Severus · Snape

I lie sprawled on the small sofa in my study, my head tilted back and my eyes closed. It is raining and gusts of wind howl around the house, sending the raindrops clattering against the windows in sudden lashes. The mild autumn weather has shifted quite suddenly into the biting cold of winter that keeps the Snapelings inside and makes them beg for hot chocolate and marshmallows. I can hear the calming buzz of their voices as they play downstairs, their mother reproving them when they become too loud or their games too wild.

I have been packing a few items that I wish to have with me at Durmstrang – not that I will live permanently at the school, as that is not the custom, but there are some things I just want in my office there – certain books, ingredients, and instruments that might be useful. Contrary to my habit, I have stopped in the middle of my work, leaving three half-packed boxes and their would-be contents strewn across the floor, to have a lie-down. It seems as if I have temporarily lost my usual singleness of purpose, but then ever since Malfoy’s death I have been at pains to recover my bearings.
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I was just about to leave for the Ministerium, the Horcrux and the amulets in my shoulder bag, when Desmond Avery rang the door bell. I could tell it was he because I was in my study and observed him through the window. He had an agitated look about him. I fastened my cloak and left the room. My wife arrived by the door before I did; I heard her greet Avery when I was still on the corridor.

“Hello Desmond,” Brynhild said cheerfully.

There was a moment’s silence. Then Avery gasped, “Dear Brynhild! Dear, dear Brynhild – you gave me a fright. I was led to believe you were dead!”

“Is that why you decided to get married?” Brynhild asked promptly.

He laughed. “Aren’t you cheeky. You are a remarkable woman, Brynhild – quite remarkable. But between you and me” – he lowered his voice – “you will never find a lover.”
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Our preparations have been running smoothly: Gravelius has taken the bait I have offered her, so the stage is set. I am at liberty to act for her in any way I see fit, and no questions asked.

When the long-awaited message from Avery arrives, our plans jerk into motion. In my head everything is clear as crystal, and I work efficiently.
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My daughter stood in front of my desk, clasping her hands behind her back and staring at the floor. She was wearing one of my old shirts over her clothes, and on her hands was a pair of dragon-hide gloves I had shrunk to fit her.

“Let me tell you,” I said, steepling my fingers, “that I have a reputation for devising disgusting punishments for little wrong-doers such as yourself. Now – I am not going to make you eviscerate small animals, because at your age I don’t trust you to handle a knife without eviscerating yourself; but I could make you search the garbage bag for that small bit of parchment I threw away three days ago, or tell you to clean the toilets, Alan and Poe’s box and the snake’s tank.”

The Snapeling’s brow clouded, but she maintained a stoic silence.
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The eldest Snapeling was annoyingly unruly, and had been so ever since I had brought her mother home from Durmstrang. I understood Alba’s frustration: in a sense, it would have been easier on all of us if Brynhild had just died – at least then we would have known where we stood. As it was…

I had, with some difficulty, removed my wife’s soiled clothes and dressed her in a long nightgown; she would have looked every bit the part of Sleeping Beauty, if on account of her age and the doubtful quality of her looks she had not been slightly miscast. And so Brynhild lay on our bed, barely breathing, her only sign of life a heartbeat so soft and slow that it could only be detected when one laid one’s head on her breast to listen for it. That was exactly what Alba had done, and as a consequence she took it upon herself to try and wake her dear Mama up. She had shaken her mother’s shoulders, screamed, and stamped her feet on the floorboards, making such a tumult that her brother, who was napping in the next room, woke up crying, alarmed at all the noise.
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(Read this entry at pr_brynhild first...)

That Sunday, Brynhild had left the house without telling me where she was going. I did not care much at the time; she was a grown-up woman and entitled to her little secrets. Besides, I trusted her, and I knew she could take care of herself. It was only when the hours stretched on without a sign from her, and then finally around ten the detestable Elke Rothweiler came to find me at my shop, that it occurred to me I might have to face the possibility that something had gone seriously wrong. ( Read more... )

During the past weeks, a few pieces of the Malfoy puzzle had come together. It was clear to me, when the Prophet reported the murder of Percy Weasley, that Arthur’s son must have been the one who intercepted Scrimgeour’s monthly dose of Inferius Potion and thus exposed the fact that the Minister had become Malfoy’s pawn. Gravelius, Kunze and I agreed that if Malfoy had infiltrated this deep into the Ministry, he was very likely to target other major institutions of wizarding Britain as well, Gringotts being the prime candidate; and indeed, the confused reports that filtered through the Daily Prophet early in July proved our speculations accurate. Potter and the Order would not have been around the bank if what went on was merely a dispute among Goblins.
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I came home later than usual on Tuesday night because Gravelius was in a panic after what happened to Scrimgeour. She called me to the Ministerium, hoping to hear more about the case, but the only thing I could do was to admit, slightly embarrassed, that I had not known anything about Malfoy’s plans for planting Inferi in high places. In any case, we all finally understood why Scrimgeour had been so uncharacteristically inefficient in dealing with Malfoy’s attacks.

