September 1, Hogwarts' Great Hall
Dear Asphodel,
My wife is a bit uptight (her family takes being a pureblood dreadfully seriously). How can I persuade her that this is 1980 and the arc of history bends towards free love?
Love Child
Dear Love Child,
Since you’re calling her your wife, it might be a bit late for that if you didn’t work that out first. Once you’ve made a promise, it’s be there or be square! Best stop arguing and invest in costumes and daydream charms before her parents hex you into the hearthrug—or she gets there first!
Best wishes,
Asphodel
Lily— what on earth does ‘be there etc.’ mean? —Rita
Rita— More or less ‘if you don’t you’re not worth knowing.’ It’s something someone calling himself ‘love child’ would understand. —Lily
Lily— I’m not sure how Barney will feel about using Muggle slang, at least until you’re established. One thing for the letter-writers to do it, the Prophet doesn’t back them. You can’t be all things to all people all at once; you’ve got to win over the bills-payers before appealing to the masses. I’ll make your point, but you might prepare a backup. —Rita
It didn’t take the serene Rowena to work out that Albus had set young Severus up with one of the sets of vanishing cabinets. The lad simply didn’t look like someone who’d spent the night in one of those cozy little closets for visiting scholars that hadn’t seen any use in… well, not while Dippet had been headmaster, certainly. It might have been either Phineas Black’s temperament or Brutus Scrimgeour’s disinterest in real scholarship that had pinched off the flow of visitors, or perhaps it had been the more usual case of a Triwizard tragedy leaving no one in any mood for any student exchanges.
In any case, as charming as the visitors rooms could be once properly outfitted and aired, no elf would replace a room’s ready-stocked furniture without being guided in its occupant’s taste. Guests were one thing, but they never presumed for new staff. The bed would have been sitting in a closed room for decades, if not centuries. Even the elves’ preservative magic could only do so much when not renewed on a regular basis, as Horace had found out when, as a young teacher, enjoying the freedom of the castle, he’d gone poking about in search of abandoned trifles.
Even they couldn’t air completely air out a room like that on short notice, and all the little resident-visitor’s cells had smelled strongly of must and stale stone. Severus didn’t look in the least like someone who’d breathed fusty bed-canopy all night and been woken by a strange and timidly enthusiastic elf shaking with anxiety from not knowing whether Severus wanted an alarm clock or tea or the curtains drawn. The boy would have stormed in to breakfast in a cloud of twanging nerves and clogged sinuses, whereas in fact he looked quite refreshed.
Horace was a touch surprised about that. He’d been told in no uncertain terms that the cabinets were only for married faculty, back when he first started. Dippet had used the term ‘family obligations,’ to be exact. He’d said that he’d reconsider the matter if and when Horace’s parents needed looking after, but Horace was not to run home every evening just because he preferred his childhood bedroom.
To do Dippet justice, when Mother and Father had got old enough that one couldn’t entirely look after the other, he hadn’t even waited for Horace to ask him. The wardrobe had just shown up, with a kind note and a basket of comforts. By then, of course, Hogwarts had been home and really living anywhere else would have been out of the question, so one might say it had been a calculated and cost-free gesture on the old man’s part. But you could say this about Dippet: he may have spent more time in worry than in getting things done, but when he did a thing, he did it graciously.
There were worse legacies, to be sure.
Horace thought that headmasters and gamekeepers had a lot in common, sometimes. Hagrid took very fine care of the castle’s chickens and cows and goats and fed the fish and Squid most dutifully, and was scrupulous in looking after all of dear Minerva’s demonstration animals, but you could see he didn’t care a jot or tittle about them. He was only interested in Kettleburn’s ‘interesting’ creatures.
Similarly, Albus was perfectly polite and helpful and patient with, oh, everyone. But you could see he didn’t really have patience even for the brightest, highest fliers, if they were normal, everyday, reasonable wizards. Like dear old Abraxas, or, latterly, Amelia Bones, or Sara Fudge, or Hippocras Smethwyck, who was going by Hippocrates now he’d got his Mastery. Or even Millie Bagnold, for Merlin’s sake, and she was Minister for Magic now. Albus would certainly have kind words for any of them, and would give advice if asked, although it might be a trifle barbed in the unlikely event of Abraxas doing the asking; that owl had well and truly flown.
It was the grotesques that caught his fancy, and only the male ones. He could be very pleased by the most shining of the girls, but never tried to talk to any until they were old enough to be sharp with him, as if young ladies were fantastic creatures who might be observed and certainly had personalities, but did not have a real language that a man might understand.
