Still Dye-Urn, cont'd
cont’d
“But you realize, with Horace gone, you’d actually be applying for two jobs,” Filius pointed out.
“Not necessarily,” Severus frowned. “…Would I be? I know there’d be two opening, but it can’t be a foregone conclusion. There’s got to be someone else on staff who was in Slytherin.”
“Imago was, when we were there,” Evan said, “but you said it’ll be this Trelawney witch teaching Divi now. Wasn’t Kettleburn?”
“Technically, yes, but only for one year,” Filius explained. Bathsheba Babbling had been, too, but Filius hoped, for Albus’s sake, that he didn’t make her more than a token offer. She had never showed the slightest envy for or even interest in Horace’s House work, and Filius didn’t think she’d respond well to any real suggestion that she take that much time away from her translations. “One of his mothers was in the Department of International Magical Cooperation. Trading Standards Body, I believe. He spent a year at Hogwarts, one in Durmstrang, one at, er, either Salem or Jamestown, I’ve forgotten, but it certainly wasn’t El Dorado, because he will go on about not having had a chance to meet any chupacabras or jackalopes or quetzalcoatl and so on. And, I think it was, two at Khemet…”
“Also, Kettleburn’s a benign lunatic,” Severus told Evan. “He may not be in Phil Lovegood’s class, but the second-years would eat him alive.”
Evan’s eyes crinkled at Severus before Filius could decide whether to protest that characterization of his former student (on the one hand, it was unkind and not quite accurate. On the other hand, Severus’s voice hadn’t been as unkind as his words, and Xenophilius only visited the world of verifiable and objective reality for playdates and to buy ice cream. The enormous amount of time and patience that Filius had for truth-questers and philosophers was significantly reduced when it came to indiscriminate conspiracy nuts). “Not the first years?”
“He could probably handle them if the prefects could be arsed to run interference,” was the cynical evaluation. “I never saw him lose control of a class, but I’m not sure what he’d fall back on if he didn’t have the implicit threat of lost body parts to explain the merits of shutting up and listening to instructions. And I’m not at all sure how well he’d have done if our year’s CoMC classes hadn’t been on a warm/cool colored House split.”
“Do you think you could ‘handle them?’” asked Filius (who hadn’t heard the Houses described that way before, and was rather inclined to blame exposure to Narcissa Black more than to a painter), with what even he was aware was perhaps a somewhat birdlike tilt of his head. If Severus already had detailed hypotheses about what it took to manage a class, that was some support for Filius’s idea that when he’d called Horace it hadn’t been thoughtlessly, or out of the innocent hubris that was fatal to new teachers. Then again, given the way Filius’s colleagues had tended to complain about what Snape had been like in their classes, he might simply have been taking notes on what worked in class management his whole time at school. Filius hadn’t had the ‘Snape keeps LOOKING at me’ problem, himself, but Charms and Flying usually did have different behavior problems from other classes.
Besides, in Severus’s year, it had been the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws who’d taken a double Charms class together and the Slytherins and Gryffindors who’d each had a separate hour with him. That had probably made Severus feel as if Filius’s class was the most well-behaved one he’d sat through, apart from History.
(In which he’d probably been one of the only people who could really be described as sitting the class. History was, both traditionally and, alas, in fact, how the overworked and the hypnosis-susceptible caught up on their sleep. And how the irresponsible and the overscheduled caught up on homework they didn’t finish in their extracurricular hours. Therefore it was, also and inevitably, how the industrious and the machinating earned their Hogsmeade money taking notes for the rest.)
And ‘well-behaved’ would not have been how Filius would have described the Slytherin class of ‘78. Severus and Narcissa Black had been the only students in it who were even slightly likely to try to do the spells as the spells were intended to be done. Or, at least, to try them without working out before even starting how to apply them to particular areas of interest such as art, flirtation, cheating at Quidditch from the stands, and pushing other students downstairs. In addition, Tim Avery kept trying to sneak girlie and Quidditch magazines into his textbook.
Evan Rosier had, as well, although he’d at least waited to open his until he’d gotten a charm right once. Filius also took into consideration (not everyone had) that in his case the scantily clad persons in the magazines were usually at least two hundred years old and accompanied by urns, cherubs, bunches of grapes, cartoons about Rosier’s classmates and Filius’s colleagues,[1] elaborately inked landscapes and castles he probably would have called doodles, notes on perspective, proportion, skin tone, and speculations about pigment usage.
As for the two so-called ‘good’ students, once Snape had satisfied himself that he had a charm down he would invariably either try to design a variation or start working ahead in the book before either the wandwork or pronunciation for the new charm had been demonstrated. That had broken Filius’s poor windows more often than all the panicky students in any other year but that one combined. He didn’t come near the Gryffindor form’s record, however (that form was impossible to score individually; the boys rarely acted as individuals, especially Potter and Black major, who were the least careful, and the girls quite naturally often teamed up in self-defense), and his mulish insistence on the practice had paid off beautifully by his NEWT years.
