September 1, Hogwarts' Great Hall (Evening)
Dear Asphodel,
All my life, I’ve been surrounded by nervous people overwhelmed by my glorious presence, help!
Snuggles,
Rock Star God-Merlin
Dear Remarkably Supreme Goiter-Monster
Have you tried being NICE to them?
Smooches,
Asphodel
P.S.: Take my job seriously, you prat! And stop breaking into the study when you’re meant to be babysitting!
Dear Asphodel,
Harry wanted to see where Mummy and Tigger work so hard for up to five minutes at a time when they’re shamefully abandoning the family business.
But Wormy really is acting extra-squirrelly, don’t you think?
Cuddles,
Radiant Supreme Genius Megastar
Dear Blind Self-Absorbed Git-For-Brains
Goodness, I wonder how Peter could possibly have gotten the idea that somebody who teases him about whether he has a girlfriend and every possible plug-ugly naff of a girlfriend he might possibly have persuaded to go out with him despite his obvious drawbacks and teased him mercilessly practically every day at school and calls him wormy might not be a particularly safe person to talk to during his first week at a never-existed-before job that could dissolve under him if it doesn’t start off well?
Nervous blokes don't think you're funny. They just think you’re mean. Keeping on when you can see it bothers them is a mean thing to do. You’re better than that, Sirius, that’s why you’re Gryffindor and that’s why you’re our friend.
I’ll see you when you’re done sulking about this, Scorpio Spectacularus.
Love (for real),
Lily
Nostalgia wasn’t what perched Severus atop the roof of the Hospital Wing, the lowest tower in the castle because nobody wanted to fly or climb any higher than that to wrestle with a giant clock. It wasn’t sentiment plastering his gaze to the solemn-lighted boats drifting apprehensively towards the welcoming castle. He didn’t care that the Black Lake under them was darker and deeper than the grey velvet of the skies above, full with the promise of the first September night’s soft rain.
It was just that if he didn’t get a memory for the pensieve of lamplit dories cutting over dark waters from the squat, forest-bound station, burdened with innocent, eager, apprehensive expectation, a professional artist who knew where he slept would gut him. Worse, Evan might try to pretend not to be disappointed to have missed the chance at a scene so picturesque.
And Severus would have failed him. Would have dropped the ball on helping Evan in his work, his clean and daylit work, when it would have taken no effort and cost him nothing. Ev wouldn’t have had to gut him.
Which Ev would know perfectly well, the viperous bastard, and his half-second of silent sad eyes before he determinedly ignored the whole issue wouldn’t be innocent at all.
Unless it would. Which would be worse still. And you could never quite tell, with Evan.
Apparently Luke and Narcissa actually enjoyed this sort of game. Severus didn’t want any part of it.
So he had to do it, waste of his precious preparations time though it might be. And since he had to, as a Slytherin he was obliged to find a way to make good use of it. Which was why, even though a pensieve visitor would see where Severus was rather than what he saw, he’d nicked a telescope from the Astronomy tower first. He wasn’t going to memorize all their faces tonight, but the head start would be helpful.
He had thought about nicking two, but even if Ev would be able to look through a telescope set up for him (which would actually be a fascinating experiment, if Evan didn’t already know), he would have had to keep adjusting it; the enchanted boats were rapid. The telescopes weren’t even enchanted to track even slow celestial motion; students were expected to work out where to look. Ev wouldn’t really be after close-ups, anyway; it was the nightscape he’d want.
Not unexpectedly, he only recognized one face besides Hagrid’s, although quite a few gave him the sense that if he saw them next to people he knew, a family resemblance would jump out. In one or two cases, he thought he could name the families. He was sure Ev, Narcissa, Reggie, and probably even Wilkes could have placed every drop of wizarding blood on the water.
He didn’t know the one boy he did recognize—had never spoken with him, didn’t know his name. He’d only seen the laid-back-looking little ginger once, in Diagon Alley, people-watching with Evan and Narcissa a few months ago. It was a face that had You can’t phase me: I sit For baby monster siblings written all over it, and it seemed to think Hogwarts looked promising.
Severus ruled out Ravenclaw. No matter how intelligent the boy might be, he had no more chance of getting in than Evan’s particular genius had. Ravenclaws were earnest or dismissive or overexcited, as a matter of general style; easygoing wasn’t in their hollow bones.
Or perhaps it was just that if anyone came in with an even-tempered attitude, it got pecked out fast by the general frantic air of the House, the expectation of feeling pressured by every assignment, the culture of We Must Get Everything Right. If the Hat really did want the children to be well as well as do well, it might need more persuasion than Severus had given it before it sent a natural tranquility like Ev’s into the land of frazzled obsessions. In Slytherin, you were meant to look unruffled, and lay out your plots calmly.
(When Narcissa was in a pet with Severus, she called him the worst Slytherin in the history of ever. He did his best, but secretly felt she had a point, or possibly several. But every other cobra had probably been called something similar at least once, and no few of the sidewinders and rattlesnakes, and some of them had done very important things.)
The boy next to the redhead was overexcited. As Severus watched, he started to poke the redhead, who looked agreeable but confused, and then their mouths started opening and closing energetically, and then their boat started rocking, and then the girls in their boat started smacking them with both hands and wands, although fortunately not with magic.
Hogwarts as usual, then.
Severus had looked at a few other boats full of apprehension, slack-jawed gormlessness, excitement that made him flinch and jerk the telescope away, and the occasional intelligent spark of deep skepticism, when the boat with the loud children overturned and the Giant Squid eeled up to the rescue.
Severus dutifully watched through the telescope, wondering exasperatedly why the one member of staff who was expressly forbidden to do magic was sent every year over a frigid evening lake to escort fifty-odd children who were also not yet allowed to do magic, might not be able to swim, and had not been provided with life jackets. The Squid was a good and friendly lake-guardian, as those who knew it well knew, but—
Ah, yes. One of the girls had shrieked away from the Giant Squid was doing her level, flailing best to beat it away from her. It gamely kept trying, but was also trying not to hurt her. Severus knew Hagrid was trying to explain, if the girl could just stop screaming long enough to hear his giant lungs shouting.
With a sigh, he turned a levicorpus on the little idiot before she could breathe water screaming, like Lockhart, and do herself a mischief. It meant he and the Squid all had to wait for Hagrid to row over and flip the boat back over by hand, but at least Severus had, since the beech tree all the Lockhart nonsense, long since worked out the bloody wandwork. He didn’t have to further terrify and humiliate an ickle firstie by holding her upside down.
