trimmed her mane into something businesslike. Short on the sides and at the back but still long up top (the remaining length she felt was necessary to keep the style feminine enough to suit her sensibilities), which she tamed into submission each morning such that each curl stayed demurely in place and fitted perfectly under her, admittedly pretentious, barrister’s wig.
Standing next to each other, they made a bit of an odd couple.
When she had been photographed for Witch Weekly while she was taking her exams, her photograph hadn’t illustrated the divide quite so clearly: she’d still had her hair that appeared as tangled and lengthy as a pot of Devil’s Snare, and she’d dressed casually, not having invested in her work wardrobe yet. Since the article painting Ron as the “Sexist Wizard in Great Britain” hadn’t been published yet, he’d not yet secured any deals with designers and had worn only his least offensive Weasley jumper and a pair of old corduroy trousers. They had still looked recognisable as themselves. As it was now, they couldn’t have appeared more incongruous.
Really though, all of that was only surface level. The kind of twaddle that the society page liked to draw attention to.
Hermione liked to think that, even with the constant begging for joint interviews and media appearances, their shared history together would help them weather the media storm and ultimately stand the rigours of fame.
Even so, she was angry with Ronald Weasley, and consequently, she wouldn’t be showing up for the interview he’d sprung on her without asking. And because he hadn’t asked her, she wasn’t going to do him the courtesy of giving more than a cursory notice that she was blowing it off.
Sure, it was petty, but turnabout was still fair play in her book.
In that spirit, she turned to her mother, and with a blank expression, finished her earlier thought: “He graciously agreed to postpone our dinner.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her father wince. Apparently, she’d not been as convincing as she had hoped.
Then again, perhaps it was too big of a leap to suggest that Ronald Weasley could be gracious about any kind of let down or disappointment. He was a known sulker.
“That is... kind of him,” Janine said, her voice hesitant.
There were an awkward few moments where all three Grangers shuffled about and studiously ignored the ginger Erumpent in the room with them. Ultimately, it took Mr. Skaggs hobbling in with a second pot of tea for the atmosphere to relax once more.
Conversation turned to more benign matters. Hermione found herself nattering on about her latest pleadings. Her parents tried their best to follow along, but there was only so much a Muggle could hope to understand about wizarding law. Especially when some of the particulars of the case included such exigencies as: “the defendant may pay out damages of up to fifty percent in a settled case by offering tender of Welsh Green dragon eggs, or, alternatively, of up to thirty-five percent by tendering Black Hebridean eggs, but if it is the former, the other fifty percent is required to be paid, in full and up front, in gold, and must be accompanied by thirty casks of ‘goode and darke’ faerie ale.”
Of course, Mr. Skaggs wasn’t present for this discourse, as she’d have had a difficult time explaining it. Hell, she didn’t bother offering an explanation to the Doctors Granger either—there was no use. Half of the laws were drafted some five hundred years earlier and had to have been so uselessly pedantic out of some kind of necessity that, in the current age, seemed baffling at the best of times and rather barmy at the worst.
It only mattered in this case as the defendant had, in fact, tried to pay out his damages in Welsh Green eggs, and the quality of the faerie ale was being contested by the injured party.
Her role was simply to explain the law as it was written, however. Thankfully, bickering over whether a cask of beer was darke enough or goode enough fell to the solicitors. She had a feeling that, unless the complainant was incredibly petty, it should handily resolve itself in arbitration.
By the end of her diatribe about how it seemed pointless anyway (Welsh Green eggs were far more valuable today than when the law was drafted, and she couldn’t understand why the defendant wouldn’t have paid out the entirety in goblin gold), her parents’ eyes had glazed over and she knew she’d lost them. It was at this point that she decided to change the subject.
“Where did you venture off to today? Do my eyes spy a couple bottles of wine...?” She asked, waggling her eyebrows at them.
Melvin grinned at his daughter and showed off their haul, slipping a bottle of red out of the brown paper tote he and Janine had brought in.
“There’s a micro-vineyard a few villages away and Janine and I took a bit of a tasting tour today. You’d not believe the quality of their sheep’s milk cheeses—and cured lamb and mutton!”
Janine smirked and leaned in to add in a stage whisper: “Unfortunately, the wine itself was rather lacking—we bought a few bottles to be polite.”
“I wouldn’t have expected much better from an English vineyard,” Hermione commiserated with a small grimace.
“Neither would we,” her father sighed, sliding the bottle back. “But the views were beautiful, and the drive out and back was worth the trip alone.”
“How long will you be with us, Hermione?” Janine asked. “We’ve a week left at our current site, and then we start over the next week on our surgery rotation.”
Hermione gave an apologetic twist of her mouth, “Well I can’t be any help there, I planned for a week this summer—”
“That’s more than enough, sweetheart,” Melvin assured his daughter with a kind smile. Hermione was sure she detected a hint of mischievousness in his eyes, however. She frowned. It was never a good sign when her dad got that look in his eye...
“So, where will we be this week?”
“Fogarty Wode Psychiatric Care Centre over in Cheltenham,” he informed her. “We’re there Monday and Wednesday until the end of visiting hours. We got about half of the patients in last week.”
“Just routine cleanings then?”
“For now,” her mother said, sipping at her tea and nibbling on a cracker. “I think between the two of us, at least for the first week, we had to schedule around five return surgeries.”
“It may be seven, dear. My final patient from this past Wednesday is going to require at least two additional return trips, unless I can be incredibly efficient with my time. I’m thinking that on Monday we’ll go ahead and get his root canal done so that I can fit him for his permanent crowns and give him some temporaries in the interim.”
“Two?” Janine wondered aloud. “Most of our patients require only an hour of surgery at most... and you’ve never wanted to move a surgery up to the same week when we do cleanings before—”
“He... ah... he has never been to a dentist before.” For some reason, Melvin was giving his daughter a broad grin at this, and Hermione felt as he expected her to be in on some joke, yet, of course, he’d told her nothing to explain himself or his joviality.
She began to feel a frisson of annoyance. She didn’t like not knowing things or being left out of the loop.
Janine rolled her eyes at her husband. “Was this that ‘secret agent man’ you were going on about?”
“Yep. Double-O-Nine, himself.” Melvin looked at Hermione with an oddly penetrating gaze, “I think you’ll be quite anxious to meet him, Hermione.”
The witch felt like growling in annoyance by this point. “Why’s that, Dad?”
“Oh, you’ll see.” His eyes sparkled at her, reminding her a bit of the late, great Albus Dumbledore.
It wasn’t a comforting comparison.
“We’re not grey people, we’re not dirty, we’re not mean
We love everybody, but we do as we please
When the weather’s fine, we go fishing or go swimming in the sea
We’re always happy, life’s for living
Yeah, that’s our philosophy”
In the Summertime (reprise) – Mungo Jerry
Chapter 4: Comfabbly Noomb
Notes:
A/N: As is so often the case in my stories, I know not of what I speak. I know nothing about dentistry or legal work. I only ever hope and pray that my research can cover for my myriad literary sins. Dental workers reading, I ask that you grant me forbearance. I am grateful for any leniency extended for technical errors.
Chapter Text
“Lookin for M’s like I lost a friend
Jump out of my bed like “Where the bread”
You gon’ hold a egg, waiter bring the check
When we talk, we Kalashnikov, keep us in your thoughts
Fully dressed at the crack of dawn, weapons letting off
I can hear them from the block, see them creeping through the fog
Season’s greetings, now feeding season can start, oh my God
Look alive, lookin like I live life on a crooked line
Doin fine, you want maximum stupid, I am the guy”
Ooh la la – Run the Jewels
Their evening was spent catching up some more and with Hermione’s parents debriefing her on her responsibilities for the coming week. It was no more and no less than she’d taken on in previous years, and no more and no less than she’d done for them while she’d been helping out in their practice during her summers off from Hogwarts; only now she was trained well enough to do routine cleanings herself, and to assist them in surgeries should the need arise.
Since she had scheduled her time off for a week when they were merely taking care of the former, she was apparently meant to run the autoclave and ferry instruments to her parents, and when she wasn’t doing that, she was responsible for paperwork. With the exception of the single surgery her father planned to conduct at the end of the day on Monday, it was a light load. She anticipated a bit of downtime.
As for the rest of their week? They had agreed to play it by ear. Her mother had told her about a pool in Gloucester where they sold day passes, and they quickly agreed to spend at least one morning getting some sun on a pool-side recliner, and her father had, with no subtlety at all, mentioned his interest in some of the nearby Roman villa tours. Hermione had agreed to this daytrip as well, with far more enthusiasm than her mother seemed to feel over the prospect.
She stepped outside for a few moments before she meant to retire for the night, breathing in the clean air and listening to the white noise produced by the chorus of insects in the trees. There was an ancient parish building that stood no further than two football-length fields away, and from her spot in the garden of Hogget House, she had a view of the stone belltower. It was nearly ten at night, and only just darkening outside. The trees and stonework cut black lattice-like shapes into the twilight sky. It was beautiful, and calm, and just what she needed, she thought with no little satisfaction.