You did get that sometimes in the wizards that became of boys who hadn’t chased after witches, especially boys whose dearest friends had all sported dust-jackets and gilt-edged right angles. Horace rolled his eyes over it with Kettleburn, but it didn’t surprise him. The thing he never could understand was that Albus didn’t care much for the boys who behaved themselves, and wouldn’t try to.
He was often pleased enough to appoint ordinary children as prefects, or Head Boy and Girl, but he didn’t make himself available or put himself out. When Miriam Strout had been Head Girl, Horace wasn’t sure Albus would have recognized her in the corridors, and he’d certainly never taken to poor Tom Riddle. He’d given every mention of Regulus Black only his polite smile—and you couldn’t hope to find a harder-working young lad who’d never need to work, or anyone more anxious to please who ought to have had everyone falling all over themselves for his favor—but he’d gone easy on the boy’s scapegrace brother time and time again.
Not that Horace blamed him for that. Sirius Black had it, that indefinable quality. Flair. Je ne sais quoi, as they said across the water. Charm, looks, talent, confidence, style, and it. Some people grew into it; young Sirius had had it from the start.
But Horace didn’t think for a moment that Albus liked the lad because he was likeable, or gave him second chances because Albus saw what Horace did. In Horace’s opinion, Albus saw a boy from a family that flaunted its conservative views and love of the darkest arts shout I WILL BE A WHITE KNIGHT, HOWEVER INCOMPETENT I AM DOOMED TO BE AT IT ON ACCOUNT OF BEING BORN FOR OTHER THINGS AND ALSO MAD AS A LOON, and a little piece of Albus’s brain had sat up in fascination and said, Go on, then, tell me a story.
He’d also been keenly interested in the werewolf boy, until the child had crumbled like a biscuit in tea at the first hint of peer pressure, and thereby proved keenly uninteresting. He hadn’t been at all interested in that year’s Ravenclaw prefect, who was doing very well for a young lad these days and had invited Horace to meet the baby. He hadn’t been interested in the Slytherin toughs, either, which had been something of a relief considering that he had rather liked James Potter.
But then, Horace supposed, it was one thing for a boy who believed himself a White Hat to decide, out of sheer sexual jealousy, that another boy was an inhuman monster to be destroyed without the faintest sense of anything wrong about it. A boy who thought he was a crusader against the unmagical and go about attacking muggleborns was a quite different bushel of knotgrass.
Which was to say: a tidier one. Everything followed logically there. The premise might be regrettable, but it wasn’t distorted. It didn’t promise Albus any story to follow, or any way to insert himself into it and Make Things Better For Everyone.
So it really oughtn’t to surprise anyone that Albus would bend over backwards to break whatever rules he decided to for Severus Snape. There would be a reason in there somewhere, and considering what Severus hadn’t-exactly-confessed to in that serene flat, it would probably be far more Political than Horace wanted to know about.
Reasons were, ultimately, excuses that passed muster. In Horace’s opinion, it boiled down to Albus’s complete inability to look away from colliding broomsticks. The bigger the collision, the more Albus wanted it to happen on his particular pitch.
He’d thought for a while that Evan Rosier might be like that. No one had ever noticed young Rosier missing a game, and he’d… if he hadn’t shouted and waved his arms about like everyone else, he also wasn’t someone you’d expect to. He’d been quite enthusiastic, in his drowsy sort of way, and helped with the face painting when he wasn’t flying. He’d also always brought a sketchbook, and once he’d become captain he’d driven his team to the air on every single post-game evening. Every game, whichever teams had played.
The Slytherins whose favorite school subject was gossip said he was rescuing the antisocial from victory parties, and the ones who saw cunning wherever they looked said he was making sure that his team was comprised only of those who took Quidditch seriously.
The young captain himself had been content to let them think what they liked, but Horace had noticed, during those three years, that innovative new maneuvers (and, indeed, dusty old ones that had fallen out of common use) only worked on the Slytherin team if tried on them first.
Albus attended only occasionally, and usually when he’d been made aware that tensions were especially high. He wore neutral colors (which was to say: never in any House’s particular color combinations; neutral really wasn’t the word) and cheered with happy, indiscriminate enthusiasm for every goal and every feat of youthful acrobatics. Horace didn’t think he’d ever played a day in his life. He supported Pride of Portree, and while he could chat about it very well, as required, Horace didn’t think he’d had any particular reason for choosing it beyond Portree’s being only half an hour away from the school on a good broom.
