Settling In.
***July 23rd, 1992
Sleeping in a familiar bed was a welcomed change from Azkaban and that bathroom at the Inn while efficient enough to do what needed to be done in it, had also been sort of lackluster. The two MACUSA agents were just happy to be back in a place where the territory was familiar. A place where they each had their own claimed spaces that wouldn’t be invaded by anyone else who wasn’t welcome in it. A nice respite from everything else they were about to encounter outside that office door. A door that received a heavy knocking much too early that following morning.
Barely the ass-crack of dawn, and already Professor Snape was there to look in on them like a couple of trouble-ridden foster kids in a new housing situation. That was fair, though. They were strangers in a strange land, in a stranger timeline, with an even stranger goal to accomplish. Professor Snape, while unaware of just how strange this all was, was definitely right not to trust them, and Lithia was patient with it.
She let him in to scope out the place, the door where he came in led into a halfway that split off in two directions, but she brought him towards a well-lit kitchen where the windows were open and the fresh crisp scent of the morning rain was filtering in, mingling with the tempting aroma of coffee in a percolator on the stove. His dark eyes scanned the place along the way, eyeballing pictures on the walls, and even pausing to take in the sight of the kitchen. A cottage-core dream of yellow wallpaper and wood accents, fresh and dried ingredients for everything from baking to mixing teas and brewing potions were stowed away in jars and wooden crate boxes on shelves that lined two walls. Beside it was a floor-to-ceiling set of bookcases where cookbooks of every sort could be found. Spells and food, baking, desserts, and specialties from both muggle and wizard chefs. There was a China hutch full of blue flowery plates with artsy images of the Italian countryside, and fancy tea sets with little ancient nick-nacks to boot. The whole place looked like a fully stocked work area for a hermetic kitchen witch, and Snape found it all a little overwhelming, even as she brought him in to seat himself on a stool at the kitchen island in the center of the room. When he sat down he could see out the window that there was a massive greenhouse and beyond that a large grassy hillside rolling downward into a fast-flowing creek that spilled out into a large river, over which the morning sun was just barely beginning to kiss the sky, painting its fluorescent shades of magenta and burning electric orange beneath the graying storm clouds. The soft wet pattering of rain gave the view a lazy vibe that reflected the room around him, though he couldn’t help but notice just how much the energy of the place resembled her mood as Lithia poured him a cup of coffee, and went about bringing out the cream and sugar to dress it up with, if he so desired. It was hard to believe that he’d only just walked through an office door, and that they were actually still there, down in the dungeon of Hogwarts Castle. Forget bigger on the inside, this was a whole other world, entirely. One of her own making and as far as the eye could see, Snape noticed, was laden with a strange sort of magic he wasn’t used to looking at.
Neither one of them said a single thing to the other at first. Lithia, simply rolling with the punches, letting him sniff out his new surroundings like a frightened cat in a new apartment, and Snape… Doing exactly that. Too hard-focused at first on staring outside and wondering if it was all a glamour of sorts or if it was all real, and then the sudden offering of coffee that he took his time in dressing up.
Lithia sat across from him, already fresh-faced and ready to take on the day, but still not in the chattering mood, or perhaps she was leeching the reserved feelings from the aura of her guest as she zoned out on simply watching him while sipping at her own cup of plain black coffee.
“It’s all real, you know,” she finally blurted out as if she’d heard him asking the question in his head only moments before. “The uh… hillside. And the river. -It’s the St. Christopher medallion on the office door. Opens a gateway into this place when you hang it on the doornail.”
“Fascinating.” Snape’s response, for once, almost wasn’t flat in tone. But it was apparent that he was attempting to not look too interested, even though he couldn’t keep his eyes from wandering. Which was probably for the better, because it meant he didn’t have to look at her. “I will admit, I hadn’t anticipated being invited in for coffee upon visiting your office this morning. I was fully prepared to hound you for an outline of your lesson plans for the first quarter, well before breakfast today.”
“Damn. Already?” Lithia frowned, turning her gaze over her shoulder as if to search for something, and inevitably snapping her fingers instead to summon a scroll of parchment from thin air. When she unrolled it, it was already a few feet long, tumbling out of her hands and across the counter so that Snape had to pick up his coffee and hold it out of the way as it nearly draped over the edge and into his lap... “I might have been spewing some notes when we got in last night, but it’s not fully thought through.”