After five minutes of soaking it in and ordering her thoughts for the coming week, she turned to let herself back into the cottage when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw an enormous, black, aerial object streak past her vision and alight onto the crenelations atop the belltower.
She forced herself to blink twice, and by the end of it, seeing no more movement from those quarters, convinced herself that it was likely nothing. Probably no more than a bird.
It wasn’t until Sunday morning that it occurred to Hermione to ask about the parish building.
“Mr. Skaggs, am I right in thinking that I heard bells tolling this morning?”
“Of course, Little Miss,” he said, insisting on his customarily condescending form of address for her. She only wasn’t offended because he was so old that to expect him to abandon his ways at this point would be its own form of discourtesy. “St Boniface hasn’t missed a Sunday Mass since the Great War.” He thought for a moment. “Even then I don’t think they ever broke from calling to their faithful through that damned bell.”
Hermione slathered a piece of toast with clotted cream. “Doesn’t it disturb the birds?”
Mr. Skaggs snorted, though he did smile at her benevolently. “One of those environmentalist types, are you?”
Hermione shrugged, “Not especially. It’s only, I saw a rather extraordinary bird landing there Friday night. I figured it made its roost there.”
He treated her to a considering look. “Mm. It might do. I hadn’t noticed it before, but I imagine your best bet’ll be to ask Mrs. Dinkel: she’s the amateur ornithologist in these parts. Then again, you could also go ask Father Gilbert directly.”
Not wishing to engage the priest first thing, Hermione fished for further information on Mrs. Dinkel. “Where might I find this bird watcher, Mr. Skaggs?”
“She’ll be at the greengrocer. Her family’s owned it for a few generations, but on Sunday mornings she usually takes herself off to the church in the next village over before opening up shop for the afternoon. She’s with the Church of England, so she may not know a whole lot about St Boniface. I don’t see why you shouldn’t try, however. I believe she keeps shorter hours on Sundays, mind you.”
She thanked him and waved away the curious looks her parents were throwing her. “It’s likely nothing. Probably just a flight of fancy.”
“I suppose you’re no stranger to those,” Janine Granger said with a rueful smile, perhaps remembering her daughter’s penchant for developing a deep fascination with anything that came without a ready answer.
“Is there anything you need from the shops, Mr. Skaggs? Perhaps I can pick it up for you when I go talk to Mrs. Dinkel.” She was rising from her seat now, having dabbed at her lips with her serviette and gathered her dishes to carry to the sink.
Mr. Skaggs visibly brightened at her consideration. “Now that you mention it, a loaf of bread and a few tins of kippers would be much appreciated, Little Miss, if you’d be so obliging.”
Hermione waved off his flattery and smiled around at those gathered to the table. “In that case I’ll be back this afternoon. I think I’ll treat myself to a bit of a tour of Thengaldene.”
“You’ll be bored to tears,” Mr. Skaggs chuckled, giving a small shrug. “But it’s pretty enough here, so I suppose there’s that.”
“Which way is it to Thengalstol, Mr. Skaggs?”
He pointed and indicated that she should travel westward down the lane from Hogget House.
“It abuts the Severn, all the way at the end of Auldthengal Road, and then the old wall marks the land. You’ll see the house at the bottom of the valley—but I wouldn’t travel onto the property if I were you, Miss.”
“Well, I wasn’t planning on trespassing anywhere today,” Hermione smiled at the man, packing away her pocketbook into her bag.
“Even so, I recommend you not trespass there at any point in the future. Thengalstol... it fights back. It doesn’t want to be messed about with.”
The witch stopped short, something about the warning sending off warning claxons in her mind. “Mr. Skaggs,” she drawled, feigning disinterest for the moment, “I don’t suppose you’d tell me what you mean by that?”
“Well, it’s difficult to say, really. There’ve just been stories. I doubt there’s much to it, but we’ve had people venture in on dares before and they come out a bit... shellshocked? Is the word I suppose I’d use.”
The Grangers were observing the discussion with rapt attention, noticing that their daughter’s interest had been piqued in a way which seemed to signal that something of her world had interposed itself on the otherwise benign country village.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more than that, I haven’t talked to any of them myself. If I had to guess, I’d assume they thought the place was haunted. Mr. Dalton certainly seems to think so, but then I’ve told you how much his word is worth,” Skaggs said with a snort.
Hermione nodded thoughtfully, shouldering her bag. “Thanks, Mr. Skaggs.” She looked up and offered the three seated at the table a small smile. “I appreciate you indulging my curiosity.”
The old man flashed her a solicitous smile and dipped his head in acknowledgement. “Happy to offer anything I know about our little village, Miss. It’s my pleasure.”
Hermione bid her farewells to her parents and the old innkeeper, and ducked out of Hogget House, looking about the barren lane for her heading.
She decided to first make for Thengalstol and see where she felt inspired to venture from what she could gather there.
Thengaldene was worth the trip, she decided. She’d begun to feel the thrill of adventure that had been sorely missing since the war had ended and the world had been deemed ‘safe’ again.
The further she travelled, the worse the pavement became, until rather abruptly the road turned into an unpaved dirt lane. She continued to walk, her shoes (which she’d spelled with additional cushioning charms for the day) kicking up small clouds of dust as she went, passing fields filled with sheep and small groupings of trees until she ran into the end of the road, where a crumbling, dry-stone wall blocked any further progress she might have made.
Behind the wall, the land dipped down into a verdant valley with waist-high grass that hadn’t been touched. In the centre of the valley stood a weathered house built of the ever-present Cotswold limestone. On what must’ve been the furthest border of the property, beyond the house, was a line of great evergreens, past which she could make out the shimmering sparkle of the River Severn.
There was no drive approaching the building, which Hermione found odd, and no signs that there ever had been one, even that had become overgrown after years of being uninhabited. However, there was seemingly a gravel pavilion surrounding the premises, as was somewhat usual for most houses from the same age.
It was neither the biggest manor Hermione had seen, nor could it be considered small by any account. She thought she could count twenty windows on the side facing her and from her vantage point she thought she detected a place in the centre of the house that didn’t have a roof and could have been a small courtyard. The windows were empty, which was to be expected, but it looked rather well-kept for a house that had been unoccupied for nearly fifty years.
She couldn’t help herself; she inched forward, bracing herself against the wall to lean and secure a better look, when she felt it—the telltale warning of strong, dangerous wards.
The witch stumbled back several steps with a gasp.
Experimentally, Hermione reached out a trembling hand and waved her hand over the wall, detecting a noticeable hostility as soon as her hand hovered past the stones.
‘Stay away,’ it seemed to say, ‘I bite.’
‘Perhaps it isn’t uninhabited after all,’ she thought, frowning. Wizard kind was well known for hiding themselves behind the façade of crumbling ruins and abandoned places.
The young woman turned about and headed back toward Thengaldene. She hadn’t planned to trespass before, but she certainly had no plans to venture into what was likely a pureblooded enclave uninvited; particularly if there was any chance that the owners were still in residence.
Which, of course, begged the question: who were the owners?
She frowned and tucked the question away, resolving to ask around for any information she could find, and in the event that her lines of questioning failed her, to check the Ministry Archives. As a barrister, she had access to more records than the average members of the public did.
She spent the rest of her Sunday popping into the small collection of storefronts that Thengaldene was home to.
On her way to pick up bread and kippers for Mr. Skaggs, she made the acquaintance of Mrs. Dinkel; a dowdy, middle-aged woman who seemed too busy running between the cash register and the stockroom to answer any of her questions. She was kind enough, but she eyed Hermione with a mixture of wariness and exasperation when the witch asked her about the bird roosting in St Boniface’s belltower.
“I’m sure there are plenty of birds that have roosted there over the years, young lady. It probably only takes a few days and a Sunday morning service for them to know the error of their ways,” Mrs. Dinkel said laughingly as she placed tomatoes into precise pyramids on a wooden display.
“This was a rather large bird, Mrs. Dinkel. Are you familiar with any species with a larger than average wingspan that appear near twilight in the summer?”
The woman appeared to think for a moment before shaking her head. “Not off the top of my head. You’re certain it wasn’t a bat instead?”
Hermione merely shrugged, eye-balling a bag of navel oranges before she picked it up to purchase. “It didn’t look like any bat I’d ever seen. I don’t think they get that big in England, in any case.”
“But then you’re proposing... what? That perhaps we have a lost albatross in our midst instead?” Mrs. Dinkel chuckled at the thought. “What would be more unlikely? A bat of that size, or an enormous sea bird making its roost in the Cotswolds?”
Hermione frowned, not liking that Mrs. Dinkel wasn’t taking her seriously. “Neither seems particularly likely. I’m sorry for wasting your time, ma’am. Do you think you could come ring me up?”