Gravelius toyed pensively with her quill. “Maybe we should take heart in the knowledge that those Inferi can be spotted eventually,” she said. “Do we know what went wrong? Is the formula unstable?”

I shook my head. “No, the potion is perfectly fine. In the version I gave to Malfoy, it must be administered regularly, though. I think that someone must somehow have stopped Scrimgeour from having his dose.” ( Read more... )

Whenever I go to the Ministerium on my own initiative, I do so after closing time. Apart from the fact that I don’t like Ministerium business to get in the way of my own daily affairs, I also do not think it desirable to remind its personnel of my existence on a regular basis, at least not before all the paperwork has been finished and my safety secured. I prefer the evenings, when the corridors are deserted and the sound of my own reverberating footsteps is the only thing I hear. ( Read more... )

Saturday was the eldest Snapeling’s birthday: Alba turned five, and the event proved an excellent excuse for a trip to Germany, leaving the children blissfully oblivious of the real reason behind their stay under my roof. The week-end’s weather was sunny and warm; Brynhild had to make the Snapelings wear hats while they played in the garden, to protect them from sunburn. She had spread a blanket out on a stretch of grass under the willow tree for Xander; Alba just zoomed around and amused herself by deliberately bouncing against the magical fence I had put up around my patch of poisonous plants.

On Sunday morning, the Zauberspiegel am Sonntag carried news of the crimes Malfoy had orchestrated in Britain, though of course the editorial staff knew no more than the Prophet’s that Malfoy was the brain behind the attacks. Brynhild scanned the paper in silence, her face unmoved; only a slight tremble in her hand betrayed her shock. She looked up at me across the breakfast table with a grim expression about her mouth, but she said nothing, and despite my entreaties she refused to name the day on which she and the Snapelings would leave England for good.
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This afternoon I sent Innocentius off to Brynhild with a letter urging her and the children to come and spend the full moon with me in Hameln. Last week, I delivered to Malfoy on his orders a large quantity of Wolfsbane Potion; and because the medicine cannot be kept long, and must be taken every day of the week preceding the transformation, I assume that he plans to set some fifty or sixty werewolves loose in England on the thirteenth. I do not know who his targets are – whether they are specific or random, Muggle or magical. All I do know is that the only horror from the past that still causes me nightmares is that time when I was nearly torn limb from limb by Lupin.
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We must have got tangled the night before. On Easter morning, Brynhild woke me up by nudging me and poking her fingers in my flesh. Whatever the time was, my body and brain told me it was much too early to start living another day, but my wife did not seem to agree.

“Severus, let go of me,” she whispered urgently.

“JussleepBynnel,” I mumbled sleepily.

“Tempting though it is, I can’t. I need to get up and hide the eggs in the garden. It’s Easter, remember?” She sighed. “The thing with children is that you can’t get them to leave their beds when they have to, but when you want them to sleep late, you can bet anything that they’ll wake up early.”

So it was really early.

“Could you roll over, please? – Severus? Or at least move your arm?”

“Bof.” I didn’t feel as if I had enough control over my limbs to move them in any direction whatsoever. Couldn’t she just stay where she was? She was warm and I could feel her heart beat. I wasn’t normally this drowsy in the morning, but unusual activity on the previous night took its toll.

“Listen, if you don’t help me here, I’m going to have to pinch you.”

“Mmm–OUCH!”
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“What’s an Unmensch, Papa?” the Snapeling asked me this morning.

“A brute. An inhuman person. Why do you want to know?” I said, frowning.

“Pia says you are one,” my daughter replied with perfect innocence.

I narrowed my eyes. “Does she really? Well, I’ll have to have a word with her, in that case.”