(Not unexpectedly: the reason Filius discouraged this sort of thing wasn’t because it didn’t usually pay off if a student stuck with it. In fact, when he’d first started out at Hogwarts, he’d asked everyone second-year and above to try to realize their charms directly from the books, with assistance but without demonstrations. The resulting chaos and its drag on his lesson plans had, however, been sadly persuasive. As had the mediwizard they’d had at that time, although perhaps ‘persuasive’ was not the word he wanted…)
And once Miss Black had satisfied herself she knew a charm, she distracted other students, whether or not they were still working, either by striking up conversations or by engaging in a form of revision in which she aimed spells she suspected would be on the next exam at their feet under the desks. Filius was sure there’d been some sort of method or system dictating whom she chose to distract and how, but he had no idea what it was and suspected he was happier that way.
And that was a class where all but one student was dedicated to learning the material, and Avery wasn’t imaginative enough to cause trouble unless he’d been put up to it. And, speaking generally, nearly everyone enjoyed Filius’s classes, and looked forward to them. Even when a student struggled in the subjects, Charms and Flying were broadly understood to be low-pressure classes with minimal lecturing of either the instructive or berating sort, and plenty of activity time in which one might burn off some energy and not be stopped from talking with friends unless one’s work was neglected. And although Filius had occasionally been known to lose his patience and grow a bit sharp when a student insisted on being careless in the same way over and over, he prided himself on being generally approachable, and students did in fact often approach him with questions. When someone skived off his class, Filius knew there was really something going wrong for them.
And that was just class, and a far easier class to manage than Severus was proposing to take on.
In Filius’s House, the worst he had to deal with was the occasional clash of personalities or debate-turned-fight that could turn into cliquishness and bullying out of sheer social ineptitude, which could usually be mediated away once everyone’s point of view had been explained to everyone else, providing no one was too pigheaded to admit embarrassment and regret over having misunderstood their friends’ meaning or intentions.
And when a problem couldn’t be mediated away, he could almost always bring the parties involved to feel deeply smug about their own maturity in embracing the idea of agreeing to disagree, shaking hands, and moving on to the next question or problem, which he’d make sure was one they were more likely to be on the same side of, or at least to be able to see in the same light. Other than that, he was mostly faced with (not to put to fine a point on it) communal blues when the inter-House competition was not considered to be going well or when Ravenclaw was part of the tension-of-the-moment.
Ravenclaw didn’t actively try to be difficult, as a rule. They just wanted, collectively, to get their work done well (or get good marks, depending) and make their parents proud, or land a good job, or land a job that would give them interesting work, or prove to a specific apprentice-master that they were good enough to be taken on.
And knock Slytherin out of the water in Gobstones and Chess Club tournaments (which ought to have been at least almost as influential on the point-tallies as Quidditch, but Filius had given up arguing that one). And keep Hufflepuff or Gryffindor away from the Quidditch cup because strategy ought to beat enthusiasm in a sensible world. And have a lot of sex and, in recent years, invent ‘interesting’ potions and suffumitories in addition to the usual potentially mind-bending and dimension-shattering experiments.
They didn’t plot, and they didn’t sneak.
...Except about the sex. But as a general rule they didn’t. And even when Filius had first taken the House up, they’d only pushed him a little, to find out whether he was going to be reliably helpful or foolish or a slacker, and to find out whether a little squeaky-voiced chap like him had any way at all of enforcing a curfew or breaking up a fight or finding out where a witch in a pet had hid her roommate’s homework and so on. Once that had been established, they’d been content to take his role in their lives for granted.
Horace kept on top of his Slytherins largely with the promise that, if they were all he wanted them to be, he’d give them every opportunity to become all they wanted to be. Severus wouldn’t even be able to pretend that he could make a promise like that; all the students would already know better before he walked in the door. Just like they’d know the stories about what he had(n’t really) done at school, and that he’d spent his student years in used robes barely hanging together with magical patches and sagging fitting charms, and that not only wasn’t he in their ridiculous Nature’s Nobility but that, however normal and un-muggle-like a first name he had, his surname was decidedly unwizardly.
A hurdle to be overcome in any House, sadly, even still. Not an insurmountable one, though—in any other House but Slytherin. Horace had said it himself: he couldn’t have made Severus a prefect because the pureblood fanatics would have taken a halfblood in authority over them as an insult and a call to arms. And Severus wanted to try to be their Housemaster? Ambition was, of course, one of the defining characteristics of the House, but really, was he mad?
“Sod if I know,” Severus said moodily.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Naj,” Evan sighed.
“Well,” Severus explained, turning to him, “I was never working on my own authority before; I could always threaten them with you and Narcissa then. And I wasn’t actually responsible, I just wanted them to shut up and let us work and not kill each other.”
Filius couldn’t quite see Evan Rosier being used as an effective threat. Even if the young man he was meeting today seemed far capable more than the boy he’d known at school of assisting an MI-20 consultant in such vital and delicate matters as, for example, filing or fetching tea than Filius would ever have suspected from the lad’s behavior at school (which, from a Slytherin, could be assumed deliberate and therefore, under these circumstances, promising).