She didn’t have much luck in any of the establishments in Thengaldene. Besides the greengrocer, and the pub, where Mr. Dalton tried to pressure her into an early pint and a story that promised to be as long as it was likely irrelevant, (mostly about how St Boniface’s had a history spanning hundreds of years during which any number of legendary falconers were parishioners), the other store fronts held little in the way to promise any answers to either of her questions and it was getting late besides.
She trudged back to Hogget House, hoping that her parents would have made plans for dinner and that she’d have more luck occupying herself in the morning helping them at Fogarty Wode than she had at drumming up some conspiracy to investigate.
It was a bit anti-climactic. She’d been certain that there was something interesting to uncover and instead had only found that there was likely one reclusive wizarding family that lived in the area. Interesting to a Muggle perhaps, but rather passé for a witch.
She certainly had no business bothering them now. She was a barrister, after all, not some snot-nosed teenager dipping around Hogwarts castle with her two best friends and an invisibility cloak, looking for clues about dark wizards behind every tapestry.
No, at this age, Hermione Granger had a reputation to protect.
She was too old to go hunting shadows and also too old to stay awake late at night pondering such mysteries. Accordingly, she was early to bed Sunday evening, and woke with the sun on Monday morning. After a rushed breakfast in the company of her bleary-eyed parents—who had never been morning people, even though their practice had often demanded it—the three were off for Cheltenham together in Melvin Granger’s Renault Megane.
It felt odd to ride in the back as an adult in professional clothing, but Hermione certainly wasn’t inclined to bug her mother over the passenger seat. Over the drive the three discussed dinner plans and how they might fit in their tours around the hours pledged to the psychiatric centre. Before long, the city came into view before them, and Melvin turned into a car park protected by chain link fences and a man in a guard shack who had to buzz them in after verifying their intent for being there.
The halls of Fogarty Wode echoed with the clack-click-clack of her low heels. They were more sensible by far than the toppling footwear that she habitually wore to her chambers, but still a sight more formal than the seemingly ubiquitous white canvas pumps worn by all of the staff.
For a moment, she felt foolish for having insisted on maintaining the formality, but then she was awash in the duties she had come to expect when volunteering her services to her parents’ traveling clinic.
From the outset, the autoclave was kept cycling through endless batches of utensils, and she prepared trays with individualised caps of prophy paste and floss. She wiped down the seat between patients and did her best to speak to them when time— and the patients themselves—permitted her.
Some were more lucid than others, though she’d not have singled out any of them as being particularly talented conversationalists, which was no matter. That wasn’t what she was there for.
It had been a full morning, if relatively dull. Over lunch, her father had debriefed her on the surgery they were going to be doing that afternoon in their final appointment. If time permitted, he thought that he might be able to double up and manage the wisdom tooth extraction in the same session. Accordingly, he’d asked that she prepare for that eventuality, even if they didn’t manage the second procedure.
With that as the plan, she was turned to the back of the room, preparing a sterilised needle with thread that was suited specifically for suturing wounds when she heard the last patient of the day enter behind her.
“Dr No—we meet again.”
The blood that began rushing in her ears very nearly obscured her father’s laughing response. Her hand trembled and the needle she held dropped to the metal tray with a small tinkling sound.
“Double-O-Nine! Imagine my surprise to see you darkening the door of our humble clinic!” Her father chuckled, even though he had clearly been expecting the man. “Take a seat, agent, your torture awaits.”
Hermione shook her head to clear it— that voice was not his. It could not be… what would he be doing here? In her parent’s volunteer clinic?
For that to be the case he’d have to be a patient...
She picked up the tray and turned around deliberately, expecting to find someone—anyone—else. It had to be a mistake, after all. Her hearing playing tricks on her. Likely it was some random stranger who simply happened to have an eerily familiar voice...
Then, she nearly fumbled the tray.
Before her was her ex-Potions professor—and truly, she should have known better than to think it could have been anyone else; the wizard’s voice was so singular—improbably dressed in loose-fitting, hospital-issued clothing. His hair had been shorn since she’d last seen him, now in something of a bowl-cut with a gently fading sheared portion up the back of his neck and on the sides, by his over-large, protruding ears. It was as greasy and stringy as ever and, if anything, the new cut somehow made him look like an even bigger arse.
When his black eyes locked on her, he gave an evil smirk and raised his hand toward her, wiggling the fingertips alone in a parody of a twee little wave.
Her fingers clenched around the handles of her tray, and she felt her eyes narrow.
Even so, she’d represented more reprehensible clients than Snape before and had maintained her professionalism. With this in mind, she approached the table that was beside the chair he reclined in and allowed the tray to drop with a small clatter.
“Miss Granger. A pleasure to see you here,” Snape drawled, one side of his mouth curled in a lazy approximation of a smile. “So good of your parents to offer you a soft place to land.”
“Actually,” Melvin interjected as he bustled up alongside his patient, “Hermione’s here in a strictly voluntary capacity. Our daughter has very capably passed her exams and we’re proud to say that she’s on her way to being the most corking barrister that ever graced the corridors of Blackhall—!”
“Dad—!"
“Oh, don’t be modest, Hermione Jean!”
“Yes, Miss Granger,” her old professor nearly chirped along—it was an odd voice for him. At once insincere and utterly childish. A far cry from the imperturbably serious mien he’d favoured at Hogwarts. “We mustn’t be modest, now.”
Melvin shot his patient a bemused look, and then when he glanced at Hermione, he looked to be attempting something like a conspiratorial air; though, for the life of her, she couldn’t imagine what her father was suggesting with his canted eyebrow and shallow grin.
Even so, he allowed the obvious barb to go uncontested, perhaps reasoning that his daughter was able to defend herself should she feel the need.
Holding the syringe aloft, Hermione’s father cocked a glance at it. “Think you can brave the sting without the gas, or should I get the face mask?”
“I believe I will survive, if only just,” Snape sighed with a wry shake of his head. He arranged himself in the reclining chair, bore Hermione’s hands fashioning the spit bib over his sternum, and obligingly opened his mouth wide, his tongue pulled back, without being prompted. For all of his bite, he appeared strangely vulnerable lying there beneath the blinding overhead light. His hands were laced together at the knuckle over his stomach, resting where his plain, white tee-shirt tucked in to the elastic waistband of his trackies.
The several injections around his gums didn’t seem to faze him at all, but then, given what Snape had endured in his life, Hermione wasn’t sure why that ought to come as any surprise.
“And how’s that, Number Nine? Feeling anything?” Melvin asked as he experimentally tapped around against Snape’s palate and gums.
The wizard gave a sigh that spoke to an almost profane sense of contentment. “Comfortably numb,” he told them, around the instrument in his mouth. In truth it sounded closer to ‘comfabbly noomb.’
“Today we’ll be doing a basic root canal, pulling out as much of that pulp as we can, so we can fit you with a set of temporary crowns. Then we’ll proceed from there next time after I’ve gotten a mould of your mouth. If we still have time, we might manage the wisdom tooth extraction today too.” Melvin told him, turning aside to gather his drill.
“Hermione, be a dear and direct the light for me—"
“Yeeash ‘Ermeeoney, be’a dweer,” Snape mimicked, his eyes crinkled at the edges with obvious mirth. He didn’t even seem to care that there was a rivulet of drool descending from his numbed-out jaw.
Hermione felt her face creasing with anger, but she couldn’t quite prevent it.
Rotten man. Snape was a rotten man with even more rotten teeth.
If possible, he was even more shameless now than he’d been as a prejudiced teacher. Before, he’d at least protected his own image.
Now, he didn’t even seem to care about embarrassing himself, so long as he got his laughs in.
’Smack him,’ a vicious voice in her mind urged her.
She didn’t. Instead, she trained the light on Snape’s face, and took a step back, just in case the little voice should somehow take control of her hand.
The procedure proceeded in a mostly normal fashion; Snape having fallen quiet once the drill began whirring.
She had to give the man credit. Even with the numbing, most people were cringing and wincing in the chair, but Snape laid motionless and endured it all. His eyelids didn’t even twitch to betray any discomfort.
“And we’re sure that you’re feeling that pressure?” Melvin asked, removing the drill in order to give Snape a break and to check in.
“Quaii shore,” the wizard slurred. “N’fact the noombing wore auft,’” he told them, very nearly conversational.
Hermione’s father’s eyes widened in alarm. “That can’t be! We’ve just begun…”
Snape shook his head back and forth against the padded headrest. “No contwol, but‘ve gawt feewing bawk.”
“Oh, God... God, Hermione! Go and turn the drill off—!"
“Naw, dun’t,” Snape tried to articulate around a spill of saliva. “Jes’ finish aup.”
The dentist blanched, his pallor fading to a stark white. “Listen here, Nine,” he objected, his voice weak. “I may have joked about being Dr No, but I’m hardly about to sit here and actually torture you!”
