Chapter Text
Snape found Number 12 Grimmauld Place nasty in a way that was bold, yet nuanced, like wine gone bad. What a storied and stately disappointment it was! When he was fifteen, he’d have been beside himself at the thought of entering this musty ruin. Both Black brothers had bitched about spending school holidays in their luxurious home. Upon joining the Order, Snape had issued Regulus Black a posthumous pardon for whingeing. The place was a vortex of despair, and it stank.
All magical households had what he and Lily had deemed a “health food store smell.” No technology meant raw chickens and split melons perched on counter-tops under stasis spells all day. Add in some giant beards and magical pets… There had never been much food at his house, but the blue haze of cigarette smoke had seemed comparably inoffensive.
“It’s like the house needed to brush its teeth,” Lily had whispered to him, after a party he hadn’t been invited to. He had snickered at that.
Later, when he felt Lily was getting a bit too comfortable with herself, he had informed her that she smelled of plastic and muggle chemicals.
Grimmauld Place was an ocean of mold, rot and dust. Unlike the big fat wedding cake that was Malfoy Manor, Grimmauld was disguised from outside and blended in with the rest of the rather run-down neighborhood. Not Spinners End, but not exactly Godric’s Hollow, either.
Snape let himself in with a whispered spell and was pleased to encounter no one. The foyer and front rooms were empty. He could just hear the muffled chatter of some of the riffraff that made up the Order of the Phoenix. The paintings on the walls were filmy, wretched Walburga’s portrait shrouded like a bird’s cage. The brocade wallpaper was peeling. An expensive mess like Sirius Black himself, whose home-confinement would have been funny if Snape didn’t have to see him there.
Aside from the distant voices, there was no sign of the children who were in residence, no doubt eager to resume their ordinary routine of running around Hogwarts and giving him ulcers.
(Sometimes Snape wondered about Granger. She had initially struck him as the sort of child who would have very involved parents. Were they truly oblivious? Or weaklings, too intimidated by her to ask questions? He finally decided that Granger, like the goddess Athena, had sprung fully formed from some powerful being’s worst headache.)
He moved past a library full of flaking books, then past the world’s least inviting sitting room, quietly, quietly. He had once imagined occupying rooms like this with violins playing in the background and a roaring fireplace. He had imagined admirers toasting him with elegant cocktails, once wealth and success had transformed him into someone capable of socializing and enjoying it.
Now here he was, specifically to socialize. Dumbledore wanted him to “Check in” at Order headquarters, “assess the security and the morale.” “Make an appearance.” Spend an instant in Precious Potter’s presence without antagonizing him, and without allowing himself to be antagonized. Get on the brat’s… well, not good side, but “indifferent side.” Normalize the idea of working together by allowing himself to be seen, by the students, working for the cause.
There was obnoxious laughter in the subterranean kitchen. Snape silently descended the steps toward that busy hole in the earth that coarse people like Molly Weasley found so welcoming. Just before the lowest steps, he folded himself neatly into the shadows behind the slightly open door.
The world’s most powerful living wizard had sent him on a mission to stand in a room for a few minutes and not be an asshole.
Well, they both knew Snape couldn’t do that, which made all of this an insulting waste of time. He was at least going to get some eavesdropping in, for his pain and suffering.
He had a good view of everyone at the table through the seam between the door and the wall. Of course he could hear everything perfectly because they were teenagers: Every word, every gesture was self-conscious and over-energized; they talked over one another in their haste to showcase their non-existent wit.
At the head of the table, holding court, was Nymphadora Tonks. Of course.
Tonks had grown a rather impressive gray beard, which she stroked contemplatively. It was a little dizzying to see it pouring out of her young face. She put a finger to her pursed mouth, then held out a saucer toward Granger, pretending to offer her a sweet. Granger, enchanted, demurred with a snort.
Muggle-borns. Forever easy to impress.
“Truly, my dear,” Tonks intoned, over-annunciating. “It is our choices that define us. Today, one may not eat a lemon drop…” she paused and looked around the room with showy mischief, “But on a different day… well, one… just… might!”
Her audience laughed and Tonks shook her head, ridding herself of the beard. Snape wondered if it was unpleasant for her. He himself could never abide having facial hair.
