Princess

Severus woke up with start by the soft chimming of his wand. He hushed the sound with snap of his fingers and gingerly propped himself up on his elbows. Ide was still asleep; her eyelids were the colour of levander, and they were fluttering a bit, as though she was dreaming, and Severus also noticed a patch of dried potatoes in her hair, which he had to miss before they settled for the nap.

Oh, and what nap that have been. At first Severus fought with all he had against the cripling fatigue, but when the baby too began to yawn for her afternoon nap, he finally surended to the idea of sleep. 

It was dangerous, he was aware, but in the end - after one enormous yawn of his own - Severus decided that trying to carry on the mission he had planned for the night without any rest would be highly unwise too, and so he scooped the toddler up to bed and uncertainly laid down next to her.

That was when the next hitch presented itself; they got in to bed and despite the obvious tiredness in Ides' eyes, she showed no inclination to go to sleep. She kept messing around, sitting up and laying down, all the while babbling something in the undecipherable children gibberish.

So far, the estabilished bed-time-routine consisted of Ide crying herself to sleep, but since she was surprisingly content since Severus returned, he had no idea of how to proceed.

"Go to sleep, please" He groaned as the girl performed somewhat of a somersault roll on the matress and giggled. Now when he accepted the idea of letting himself sleep, he was eager to act on it, and was loosing his patience with the exhilarated kid. 

It was still lot better than if she was crying though.

"Please, come here and shut your eyes and shut your mouth. It's time for a nap" He tried again, his voice soft yet strained at the same time. Ide finally complied and plopped herself down the pillow right next to Severus, and fixed an expectant gaze on to him. 

"What?" Severus asked, suddenly feeling somewhat sheepish. If the girl expected him to sing her lullabies, then she expected wrong. No matter what all Severus went through in the last twenty-four hours because of the girl, he would sooner deliver them both to Dark Lords' feet than to sing out loud to anyone. Period.

But maybe he could talk, couldn't he? Severus was not oblivious to the rich velvety quality his voice posessed. The sound of his voice was one of the very little things that he liked about himself. It was a great turn of things after those few disastrous months in his fifth year in Hogwarts, when his vocal chords were going through the embarassing phase of development, cracking and flying octaves higher at the most inconvenient times to make his miserable self even more embarassing.

And so he talked. First he stayed on the safe ground, very unsure about this whole experiment, listing ingrediences for various potions to the girl, his voice soft, calming silk. It worked to a degree, but not really. Ide obviously enjoyed Severus' unadulterated attention and listened to him closely, wearing a frown of concentration which looked somehow off on such young face, but after the third potion ( a sleeping draught, conviniently) though entertained, she showed no signs of sleep. 

A slight break-through occured during the fourth potion, where one of the mentioned ingrediences was horn of an unicorn.

"Unikoon" Ide repeated excitedly.

"Yes. You like unicorns?" Severus smiled, not even realising doing so.

"Yeee-ah. Unikoon" the girl cooed, and Severus, inspired by that, decided for a shift in his strategy. There was a book, a book he liked as a child, and he did still remembered some parts, even if not with the sharpest accourency. It was not like the girl would know if he messed the story up, anyway.

So he began. "She did not look anything like a horned horse, as unicorns are often pictured, being smaller and cloven-hoofed, and possessing that oldest, wildest grace that horses have never had, that deer have only in a shy, thin imitation and goats in dancing mockery"

Severus could see himself in the reflection of Ides' widened eyes, as she was clearly mesmerised by the liquid sound of his voice, and now, even with the content of his message.

She was blinking and yawning still more, and when Severus broke in to the one poem he had remembered, he knew that the girl won't be awake by the end of it.

"I am a king's daughter,

And if I cared to care,

The moon that has no mistress

Would flutter in my hair.

No one dares to cherish

What I choose to crave.

Never have I hungered,

For that I did not have

I am a kings daughter,

And I grow old within

The prison of my person,

The shackles of my skin.

And I would run away

And beg from door to door,

Just to see your shadow

Once, and never more"

Severus finished in a whisper and smiled when Ide released long puffed sigh, the over-observat eyes of hers finally closed. "Sleep tight, you little thing" He breathed, pulled the brown blanket over the both of them, and finally shut his tired eyes too.

.

The late afternoon Severus woke in to, held no remains of that peacefullness though. The sun outside the window was reddish, preparing to set, and Severus' fingers were slightly shaking in anticipation. 

By the time he went to get the nanny lady ( gracing her with more confusion charm ) Ide was already up, and when he was about to leave she launched disquieting commotion.