The man in the chair gave a languid shrug. It was asymmetrical. He apparently favoured shrugging with only one shoulder, his right.
His eyes sought out Hermione’s and she could scarcely stand it. For reasons that were unknown to her, having his stygian eyes trained on her while he was incapacitated in such a way filled her with inappropriate and unaccountable guilt.
“‘S gawt nothing awn Crusyaytush,” he admitted, crossing his arms over the bib they’d clipped to him. “Does it, ‘ermeeony?”
Melvin looked taken aback, and he darted a look to his daughter who had seized up at the reminder. She refused to meet her father’s questioning gaze.
“Well… erm… I suppose we can dose you with a little more—"
“Dun’ bawther. Cn’t titwate it for wishurds c’rrect’ly. We metabolaish diff’entlay. ‘Shpeciallay coca leaf d’rivativesh.”
One of Melvin’s eyebrows crept up his forehead, a slow crawl that spoke to a mixture of suspicion and intellectual interest. “You don’t say.”
Snape offered a mischievous grin. “Made partiesh ‘n the aiteysh very li’ole fun.”
Melvin barked out a startled burst of laughter. “I imagine so!” He agreed with a grin.
Hermione’s mouth had dropped open… had her professor just admitted to…? And her father…?
“Dad!”
The dentist turned to his daughter and made a motion like he was patting the air to placate it. “It was the eighties, Hermione, really.”
“But… I was alive then! That was after I was born!” She protested, her voice slightly weak.
“And you’ll recall there were times where we hired a child-minder,” Melvin shrugged. “We’ve not done it for years.”
“What!? You don’t mean to say that Mum—?!"
“My goodness, dear girl. Who’s meant to be the parent here?” He posed to the room at large, punctuating the rhetorical nature of the question with a wry shake of his head. “In any case, you’re sure you want to keep on, Severus?”
Snape turned his palms up to the ceiling and allowed himself to go completely limp, a crude parody of the Pietà. Or perhaps of the Crucifixion. “Do your worsht, Doctwor.”
While her father chuckled, apparently enjoying Snape’s humour, Hermione couldn’t help but to frown.
Really. That was in terrible taste.
Though why she should expect better from Severus bleeding Snape was beyond her.
And yet, unaccountably, she did feel disappointed in him. It was gallows humour on steroids.
Or cocaine as the case apparently may have been.
They had only made it through one of Snape’s teeth when they’d stopped. Given that it was now apparent that the numbing agent wasn’t doing its job beyond making the man sound like a slobbering lush, Dr Granger tried not to take any more time than was necessary.
A couple of times Snape brought up a hand to tap on Melvin’s arm, and the doctor would retreat and give his patient a moment to re-centre himself. That was Hermione’s cue to approach and to dab at Snape’s chin, and to suction out the corners of his mouth and beneath his tongue.
He had the perplexing habit of staring her down with unblinking eyes as she did so.
He wasn’t scowling at her. In fact, his expression was curious in that it was entirely devoid of identifiable emotion. For all that, she felt like he was convicting her in something. It roused a deep sense of disquiet. Of defensiveness. Though, to her knowledge, she had nothing to be sorry for aside from feeling pity that Snape must have been enduring utter torment under the onslaught of the tiny, electrical drill wielded by her father.
It took another hour. A period of time which saw Hermione’s discomfiture rise from a distant sense of unease to feeling as though her skin was crawling.
After what felt like an eternity of monitoring Snape for any signs of flinching or adverse reactions, her father withdrew the drill from his patient’s mouth and announced that they were going to take a mould before he fitted the temporary crowns.
“I’ll have to see you twice more, Agent Nine. Once for your wisdom tooth extraction, and again to fit your permanent crowns. I can’t ask you to undergo an extraction without something for the pain, not after the drill.”
“Crowns, plural,” Snape drawled, the numbness of his tongue apparently having loosened its hold over him. “Sounds spectacular. Quite fit for a Prince, wouldn’t you agree, Hermione?”
She felt herself blushing. Her emotions were stirred to frothing: anger, embarrassment, shame, and something else...
Something else that only made her angrier.
What was his game? Why was he saying her name? Why… why like that?
In the end, she managed to turn her nose up, affecting a prim mask to hide her ambiguous feelings. “In my estimation a Half-Blood Prince only ranks half a crown.”
He quirked a smirk at her, apparently amused. A dribble of blood snaked down his chin, right below his snaggle toothed canine. Even in all black robes and a dungeon setting he’d never looked more vampiric, nor more predatory.
“Just so."
Apropos of nothing, her father laughed. He was either unaware of the tension, or else he didn’t care one whit. “Half a crown would do you very little good, under the present circumstances.”
“People, we the pirates, the pride of this great republic
No matter what you order, mo’fucker, we’re what you’re stuck with
I used to love Bruce, but livin’ my vida loca
Help me understand, I’m probably more of a Joker
When we usher in chaos just know that we did it smilin’
Hannibal’s on this island, inmates run the asylum”
Ooh la la (reprise) – Run the Jewels
Chapter 5: Pick Your Poison
Chapter Text
“Norm life, baby
I'm just a sample of a soul
Made to look just like a human being
Norm life, baby
‘We're rehabbed and we're ready
For our 15 minutes of shame’”
I Don’t Like the Drugs – Marilyn Manson
“And that was when you killed the ice cream man?”
“He wasn’t an ‘ice cream man’ like the sort that drive around offering ice lollies from the back of a van playing Greensleeves—”
“I—”
“He was the proprietor of the ice cream shop in Diagon Alley. And a famed, amateur Magical Historiographer.”
“Of course—” the doctor tried to interrupt again.
“And no, that wasn’t when. We also went to abduct old Mr. Ollivander that day. He didn’t die, of course, but it was a close thing.”
The man Snape was meeting with waved the hand holding his biro around in the air before him, either to urge Snape on or to dismiss this correction as being irrelevant.
“By your count, the ice cream man brought your tally up to—?”
Snape leant back in his chair. His knees were spread wide before him as he sank into the comfortable upholstery, and he didn’t miss the slight flinch from the psychologist seated opposite when he reached for the paper cup with his tea. Delicately, he picked up the tag and flipped it to the rear of the cup where it wouldn’t interfere with his mouth when he took a sip.
Bitter. Astringent. Cheap.
Brilliant. Just how he liked it.
“By my count somewhere north of forty.” Severus sniffed as he examined the oils floating atop his beverage. It had over-steeped. “He was one of the last.”
“Somewhere north? It seems to me, Severus, that you kept meticulous count—”
“Forty-nine.”
“Of fifty.”
“Of fifty,” Snape agreed.
“And your former employer was forty—”
“Eight. Forty-eight.”
Affecting a mien of agreeability, Dr. Foster sat back in his own chair, perhaps to mirror Snape’s own relaxed pose. “You know, you really lived out some men’s dreams. I can’t tell you the number of times I fantasised over braining some of my tutors in University. Or after, when I had some real sticklers during my interning years. I had one bloke try and hold up my paycheque over some paperwork I was meant to have done, and—”
“I would have given anything to not have had to kill Dumbledore,” Snape’s mouth tightened, and his tone could have frozen a coal fire. He sat up straight once more, partially because he no longer felt like relaxing and partially to be contrarian.
See the doctor try and mirror his energy now.
“So you never imagined defenestrating your employer before you—ah—threw him from the... what was it? The Astrology Tower?”
“Astronomy. The Astronomy Tower.” Snape sniffed again at his paper cup of tea, the walls of which looked as though they might begin to dissolve at any moment, despite the wax coating. He tossed back another slug. “I regularly considered killing Albus; but defenestrating him—as you say—is hardly my style, given any choice in the matter.”
“And what, would you say, is your style?”
“Poison.”
“What percentage of your victims would you say you used poison on? That is to say, how many?”
Snape pretended to think, even though he found the line of questioning boring. They always asked the same questions, and the account usually always went mostly the same way, with slight variations depending on his doctors’ areas of specialty or pet interests.
Severus found himself preferring the psychoanalysts and Rogerian oriented practitioners over those trained on the relatively newer discipline of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. The former usually let him do most of the talking and ran with the premise that Severus was being truthful. In the case of the later, the effusive empathy and too-frequent interruptions seeking to validate parts of his experience (never the murders, but whatever his feelings were surrounding the “supposed” murders) while obviously not taking his story at face value, were grating.
He’d not yet figured out Dr Foster’s particular flavour yet, but it hardly mattered. The result was always the same. Recommendations for new psychiatric assessments, group therapies, or art therapy and the like. One woman had recommended his television privileges be slashed, as Snape’s grasp on reality was clearly too tenuous. Severus hadn’t taken any chances with her. He’d taken his wand late at night and made sure to contrive a paper trail leading to a scandal great enough to ensure that she was never invited back. On the other hand, the other lady doctor who regularly told the orderlies that Snape deserved double pudding rations and extra sessions with the dance instructor on Samba days had her performance review updated to reflect how very pleased he was with her.