Which was a very great mercy. It was odds on she wasn’t wearing either muggle trousers or proper soft, split-legged, foam-hemmed wizarding underrobes. Fashions in Diagon lately had leaned more towards displaying what wizards would once have considered fit only for private wear or clothes for muggles, with robes worn open and cloaks cut so high in summer as to barely qualify as capes. Skirts and frocks had become quite common.[1],
(Severus had no opinion about this. He’d been informed that, until he was willing to stop dressing like an eccentric Victorian accountant and wear traditional robes, he was not allowed one. He had pointed out that a) Lucius was the only wizard their age who wore straight-cut full-length robes at any occasion that did not boast nervous elves holding golden platters and b) robes did not go well with the high boots he liked, and these points had been flicked away like less than dust. By which Severus had gathered that Narcissa was well aware that her argument was irrational and being right was not going to help him win this one. And he wasn’t giving up either waistcoats or his frock coat; robes without them felt... loose, louche, unanchored, unarmored.)
Once the kids were all safe, if not dry, Hagrid started looking around for who besides the squid had helped. Severus’s clothes were hard to see against stone and a night sky, though. Especially when he’d instinctively ducked behind a pointy crenellation.
He hoped Hagrid had the sense to say something vaguely threatening about how they’d always be safe at Hogwarts because, see? Hogwarts was always watching them and looking out for them.
Half-hoped, at best. He knew better.
It occurred to him that, had he not humored the request Evan hadn’t thought to make, he wouldn’t have been in position to help the shrieking panicker (or to learn who was most likely among the first years to go all to pieces the first time a potion started spitting), and so it was in a pensive mood that he slipped into place at the Great Hall.
Slughorn’s sour look washed right over him. It wasn’t his fault if Slughorn didn’t allow enough time for work assigned to be done well enough that it didn’t have to be done again later. Or if Sluggy dropped him into the middle of sensitive negotiations without adequate preparation. Or if what Slughorn wanted out of them, even if Severus wanted it too, was less important than speaking for the lethally contagious who had no other credible voice, no recourse but the fangs of their contagion.
—Of course, it occurred to him, he also wouldn’t have been in position to help the hysterical twit-child if he hadn’t got involved with idiots who couldn’t say boo to parents who thought the Dark Lord was sensible and right as well as powerful.
Besides, the twit-child hadn’t been in any real danger, surely. Hagrid would have summoned the Tartan, in the worst case. Or grabbed her with less delicacy than the squid had shown, since he never could understand full-blooded humans were more fragile than himself, and dragged her back into a boat by force.
Severus noticed that his thoughts were jumping about, and wondered at it. He hardly had any real cause to be nervous. Just because five sevenths of the current crop of students had seen him beaten up and humiliated at one point or fifty…
…And besides, it was only three sevenths, wasn’t it? At least, Severus had only been habitually humiliated through fifth year. After that, Black had seemed to realize his own impulse control issues and haunted Lupin’s heels like a devoted omega as often as not. Potter, while at least as insufferable and self-righteous as before, had taken his duties and his NEWTs at least half as seriously as Quidditch, and therefore been busier than in previous years.
Potter had taken looking good for Evans, and anyone who might grass to her, very nearly as seriously as Quidditch, too. Classes had still been painfully tense, but there hadn’t been flying ingredients in NEWT potions. The occasional bout of fighting or guerrilla hex-fest had broken out, but that was mostly incidental between the houses at large; arguments rather than ambushes. When it came to Severus, Potter and his cabal had started limiting themselves, in front of everyone Gryffindors would believe, to taunting and what they thought was sarcasm. It wasn’t true peace, and certainly wasn’t leaving him alone, but it had helped.
And Slytherin had closed ranks, which had helped more.
Once they’d gotten the hang of it, at least. One might think that a collection of aristocratic scions would have some understanding of self-discipline, but it became a House joke quite early on in sixth year that you could hardly expect Slytherins to move in lockstep, since snakes didn’t have feet.
Since it was a House joke, it didn’t have to be a good one. Since it was Narcissa’s joke, everyone pretended it had been anyway.
(At least, Severus had just groaned loudly and put a sofa cushion over his head. But he was accustomed to speaking truth to psychotics in stilettos, and had the bruises to prove it.)
So less than half the school, really. The oldest 43%, to be sure. The nearly-half the rest looked up to. But only… seven years times four Houses: twenty eight forms, and the three highest-threat forms—three years' worth of the most fully educated Gryffindors—divided by twenty-eight forms total… three years? Yes, call it the top three, because first years in the fall of ’76 would been too busy getting their bearings in more basic matters to wrap their minds around upper-form politics before Slytherin had gotten its act together. First years always were, their first term, even in Slytherin.
Since they generally spent the next term reeling over the reality of exams, Severus might have gone so far as to think most of the rising fifth-years might not have been paying much attention during the worst of things, either. But that would have been foolishly optimistic, when Black and Potter had gone to so much trouble to make hounding him a spectator sport.
Still, only 11% of students were in the top three years and in Gryffindor. Three problem classes out of fourteen, if he even took all fourteen. Nor would he be alone in front of them, or even the primary focus of their attention.
For that matter, given Dumbledore’s lunatic insistence on trying to make the two Houses most at loggerheads work together during the single most volatile class available, they wouldn’t be alone in front of him. This would provide them with ample opportunities to try to make him lose face in front of his own House, but it would also provide him with natural allies to whom he was no stranger.
Not cake, but manageable, surely? Like dueling a Dark Lord who was holding back to teach him. Survivable, so—
“No need to be nervous, m’boy,” said a kindly voice, and since it was in his ear as well as exactly what he was thinking, was Slughorn a telepath now?!, he jumped.
Sluggy chuckled and patted his hand. “Not to worry, not to worry,” he said, with a much kindlier aspect than he’d been lowering at Severus not two minutes ago. “Children don’t bite, m’boy. Well,” he lifted a wagging finger, “I have met one who did…”
Severus waited for it with flat eyes.
Too pleased with himself to notice, Walrusface finished, “and you mustn’t think dear Rufus has forgotten! You really must apologize to him, Severus, now you’re both grown wizards.”
On Slughorn’s other side, Professor Babbling choked.
“Why would I apologize for teaching a future Auror a valuable lesson?” Severus asked, eyebrows raised.