“Oh, I hate it when Dumbledore talks like that,” Potter moaned. As if Potter had ever gotten a real dose of Albus’s cryptic little mind games.
“I know, I know,” Granger whinged, “it’s always these…”
“… vague metaphors,” she and Weasley say at once. The girl blushed.
Snape, queasy, considered striding into the room right then. But he stayed where he was, curious, as the students shouted requests for Tonks’ next object of fun. He rather enjoyed seeing other people well-mocked.
Or perhaps he was next. That would be a perfect moment to walk in.
“Do Snape!” The wretched twins barked, right on cue.
“Do Ron, please, Roooon!” Squealed Girl Weasley.
“I’ll do Ron,” giggled Granger, of all people. With all eyes on her, she grabbed a handful of soda crackers, jammed them into her mouth and commenced chewing with her mouth open, bits of them flying everywhere.
“Aw, yeah- brilliant, mate, brilliant,” she said in a low, dopey voice. Cracker crumbs flew from her mouth. The children went into hysterics. Potter nearly fell off of his chair. Tonks was clearly unsure how to react. The victim himself pursed his lips and shook his head, struggling in vain not to smile.
“Unkind, ‘Mione. That’s quite beneath you.” He swatted at her half-heartedly, pausing to brush a few crumbs off of her shirt.
“In fairness, that could be any of my brothers,” crowed Girl Weasley. She wasn’t wrong. She and Granger clutched each other and cackled, quintessential witches.
Tonks ran her hands through her hair and turned it black, then rubbed some whiskers onto her chin, moving on to an impression of Black. She swaggered around, Snape thought, like a cross between Mic Jagger and an ape. She put her food up on the bench beside Potter and stretched oafishly; a nice touch.
“Right, right. We can be anyone, Harry. Why, I’m the scion of a wealthy pureblood family and it’s never once stopped me from speaking with a fake cockney accent when the mood strikes me!” Ugh, so Black was still doing that. “And it’s never stopped me wearing leather pants! Not my age, not my social station, not any spell on earth.”
The twins howled.
“Nothing comes between Sirius Black and his leather pants!” She growled at Weasley, who dramatically fanned himself. She grinned and looked Potter in the eye “meaningfully.” “Just you remember that, Harry!”
Potter wheezed and slapped the table.
“Say, love,” ‘Black’ growled solicitously, leering down at Granger. “Do you think, if I asked him nicely, Snape would brew me some new cologne? I’ve tried just about every scent there is, and often several at once, but I just can’t get m‘self smelling spicy enough.”
Granger gasped and clapped a hand over her toothy mouth. It was all too true: Growing up Grimmauld really must have fried Black’s olfactory nerves. How else could someone who spent so much time as a dog would have anything to do with wizard cologne? Then again, didn’t dogs like rolling in all sorts of terrible things?
Tonks really was quite good. So much for Hufflepuff loyalty and sweetness! She had disrespected their leader and skeweredher own cousin in under five minutes.
“Professor Snape,” She Continued in her Sirius voice. “Now there’s a bloke wears too much black. But really it’s not a matter of too much black, so much as not enough velvet, ay?”
Black really did wear the most absurd clothes, for someone whose life held so much animal hair.
“I said to him, I said, ‘Russ… Why don’t we go out on the town, eh?’ He idolizes me, you see. He’s always scowling at me admiringly, sitting as far away from me as possible at meetings to get a good look at what I’m wearing… and he looked at me, all sneering with gratitude, and in his honeyed baritone he said…” She paused dramatically. Snape held his breath, waiting to hear what he had said.
“No.” The word cold and rich with boredom. Dead-on, even in a woman’s voice. It had taken Snape years to perfect that drawl.
The children laughed and begged for more, but Tonks reverted to her current pink-haired default and sat down, claiming exhaustion.
For once, Snape realized, he was actually enjoying seeing his students beside themselves with laughter; even Potter. It was even amusing, in a stupid sort of way, to be made “part of the act” of ridiculing Black.
Now that “An Evening With Sirius Black” had concluded, however, it was time to make his entrance. Dumbledore had sent him here to interact with these fools, after all. The brats were getting raucous; clamoring for Tonks to do just one more. Perhaps the young auror was in over her head. After all, not everyone knew how to keep order in a room full of adolescents.