The one thing he’d give the CBT specialists was that they always piled his plate high with art therapy, even if they were eye-rollingly mushy about it.
He liked the art therapies.
Of course, if anyone actually did believe him, he’d be in trouble, but he still found the ones who at least acted as though he really believed what he was saying and confessing to be the most entertaining. The psychoanalysts usually only ever broke that illusion at the end when they began trying to delve into what his murderous confessions probably meant, symbolically speaking.
“No fewer than twenty, but probably not greater than twenty-five. Half or thereabouts.”
The doctor raised his head up to look at him, blinking slowly. “Five of them you don’t remember?”
“Seventy-nine and eighty were a bit of a blur for me,” Snape confessed. “A whole forty-five of the men I killed were done in between seventy-eight and eighty-one. Most of those were directly at the Dark Lord’s behest, and any that weren’t were casualties of raids I was sent on at his pleasure.”
“And these you killed because...? Explain if you would. Did you simply want to?”
Sighing now, Snape eyed the bottom of his cup. It was empty. When had he emptied it? He mashed his eyes closed and gave his head a small shake. Some of the medication he was taking was new, and that could always bring on a bit of brain fog. In any case, his plight didn’t go unnoticed and the doctor rose to take the cup from him, moving to a rolling cart where a tea service with an electric kettle sat.
“What’s your poison?”
“Usually Draught of Yew.”
With an expressive sigh of his own, and a chuckled oath, Snape’s newest doctor (in a long, long line of doctors), shook his head at him. “Tetley Original or Yorkshire Gold?”
Snape’s mouth opened a bit as he pantomimed an ‘aaaahhh,’ of acknowledgement. “Yorkshire. Always Yorkshire.”
The cup was handed back to him and Snape grunted his appreciation.
“So. The ones on the raids, Severus?” His doctor prompted. He took a long moment to settle himself back into the chair he’d taken over as his own, shifting to get comfortable before he took his legal pad back up again.
Snape had looked it over while the older man had been preparing his drink. Often he could find out a good deal from inspecting the notes while his doctors and therapists were otherwise occupied, but this newest specimen was a bit of a dark horse in that he used short-hand.
Finally, he shrugged and took a small sip. Since his root canal, hot liquids could cause discomfort. He usually had to wait for his tea or coffee to cool now before he could drink it as quickly as he was accustomed.
“At the risk of sounding entirely mercenary: they got in the way.”
The man opposite him nodded, his face as unreadable as his notes had been. “And was there, perhaps, just a small part of you that hoped they would get in the way? Or... ah. That’s not quite the way of putting it, is it? Could it have been that they weren’t so obtrusive as to warrant being dispensed with—?”
“I’m afraid I still don’t understand what you’re driving at.” Snape crossed one lean leg over the other at the knee and began bouncing his foot.
“Were they really in the way? Or did you want to kill them?”
Smirking now, Snape sat back to admire this latest doctor. Now here was a specimen. Usually they didn’t indulge him to this degree.
“Herr Doktor—”
“Don’t call me that,” the doctor interrupted, his placid face finally showing a bit of irritation.
“I cannot claim that I never wanted to kill anyone, but I was never fortunate enough to wind up killing any of the people I actually wanted to. With the exception of my employer, whom I wanted to kill many times over the years. Of course, when it came time to actually do the deed, I would have rather had any other option.”
“Don’t call me ‘Herr Doktor.’”
Hmmm. Snape frowned and began tracing at the seam of his chapped lips with his pointer finger. Apparently, that was a sticking point if he’d returned to it even after Snape had gone back to talking about his murderous ways.
“What would you prefer I call you?”
“I introduced myself to you when we sat down half an hour ago,” the older man answered, his eyes expressing a certain firmness that he hadn’t before evinced.
Snape’s finger slid to pull at the space between his droopy lower lip and his jutting chin, which exposed the sorry state of his lower teeth. “Remind me. I forgot,” he lied.
“I believe I introduced myself to you as Doctor Foster, but if that is too difficult to remember, Doctor—or Leland, even, if you prefer—is acceptable.”
“And Herr Doktor isn’t because...?”
Dr Foster sat back in his chair after laying the legal pad down on the desk between them and rested his folded-together hands on his rounded belly. His mouth quirked infinitesimally as he stared Snape down. He’d made no attempt to obscure his notes. In fact, he’d turned them so that Snape could read them as he liked, little good it did him.
“Because you are mocking me.”
Scoffing now, Snape added his half-empty cup to the rapidly cluttering desktop. He used the freedom from it to now cross his arms mulishly over his chest. “And you’ve never been mocked before?”
Foster’s smile widened and he snorted a bit.
“How used to being mocked are you, Severus?”
This brought about a black scowl. It was odd... he’d almost forgotten what scowling felt like. He’d almost forgotten what losing felt like. His dislike for Doctor Foster intensified.
“I’ve been mocked enough in my life to sometimes have a hard time knowing when I’m being treated with sincerity,” he answered, truthfully.
So seldom did he lie now that he’d mostly given up on it. His waking moments were given over to every therapy known to man and practised by the NHS. Rather than get pulled into the undertow, he had learnt to just go along with it. Besides, he wasn’t quite cynical enough to where he didn’t find himself hoping that someday one of these bloody headshrinkers wouldn’t say or do something to actually help him.
He was open to that possibility. Open to being helped. He took whatever pills they shoved at him. He drew with whatever implement they placed in his hand. He participated in circle time whenever the squishy ball made its way around to his possession, and he sambaed forwards, backwards, and sideways to whichever Bossa Nova track their dance instructor chose for the day. No one could accuse him of not trying.
But what did help look like when he couldn’t properly articulate what was wrong?
Oh, by the Muggles’ standards he’d never get better. He expected that that would mean he’d need to stop “compulsively lying.” But as for what he was there to accomplish, given a choice?
He shrugged one shoulder, rather asymmetrically. “If being mocked bothered me anymore, then I would stop telling everyone about all of my misdeeds.”
Infuriatingly, Doctor Foster clucked his tongue. “Indeed, you invite your fair share of head-scratching, going about as you do. You maintain you don’t mind being mocked—”
“And I don’t. Not anymore. No one here calls me names.”
“You aren’t aware, then, that you’ve earned the rather unglamorous designation of ward Pinocchio?”
Snape only tapped his nose. “You don’t grow up with this schnoz without hearing every joke in the book.”
“They’re not making fun of your nose, Severus—or at least I don’t think that’s the real point of the joke,” his doctor for the day pressed, his sedate, brown eyes trained upon Snape’s slouched figure. “You’re familiar with the story, are you not? Pinocchio’s nose grows when he’s lying—”
Unperturbed, Snape canted his head. He wished he could take another swig of his tea, but decided against it. Somehow he felt as though he’d lose ground if he did so. “As I just explained: my nose has always been this size. It’s not grown since I got here.”
“Fifty—”
“Fifty men.” Snape uncrossed his legs and sat up so that he could stare the doctor down. Seated, they were of a height, although standing, Doctor Foster had three inches on him.
“No women or children?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“It is a point of pride that I avoided adding their number to my casualty count. Granted, there was...” He sighed and looked away, slouching once more as his eyes studied the certificates framed on the far wall, hung above a mid-century Magnavox console. He hated talking about Lily still. He’d done it before. Sparingly, yes, but still. If Doctor Leland Foster was at all familiar with his new patient’s files then he would likely already know the story, insofar as Snape had related it to various professionals over the years.
“There was one,” he picked up the thread. He couldn’t bear to look at Doctor Foster just now, so instead he studied the woven panels on the Magnavox that allowed sound through the speakers. “One whose death I caused. And where I was not the instrument of her demise... I killed her just the same.”
“Is she one of the fifty?”
“No. Neither is her husband. Had he been, he would have been the only person in that number who I’d have hated enough to want to kill... but his death I regret, now.”
Annoyingly, Doctor Foster was nodding along. Such a show usually signalled the kind of empathy that screamed CBT, and yet he wasn’t exactly showing his hand yet, in all of this. Had Snape his wits about him, he might have tried harder to figure out what it was that Foster himself personally believed... but that would have only been possible if what it was that the bloody man was doing wasn’t actually working so very well.
“His death you regret?”
“All of their deaths. I regret them all. Every last one.”
There was that nodding again. Like a witless owl.
“Well, truthfully, there was one bloke I’m a bit proud of, but that’s only because he was known to eat people.”
Finally—finally—the head-bobbing ceased as Doctor Foster was brought up short. Snape did a little mental jig (that probably was closer to his bloody Samba-ing) when the other man’s mouth actually parted a bit in... something. Probably horror. He hoped it was horror.