Which was to say that Albus was clearly a Quidditch fan only because it was expected of him, and for the fun of the fouls. Imaginative nastiness that didn’t do permanent damage at Hogwarts didn’t earn detentions half so harsh as did fisticuffs. Of course he’d find good cause to break any rule that occurred to him, if it would keep the frantic, steaming clockwork that was young Severus near enough to watch the show.
Make no mistake, though: Horace was happy that those boys would be allowed to go on sharing rooms, even if that meant that a staff member who wasn’t even faculty and might not be staying was getting special privileges.
For one thing, Severus probably didn’t know he was getting special privileges. Horace knew because he wasn’t smirking at anyone, and the poor boy couldn’t half help himself with a face like that.
It really was the only way he knew how to smile, Horace was sure. Since he did, in fact, feel superior to his fellow beings on intellectual grounds quite often, and did like to win, that razor-honed eyebrow saw a lot of exercise. But Horace had never seen him smile with his eyes tucked up and teeth showing, like a normal boy. There had been teeth showing at times, but those smiles had always been of the murderous variety.
On this occasion, however, none was in evidence, of either type. Severus had just slunk into breakfast as if he wished he could sit at the foot of the Slytherin table and ignore Gilderoy and Regulus in favor of his book, as usual, while his own year ignored him farther up.
Horace had lived through the Dungeon-Wide Creeping Pall of the disastrous Lily Evans breakup of ’76, and he did not wish to do so again. Oh, there had been other cyclones at the same time, largely unrelated except for who was at their eye, but Horace didn’t think they’d mattered as much to him. Snape might not have been atough, but he was a tough lad. Whatever Poppy Pomfrey said, getting shoved about a bit and publicly mocked again would have been more or less another Tuesday for a boy who didn’t care what other people thought, if he hadn’t managed to make the girl he did care about hate him.
That had been a real tragedy, in Horace’s opinion. It was one of the few things he and Flitwick agreed on. Evans and Snape had made as good a team in both their classes as Potter and Black did in Charms and Transfiguration, and almost as good a team in Runes and Arithmancy, too. When they were speaking.
A real tragedy. If those two hadn’t split up, Horace thought Albus might have stirred his skinny arse to bring back an Alchemy class, or Theory of Magic, even if he’d had to teach it himself. Merlin knew the Ravenclaws had been clamouring for one for decades.
Dippet hadn’t been interested, and Albus tended to smile infuriatingly and burble about collecting dew with full hands in the fields of heaven, or some such rot. Horace had, after reluctantly asking Flitwick what the hell he was quoting, gathered this to mean that he wasn’t going to bother teaching Alchemy to anyone who wasn’t enough of a visionary and passionate enough about it to pick him up by the front of his robes and scream the demand in his face.
Snape on his own was a meticulous sort; he knew how much about Potions he still didn’t know, knew how much room for growth and research there still was in the field, and his experiments were careful. He wouldn’t scruple to shout at anyone, but he didn’t have the sheer arrogance it took to try to be a potions master and a charmsmith and an alchemist all at once just because he could.
Whereas Lily Evans was far too charming a young lady to shout at her Headmaster, but she would have made Severus do it for her if it might win them the chance to play around with alchemy together. And for her, he would have made the effort even if he did think it was silly and airy-fairy.
A real tragedy.
And they both had it, too, although Snape hadn’t had it from the beginning and half the time seemed to wish he still didn’t. Horace had never bothered to find out whether any actual weather magic was involved, but some people could affect the barometer for up to a hundred feet around themselves simply by being in a good mood, or a bad one. They rarely noticed, in his experience. The ones who did, like Albus, used it very, very effectively.
Yes, he was quite pleased that no one had tried to wrestle Snape away from the chap he was currently attached to. No one wanted the walls in the dungeon sweating miserable grey stone dust while Snape drifted listlessly about, biting off the occasional head completely at random. Again.
Besides, Severus was thoroughly incompetent at everything at which the Head of Slytherin had to be excellent. Albus was completely off his rocker, although Salazar knew that wasn’t news.
The only two saving graces to the situation were that it might well only last a term or a year, after which Hogwarts would resume as usual with Horace in his usual position, and that Severus could apparently go home and talk out all his problems and inevitable social explosions with Evan Rosier. Who could, at least, tell him what he’d done wrong sometimes, so Horace wouldn’t have to be the one every time.