“What lesson was that?” Professor Babbling asked, morbidly curious.
Since hers was far from the only curious face aimed his way, Severus elected to answer her in Mandarin: he was sure that Flitwick, at least, spoke every other language Severus knew, certainly all the Western spellcasting ones. With Mandarin he at least had a chance at private conversation. “Not to turn his back and walk away from one he had denied, insulted, and patronized, honored teacher, no matter how much smaller was that one,” he told her. “Also, the lesson was to my great detriment: I was given punishment and, beyond that, the behind side of his trousers did not taste delicious.”
Severus was out of luck: Flitwick and Babbling both laughed. Oh well; at least they both laughed.
“But don’t you think,” asked Babbling, who was a Slytherin even if she didn’t seem to care about it much most days, “that it would be wise to mend fences, since he is an Auror?”
“Certainly it would,” Severus agreed, because stupidly stubborn wasn’t the same as just plain stupid.
After a moment of watching him look back at her placidly, she sighed, “This is a men thing, isn’t it.”
Severus told her, “Possibly, but since only one of us was old enough to have testosterone poisoning at the time, it’s equally likely to have been a cobra thing.”
Then he glared, because Slughorn had sprayed pumpkin juice all over the table, and half his face.
“This explains so much,” Babbling said faintly, and passed the frantically nodding, choking Slughorn a napkin.
“The juice went on me,” Severus pointed out indignantly, cleaning his face off with his own napkin. A good portion of his indignation was for Slughorn evidently not bothering to find out or remember his students’ snake-names (unless Slughorn had just been unprepared to hear hormones named scientifically at breakfast? He was quite old… but no, surely: he was still a brewer!)
He’d told Babbling out of politeness, and more, self-preservation. Most legless serpents were peaceable, conflict-avoidant creatures who killed only to eat and when fleeing or giving a sharp warning didn’t work. Similarly, most Slytherin serpents liked to play games, including metaphorical arm-wrestling, and were dangerous when they had to be, but were largely polite, family-oriented, and risk-averse, and liked to build their castles in the air on very solid foundations.
The whole point of giving snake-names publicly, though, was that, while most Slytherin were just variations on your garden-snake variety peace-loving, don’t-tread-on-me I-have-plans-I-won’t-let-you-interfere-with, don’t-you-dare-bite-my-eggs asp, 'most' wasn't 'all.' Some, like stiletto snakes, like saw-scaled vipers, who seemed unnatural and unpredictable for their aggression, their irritability, or because they moved in strange directions. Some snakes no one knew anything about, like Narcissa’s silvertail, so good were they at evading researchers.
Slytherins complained, if Severus snapped at them or told them to their face their spelling was horrific, that he should have introduced himself by saying, ‘I was identified as the snake with a subtlety deficit.’ And that was just when he spoke without artifice, before they crossed him hard enough to find out which kind of cobra he was.
He and Babbling were at least nominally colleagues now, and he didn’t know what kind of snake she was, or what form her annoyance would take if she felt she should have been warned. And she certainly hadn’t been, before now. She was so far removed from Slytherin politics that he’d never expected her to know. She certainly had no formal obligation to know, never having had a titular role in the House, much less as its Head.
Unlike Slughorn. But just at the moment, with sickly squash juice dripping down his linen collar, staining the thirsty fibers with insipid spices and cooling Slughorn saliva, that wasn’t the larger fraction of Severus’s revolted irritation.
“But not on your napkin, Severus,” said Flitwick, making a magical copy of his own napkin and passing it over anyway. He must have done something else to it, because it worked much better than Severus’s had. Even Severus’s hair dried off when he dabbed at it, without going sticky or spiky. Severus raised an appreciative eyebrow at him.
“Children,” Dumbledore murmured ambiguously from farther down the table. He was watching them with an infuriating smile and eyes dancing like a figure skater’s blades under spotlights, but he was also doing a chin-nod at the doors.
They were still closed, but when silence fell so everyone could eye them, the sharp clip-clop of McGonagall’s hard-soled shoes rapped nearer and nearer. Then they did swing open, and Severus’s vision swam with the surreality.
A swarm of black robes and pointed hats seethed in semi-orderly fashion to settle themselves around the four long tables, color-coded by the collars, while the Tartan stood by the doors and watched keenly, turning on her heel to go await the first years once Dumbledore gave her the nod.
It was the eighth time Severus had been in this scene, and the angle was wrong. It wasn’t the first time he wasn’t weak and scared and starving and bruised and feeling filthier than he was, but it was only the third, and the last two times he hadn’t been able to believe it either.
It was the first time he’d faced this hall in new clothes, clothes he’d bought with his own money, chosen-himself-clothes without holes mended fifty times. The first time in boots made for his feet that didn’t squeak or leak. There was sharp defense well-balanced and well-sheathed against his ankle, straightening his posture without chafing,
His robes weren’t useless sheets of threadbare netting glamoured barely respectable over thirdhand rags, either. He had first aid tucked away, and stronger medicines, too, and extremely unpleasant topicals and suffimitories in phials that would become most delicate once removed from their careful cushioning charms. His wand would spring to his hand from whichever of three different sheaths he moved to draw it from.
Neither did he really need the boiled egg or flask of water in his side pocket: an elf would be delighted, literally delighted, to give him whatever he asked for. To bring him whatever he asked for (although he didn’t think they knew how to fry fish properly). It was literally his privilege to call one into his presence. He didn’t even have to go sneaking to the kitchens and risk assault if he forgot to store food away. Anything he needed would be brought to him; he had only to ask, and there would be no cost.
His rooms in the castle were closet-sized, lonely, and on the gloomy side, but they were free of inventive Mulciberness and had a padded corner bath in them. If the bed reeked of faded moth-repellant herbs and the mattress was elderly and hard and rather thin, it was free of insects and poking springs and he did not, in fact, need it at all. He could walk straight home through the wardrobe whenever he had the time.
He looked at his hands. There, that was the barbed wire scar on the side from almost getting caught sneaking the Nelson lads to see Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. Or had it been The Body Stealers? Or maybe The Horror of Frankenstein.
One of those; he couldn’t recall which. It had been before Hogwarts, but after meeting Lily. He was sure about that, at least: she’d held it over him for weeks how smart she’d been for not wanting to see it, not quite understanding (as usual) that he'd needed to go—not out of a pressing desire to see Mary Shelley’s masterwork desecrated for cheap thrills but because it would make him right with the other boys for a while.