I wondered what had prompted my apprentice’s judgement: was it the fact that she had heard me address my daughter as “small mammal”, or that I had told the child quite frankly that the Easter bunny does not exist? Alba did not seem particularly upset about either, in any case. She sat in the workshop painting hard-boiled eggs in bright yellow, green, blue, fuchsia and red, humming made-up songs. The lyrics made it hard for me to suppress a smile. After repeated tours of the shelves in the shop, and entreaties to Pia to point everything out to her once again, she was singing things like, “Wormwood, Solomon’s Seal, Ya-a-a-row; Samphire and Sanicle, Mo-o-o-onworth; Graphorn horn and Dra-a-a-gon liver, brain-of-spar-row, brain-of-hare; ointments, syrups, lo-o-o-hocks; scrape-the-roots-clean, boil-them-soft, boil-into-a-sy-y-y-y-rup, keep the roots inside…”
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If I had thought that the space the Snapeling occupied in my life would be proportional to her physical size, I was sorely mistaken. Although she appeared tiny and insignificant to my eyes, she was a little person, and a discernable presence in my house. Part of this I perceived as being Brynhild’s touch – she had fitted the child out with all sorts of personal things: pretty clothes predominantly in red, small red and pink slides for her hair, assorted tiny bracelets, and a miniature red plastic handbag that showed an impishly grinning girl called Pucca. Alba even brought her own red towels, pink soap, and bath bubbles and shampoo in pink bottles with rubber animal heads for stoppers (those I thought slightly morbid, but my progeny seemed to think them cute), all of which were carefully displayed on a corner of the bath. Every morning as I washed and shaved, I leered at the peculiar collection from the corner of my eye, and every time I had to suppress a vague wave of discomfort and a sinking feeling in my stomach. Seeing Alba’s things reminded me of the fact that the house was no longer my private, exclusive territory. I could not leave bottles with poisonous substances around for fear she might swallow their contents; I had to lock the door to the cellar because the stairs were steep and dangerous; I could no longer smoke inside the house; I had to eat at regular intervals because my daughter needed food at fixed times; and not only was the toilet occupied at the wrong moments, when finding the door locked I couldn’t swear aloud because that was not language fit for the ears of a four-year-old. Of course Alba would be gone again shortly, but that was cold comfort. Soon she would be back for good, with her mother and her brother, who would all need room and consideration, and who would bring their own things into my quiet, empty house and change it beyond recognition. Xander would bawl, Alba ask her interminable strings of questions, Brynhild listen to Wagner, and I feared I would rapidly go insane.

Yes, every morning as I patted my face dry, I closed my eyes, contemplated what I had done, and panicked in silence. ( Read more... )

As the Easter holidays approached, my wife and I found ourselves facing a problem; it had black eyes and curly hair and had sprung forth from my own loins. On Sunday I went to London to confront it.

“Usually during the school holidays I can leave Alba at my parents’ house,” Brynhild said, pacing up and down and running her hands through her hair, “but not this time.”

“How come?” I asked.

“I booked too late.” She grimaced. “Bruno and Elisa are travelling to Australia and dropping their brood at Mutti’s. My parents are not getting any younger; taking care of three children is quite enough of a burden for them. I can’t add a fourth to it.”

“What about day care?” I suggested.

“I tried. Xander is going to his usual place, but they won’t take Alba as well. The centre has a waiting list; they are already turning babies down, and they don’t want to prioritise a four-year-old, not even temporarily.” She shook her head. “There is really nothing for it: you have to take Alba with you.”
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It had not been easy for me to make myself acceptable as Frau Thielicke’s replacement at the Hameln pharmacy. The shop itself was a kind of monument: the Thielicke family had run it since the fourteen hundreds, and people were loath to see it pass into the hands of a stranger with a foreign accent. It seems a defining trait of magical communities everywhere that they do not welcome change, believing that some things just cannot be improved upon; and old customers wondered whether their familiar potions would continue to be brewed the exact same way. There was suspicion in their eyes when they placed their orders after the news of Frau Thielicke’s retirement had become public, and I am sure they sampled the first sip of new potion like an oenophile assessing the quality of a special cuvee, and examined the first new pill like a jeweller the cut of a diamond. But though my personality rarely pleases anyone, my craftsmanship is never disappointing, and the steady number of the shop’s customers proved that I conducted my business to their satisfaction.
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Some great problems have amazingly simple solutions – you just have to know where to look for them. I found one yesterday, while scanning a shelf full of glass jars for my provision of pickled eye of newt. It so happened that I picked up a random jar to move it aside, when a painful jolt seared through my arm. It was the Dark Mark that did that, of course.
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Skimming through the pages of the Zauberspiegel am Sonntag, I come across an article that makes me choke on my morning coffee.
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On my orders, Amycus and Alecto have exhumed the hapless archaeologist’s body and brought it back to Castle Grindelwald’s dungeon. They let her down onto the cold floor and move away when I come closer; apparently they have decided to be in awe of me. That is just as well.

“You can go now,” I say, waving them away. They scurry off.
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Once I had the recipe, the Inferius potion did not pose any problems to me. It took a few hours to brew and a few days to mature, but that was it. And there I was, with my concoction that reduces people to an un-life.

I met with Kunze just after lunch in our favourite Kaffeehaus to tell him about my progress with the potion project. I didn’t feel well about it; once the excitement of creation is over, I tend to start to think about what it is I have made, and I dreaded having to hand this particular mixture over to someone like Malfoy who, I sometimes thought, might be slowly losing his mind.

“The potion is ready,” I announced to Kunze.

“Congratulations. That’s great.”

“It is, except if your name is Melinda Roberts,” I said casually.

“Eh?” He seemed to have forgotten all about her; but then she was Irish and the Germans wouldn’t care much about what happened to her. Neither, it seemed, did her own government. “You mean the archaeologist?”

“Yes, her. Tomorrow she’ll be an Inferius. The first.” I looked Kunze straight in the eyes. “Gravelius wanted the recipe complete. Well, I can offer it to her on a silver platter. But I hope she has realised that once the thing is ready, it will be used. And I don’t wish to be held responsible.” I ticked my fingernails against my coffee cup.
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