Foster’s next words were a bit breathless and emerged in only the faintest echo of his normal speaking voice. “You don’t say...?”
“Caliban Yaxley.”
“Is... er... is eating people de rigueur amongst wizards?”
Snape treated Doctor Foster to a bland look. Instead of answering, he leant forwards and deftly plucked a few Twiglets from the bowl before him, tossing them between his molars where they produced a satisfying crunch.
Silence reigned for a few moments.
“You’re trying to put me off.”
“Yes.”
“So. Do you wizards habitually eat people?”
“We do not, no.”
“Well,” the doctor tapped the end of his pen absently on the desktop. “That is a relief.”
“Quite. Had there been more deviants like Caliban in the rank and file, I imagine I’d have had to come up with a great deal more excuses for dead compatriots.” Snape drawled with a small chuckle.
Perhaps this Foster wasn’t so bad, if he was game to play along like this. Of course, it had all begun with Snape’s quest for quiet oblivion. He spun a yarn to the doctors about his life as a wizarding spy, and they kept his little paper cup full of sedatives and anti-psychotics (which he always managed to Vanish without taking). Over time, however, he’d begun to enjoy little things here and there about his stay in Fogarty Wode.
There was nothing but downtime, for one. That was something he’d never had before. He had zero responsibilities. No one expected a damn thing out of him, particularly given that they thought him a complete and utter loon. Or, as was Foster’s view, a compulsive liar. Snape didn’t really care which view any of the staff took towards him, so long as he got his telly time. If ever that was threatened, woe betide whoever sought to wrest the clicker from his long, bony fingers.
“Have you ever thought of writing, Severus?” Foster asked. He’d rested his forearms on the desk and was leaning over them, his professionalism and self-imposed distance appearing to waver. Snape smirked back at the older man.
“Merlin, no. As a creative, my gifts lie in research and development, not story-craft.”
“Don’t they?”
“No,” Snape answered. He winced. A piece of one of the Twiglets had lodged itself between his gum and his tooth and he probed at it with his tongue, before he began fishing behind his lip with his pointer finger, seeing if it were possible to evict the irritant. He could just feel it, but it resisted being moved when he scratched at it with a stained nail.
“I think you’re positively gifted,” Foster continued, in a conversational tone. Had Snape not been banking on the fact that the doctor wasn’t supposed to believe him, he might have thought it terribly disrespectful for the man to be calling him a bald-faced liar, but then another part of him almost had to respect Foster’s moxie. Usually, his doctors just played along and then afterwards shot him pitying looks as they conferred with the on-call psychiatrist about his dosage of Risperidone.
“On the other hand—”
Snape snorted. “You have some criticism to offer?”
With a sheepish grin, his doctor spread his hands with his palms open wide. “Cannibalism always sells great, of course, but perhaps it would be more compelling to have more than one?”
“More than one cannibal?” Snape deadpanned. “Is one not more than enough?”
He considered the doctor’s wry shrug of the shoulders for a second before he offered a concession. “Fenrir Greyback was known to partake here and there, but that was usually when he was transformed. He wasn’t principally a people-eater.”
Foster checked his notes. “Greyback...”
“A werewolf. He enjoyed turning children. And if he sometimes bit a little too hard and ended up with a tasty snack instead of a pint-sized, ankle-biting cub, it couldn’t always be helped. I suppose he wasn’t one for waste.”
Snape’s words earned him a low whistle for his trouble. “Werewolves,” Foster muttered, scribbling that down on the paper.
“The world-building alone...” he marvelled. “You could make a mint off of an idea like that.”
“I could do,” Snape nodded, extracting the finger that still probed his gumline from his mouth. He’d all but given up before he remembered the small pack of toothpicks in the pocket of his dressing gown. He withdrew one and handily used the tip to liberate his teeth from the tiny crumb.
Toothpicks were contraband on the ward, but Foster didn’t blink at the fact that Snape had seemingly produced it from nowhere. Of course, he wouldn’t, given that the wizard had enchanted every last one of them with Notice-Me-Not charms.
Mission accomplished, he began chewing on the end of the wood and re-crossed his legs, using the opportunity to flip his dressing gown over his lap and draw the waffle-woven material tighter around himself. He crossed his arms.
“Would that that were possible, of course. It’s quite expressly forbidden for me to disclose the nature of our world to the Muggles,” he somehow managed to say, without a trace of the irony that the words should have held. “I’d be behind bars for such a large breech. Of course, I’m not sure how the Ministry would manage to cover up something like a book publication, particularly if it had wide enough circulation, but, for my own part, I’m certain it wouldn’t matter.”
The pen in Foster’s hand was set down, and he levelled a piercing look in Snape’s direction as he canted his head to the side. It was the sort of stare that seemed to say ‘Really? Do you even believe what you’re saying now?’
“Which is naturally why you’ve told everyone in the building—”
“And the itinerants, like yourself. And the police. And—”
“You don’t think your Ministry would take issue with that?”
“I don’t think they’ll ever find out what I’ve told you lot, because who would believe such a thing?” Snape asked, rhetorically. He worked the toothpick from the left corner of his mouth to the right with a little flick of his tongue and stared down at the tendons of his right hand where it gripped his tracksuit bottoms at the knee.
Unaccountably, for the first time since he’d walked himself into the A&E, spouting off about magic, he found himself wishing that someone (Leland Foster or anyone, really) might actually believe him.
With that realization, his mouth twisted into something approaching a sneer. “We’ve run over by five minutes, Dr Foster.”
Foster’s eyes darted up to the clock face and he nodded slowly. “You know, I haven’t got anyone after you, today. My next appointment was cancelled—”
“Ah, but mine was not,” Snape drawled, standing. He wiped his greasy, salty fingertips on the outside of his dressing gown, near the hip, and stared down at Foster, who was now openly staring at him with an expression that Severus couldn’t hope to interpret, even with the aid of a touch of wandless Legilimency.
Finally, Doctor Foster heaved a sigh through his round nose, the force of it making the hairs of his moustache fluff out a bit. “As you wish, Snape. We’ll speak again next week.”
At the door already, Snape turned. “Oh, don’t be glum, Herr Doktor. There’s always Group on Wednesdays.”
The door was shut behind him before Foster could voice his objection to Snape’s mockery once more.
“Finished up in there, have you?”
Snape turned to see an orderly, standing sentinel outside the door.
“For the week, yes.”
“And where are you meant to be now?” The burly man asked in a pronounced Jamaican accent. He eyed Snape mistrustfully.
Really, the constant supervision ought to have stuck in Severus’ craw, but he felt no sense of being entrapped or imprisoned, as perhaps he ought. It was merely part and parcel of living on the ward. Since living on the ward was what he wanted, so was this level of paternalistic overreach in all things.
Shrugging like a carefree adolescent, Snape shoved his hands into the pockets of his trackies and scuffed the toe of his slipper on the floor a bit. “Would have been with Ms. Montrose in the multipurpose room today, I suppose, but Dr Swain had me meeting with him,” he jerked a thumb at Foster’s temporary office, “instead.”
“You know your options then,” the orderly drawled, pulling himself up to his imposing height of somewhere approaching six-foot four. “Your room or the Commons. Your choice, Snape.”
Severus sighed and buried his hands into his pockets, shifting his weight a bit as he considered things.
“I don’t suppose you know what’s on at this hour?”
“You know as well as I do that I’m here to work and not to watch telly. There’s a TV guide in the Commons, if you’re curious.”
Knowing full well that he was already bound to be sat on his arse end for at least an hour, watching whatever it was that was on, Snape still made a play at deliberating.
“Come on, mate. You can rest up or you can park it on the sofa, I don’t care which; but you can’t hang out in the hallway. You know that.”
“Alright, alright.” The wizard heaved a put-upon sigh and waved a dismissive hand through the air. “I’ll go try my luck in the Commons.”
“Atta boy,” the larger man snorted. “I’ll buzz you through the door.”
Being called ‘boy’ ought to have really chafed. But it didn’t. Severus merely approached the reinforced steel door and waited patiently for the locks to release so that he could step through into the modestly appointed Commons.
Given the time, it was mostly empty. Tuesday afternoon was usually chock full of opportunities for different activities. Severus himself usually availed himself of one of the offerings for recreation, thus, he wasn’t entirely certain what to expect of the television programming at that hour.
Grabbing up the TV guide from atop the crusty, old set, he plonked his arse down on the squeaky, vinyl sofa and wiggled a bit in an attempt to make himself comfortable.
A quick look around the Commons revealed that there was no one he should expect to join him. At one of the long tables was sat a woman named Sandra, whose chief occupation most days was in reading (and rereading, and rereading again) large-print romance novels. She never had time for anyone but the heroes in her books. Behind the sofa, at a small, café-style table by the windows, was a chap called Max. He preferred bird watching, and his nose was a scant inch away from the windowpane as his hawk-eyed gaze tracked his avian friends swooping through the airspace near the hospital.