She’d been right to give it a miss, of course, despite utterly missing the point, but Severus—Seth, then, to everyone but Mam—had been lucky. At least the dogs had backed down when he’d yelled at them. Tommy Yates had had worse than rust to clean out of his leg.
So that was normal, that looked like his own hand. So did the knobby wristbone and the stubborn, barely-there little pale pinprick stains on his fingertips and knuckles from giving the stirring charm on the Felix Felicis its daily refresher. There, staining the fingers of his left hand, was the deeper, golden splash-stain, not yet faded, from when they hadn’t realized the Bulgarian hotel’s fireplace had a drop-off at the back enchanted with a Vanishing charm, to sweep the ashes into, and Severus had had to grab to prevent toppling when the back of his cauldron-stand had suddenly ceased to exist.
Here was the old, jagged scar from where his knife had slipped cutting dragonhide, the cut that had slithered raggedly from the heel of his palm so dangerously near his wrist and made him decide a knife that couldn’t rebound while reverberating like a struck bell would be quite a good idea. And here, almost below his cuff, very new indeed, a faintly blue mark that wasn’t really his own. Not a stain or a scar: a sleepy kiss good morning.
He slipped his thumb under the cloth and pressed down, hard and harder, until his bones creaked under the pressure and it finally hurt.
There: he had been sent off from home with a bruise after all, so he was Severus on September first at Hogwarts. There was no need to feel the world had gone all sidewise and inside out and left him trying to breathe treacle. If this was a bruise he was pleased about, it was still a bruise he’d carried here from home. Everything was, after all, if not quite normal, comprehensible.
It was a good job he’d taken that pensieve memory of the boats. It was only fair, what with Ev laying down cunning time-bombs to stop him embarrassing himself by running screaming out of thickly populated rooms. Especially since cooking for him was going to be trickier now.
They were going to have to talk about the cooking.
Severus could feel eyes on him, and he could feel that the whispers were aimed. It was because only a few of the Slytherin children had been given any idea he’d be there, of course. Or, in the case of the younger students who didn’t recognize him, because there was an extra wizard at the staff table, and between Severus and Robards and Trelawney they didn't know who was there for what purpose. They couldn’t see he was losing his mind.
“What was that you were saying about cobras?” asked Professor Babbling, and she was even kind enough not do it in a particularly kind voice.
“Ah, yes, snouted cobras,” Severus said in an I-was-interrupted-so-thank-you voice, nodding briskly. He didn’t care if it looked pathetic to anyone who might have been following along, as long as the children taking in their first impressions were fooled. “Strong, as snakes go; they can make a very impressive display, lifting quite a lot of themselves off the ground, and enormous hood flare, as these things go. Big hair, as one might say. Odd creatures, though; did you know they make their nests in termite mounds, as often as not? Abandoned ones; they don’t eat bugs. And they don’t get called king snakes even though they do sometimes eat puff adders. Odd, as I say. And they can be… oversensitive.”
“Not the sort to take being bitten lightly, then,” Babbling suggested dryly.
“Oh, they can fall to other snakes in their own turn,” Severus said, less dry than wry. “Can’t we all? Snouted cobras are considerate, though; they don’t strike the moment they’re frightened. They bluster first. Which, I suppose, is fine if all your challengers are mice.”
Slughorn very nearly breathed pumpkin juice again.
“I never would have pegged you for a gossip,” Babbling noted, grinning at Severus a little.
“I don't care who Scrimgeour’s dating,” Severus returned, affronted, “it’s a character assessment.”
She grinned a little wider. “Is that what Miss Black told you?”
“And,” he said firmly, “I’m sticking to it.”
Then the doors to the foyer opened again, and the House ghosts preceded the rising first years into the Hall. They circled the High Table, Sir Nicholas and the Friar calling merry hellos to everyone, greeting the Trelawney sparrow warmly and welcoming Severus and Robards back. The Grey Lady floated more ceremoniously, her face, as usual, detached.
The old Baron stopped right in front of Severus, his eyes piercing and steady as the silvery blood throbbed down his doublet.
He didn’t speak; he never did. He didn’t even speak in Severus’s head, which was something of a relief. Everyone was secretly afraid he’d someday do that and either their heads would explode or their brains would dribble out their ears, or that he never spoke because his voice struck all listeners like the imperius, or that he could only speak like a mandrake or a banshee.
There weren’t any words, no compulsion, no shrieking. Severus felt, instead, a great pressure of question around his skull. It was very like the beginning of a migraine, before the pain set in: that sense of weight-all-around. This, though, this was awake and examining him, joyless, endless, implacable. This was the closing-in of a warden’s expectation in a silent language that was an alien to innocents.
Severus half-rose on his hands, and half-bowed. What else was there to do, except run screaming?
The Baron gave him the quiet, dull eyes of a Sisyphus long past the agony of hope, but the vice-grip of demand eased. The ghost joined his fellows in front of the High Table.
Severus had always thought that a bit Gryff-centric. Muggleborns were raised to be afraid of ghosts, but had to turn their backs on them while being Sorted. That meant their ability to function while afraid was in the spotlight while Gryffindor’s hat was evaluating them. The effects of peer pressure could look a great deal like courage to people who didn’t think things through properly.
Especially to small children who preferred to tell themselves that they were brave rather than terrified of looking uniquely phasmophobic in front of up to six hundred strangers. It was no wonder Gryffindor tended to get more students than anyone but Hufflepuff, and had always got more of the muggleborns even when that wasn’t such a hotly charged political issue.
“What was that about?” Babbling whispered curiously. “He didn’t do that when I got here. Horace?” Slughorn shrugged.
“The Baron is from a martial age,” Severus said carefully. He felt his mouth try to tug up a little: he’d seen the curiosity in Sluggy’s eyes, and thought the bland shrug and its accompanying mysterious smile under the monster moustache was good policy. “I think he may see you as monks at heart, and outside his particular… idiom.”
The Runes Master frowned. “What do idioms have to do with it?”
“It would take too long to explain,” Severus said, letting his eyes fall in a half-lidded look he hoped would be taken for apology, “and I suspect I’d lose you even before the coconut-bearing songbirds.”
“…What?”
“See?”
“I don’t think I should enjoy being a monk,” said Slughorn cheerfully.