“—Going to eat that or poke at it, Horace?”
Horace blinked. “I do beg your pardon, my dear Mona,” he apologized, and looked down to see what he had, apparently, been mutilating.
It was a pile of fried tomatoes, and the word ‘mutilated’ was distressingly apt.
“Can’t abide airs and graces at breakfast,” Pomona reminded him baldly, and descended into her seat with an air of phwumph, if not the actual sound. “What’s eating you? The locusts descend tonight, you know. I should rest up while I could, if I had your lot to look after. I thought you did, usually.”
“Ah, well, it’s not a usual start of term for me, you know,” he confided, glancing down at where his new ‘assistant’ was arguing with Poppy Pomfrey about whether a) one apple and a cup of coffee could be considered breakfast (and if not, whether the deficiency could be made up with a hard-boiled egg) or b) it was mean and ungrateful behavior to turn down the muesli and bacon and sausages and fried slices that the nice elves had worked so hard to offer. And also whether the ‘nice elves’ had any right to decide whether or not a ‘grown wizard’ needed feeding-up.
Severus seemed to think the ‘nice elves’ were all overbearing, tyrannical busybodies, as a matter of species prejudice. By which Horace understood that he had met one house elf once as a young child and failed to be crueler to it than were its masters.
Horace noted with pleasure that Severus had the sense not to tell Poppy that she had no right to decide he needed feeding-up. He hadn’t been out of her care nearly long enough to hope to get away with that, not with all the time he’d spent under her eagle eye. Not with cheekbones and a jaw you could have dissected a kipper with and wrists as knobby as gobstones. Horace was frankly surprised he didn’t try it anyway.
“Well, I won’t say he was a sensible boy,” Pomona judged, heaping her porridge with gooseberries and crumbling some bacon slices over it (Horace tried not to look). “And in your place I think I should have boxed his ears for him last night. Worked bloody hard in my class, though; I daresay you could do worse.”
Horace frowned. “I don’t recall being impressed with his Herbology marks,” he said delicately. By which he meant that if any student had reliably earned only Acceptables in his class, and hardly ever earned anything as low as Exceeds Expectations in anything else, he would have taken it as a mark of disinterest, if not disrespect.
“Oh, well, same problem Minerva had with him,” Pomona shrugged. “Difficulty with the practicals, just doesn’t have the touch. Made up for it in the written work well enough to pass, though. Which took some doing, I don’t mind telling you. Rummiest thing I’ve ever seen. I tell you what, Horace Slughorn, if you send that lad anywhere near my greenhouses, I’ll have you in detention, don’t think I won’t.”
It wasn’t pleasant to have Pomona Sprout glaring at you with a beady expression she probably considered to be shrewd, so he merely said, “Perish the thought, m’dear.” He resigned himself to gathering his domesticated fresh ingredients as usual, and wondered whether he had any appetite for his tomatoes at all.
“What’s he trying to get out of now?” Minerva asked Pomona, sitting down next to her with rather more grace.
“Nothing yet,” Pomona assured her cheerfully, and passed the eggs.
Which were scrambled, not hard-boiled at all. Horace didn’t know whether to hope that this meant young Severus wasn’t entirely awake yet. On the one hand, that would be cheeringly normal of him. On the other, Horace wouldn’t be able to pass off the responsibility for keeping an eye on the House at breakfast for heaven knew how long.
“Minerva, m’dear,” Horace said hastily, smiling charmingly under her gimlet eye, “you look lovely as ever, but rather tired. Do have some tea.”
As he’d hoped, she only glowered at him suspiciously for another moment, before accepting the tea and launching into the traditional rant about the patrol schedule.
Albus interrupted it, probably because he’d foolishly joined forces with Poppy in praise of hearty breakfasts and caused Flitwick to start lecturing him about complex sugars and how to avoid needing a nap every day after lunch and why ‘jammy sylvan dolichocephalic ectomorphs should not take their jumped-up metabolisms for granted.’
Horace didn’t begin to understand this turn of phrase, but it made Albus turn up his twisty nose and Severus choke on his coffee.
In very understandable haste to avoid being lectured about fibre at breakfast and, perhaps, to get back at Severus for coming so close to laughing, Albus suggested, “Severus, perhaps you could be of some assistance to our good Professor McGonagall?”
Severus blinked at him and then at Minerva, and then helpfully passed her the fruit bowl.
“Thank you,” she said graciously, and took a bunch of grapes. “What do you mean, Albus?”