Neither of them would give him any issues, nor would they compete with him if he chose to watch...
Well, what was even on?
He flipped through to Tuesday afternoon.
The Avengers. Good stuff. His hand found the power button on the clicker and he quickly surfed through the channels.
Once there, he found, to his great disappointment, that he’d tuned in near the end of the episode. Checking the guide once more suggested that another episode ought to follow, however, so he accepted the fact that by this point in the story, Emma Peel was tied to a log making its way towards a buzzsaw and that he wasn’t to be privy to how she’d gotten there.
Fawning over her were two Bela Lugosi-esque gothic characters. They easily could have passed for wizards had the intent not so clearly been to channel the mystique of Eastern Europe. Probably they were meant to be vampires then... But then there was a man going about directing their acting…
Who knew. Mentally, he shrugged.
“And vhat do you tink of zhat, mein liebchen?”
“I think I’m in danger of becoming a split personality.”
Severus’ low chuckles were interrupted by Max softly hooting out the window. The other man was trailing his fingers along the glass, his eyes filled with a desperate and wistful ache.
Snape snorted again, trying to train his mind back onto his programme. It felt more difficult than it ought to have, and he realised he had become keenly aware of the rhythmic ticking of the clock on the far wall by reception.
With renewed dedication he stared forwards with an unwavering gaze, watching as Peel’s lime-green suited form made its way toward the enormous circular saw—
Sandra let out a soft shriek and grinned down at the passage she was reading. Seemingly out of a sense of excitement, she wriggled in her seat as her eyes moved over the page at a startling pace.
Snape’s own eyes mashed together and he produced an irritated little grunt. Luckily for him, that was the last such interruption for quite some time.
Somehow, while he’d been too on-edge to pay proper attention, Peel had been saved from the saw and the episode ended. The first moments of the new episode—after he’d been made to wait through the commercial break—made him blink stupidly for several moments.
Swirling patterns of black and white had momentarily thrown him for a loop. Unlike the previous episode, this one wasn’t in colour.
There was blessed silence from the other occupants of the room, and it lulled him to complacency. Nearing the end of the story, he finally slumped haphazardly on the sofa he had all to himself. He even brought up one leg to drape over the cushions beside him.
“The object of the exercise is to drive me insane. How will you know when you have achieved it?” Emma Peel asked the computer, a perfectly manicured brow rising above her eye.
“Be-cause, you, will, kill, yourself,” the computer spoke back, in a heavily robotic voice.
“How?”
“You, have, key. Key, unlocks, door, at, end, of, machine.”
“And then?”
“Suicide, Box. Once, inside, gas, released. You, will, feel, no pain. No pain.”
Inside the purported suicide box was the body of a man who’d presumably already succumbed to the gas in the chamber. With no other way of exiting the house she’d become trapped within—each hallway led to the same central room—Severus was on the proverbial edge of his seat (though, of course, he was actually sunk comfortably into the cushions).
Naturally, the worst time for an interruption.
Her voice had always had the worst quality of carrying far further than it ought to have. Whether she was seated at Gryffindor table, taking her dunderheaded friends to task over their study habits, or whether it was from behind a cauldron, as she regurgitated yet another rote-memorised answer she’d plagiarised from the assigned readings.
When Hermione Granger spoke, there was simply no ignoring her.
He peeked over the back of the vinyl sofa and glared balefully out at her. She was speaking to the receptionist, her palms braced against the counter as she communed through the tiny window.
“Yes, we’ll be back tomorrow for the rest of the cleanings, but when I called earlier, I was told that I’d be free to visit.”
“Until five, ma’am.”
“That’s perfect. I probably won’t need more than a few minutes...”
“Most of our patients are busy this afternoon, of course. Tuesday afternoons are usually reserved for activities overseen by volunteers.”
Granger clucked her tongue. When it looked as though she might glance his way, he ducked his head back behind the back of the sofa.
Somehow Peel had contrived yet another escape and he’d missed it. Again.
Damn Granger. Damn her.
A low growl escaped him and he drew his legs up onto the couch so he was lying sideways on it, taking up the entirety of the available space. He crossed his arms over his chest and did his best to burrow into the protection offered by his thick dressing gown.
“I’m mostly interested in speaking to Severus Snape. Is he around this afternoon? Or is he busy?”
“Snape? You’re in luck, Ms. Granger. Usually on Tuesdays he’s with the volunteer group—we have an instructor that comes to teach dance—but he had a conflicting appointment today and came back here to spend the rest of his time.”
‘No. I’m not here. I’m not here—’
“He’s over there in the corner. You see the telly? He’s on the sofa.”
‘Bugger.’
He heard her stupid shoes clacking against the floor before he saw her. She poked her head around the edge of the sofa before she stepped fully into view.
“Forget something, Miss Granger?” He scathed, purposefully not looking at her.
That was difficult to accomplish, given how very much he wished he could blatantly stare. She looked altogether different from the last time he’d seen her. Of course, he didn’t expect the same gaunt-faced, bloodied warrior that had loomed above him as his blood and memories were pouring out of him onto the dusty floor of the Shrieking Shack... but she also looked entirely unlike the Hermione Granger that had appeared in his office with Lovegood and had alerted him to the Death Eaters in the castle. The final moments where he’d been her teacher before he was made to flee the school.
Even as he tried to pay attention to whatever tripe was being advertised to him on the tiny screen, he couldn’t help but to notice her out of the corner of his eye.
She looked as self-important as ever—no... scratch that. She looked more self-important than ever.
He’d noticed the day before that she’d seemingly chopped all of her hair off. Of course, he had too, or rather, he’d allowed the barber to chop his hair off when they’d brought one in on another volunteer day. He’d grown tired of his rope-like hair tangling around his neck as he slept, and he’d grown tired of the very involved process of managing it, particularly as he’d gotten into the habit of actually taking daily showers since he’d come to stay on the ward. Washing and combing his new style took only seconds. It suited the decidedly small amount of time he was willing to invest in personal hygiene.
Besides that, he’d thought it had been time for a change. The new cut suited him in that he’d wanted a clean break from life before to life now. Hell, had it not required a boatload of paperwork, he might have considered changing his name, too.
He wasn’t so very certain that the new ‘do suited Granger, however. His brow furrowed as he darted furtive looks towards her out of the corner of his eye.
Annoyingly, she seemed to realise that he was sizing her up, and she stood there, enduring his appraisal, even as it was clear he was trying to act as though he wasn’t paying her any mind. Granger took a step closer and stood up straight, her well-groomed hands coming to rest on her hips.
She’d always thought too highly of herself, and it was now apparent that that self-occupation of hers had downed a Strengthening Solution. Her self-regard radiated off of her in waves. It was sickening.
She declined to answer his initial question and tapped the toe of her patent-leather shoe against the edge of the rug.
Oh, but that was worth staring at... at least a little. Four-inch heels (stilettos!) and fully-fashioned nylon stockings. Doubtless the cheeky kind that had that irresistible seam up the back. He felt his mouth pursing a little bit as his eyes roved higher up her shapely legs—
The blasted girl was smirking at him now! Smirking!
He scowled and resolved not to stare at her a moment longer. No matter that her mid-thigh length skirt was tight enough around her backside to show off how perfectly lithe her midsection and hips were. No matter that he had always appreciated a woman in a well-fitted suit...
No matter that her stupid, pixie-cropped hair seemed to beckon him to twine his fingers through the short curls, even if only to yank on them.
Unwelcome thoughts, all.
“I asked if you forgot something, Granger. A bit of dental floss, perhaps?” He flashed a snaggle-toothed canine her way and deliberately licked it with a short flick of his tongue against the enamel. “I’m afraid you can’t have it back. Bit sick of you to want it, anyhow—”
“What are you doing here?”
He waved towards the television set in a grand, sweeping gesture. “Rotting my brain on the best entertainment our dreary little isle has to offer, naturally.”
She spared a second’s glance to the TV, blinking at it in a way that communicated how less than impressed she was with his current occupation.
Her pert nose wrinkled and she had the absolute gall to tilt her head up a bit more, so that now she was staring down the upturned bridge of that annoying little nose at him.
After an ad for McCoy’s vinegar crisps aired and Severus realised that he’d not been able to pay attention enough to have even absorbed what it was that was being hawked to the viewer, he finally looked over, lazily returning the brunette witch’s gaze.
The standard defiance and irritation were there, but he was surprised to see that she also appeared troubled.
“Are you sick?”
Snape’s tongue probed at his teeth and he found himself sucking his cheek gently while he considered her. “Sick?”
“Ill. Unwell. Was it… was it the war? Is that why you’re…” She trailed off and spread her hands hopelessly, indicating his state of repose on the sofa.
Oh, blast and damn her. Oh, bless her heart.
He was about to become a cause.