He could step in… perhaps convince Tonks to do an impression of Potter. He pictured her with wild hair and borrowed glasses, earnestly yammering something like “The trick is to do everything without thinking, and in the most dangerous way possible…”
Unfortunately, Snape entered the kitchen at the exact moment that Tonks decided to play at being Girl Weasley for an encore.
He emerged from the shadows to see a girl with her hand on her hip, flipping her long red hair behind her shoulder, leaning conspiratorially toward a laughing Potter.
“You know, they’re my brothers and I love them,” she said, “but they’re all such gobshites…”
When this was met with silence, she turned around to see what had sucked all the joy out of the room.
“Oh! Wotcher, Professor!”
Snape stood there, dark and clunky and stiff. Tonks looked at him, half wincing, half hopeful. “We’re just finishing up tea,” she said with false nonchalance. “Can I get you anything?”
Potter and his “brilliant mate” scowled at the floor. Granger swallowed, squared her shoulders, and bid him a defiantly polite “Good afternoon, professor.”
Tonks smiled at him, red hair falling around her face, her hand on Potter’s shoulder. Her shoulders tightened ever so slightly as she took a breath; it was that stance that sweet-natured people adapted in the face of certain hostility.
“I was just attempting a Weasley makeover,” Tonks chuckled.
Snape raised an eyebrow and stared her down.
“Surely,” he said slowly, “there are enough Weasleys in the world already.” There. That was how you did cold, disdainful boredom.
The Weasley twins, surely concealing some sort of contraband, were already sliding away in opposite directions. Granger motioned to her pet nincompoops with a jerk of her head. They got up from the table with cartoonish delicacy.
“Miss Tonks, I must say red hair is particularly ill-suited to you.” He spat it out quickly, since she was already in the process of changing back. “Though I can see why you would consider anything an improvement.” He heard Granger gasp with sympathetic hurt. Good.
“Are there any grown-ups about?” He snapped. Tonks folded her arms, tilted her head back, and grinned at the ceiling.
“Sir,” Granger butted in, “Sirius Black is upstairs. I believe he’s resting, but I can collect him for you, if you like.”
“No adults on the premises, then,” he snarled. “And Granger, as much as I know you like to pester and annoy, best to let sleeping dogs lie, as I believe the muggle expression goes.” He glared at her as she scampered out.
Girl Weasley got up slowly, and made a point of looking into his eyes. He met her gaze with almost matching resentment. When she stomped up the stairs he smirked.
Unfortunately now he was alone with Nymphadora Tonks, with nothing to say and no real reason to be there.
“I see the students have been working diligently. Training, studying…” He had to spin around around to face her, as she had walked away from the table and the dozen empty chairs to sit on the kitchen counter like a filthy little house cat.
Tonks nodded and made an expression of mock-gravity, which he ignored.
“If there really are no other Order members about…” He paused.
“The Weasleys will be back tonight. Kingsley and MadEye tomorrow. I can relay a message…?” She shrugged. They both knew he wouldn’t leave any message with her.
“That won’t be necessary,” He said. “I have a few security checks to perform.”
“Need any assistance?”
“Certainly not, Miss Tonks,” he sneered. She grinned.
“But would you like any assistance?” She raised her eyebrows and spread her hands in a gesture of exaggerated solicitude.
“No.” He packed the word with so much disdain he was sure the temperature of the room dropped.
“Alright,” Tonks whispered in a posh accent, hitting the “t” hard and grinning. She folded her hands in her lap and leaned against a great ham, looking at him as if they had just shared an excellent joke.
All wards were up and intact, but the house was infested with magical vermin.
Spape’s final diagnostic spell indicated too high a concentration of dark and chaotic magic to be explained by a boggart, even a particularly nasty one.
He was standing in the long dim hallway in front of the smudgy old Black family tree, debating whether to investigate or to simply inform Tonks and be on his way, when his ears popped.
He sallowed; it didn’t help at all. In fact, he was sinking, rapidly even as he propped himself against the wall. His body was melting, was sliding away in slow waves and Oh, he was so heavy.