“What about the Trappists?” Severus asked. “You could drown in ale, all day.”
“An excellent point!” Slughorn toasted him with the magically (elvishly) refilled pumpkin juice. “Although I prefer mead.”
By the time the first years had shuffled into the Hall and McGonagall had set the stool down to be stared at apprehensively, half the staff were arguing over whether ale was still in a different category from beer and what hops had to do with it, most of the rest (including the Fat Friar) were arguing whether the quality of alcohol out of Normandy made up for its lack of variety, and Severus and Flitwick were staring at each other in mutual incomprehension over their respective preferences for dry green-apple cider versus sweet scrumpy mulled with cherry malomel and maybe a dash of caramel syrup or butterbeer.
When McGonagall put the Hat on the stool and (rather pointedly) cleared her throat, Severus was in the middle of incredulously demanding, “What are you, half butterfly?” and it rang out into one of those silences that happens in crowds, very clearly.
Unphased, unlike the flushing Severus, Flitwick chirped, “No wings yet, alas, but I’ll let you know if a proboscis develops,” and turned, bright-eyed and unruffled, to the Tartan.
She gave them all the if you’re QUITE finished eyes with which Severus was all too familiar, and turned her gaze to the Hat.
Sitting behind her, Severus forgot his embarrassment in gleefully noticing that she nudged the stool with her foot before it started its stretch-and-develop-features routine. It was so subtle the children couldn’t see it from in front, but she had definitely given it its wake-up cue with a kick.
It wasn’t the same as Narcissa being there, or feeling the irked little jolt on his own ankle. He still felt a bit more at home.
He hadn’t expected Trelawney’s uninformed haiku again, but he had, he realized, unconsciously been expecting the Hat to sing what it had on Robards’ head. And he hadn’t taken into account that, unlike what it had produced for Robards, the Trelawney haiku had not followed the usual formula of friendly free-verse for fluff-brained firsties. Today, the hat sang:
Hail! To the brilliant, and hail to the strong,
Hail, traveled wanderers! Welcome, new friends,
To where, will-ye nill-ye, you’ll always belong.
You fear for who you’ll be, I apprehend,
But history’s ragged form is on your side:
Your gnawing knot of dread I’ll swiftly mend.
Long guardian am I of Hogsmeade’s pride,
Soft-tattered now, a soldier’s helm of old,
Turned confidant and keeper, willing guide.
How came I hence? Their stories long ill-told,
Trailblazers worked and strove in days of yore
The future of their own to raise and mold.
Laud always first: bold, glorious Gryffindor,
Which draws the brash, the advocates, the tough,
The rash, the rascals, and the ever-sore.
Praise next the doughty, oft dismissed as fluff,
Who never tire: stronghold of lambs, rams, bricks
Who hold the world together: Hufflepuff.
To Ravenclaw, proud home of the eccentric
Who love that learning is unlimited,
Surge blazing, ready minds, both deep and quick.
Last, subtlest, most suspect, most misread,
Inspired and thirsty, their memory long:
Sing Slytherin, who, patient, lightly tread.
Take comfort, each, all, in this artifact’s song:
I’ll faithfully send where you’ll grow to belong.
So hail to the hopeful, the just, and the wise,
Hail gentle, raw, resolute, clever.
Be welcome in Hogwarts: by wandwright yours now,
The order here joined yours forever.
Severus stared at the Hat until the tingling on each side of his face told him that all the professors were staring at him. Even some of the ones who’d been at the hell-meeting last night.
He raked his eyes desperately over their faces. Most of his old professors’ were on the dour-to-sardonic scale; he might have translated these as It Had To Pick Someone’s Version, Kid, You’re Not Special. Babbling was scribbling thoughtfully, though, and Flitwick was exchanging smug eyebrow-waggles with Dumbledore’s twinkles while McGonagall looked more annoyed than Severus had noticed last night. Which also made more sense than it had last night, when Severus hadn't realized how many snide puns about her House he had, apparently, unconsciously slipped in. Digitalin, for once, did not seem personally affronted, and seemed to be subjecting the song to numerological examination, as if it were a piece of homework Severus had turned in about which she intended to be fair-mindedly critical.
To his terror, Professor Sprout’s eyes were too shiny. She wrenched them away from the Hufflepuff table to give him a watery smile, and it didn’t help at all.
As a matter of fact, it was worse than the time she’d enveloped both his shoulders in her hands and told him with overflowing compassion that she expected him to continue his very good written work and if he ever stepped foot in her greenhouses again she’d hang him upside down over the Devil’s Snare, and then told him she knew it wasn’t his fault and hugged him. And he’d had nightmares about that for well over a month.
Mostly about the rest of his professors telling him the same thing and taking his wand away and locking him into the library forever while everyone else got to practice their magic, granted.
He hadn’t made half of anybody else’s greenhouse dry on the stalk over the course of three classes, but still. Nightmares.
And it had been second year, right when they’d started to learn how to use their own magic to compensate for uncooperative soil and weather. Sprout had started them on that quite early in second year, well before winter got its claws in, and so Severus’s only friend had been of the wrong House and gender to be of any help with his sleeping problems.
Besides, the overflowing professorial compassion dripping down on him, especially while being squeezed by someone who was usually so brusquely lets-be-about-it-then-lads, had been traumatic all by itself. He’d had no idea how he was meant to respond to melted looks like that.
Like this. It made all the hair on the back of his neck want to jump through the sky-painted ceiling, and he sympathized with that desire.
The Tartan had her back to them, and had already briskly read out the first name. Thank God.
She was six names in before the hat first sent a boy to Hufflepuff. He hadn’t taken half a step towards the table before it erupted: first one voice, then a dozen, and then the lot of them, shouting, “Bricks, bricks, BRICKS!”
Professor McGonagall shot Professor Sprout a look Severus didn’t see. Somewhat reluctantly, Severus thought, Sprout gave her table the sort of sweeping gaze that nearly-enough met everyone’s eyes, and held up a quiet hand.
They subsided, and if there was an occasional whispered “Real bricks!” when a new Hufflepuff was sorted, it didn’t get louder and no one stopped it.
To Severus’s annoyance, about halfway through, Septimus Travers in fourth year, who Severus recalled as not so much malicious as easily bored and convinced he was funny, took it upon himself to baa. Severus might have been wrong about him. Too many people sitting at this very table had thought the same about ‘Frivolous’ Black. Refusing to admit he'd been wrong about a charming bully was a mistake Severus was resolved to never, ever make.