Severus was surprised to see the child refusing the woman which was supposed to look after her, and even more taken aback when her protests turned in to coherent form. 

"Sev, Sev..." The tiny human shirled, sprawling her arms in his direction, and for a moment, Severus got pent by a feeling as if he could not breath, as though a giant fist clutched his rib-cage when he watched the little girl fighting her way to him.

Automatically, he made couple of paces back in to the room, knelt down and outstretched one arm, to let himself be hugged by the toddler with a terrible lack of judgement for people.

She was definitetly the first one to willingly demand to be in his presence. Oh, had she only knew.

The girl clutched on him, crying and clenching the fabric of his cloak in her little fists, and by then Severus was truly struggling for his breath. Just how twisted it was, that she clung to him from all people, instead of her mum and dad?

He needed to go.

In despair Severus looked up at the woman for help, and the poor half-wit looked all soft by the touching display.

"Come here Ide, daddy needs to work. We will be playing together sweetheart, and he will be right back to you by tommorow" She soothed and separated the wailing toddler from Severus. He fastly stood up.

"I will be likely gone for the whole night. Do you still have the letter I gave you?" He asked sharply, while cleaning snot and tears out of his cloak. The lady nodded.

"Send it, should I not be back by tommorow noon" With that he turned on his heels and hastily left the room.

.

Something was off. That was the first thought Severus recieved from his brain, as he materialised at the gravel patio of Malfoys' unnecessarily fancy manor.

There were no signs of anything yet, but Severus could sense something, and it made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

He didn't had to wait long to figure the mystery out, because before he could make two steps, the encraved front door flew open, and Lucius - the uncharacteristically feral look still upon him  - jogged to meet him.

"The Dark Lord is here, Severus. Did you found anything?" He whispered urgently, the pale gray eyes ticking all around.

Severus swallowed on empty. "Why is he in here?" He asked with terrible foreboding.

Lucius licked his thin lips. "Avery came here like an hour ago, raving about some prophecy. He summoned the Dark Lord, and they are locked in the drawing-room ever since. People are rushing to and fro, Cissy is there, but I didn't dare to show up until we bring the child" His pale eyes stabbed at Severus expectantly.

Severus suppressed sigh of relief. Some prophecy to distract the Dark Lord played well in to their hands. "That's good. Let's go for the kid" He outstretched his hand towards Lucius, who eagerly wrapped his own in to the crook of Severus' elbow, to let himself be apparated towards their redemption from this whole awkward lost-baby-mess.

"Is she in London?" The blonde arched his fine eyebrows when he looked around.

"I have no idea where she is" Severus admitted bluntly and watched as the anticipation in Lucius' face got imedilately extinguished, to be replaced by angry confusion.

"What the hell you mean? You said you have a plan" He fretted at once, his panic concealed quite poorly.

Severus rose his palm in pacifying maner. "Calm down, I do" He checked whether they might not be overheard and dived in to strict explaining. "Listen to me. From the look of it the child simply disapeared from the face of the earth, for all we know she didn't even had to be present in the cottage that night. She's nowhere to be found, and all we know is that it's a girl around eighteen months old, but no one really knows how she looks like, right?"

With the downing understanding Lucius' face gradually eased, until his bloodless lips were quirked up in sly smirk. "Oh my god, Severus, you are right. All we have to do is bring back any child meeting these parameters"

Severus' stomach quirled a bit, at the ease with which the other man considered a murder of some random child, in order to protect his own family. He decided that he cannot really judge him though; he never cared for anyone to such a degree, he supposed.

But his snapped answer held some exasperation anyway "Of course not! Kidnaping would bring an unwanted attention" Severus was pleased with his reasoning, because it made sense. "All we need to do" he amended Lucius' abrasive conclusion "is to find a fresh corpse of a child meeting these parameters"

The blonde prick grimaced as though Severus' suggestion was the more repulsive of the two. "You want to what, dig graves?"

Severus could tell that Lucius was thinking about the effect a digging children graves would have on his manicure.

"I don't think it will have to come to literal digging. There is around three hundreds of hospitals and clinics over the London. It shall not be hard to find an suitable dying child" Severus explained matter-of-factly. He was definitetly not stoked about the prospect of spending his night like this, but his situation did not allowed to be picky and a missing body was a lesser trouble than a missing child. And the best reward; no innocent dying. No innocent dying by their hands, that is.

Lucius groused some more, seeing the plan unnecessarily complicated, but they both knew that it was Severus who held the upper hand, so after few more half-hearted complains from Lucius the two of them splitted in to the night, heading for the most frequented London hospitals to lie in wait for some fine child cadaver.

Severus wondered what were other people doing on Monday night.