It was obvious that Snape was just dropping in to bully them into working on his terms, and not the Ministry’s. But he was almost irritated when he asked for her notes and she actually provided them. How dare she act efficiently! “It was nearly midnight when you got in, last night. Ms. Device, did you even sleep?” He looked skeptically across the counter at her.
“A little,” she said, not looking back at him, and raising her coffee for a sip instead. She looked like she may have rolled out of bed hours before this, and primped herself for the day, already. But she also didn’t seem to be dragging. That had to mean the notes were a mess! -Right? But no. The more he looked over them, the more it seemed she’d actually taken her time with it. Even the handwriting was neat.
“I find it hard to believe that you’re already primed for the day, well rested, and fully prepared to fulfill what I had previously assumed was an almost unreasonable request without either the use of a very strong pep-up potion, or a time-turner…”
Lithia just stared at him, which he found all the more infuriating.
“Right. Well then. I suppose I’ll be taking these with me,” he said, finally dropping his glowering eyes back down to the scroll in front of him, letting them graze the lines one at a time.
“You’re welcome to sit right there and finish your coffee while you look them over, Sir. I was just about to start cooking breakfast. If you find anything amiss with those notes, we can go over them right now. Then if you like, you’re welcome to eat.”
“I will go over things with you, but I don’t believe I’ll be staying for breakfast. They start serving in the great hall in about an hour. Coffee is quite enough.”
“Suit yourself.”
Lithia stood up and pulled her wand from the bun in her long hair, auburn curls dipped in black spilling down the middle of her back as she turned away from him. He pretended not to notice the color of her hair or the intensity of her eyes when he looked at her but little things like this still caught his attention and made his mind drift into places too painful to fully acknowledge in his conscious mind. That alone was enough to sour his mood. Snape was only human.
She lifted her wand like the conductor of a symphony and summoned eggs from the fridge. The frying pan drifted down from the wall, buttering itself and setting itself up to brown said nob of butter over a gas burner on the stove. Bacon followed the eggs, dividing themselves up into strips to lay out in a second pan, setting up to slow-fry as the eggs scrambled themselves in a bowl with some cheese and seasonings. Across the room, flour was folding itself into dough with salt, oil, and yeast, rising on the spot and dividing itself into a muffin tin that floated into an oven to bake while Lithia prepped a pot of country sausage gravy on a third burner. Magic made this homemaking thing kind of a breeze, and she moved through the kitchen like every tool and gadget that lined its shelves and drawers were mere extensions of her fingers and toes. To Snape though, when he finally did look up to watch, it was all chaos that somehow landed in neat little projects on the stove-top, easily controlled by the woman with the wand.
Living a good chunk of his life at Hogwarts, Snape hadn’t really experienced a lot of watching anyone else cook. The house elves worked in private, and he only visited the kitchen when he had to. This, he found, was quite distracting. He wasn’t sure what was worse. That he’d been all but completely denied the chance to play the role of unpleasant vulture, this morning, or that he was low-key enjoying the moment. The atmosphere was warm and relaxing, everything smelled even better than before now that there was food in the process of being prepared, and the coffee wasn’t bad. Even having something to zone out on while this un-chatty woman busied herself with other things was bordering on enjoyable.
Unfortunately, the smell of breakfast being cooked alerted the other agent that it was time to come out of hiding, and Lou emerged, tie wrapped around his neck and tucked beneath his shirt collar while he fussed with getting it tied. Even the sound of his voice as he crooned out “Anniiiiieeeee, is that breakfast?” Was enough to bring Snape’s mind crashing back into reality.
As if the moment was utterly ruined by the mere sight of Lou coming in to take Lithia’s seat and block Snape’s view, Snape began rolling up the parchment and pushed the coffee away, unfinished.
“Alright, Professor Device,” Snape said, his tone falling flat. “I’ll be bringing this to Dumbledore to be fully looked over. If you find you need my assistance with anything else this morning… -Send an owl.”
“Professor,” Lou scoffed, looking over his shoulder and grinning at Lithia who didn’t even bother with looking back.
Shut up, Medical Cadaver!
“Will do, Professor Snape.” She said, now more or less talking over Lou’s head, still not acknowledging him. ”Oh, but I was hoping, if you’re willing to, that is, that you could take us out around the castle and the grounds. You know. Just so that we can familiarize ourselves with the place and all that.” Lithia finally turned around to meet Snape’s eyes specifically, catching his gaze just as he was standing up from his seat and making an attempt to exit through the hallway.