There was a collective hiss from the Hufflepuff table—not a snakelike one. Not even a weasel-family hiss. It was pure indignation.
Since Slughorn only sighed, Severus, more annoyed yet, cleared his throat quietly and caught Travers’s eye. Travers Looked Innocent at him, to which Severus responded with a heavy dose of Deeply Unimpressed with a healthy side of Come On Tim You Know Better.
Travers turned—apologetically, when you could read the muted body language of even a fourth-year Slytherin—to the Hufflepuff table, and the girl who’d just sat down at it with a blotchily humiliated face. Considerably more loudly than he’d baaed, he declared, “Real bricks!”
Severus nodded at him, just a little, sharply.
Then the Baron nodded at Severus. Just a little. Sharply.
Theoretically, there was a table to duck under, and he could probably sink through the floor and into the kitchen if he really tried, but he was in front of all these people. If he imagined all his blood shooting into his feet, maybe it wouldn’t pound out through the pores of his face and paint the fine unbleached linen of the tablecloth. He felt it was already.
“Well, that’s more than I expected of him,” Slughorn said happily, aside to Severus, his little gooseberry eyes still fixed on the Sorting. “A bit quick off the mark, Travers—be sure you keep an eye on him during classes, m’boy! But he’s a good sort as these things go. I’d invite him to Club meetings if I could only be sure my drapes would end the evening the same shade they started. You know how it is. But he’s a clever lad; his uncle’s rising, I think, and since all the children are at school his mother’s got in on the ground floor for a magazine I think will do very well, very well indeed!”
Severus stared at him, trying to decide if it was even possible that Slughorn had missed all of that except for the bits that had actually come out of Travers’s mouth. Surely not. Slughorn was saving face, that was all. Pretending he’d passively delegated, rather than failed to act. Or pretending nothing had happened at all. Just pretending. Wasn’t he?
He hadn’t made up his mind before Babbling asked what magazine and Digitalin leaned behind Sprout to hiss shh at them all.
Severus’s gaze was caught on its way to her by a pair of bespectacled eyes that weren’t even twinkling, they were approving of him so hard, and he very nearly did dive under the table.
Now the blue eyes were suspecting he was crazy, which was more usual. He could deal with that. Lungs functioned properly and everything.
And now they were sad, ugh. What was wrong with people.
Twinkles back, this time with a conspiratorial flavor, Dumbledore mercifully looked away from Severus and stood while the House ghosts joined their tables, creating cold spots and not-merely-physical discomfort, but also the first step to newcomers knowing their hearths.
Just like always, Dumbledore beamed at everyone (Severus could see it in the windows at the back of the hall, and belatedly realized he’d have been able to watch the Sortees’ faces, if he’d been paying attention. Maybe even read their lips. Damn. Well, that was what pensieves were for, although he was dubious about having time for it) and spread his arms. “Welcome to another year at Hogwarts,” he announced.
Severus waited with morbid fascination, along with everyone from third year up (the rising second years often still hoped their greeting might have been an anomaly), for this year’s ‘few words.’
As pleased with himself as ever, Dumbledore declared, “Sully! Cuckoo! Madcap! Swallow! Thank you!”
Sometimes Severus just thought the welcome words were weird. Sometimes he got a sense that Dumbledore meant something. This was one of those times, and one of the times that it chilled him.
Off at the other end of the table, someone Severus barely recognized, almost certainly the Muggle Studies teacher, snickered sotto voce, just audibly into the traditionally stunned is-he-mental silence of the firsties. “African or European swallow?”
Severus’s mouth twitched, just a little, but he had a sinking feeling in his gut that it was a distraction from something that was already being too universally ignored.
Of course, his brain told his gut, twinging with impatience and irritation, if what Dumbledore had to say was as important as all that, if it was important for anyone to understand, he might consider just saying it.
After more food than a reasonable mind could take in (the vast majority of which he ignored) and one shortcut (courtesy of Phineas Nigellus Black’s offhand decision, several years ago, to rescue a hounded Slytherin from his own descendant), Severus was home.
It wasn’t his new-and-now home, his haven. Neither was it the one they’d made theirs, the one that was respite, the one they were forcing Evan’s old cage to become.
This (sorry, Mam) was his first home. This was the perilous, promising hearth-inferno that had forged him. The one that had, for a thousand years, hatched and hammered out the ones who went out determined to remake the world—and often failed—and sometimes didn’t.
This, however few knew or noticed, was the center and sprouting-point of magical Britain. With firelight flickering over him and making it hard to see the lazy fish through the great bubble-window, surrounded by earth and stone on every other side, Severus breathed what felt, for one mad moment, like the only true air he’d had in years.
He knew it for nonsense even while the feeling swamped him, but couldn’t disavow it.
The wave of black woolens swallowing wooden benches well-polished by a thousand years of variably-miniature arses had rocked Severus. The orange glow here, flickering over wrought ironwork, grey marble, and forest-green velvet, picking out new fires in some two-dozen pairs of solemn, unblinking, unliving amber eyes, seized like roots at something in his chest and lulled his anxious pulse.
The left one. The pulse on the right had been reassuringly and strongly placid since well before lunch. He hadn’t given in and reached up to touch it yet, especially since his hand would feel nothing but his waistcoat if he did. What he felt was an enchanted echo, no mere illusion, but it wasn’t as if Evan’s heart physically beat inside him and fueled his blood.
He did put his palm against the wall. Granite was the most common sort of wall in the in the castle, but mainly in the halls and storage areas, and places like the kitchen. The areas where students sat down were more finely finished—occasionally in marble, as here, where someone had felt it appropriate, but mostly in panels to be covered in wallpaper. Silk wallpaper in the common rooms, Severus’s Ravenclaw friends had told him.
And, hiding with false modesty in corners, or in the crowning in classrooms, you could usually find a small etching of a boar on a field shaped like a five-petaled rose, feet planted firmly, eyes keenly facing forward. Severus didn’t know if there had ever been paint on those etchings, but he knew that, as far as the man with the chisel (or wand) had been concerned, that boar was a snowy, stubborn, skeletal white, the wild rose behind it as blood-black as the drowning, super-fertilized earth of civil war.
Mottos had once been a personal matter, like monograms, and the families that had come together after ripping a nation apart had each burned through many. When people had stopped needing (and painting) their own shields as tools for self-defense and self-identification on confusing battlefields, heraldry had become more about history than personal accomplishment. Mottos had become things that Houses were stuck with.