He was so heavy, it was unsustainable. His whole apparatus was finally coming down.
Each breath he took was louder than the next, echoing inside of his head. His heart was beating so hard. Not faster but, harder, like a battering ram. It was trying to break free, to escape him.
Godspeed, he thought. Make a break for it. Die free.
The sound of body dying was symphonic struck Snape as symphonic somehow and he was just thinking that it was terribly sad that no other living creature would ever hear it when he heard a very soft scraping sound behind him.
He whipped around, searching desperately for a glimpse of something, even as his knees began to buckle. What he saw made him stop breathing altogether.
A little gray child soldier-crawled slowly toward him across the dirty floor. The child’s head was so heavy that its shoulders trembled, but it moved steadily and with purpose. Its right cheek was smudged with dust. It didn’t have much of a nose, but its eyes were big and round and shiny. The red, plump mouth was lined with rows of needle-sharp teeth.
It smiled at him as if they shared a secret.
Snape’s head swam. He started breathing again. It burned now, and he wondered how long it would go on.
Snape heard a child crying; heart-wrenching sobs. A wretched wave of tenderness washed over him. He had never felt desperate to comfort someone before. Other people had those types of feelings; he didn’t. It was horrible, like breathing.
His vision tunneled and there were spots in front of his face.
He understood that the crying child was him and that, like his struggling lungs and failing heart, it was a sound that no one else would ever hear. The sadness was sharper than terror and hotter than rage. Snape could only wonder at it and be glad he was about to die.
Snape’s bony body clattered to the floor and the thing’s smile widened with delight. It was much closer now, and moving a little faster.
Someone was shouting.
There was a sliver streak before his eyes, and tit knocked the creature from Snape’s line of vision. He twisted around just in time to see a dazzlingly bright rabbit. She raised a powerful little haunch and delivered a kick that sent the creature into the wall, so hard and fast that it exploded.
The thing’s death scream was in his brain, and it was in his burning lungs and whistling nose as he struggled for air. He felt the strange elevator-drop sensation of a levicorpus as he blacked out.
Snape came to on a bed with a cobwebbed canopy, scared. He was disoriented, and the crimson-and-ivory bedroom around him belonged in a nightmare, but he was cold with sweat and achy from shuddering. Those were wakeful details.
So this was reality, complete with Nymphadora Tonks sitting cross-legged beside him on the bed. He tried to curse at her but could only make a garbled sound.
“Don’t try to talk just yet- trust me,” she said. She picked up a blanket and sniffed it, tossed it aside, then shrugged her jacket off and put it over him. He wriggled in protest, but quickly became too weak to continue. It was thin, but surprisingly warm.
“You have to stay still and just breathe, just get it out. You can hex me to kingdom come later, but right now you have to just breathe it out. You’ve been coughing something terrible.”
Once he was arranged to her satisfaction, she sat back, wrapping around herself a little. The room was chilly.
“Jesus, Snape. I’ve never heard of a Pogrebin being that powerful, never. It might as well have been a Dementor. It must have been here for decades.”
A Pogrebin. He tried to remember if he’d ever heard of a Pogrebin attack in England, or anywhere else for that matter.
It was what he had imagined being hit by lightning was like, so powerful and sudden and devastating. He shuddered, suddenly glad of the witch’s little jacket.
So he wasn’t going to die, then. At least, he wasn’t going to die the way he had been about to die.
“I did a sweep,” Tonks went on, “just to make sure there weren’t any more. I let the others know too. Sirius’ll keep everyone away. Ordinarily I’d have MLE in here, but… secret location.” She shrugged. “Have to be our own pest control. Lucky thing Dumbledore sent you over! Bloody Pogrebin of all things. It came right out of the linen closet.” The girl shook her head, then thrust a glass of cloudy water at him.
“There’s nothing else but a boggart and a bunch of doxies. The others can handle those. I told them what you found, but… they have no idea how bad it was. I, uh, didn’t tell them you were attacked.” He nodded stiffly at that, then choked down some of the water she was trying to drown him with.
“Anyway…” the girl rolled her shoulders and slapped her knees, ready to shift topics, “I scraped some of it for you!”
He blinked.