“If there is time, later, perhaps. For now, I’m afraid I must leave the two of you to settle in for the day.” Snape was already on his way out, even as he spoke. Lithia had just enough time to follow his fleeting figure with her eyes, opening her mouth to protest, but as soon as she stepped towards the hallway, the door was already slamming shut, shaking pictures on the wall, and rattling the door in its frame.
“What’s up his ass?” Muttered Lou, straightening his tie idly against his throat. But he was easily distracted by the aspect of breakfast when an omelet suddenly drifted out of its pan and onto a clean plate and floated itself across the kitchen to the counter in front of him. The biscuits left the oven, arranging themselves on a platter at the center of the island, and the gravy boat settled in next to it, bacon and sausage joined the mix and suddenly Lou was tucking into an all-out buffet.
Lithia was still standing there looking non-plussed about the whole situation. Something told her that their case was about to be stuck on a back-burner. That simply wouldn’t do.
***
“Headmaster, please. You told me before that you would explain the entirety of this situation to me at a later time, right now is a later time.” Snape stood, slightly exasperated, in the middle of Dumbledore’s office, feeling very much like an arm-waving madman as he found himself yet again, begging for unspoken information from Dumbledore.
“Severus, I understand your frustration, but with that tone of urgency, I have to wonder what the real problem is. Have they done something wrong?”
“No, they’re… It’s a handful to deal with so close to the beginning of starting term and I can’t help but wonder if you’re not just scraping off a migraine onto myself and McGonagall. We’ve got plenty on our to-do lists as is, we haven’t got time to babysit a couple of barely willing aurors.”
“This lesson plan is extensive, Severus. And they’ve done all we’ve asked of them so far. And in the time span of a single night, I might add. You can’t possibly think I believe these two are less than capable.”
Snape glowered at Dumbledore, clenching his hands into fists and tensing in the shoulders but he had no retort. The wisened old man across from him simply sighed through his nose and produced the case folder from his desk drawer, placing it down on the desk as if Snape hadn’t already seen it, before. “It is my understanding that these two aurors from America are following someone on a blood trail.” He paused, watching the icy stare melt into a simple frown on Snape’s face. Snape slowly moved forward and found himself a seat in the armchair at the other side of Dumbledore’s desk.
“A blood trail, Sir?”
“The fires, from my understanding, were caused by a fight. Apparently, they’ve hunted this individual all the way from Canada. I don’t truly know much more than that, and that their suspect is potentially close by. Fudge found out they were aurors from America, only after they were discovered during the fires. Apparently, the MACUSA vouches for them and has been making arrangements with the Ministry to have the two of them track down their man. Fudge believes that having them here to keep the school safe is for the best. Thus, I am afraid you and McGonagall are stuck with them for the time being. Perhaps we will get lucky, and they catch their suspect sooner rather than later. Their classes end, and that will be the last we see of them.” Dumbledore sat there as he finished, clasping his hands over the top of his desk and watching the microchanges in Snape’s face.
“Indeed…” Snape did not seem pleased. All was well and good until they proved to be a couple of loose cannons, and suddenly there were more fires around the school.
Dumbledore couldn’t help the mild upward curling at the corners of his mouth as if he’d heard that thought, loud and clear.
Snape simply glowered. “What are you smirking at?”
“Nothing at all, Severus. Nothing at all.”
But Snape knew there was something behind that look, even the old man’s eyes were beginning to take on that slight gleam again and Snape wanted to bark at him for it. Though he knew it wouldn’t do him any good.
A sudden knock at the door had Snape’s head jerking to scowl behind him as Dumbledore called out gently for the new visitor to step in. Much to Snape’s chagrin, it was that dreaded MACUSA witch who stepped through the door.
Lithia’s eyes swept the room, bouncing at first between the two men with drastically varying looks on their faces, one welcoming, and the other very much the opposite of that, and then a flash of bright red and gold feathers caught her eye, causing her to look up and away from the headmaster and Professor Snape with her eyebrows raising slightly at the sight of Fawkes chained to his perch near Dumbledore’s desk. “Excuse me, Professors, I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” She said to the pair of them but her eyes were fixed on the bird, which was now also turning on his perch to better observe her in return. Where he may as well have not existed in the room before, suddenly he was present and very much in the moment. His feathers fluffed, and he chirruped curiously, his full attention setting upon her as if he saw something he liked, and wanted desperately for her to come closer, but Lithia intentionally kept her distance, holding back the urge to grin. She wanted so badly to come forward and say hello. “I came as soon as I got your note, Headmaster.”