Severus considered that the Prince choice to call upon their Gaunt ancestry in picking their motto proved two things, or nearly-proved enough to make a working theory. First, that the Princes were as snooty as any other purebloods (which he really knew already). Second, that whoever had picked it knew what gauntlets were (saw them every day, most likely) and was genetically responsible for what Severus’s friends called his alleged sense of humor.
He suspected, however, that the Hogwarts headmistress at the time, who had known her runework well, had deliberately turned a blind eye to the Neville contractor from York signing his cousin's arms in graffiti wherever he worked. She must have known that what he was etching, in room after room after room until arithmantic resonance began to kick in from sheer force of repetition, meant safe in my hands.
If you read between Bagshot’s lines, the only other reason for allowing it had been quite stupid. In sum, one of Severus’s de Medici ancestors, during the family’s exile in Italy, had made a stink about his precious pearl (oh, well, all right, and her brothers) going off to school in a giant stone pigsty. Since his ancestrally-English mistress had insisted and Italy had been extremely dangerous at the time whether or not one was magical, or blue-blooded, or wealthy, he had resolved the problem by throwing money at it.
Headmistress Skanderberg hadn’t particularly cared what school Aurelia Prince went to, but she’d been perfectly happy to take the doting papa’s money. She’d even used (again, according to Bagshot) at least 80% of it to renovate the common rooms and hospital wing and dormitories, as he'd intended.
The doting papa hadn’t thought about the Great Hall, or the classrooms.
This shouldn’t have surprised anyone.
Severus had seen Evan’s paintings of Aedis Hekate Minerva, the Roman magical school. In bad weather, Italian students did weird and humidity-defying things with floating, spinning wreaths of rosemary and lavender that, apparently, insects hated. If things ever got so bad they had to have classes inside, Ev had said, they had arrangements with the theaters and cafes. You could live like that, Ev had sighed wistfully, when you weren’t subjected to British weather.
(Severus had called him a silver-spooned Hampshire milksop who didn’t appreciate what was in front of his easel. Hogsmeade weather was unpolluted, bracing, moody, and gorgeous. Evan had protested himself extremely appreciative, as long he could appreciate it from the warm side of the window.)
Most of the furniture from that donation had long since been replaced—in various pushes for what was considered at their times to be modernization, and from damage caused by plagues of magical pests like doxies and children. Severus didn’t think that the current Slytherin sofas and chairs, for example, were much older than his own… well, than Mrs. Prince. Whatever she was to him.
He stroked a plush green armrest, idly trailing his fingers down to thumb over the smooth polished-amber eyes, for luck, and felt a smile ghost over his lips at the memory of Potter and Pettigrew high-tailing it out the door, committing a noise far too high-pitched to be called yelling.
You could survive coming into the Slytherin Common Room without the password, if you could find a way. After all, the House was inclined to reward both competent sneakiness and excellent social networking. Just as it was inclined to let stupid Slytherins who let themselves be spied on reap the benefit of a learning experience.
But Godric help any fool so arrogant as to abuse the hospitality of Slytherin, so clumsy as to try to directly harm one of his own in his own halls.
Severus had really treasured that squeal.
Even if, sounding more Pettigrewish than Potterly, it might not have been so very hard-come-by. At the time, shaking, putting out fire in his hair, with the chandelier spewing purple goo that had half-eaten his only pair of boots, it had been soul’s balm.
He hadn’t despised Pettigrew for squealing. There were a plentitude of other good reasons for despising Pettigrew, but abject horror, when mostly-metal snakes were springing out at you from the chairs and sofa-arms and the fire-grill, was pure good sense. Severus had just been pleased the lump hadn’t left a biohazard on the rug.
Most of the time the fangs on the chair-leg serpents hooked into the carpet for stability, disappearing entirely when the chairs were intentionally moved, placed on a hard surface, or swung at heads by angry Averys. Severus had examined them, though, and they were sharp. Even if the subtler, more serious protections on the room had decided the Gryffs weren’t worth troubling about, the obvious-to-anyone-with-eyes ones were nothing to take lightly.
These guardian seats were new by the standards of Hogwarts, but the writing-tables were in the same closely-carved style as the heavy Slytherin bedsteads, and the slightly hypnotic grey swirls of the interior walls breathed history that reached out like family into Severus’s veins.
This hadn’t meant anything to him as a child, when he had no leisure to care for anything but his own survival. Coming back to this marble, though, felt like Mam looking up calmly from the mending on a summer evening to give him a back, are you nod that was pleased enough to see him but not particularly exercised about it. Of course he was back home, where else would he be, and had he brought that stitchwort she’d sent him for?
Here and now, Severus didn’t know what he was meant to have brought. But the nagging of expectation hadn’t evaporated when the Baron turned aside, just because the weight of that empty gaze had trailed away. He could still feel it in his soles, like the itchy wrongness of soil across the sea, the slightly-drugged sun-warmth of Rosier hall, the sullen, patient four-hundred-year-old fury sizzling out of Pendle. It was strongest on the hill, not an hour’s walk from the grubby, choked despair of Spinner’s Row. Pendle Hill, where witches and muggles alike had fallen on each other in the storm of petty betrayals that had lit the match of the Separation. Very much, in fact, like that: something fuming, something waiting.
Only this weight was looking at him like it was his problem, which the Witch’s Walk at Pendle had never done. Not even when he took Lily out for a two-day’s tramp through the Bowland back in the summer after second year and lay on the moor outside Lancaster castle, where ten condemned ‘witches’ had proven themselves to be either muggles or unbelievably pig-headed by successfully dying on loops of rough rope with plenty of warning.
Unless they’d faked it, like Mata Hari or Wendelin Flinders, to set off a revolution—which the outrage certainly had done.
Pendle Hill hadn’t even told him she was his to solve or sooth when he’d dug his fingers into her earth and closed his eyes, just roiled and ached and hammered out danger through his blood, sang a warning into his magic, tolled out the centuries-old peal of run, run, there is no justice, take your freedom, take your brothers, take your sisters and run that had struck like a gavel and dropped a Veil all over the land. Britain’s Carthage, maybe: blood-salted earth, blind to any future less bleak.
But Hogwarts still saw a future, still wanted something. Wanted a very great deal, and he didn’t know what.