“Why, Minerva, that our young Master Snape here has only lately come from running a laboratory, and so he must—”
Severus was giving Albus a funny look, and followed it up by interrupting him. “Excuse me, sir, but I don’t know what you mean by ‘running.’ It was Master Belby’s lab.”
“I think he means, Severus,” Horace put in comfortably, “that my good friend Damocles has so very many projects, and surely, as his senior apprentice, you were effectively responsible for the administration of your laboratory.”
Severus blinked at him. Tragically, Horace didn’t even think it was fake confusion because he’d worked out he didn’t want to be anywhere near Minerva’s schedules. “Er… no, Professor, as senior apprentice I was ‘effectively responsible’ for the stillroom. Ranjit Patil took over most of the paperwork over a year ago.”
Horace blinked back. “How unusual,” he said, only a touch blandly.
Severus raised an eyebrow at him—rather defiantly, Horace felt, although what he thought Severus was in fact trying to communicate was the drawling sort of sardonic expression that had made the Malfoy boy the bane of his fellow prefects. “He seemed to prefer that arrangement to the alternatives.”
And he might not have weeded all the defensiveness out of his face muscles, but his slightly amused, matter-of-fact tone was perfectly chilling, and the cool glint in those colorless eyes sent goosebumps down Horace’s back. Refusing to show it, Horace said affably, “An admirable attitude in an apprentice.”
“Serving as most needed?” Severus asked, tilting his head thoughtfully, his eyebrow sliding up another notch. “Valuing the real requirements of the situation over a job description? In anyone, I should think. But so few wizards are able to see sense when presented with the opportunity to serve the common good in a way they personally dislike.”
Horace felt himself go an angry red, and if they hadn’t been at the breakfast table he might well have informed the young snot that he had bloody well tried to offer his resignation, and then where would Severus have been with no guidance and no experience, and what was Severus’s definition of the common good anyway, because in Horace’s opinion intimidation and the creative killing of helpless animals just to make a point was unlikely to lead to any common good that Horace recognized!
Fortunately, Pomona got in first with a puzzled, “What alternatives?”
“Oh,” Severus said, turning to her with a rueful twist to his mouth, “he said he’d rather deal with the paperwork than with the filthy temper the suppliers and the equipment schedule put me in—which was probably true. And that I wasn’t as good at those sorts of logistics as he was, which was certainly true. And then it turned out the potion we were working on required some spellwork that was a bit beyond him. Master Belby asked if he’d rather be moved to a different lab, but he said that even if all the brewing he got to do was ingredients preparation it would be excellent experience towards running his own brewery one day.”
Horace let him talk—perfectly naturally, as harmless as any other young swot—and felt the cold sweat evaporate on his temples as the atmosphere returned to that of a pleasant collegial breakfast table. After Severus’s abominable failure to behave like a new and very junior addition to the staff last night, Horace hadn’t expected anything like this under-the-table tail-rattling.
He was proud and heartened by it, of course, not least because he didn’t think anyone but Albus had noticed, but ye gods. Horace couldn’t think when anyone had got to him so badly, since the war. Even when Severus had unnerved him before, he hadn’t struck under Horace’s skin and pricked his temper.
“Didn’t you want that experience?” Pomona asked, frowning at Severus as though she’d thought for a moment she understood him and was baffled again now.
“Patil has hopes of running a commercial lab one day,” Severus explained, and continued to explain for at least a minute and half. At the end of it, he’d avoided sounding like an overbearing petty tyrant and reasonably-subtly suggested to Minerva that anyone who gave him paperwork to do would get it back meticulously filled out in ways they would not like, and also, as a matter of compulsion against which Severus was helpless, completely rewritten with margins full of snide commentary.
“And speaking of demarcation of duties, have you finished eating, m’boy?” Horace broke in again cheerfully, because he’d quite lost his appetite and a bony drakelet a quarter his age could not be allowed to think he’d won. He would have been proud, if he wasn’t still feeling so rattled.
“Quite, sir,” Severus said, making Poppy scowl forebodingly. As he rose, only his limply unpleasant hair and rawboned vulture of a face stopped him looking perfectly good-natured, in an uninspired sort of way.
You’re imagining things, old boy, Horace told himself. You’ll be sleeping with nightlights next. You know perfectly well the boy’s mouth goes running off without him when he’s cornered; it doesn’t mean he follows after it.
The hair at the back of his neck, facing his old student, his new teaching apprentice, factotum, and protégé, was not convinced.