Snape squinted at her and then up at the bird, saying nothing, and caring very little for whatever was happening right now but Dumbledore was still smiling.
“Of course not, Professor Device. Professor Snape and I were only just going over your lesson plan. Might I say, it seems extensive for the first quarter? I wouldn’t want our demands for you to fill a teaching post to get in the way of security.”
Lithia frowned, turning her eyes back to Dumbledore, looking a little taken aback by the mention of the security job. So far, she’d been feeling a little ignored in that department. “...-About that, sir. I was hoping for permission to start a routine of making the rounds. I’m sure you’ll find that Mr. Pulsifer and I have a habit of making good on our word and utilizing every spare minute of our time to sort out the fullest details. We can do all that you ask, but we’d also like to stay thorough with our case. We can’t afford to leave a single stone unturned, and if I’m being honest, sir, neither can you.”
“That remains to be seen, Professor Device. You and your partner are here based on the ministry’s assumptions. If we are lucky, your man has already picked up and moved on. If you are lucky… I’m not certain what that will mean for the safety of this school. I hope you understand that in your case, I do not hope for the best.” Dumbledore’s smile had faded, and the gleeful flicker in his eyes had gone away with it, though he did seem a tad distracted with the way his bird seemed to be hanging onto the conversation as if he could understand what they were actually talking about. Curious. And yet Lithia seemed none the wiser.
“I understand, sir. Really, I do. But every wasted minute on our end is a minute spared on our suspect’s. You have to understand where I am coming from, as well. You don’t know how gruesome the trail is that we’ve been following, Mr. Pulsifer and I.” She frowned, clasping her gloved hands in front of herself, her pale green eyes settled purely on Dumbledore before Snape finally butted in.
“Gruesome enough to have nearly set the castle grounds on fire, from what I’ve heard of it.” This was clearly meant as a jab, but Lithia didn’t react.
Instead she looked at Snape but said nothing in her own defense as if he was only furthering her point. “Other crime scenes have looked a great deal worse, I’m afraid.” And then her eyes flickered back to Dumbledore, almost pleadingly. “Every step closer that we come to catching him for the Ministry, makes it all more worth the trouble to spare and even possibly save the lives that would have otherwise gotten pulled in and snuffed out in the crossfire.”
Both men looked from her to each other, and Snape’s frown deepened visibly. As if he already knew that Dumbledore would be pushing this responsibility onto him.
“I do believe, Professor Device, that you were requesting a tour of the grounds earlier this morning. You won’t need more than one good lap around the castle to memorize things, correct?” Snape finally spoke up, twisting in his chair to partially face her as he spoke.
“Correct… Although a map of the school would be immensely helpful if you have anything like that to offer on hand.” Her gaze jumped from Snape to Dumbledore, who nodded and produced a rolled-up map from his desk, placing it over the scroll of lesson plans he and Snape had been going over previously.
Snape picked up the map and stood from his seat. “If that’s all, Headmaster, I think I would like to get this out of the way so that I can have the remainder of the afternoon to myself.”
“Of course, Severus. Thank you for agreeing to meet with us.” Dumbledore waved a thin hand lightly, dismissing the pair of them.
Once they were out of the office, Snape immediately took to leading the way down the corridor, walking at such a quickened speed that his robes flared out behind him, and his shoulder-length black hair seemed to catch a bit of the same breeze. Lithia kept her distance, taking note of the fact that he needed clearance and an obvious landing strip to take flight from. His wardrobe choice made that break-neck speed-walking seem all the more dramatic, and she had to wonder if he did this on purpose to keep the attention, or possibly admiration of his students. Wasn’t he a head of one of the student houses? -Yeah. He was definitely doing it for visual effects and fancy flare.
“Professor Snape,” she said a little breathily, eventually getting brave enough to jog up beside him, but giving him a wide berth for fluttering room as she did. “As much as I appreciate the idea of getting this tour over in a timely manner, I didn’t mean quite this timely.”
They were just coming out into the main corridor that led to the Great Hall. Snape came to an abrupt stop, planting his feet on the ground and rooting to the spot so that Lithia nearly ran right past him in an attempt to keep up. She was only just turning around to face him again, mouth opening to complain further when he cut her off.