“In the loony bin? Locked up in Bedlam?” He supplied, breathing deeply through his nose.
“That’s not what I said!” She protested, her elven features flushing. Her lips pursed and it looked as though she was sucking her teeth to restrain whatever it was that she wished she could say to him. The front ones were still over-large to the point where her cupid’s bow often framed them. They were always there, poking out. Even after Madam Pomfrey’s intervention on her behalf they were a bit too big to be contained behind her lips.
Either for a bit of harmless mockery, or because it was nearly instinctual, he found himself mirroring her expression. From the confused look on her face, she clearly wasn’t certain of what it was that made him screw his features up and suck his cheeks in the way he was doing.
“I know perfectly well what you said. You seemed as though you were a bit lost, however. Forgive me for supplying the answers you were too frightened to ask for directly.”
This earned a scowl and a growl. That was more like it.
“So you are? You’re sick?”
Groaning now, Severus rolled his eyes so he could see the clock on the far wall. Ten minutes until the facilities were locked down for the night and they kicked Granger out.
“I’m sick of this conversation.”
“They don’t just section anyone, Professor. The way I understand it, they need a pretty good reason.”
“What is it you do now, Granger?” Snape asked, pointedly changing the subject. He forced himself to sit up and waved an errant hand toward the other half of the sofa, indicating that the young woman ought to have a seat.
She eyed the proffered cushion with the due amount of caution given its source, but then eventually did perch her backside on the squeaky vinyl.
Snape noticed that when she finally sat, she flexed her feet in her pumps so that her heels rose out of place by an inch. The support of the sofa allowed for her to stretch her arches and curl her toes. The motion of it offered an intriguing little peek of the seam he’d earlier suspected ran up the back of her calves.
“I’m employed at Blackhall—”
“Half of wizarding Britain is employed at Blackhall,” Snape brushed off. “Unless you lost most of your brains in the war, I can only suspect that you’ve not been hired on as a custodian of some sort. You’re being cagey enough that I might have guessed an Unspeakable, but often they won’t even admit to being employed at the Ministry.” He drew a hand down his face and rubbed at his mouth and jaw while he thought.
“You always were a soft touch. You’re not wasting your time campaigning for the Hob Fae, are you? No? Rehoming orphaned werepups—?”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those occupations,” she interrupted, crossing her arms over her bosom, “but no, I’m not. I suppose you forgot my Dad telling you what it was I do during your appointment yesterday.”
In point of fact, Snape did remember. Even so, he persisted in his wilful ignorance. “I seem to remember Percival Weasley making it quite far in his capacity as some sort of Cauldron Bottom Bureaucrat—”
“He was in the Department of International Magical Co-operation.”
“Same thing,” Snape dismissed with a sniff. “And he somehow contrived to earn the title of Junior Assistant to the Minister. If you’re not already, might I offer—in the capacity of once and forever former Professor—the very good career advice to spend more time deeply considering the international standardisation of potions equipment? It apparently is the critical point of merit in evaluating who is topmost in line for our highest and most esteemed office.”
“Apparently not,” Granger’s prissy little mouth tugged to the corner, revealing a small grin. “He’s now the Head of Magical Transportation. He decided against running for Minister, at least for the time being. I suppose we’ll never know if that’s what truly makes for a great leader.”
“Well, let me tell you then: having been under the command of the two most brilliant, politically-savvy minds of the last century—I’d have taken Weasley.”
“I think most of us would’ve,” she agreed, drawing up one leg and swinging it over the other. She clasped her hands together by lacing her fingers and settled them around her nylon-clad knee. “But you can rest assured, Professor Snape: I have no interest in the highest office of the land.”
Severus sneered, his black eyes rolling. “Oh, don’t you?” He asked, sardonically.
“Really! I have no designs on the Minister’s chair.” She smirked, as though she thought this should intrigue him greatly. As though her apparent abdication of the ambition every Professor had pegged her for from her first year ought to be some sort of all-important revelation to him.
He yawned.
“Good.” He jerked a nod at her and then looked over to the nurse’s window, adjacent to reception. He managed to catch the gaze of Nurse Espiritu, who was just now arriving for the early evening shift. She smiled at him, her soft gaze looking between Severus and his unwelcome guest, before she flashed him a quick thumbs up with a saucy grin.
Slightly dismayed, Snape frowned to her and shook his head, glaring pointedly at Granger’s profile. Before him on the coffee table was the paper cup he’d been using for water from the communal water cooler. He reached out to grab it and raised it high above his head, pointing at it and gesturing wildly in an attempt to communicate what it was he wanted.
This, at least, seemed to impel the older woman to action. It looked to him as though she’d sighed and then busied herself gathering his provisions for the evening.
“Good?” Granger hadn’t asked it of him directly, but more seemed to be speaking to herself. She seemed, by turns, discouraged and indignant that he’d not followed up with more questions. Or perhaps it was because she thought he ought to care whether or not she climbed all the way to the top of the Ministry chain of command.
He cared only insofar as he imagined himself shoving the determined targe off that same peak.
Of course, he’d never stir himself to do so... that would mean doing something. It would have meant leaving the comfortable life he’d finagled for himself, protected inside the belly of a Muggle psychiatric facility. Four years of institutionalised living had taught him that he enjoyed nothing so much as doing nothing much whatsoever. It was a very good thing that his pettiness was satisfied merely with the mental image of pushing her—none too gently—from atop her high horse.
“Good, he says.” She was still mumbling to herself, now having crossed her arms over her chest. The tailoring on her jacket was clearly a professional job. It fit her exactly... however it was a slim fit, and the tension produced by the action saw the bouclé wool (in the middle of summer, Granger! Really?!) stretching in a way that must have been uncomfortable across her slight shoulders and arms.
“If you only stopped in to ask if I was sick, and to inform me that you weren’t yet chomping at the bit for a scrap of bureaucratic power, then I believe your time with me for the day is coming to an end,” he twisted his lips into the semblance of a grin—or what would have been a grin from anyone who wasn’t called Severus Snape—and motioned with a wave for Nurse Espiritu to approach.
She did, although gracelessly and with obvious annoyance at his high-handedness.
“Mr. Snape,” the woman sighed, holding out a smaller paper cup than the one he’d been drinking from. “Can I get you more water, sir, or have you got enough?”
“I could use a refill,” he answered, swishing the tiny amount left around the bottom to illustrate his point.
The nurse snatched it from his hand and stomped off, tossing a disappointed look over her shoulder at Granger as she did so.
Trust the ladies in that place to be all up his nose about any visitor he might suffer. Heaven forbid, but they often treated him like some sad whelp with a scraped knee and a tear glistening in his eye.
Let this be a lesson: Severus Snape accepted pity from no one.
“Well,” Granger interrupted the snit that was beginning to brew, “that was rude.”
Severus ignored her, though he did find himself glaring into his cup as he poked through it with one finger. His favourite time of day and here she was, ruining it.
“And those are?”
God above, she was a bloody menace. Was Weasley still with her? Merlin preserve the boy’s bollocks—like as not she’d seen him gelded in a trice.
Trying to focus once more, he inspected the contents of the cup critically and continued to swirl his pointer finger through the assorted pills.
“Ah. There, Haloperidol. I’ll not be having that.” He picked it out between his index and thumb and vanished it in a puff of powder as if he were doing nothing more than pulling an annoying bit of lint out.
She gawped at him and uncrossed her legs as she leant over, attempting to crane her neck to look at the rest of his nightly medication.
“That is unbelievably irresponsible—!"
Snape responded by flicking one of his pills at her lazily. It bounced off of her cheek. “As the youth of today are fond of saying, Granger, ‘take a chill pill.’” He paused for a beat and looked at the little, blue oval, which had landed in her lap. “Not that one though—that one’s an antihistamine. My allergies have become dreadfully bothersome here. Hand it back, if you don’t mind.”
Had he not had twenty years practise at suppressing his emotions he might have been rolling around laughing at her trout-like expression. Dumbfounded outrage, that was what it was.
“Here, try this one. This one’s a Diazepam,” he offered, his expression carefree.
Hermione scowled at him. “I’m not taking that!”
“Suit yourself, Granger. You always did seem like a wet blanket to me. I suppose that bears out,” he remarked, popping the pill into his mouth.
The uptight witch bristled. “Says the man who gave out more detentions for behavioural offenses than any of the other professors combined!”
Snape offered back an amused smirk. “Ah, but I’ve seen the error of my ways, you see? It’s much better for my health to not give a toss—"
“And to take loads of drugs,” Granger accused.
“Loads,” he agreed, and he downed the rest of his paper cup regimen in one swallow.
“I don't like the drugs but the drugs like me
I don't like the drugs, the drugs, the drugs”
I Don’t Like the Drugs (reprise) – Marilyn Manson
RealOrMagic on Chapter 1 Mon 17 Nov 2025 08:11AM UTC
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