He could feel it when he opened doors, when he brushed the walls, when the Baron looked at (through) him. It was that feeling of I Know I Shall Have A Cold Tomorrow, of already being miserable, exhausted, and contagious, but not quite having symptoms yet. It was that feeling where the throat and nose had not yet begun to suffer, but a heavy aching had already set up camp in every bone and spread a fog throughout the brain.
Hogwarts was like that; probably every old castle was. Its bones were deep, sensitive, one with the ley of the land, but centuries of repairs and renovations had layered them with younger, bolder, brasher stones.
Severus had always found it reassuring to look through the common-room window. If you didn’t get distracted by the lake-life swimming by, you could see where the marble changed to granite. Where the castle became harder, rougher, scarred and speckled, a promise of strength under the style and shine of Salazar’s silver.
The school could hang its bright banners in bold, naïve primary colors, but its every wall, its every stone was shaded in steel. Other rooms might be paneled in wood, plastered or papered over for cheer, but they were supported and shielded by the strength of the grey.
Red-gold might reign over the hills for a few weeks, when the students were forming their impressions. That would start soon. And it would leave an impression even when its true strength was gone: that was the deception and the magic of glory. It was powerful magic, powerful as a good illusion always was.
As a good story always was. Stronger than cold iron, until it was questioned.
But in winter the children looked out onto white snow, and in summer onto grass of a dozen shades of green, and all year round changeable shades of silver shared the sky peacefully with brutal, tranquil blues over this place of learning, peppered the broad planetary shield of den-dark black at night, omnipresent, never failing.
And most of the clueless lumps so fiercely guarded with this primal prismagery just thought the campus was pretty.
If they were muggles, it would just have been pretty. But centuries of Hogwarts wizards had been beaten over the head with the meaning of every color but pink and purple, had those stories drilled and dreamed into them. No British muggle could see the color red without the silence at the back of their mind whispering blood and love, no Chinese muggle without knowing they were seeing luck, and no British wizard would ever see the color without feeling (and loving, or resenting) that spark of courage. This was a knowing beyond thought.
Magic was will formed by power, shaped by belief. There were stories you heard, and there were stories your skin breathed in.
‘Wands are necessary,’ for example. Wizards believed that one like nobody’s business, these days, even though everyone knew there’d been a time of staves, before wands, and a time of magic before the first druidical staff. Not all countries’ wizards used either, even today. But wizards who believed they couldn’t do magic without wands couldn’t.
Severus was inclined to suspect the goblins of a long-term snow job to make the stupid humans reliant on easily breakable sticks. The way they kept ostensibly starting wars over wand-rights and ending them when ceded other rights and properties that were definitely not wands was… notable.
Severus had grown up in a Muggle house and neighborhood, according to the Ministry: in a house where it was illegal for a minor to use a wand. He loved the swift sugar-rush exhilaration of wanded magic as much as any other kind, but the original reason for that law was that wands were obvious and muggles understood them, couldn’t easily explain away a wand making bright lights that did something unnatural.
Severus could respect that. It was hard, when home was dangerous, but it made sense. However, he had never, not once in his life, never had any intention of being a brainless, domesticated rabbit in the modern Ministry’s shiny, not-even-pointed hat. If someone wanted to act as though a rule meant more than it said—meant no magic when it said no wands—they could only fool the sheep who let themselves be cowed instead of bloody reading something.
So now it was his penknife he took out instead of his wand, although he hadn’t really planned on doing anything with either. He was moved to it; it felt right. That was all.
(Later, in Devon, the teacher he called Madam Nell owled to ask him to please re-write his letter in more subdued handwriting with more traditional capitalization, or perhaps to come to tea instead, as she could only think he’d written that a pail of rooks had processed his bran, and she did not believe, herself, that either corvids or chess pieces had very much interest in grains.)
He put one knee on the floor in front of the sofa. He’d dozed and read and worked on it a thousand times or near, with red-gold waves spilling over his hips and cornsilk pooling on his shoulder. a puddle of children and their familiars scritching quietly with their quills and playing gobstones and go all around him. He curved a hand over the plush green armrest and murmured, “I know you, you old serpent.”
It might have been his imagination, but he thought something flickered in the pale amber eyes. More likely something had, and it was only the firelight.
He took out his penknife anyway, pricked his thumb, and wrote four runes on the stone next to the valuable carpet, so ornate that the eyes never quite bothered to take in its details.
His blood was sucked, siphoned, breathed in, one oath at a time. Othala, Logr, Tiwaz, Algiz: it was his promise, and Slytherin had heard it. Flowing hearth of mysteries, home and heritage, I will shield you with reason and honor will lead you.
Just as he’d felt a pressure of expectation when the Baron looked him in the eye, he now felt a strong sense of being wearily eyeballed by a plague victim being told they’d feel all better if they just rubbed themselves with birds or drank emerald powder and wee.
“Er?” Evan would ask later, one quizzical eyebrow up, when Severus tried to explain.
“I swear, Ev,” Severus told him, pouring himself a measure of headache draught, “I could practically hear Salazar himself telling me, ‘untwéolic, onæpling, sigorspéd gesundigan.’”
“You thought,” Evan translated slowly, “you heard Salazar Slytherin saying, ‘sure thing, kiddo, good luck with that.’”
“I didn’t hear anything,” Severus corrected, raising his chin defiantly, “it’s what he meant.”
He didn’t have time to sit and shiver at the time, though, as would have felt fitting, or even eye the corners of the room warily. The blooded stone had only just dried grey again when he heard heels ringing towards the door.
The cut he’d pricked into his thumb burned suddenly, but not with pain. Like Pepper-up, or brandy, or purpose.
[1] Severus was muggle-raised enough to have breathed tea the first time he’d seen Damocles Belby change out of his lab gear into a set of wired petticoats, and had then been subjected to a five-minutes lecture on Why Robes Are Poorly Designed Tripping Hazards Designed Only For Broom Flight and One Should Only Ever Wear These And Trousers For Walking.
Severus had won that argument by handing Belby a cup of tea and a book, turning on the daylight-quenching spell in the ceiling but not the moonlight-emulator, and saying, “Stairs.”
At least, he’d thought he had, but then Belby came in the next day with the same sort of petticoats, only six inches shorter. At which point Belby’s apprentice admitted that all major safety concerns had been addressed as long as nobody tried to brew in the things and they were properly enchanted, and got on with his life.