“And I have better things to do right now than to spend all day taking a leisurely stroll around the castle.” Snape whipped the rolled-up map out from under the crook of his arm and held it out to her.
Lithia reached for it, again, offering no definite form of defiance or argument, but no polite thank you’s either.
“If you open that map, you’ll see that we’re currently standing just in front of the Great Hall. This is where all meals are served and where most gatherings are held. As you well know, the Headmaster’s office is just above us at the end of the grand staircase where we just came down. Out this way,” He began walking again, not bothering to actually show her into the Great Hall, as he figured she’d be seeing the inside of it eventually. “-The Quad. Something of a central meeting point where a lot of student’s free periods are spent. If you’re smart, you’ll avoid it unless you’re on surveillance duty.”
“Duly noted.” Spoken now from behind an open map, with her eyes now attempting to trace out on paper where it was that they were going. It looked like they were heading for a suspension bridge, but Snape was still pointing in random directions.
“That way takes you to the divination tower, and that way is the Gryffindor tower…”
It went on like this for nearly two and a half hours, and by the end of it, even though her heart was pounding and her lungs were begging for a proper gulp of precious oxygen, Lithia could fully understand why Snape had been in such a hurry. It was a whole goddamned castle, after all. There was a lot of ground to cover. So much so, that in between explaining different parts of the castle and the grounds during the tour, there was little time left to actually converse with one another. In fact, instead of pressing for anything to fill the quiet spaces, they both seemed to fall mutually into an easy silence that hung between them, giving them just enough time to make some physical observations about one another, but little more than general body language and facial expressions. Snape did not, however, make any attempts to take her out into the forbidden forest, even though he likely had that nagging feeling that she was bound to ask for it. Luckily for Snape, Lithia was already worn out from trying to make full sense of the map. They’d skimmed through the grounds so quickly that she had to stop and check where they were, multiple times, only to look up and find Snape several yards in front of her, already taking off like a bat out of hell. Thus she chose to save the forbidden forest for next time… Or possibly later, with Lou, if they played their cards right. -Or just disregarded Dumbledore’s orders and started going out into the woods on their own despite his demands. Although that would require breaking the old man’s trust, and they needed that for cooperation on his end… Crap. Lithia was going to have to figure out how to get on a few peoples’ good sides just to get what she needed out of all of this. Their plates were fucking full.
That night, just after a lovely dinner in Lithia’s kitchen, she and Lou huddled down over that map and went about memorizing it as best they could. They made a copy of it so that she and Lou could each have one in case one or the other got lost, and then they charmed their individual maps to tell them specifically where one another was on said map so that they would never have to question where the other one was if they had to work in separate parts of the grounds. When the practice became monotonous, Lou took out their time turner and cranked it back a few hours to leave the cottage and escape out into the grounds for a night-time prowl so that Lithia could show him at least some of what he’d missed, but nearly halfway through all of that, about the same time they reached the silhouette of the gamekeeper's hut in the distance, just before the treeline where the sun was beginning to disappear, they made a break for the woods beyond. Looking to make their way back to the site of the fires, no doubt.
It didn’t take too long once they managed to orient themselves. Even several days after the fires were put out, the dry dusty stink of charcoal and ash wasn’t hard to find, and they followed it in. A human nose was useless in detecting such smells at a distance, but it was the wriggly black nose of a hare that led the way. She ran, even though she was partially exhausted already, all the way out to where the trees had turned black, and muddy earth smelled coppery and wrong, picking up visions in the beans of her paws that played through her animalistic mind like she was experiencing the violence in real-time. Some of it was memories of her own. Most of them were memories of others. People who were dragged out here by force and their lives were abruptly ended to add what years of youth they had left on top of those of their attacker. People whose faces could still be slightly made out in the gnarled and knotted trunks of the blackened trees. By the time she changed back, and her paws became boots protecting her feet from the earthen soil again, their screams had already saturated her brain into a sensory overload that didn’t disappear with the change as her animal body did. Lou, only just now coming up behind her, put his hand on her shoulder as if to steady her, and was immediately met with the firm grasp of an un-gloved hand, and a look in her glazed eyes that told him she was only just now coming back to earth.
“What did you see?” Lou asked, frowning deeply as Lithia finally came to stand up on her own two feet again, looking just a little green in the face.
“I saw the fucking dream again.”