“You… scraped some of it…?”
“… off the wall, yeah. Saved you a couple of vials of, uh… residue? Pogrebin… discharge? Dunno if you can use it in a potion or something. I figured you might want to analyze it.”
“Vanish it. Immediately.”
“Really?”
“Yes, you little fool. It’s useless and dangerous.”
She pointed her wand at a bag on the floor as he flinched and looked away. His reaction was visceral and unlikely to bear scrutiny, but the very idea of touching that dark slime made him shudder even harder.
“What in Merlin’s name is wrong with you,” he hissed, “collecting something so disgusting and putting it into your handbag?”
“I put it in a marmalade jar,” she said. “And I wrapped the jar in a tea towel. I didn’t just…” She pantomimed flinging glop from her hands into a bag.
“How very fastidious. I stand corrected.”
Once again, the girl chuckled as if his dig at her was a secret joke they were sharing. It should have made him uncomfortable, but for some reason it eased his nerves. His trembling subsided a little.
“I was thinking of ambergris when I collected it,” she mused. “You know, when the whales eat the squids and then…”
“Yes, I know what ambergris is, Miss Tonks.”
“Right, so… something really foul and smelly that turns out to be valuable and useful. I was hoping it might be like that.”
“A classic example of Hufflepuff logic.”
She smiled as if she’d been awarded house points and asked, “Do you think you could manage some chocolate?”
To his horror, she then placed her hands on him, patting down her jacket and muttering, “I have some in the inner pocket…”
“No, I don’t want any chocolate, or anything else that’s been in your grubby little pockets! Salvadore’s trousers! You’ve probably got it nestled beside your lucky hag’s tooth.”
“It might be nestled beside some calming draught, if you’d rather.”
“I would not rather. I don’t take commercially brewed potions.” As soon as he said it, he regretted it. Personal standards aside, he could really have used a calming draught or four. The girl pulled a vial of it out of her jacket anyway, along with a bar of standard-issue medical chocolate.
“Well, if you change your mind,” she said, reaching over him to set them on the bedside table. Her upper body crossed over Snape, so close she was nearly touching him. He started to scrunch away on principle, but he was bone-weary and, if he was being honest, her body’s nearness was comforting. She was warm and full of calm energy and more than that, she was strong.
Tonks sat back and studied him. “Are you going to seek medical attention, then?” He blinked. “Maybe flue back to Hogwarts, check in with Pomfrey at least?” He blinked again. She sighed, untroubled. “Yeah, thought not. Well, go ahead and rest, I’ll stick around a bit. In case, you know, you start choking on your own vomit, or your heart stops or something.”
He wanted to argue, but they both knew she was only half kidding. A weak and primal part of relished the the idea of staying here, of basking in Tonks’ reflexive protection and inexplicable goodwill. He tried to chastise himself for it, but found that it was too much work, and so he closed his eyes and let it happen.
Tonks sat on the bed and paged through a muggle magazine she had found somewhere. At some point, he was dimly aware that she was singing, under her breath, perhaps without realizing it. “Talking ‘bout a girl that looks quite like you…” she murmured “She didn’t have time to wait in the queue…” and then hummed the rest and turned a page. He was helpless against the little shiver of fondness that crept over him as he sank into oblivion.
When Snape awakened again, hours later, the aches in his body and the fire in his head and chest had subsided. The thick dream feeling was just as strong, though, as he gathered himself to leave. Tonks walked quietly beside him, ready to catch him if he stumbled. He wasn’t strong enough to resent her for it; couldn’t even bring himself to be irritated, just bemused.
In the hallway, they passed the great family tree where the name Nymphadora Layla Tonks sat below a scorch mark where her baby face once was. He wondered if her own children’s names and faces would appear there one day, only to be immediately defaced by a righteous pureblood spell. He wondered, as they entered the library and Tonks handed him the tin of flue powder, if she’d live to have children, to sing to them.
“This was fun,” Tonks said quietly as Snape prepared to step into the flames. “We should do it again sometime.”
“I’d rather bathe in your cousin’s perfume collection,” he said, and snatched her hand. Her fingers were cold and dry against his lips. Her eyes were wide with surprise when she disappeared from his sight.