Not to mention from his handwriting. Filius had only studied graphology for a lark; he didn’t put any credence in it; but now he was starting to wonder if Rosier had studied it in earnest and purposefully developed a hand to match the old-fashioned, impractical, over-bred, slow roll of his voice.
Narcissa Black was another kettle of kneazles entirely. The only reason Filius was now willing to consider trusting her as far as he could throw her without a wand was that, despite the sweet-and-pretty veneer, she’d never tried to play warm and bubbly, and if she hadn’t let her intelligence gush enthusiastically out of her every facial orifice the way several others in her year had, she’d also never once, to his knowledge, tried to play dumb. He could quite see a class of first-years drawing back in terror at the thought of annoying her.
“You could always threaten them with their Headmaster and their parents,” Evan pointed out, “although, I repeat, don’t be ridiculous.” He turned to Filius, and said, “Professor Slughorn knew the answer to that question was a resounding ‘he’ll be better than I ever was’ before we’d graduated.”
“Now who’s being ridiculous.”
“Still you.”
“Evan.”
“Nope, still you.”
“Sorry about him,” Severus told Filius, looking humiliated.
“Nonsense,” Evan said firmly, although in this instance Filius rather thought Severus had the right of it. “When you left us alone this afternoon so I could soften him up, I reminded him of when I noticed him pegging you for his replacement when he retired.”
Filius raised his eyebrows, skeptical. He hadn’t heard Horace moan pathetically about getting old in years, and at the height of that exercise in self-pity Severus had not been anyone’s idea of an authority figure. Filius might have cast him in the role of the falcon-headed Set of the storms, setting forth again and again and unendingly in the boat of Ra to do bleeding battle against the flint-headed Apep, World-Encircler, Eater of Souls, if all aspects of the comparison wouldn’t have offended absolutely everyone involved.
Not a weak or unworthy figure, if all you were looking for was indomitable (a quality deeply to be desired in a mole), but he hadn’t exactly shone as a problem-solver or a leader, or as anything but too proud to ask for or accept any help, or do anything else that might have been taken as giving in even a little. Filius couldn’t see Horace even thinking about replacing himself with that hissing, cornered, half-drowned, half-crazed little black fox, no matter how tired or cranky Horace had been, let alone planning to really do it. No matter how clever a potioneer Severus had already been. Even Horace was more responsible than that.
Evan smiled at his doubt, quite sure of himself. “I may not have used those words exactly, but I promise you he knew exactly what I was talking about.” He frowned, and admitted, “I’m not sure if he’d agree that he did, though; he’d have to own up to some other things in order to even come close to talking about that, and that would be a touch uncomfortable for him.”
Diverted, Filius had to remind himself that he was only talking to an extremely recently-graduated alumnus to keep from answering that with the remark about Horace’s fortitude that it deserved.
“Narcissa might be better than he is at something someday,” Severus said firmly, after the silence wherein no one commented on Horace’s inability to handle discomfort had stretched a little too far. “You would be, if you bothered, do not take this as a pointed hint to alter your behavior or I will beat you to death or at least gasping insensibility with a pillow. I’ll never be anything like him at anything, and he knows it, and that’s not something he cares for in people.”
Recently-graduated-alumni, Filius reminded himself: agreement inappropriate.
Although he thought ‘cares for’ wasn’t quite it. Severus did not appear willing to grasp the idea of a mandated social game with clear and navigable rules which Evan had tried to remind him of before. Filius didn’t, however, get the impression it was the same sort of blind spot that he seemed to be showing about decisive actions that ought to have been assumed available to him.
This, Filius thought, hiding a rueful smile under his moustache, wasn’t youth and inexperience, as he’d first assumed, or at least not only that. It was ordinary, stiff-necked, self-blinkering class resentment, and would need to be approached quite differently, without any assistance from Severus’s pureblooded friends. At least, not the ones he actually liked.
“Regardless,” Evan said serenely, leaning back to sip cider with an arm still around Severus’s neck.
“Let’s go back a bit,” Filius said. “Whether you could or should do the job, either of them, isn’t ultimately up to me, anyway.” Thank Athena. If it turned out that Severus was right about it being the only option, or if it seemed to be the best option and further examination showed half a chance the boy could survive the work, he would have felt obligated to go apologize in person to Ellie Prince. Her displeasure at being contacted by a wizard when she’d made her position quite clear would only have been the start of his troubles, whether or not she still used a wand. Albus was welcome to every single headache he’d brought on himself by stirring up this mess. “You said that freeing you up to be a supplier was one reason. Are you aware of others, or being modest?”
“He’s being modest,” Evan posited, grinning.
“I hesitate to classify a potential proficiency at playing Pestilence as a matter for modesty, and suspect others,” Severus corrected dourly. “Suspicion only, but specific others.”
“Well?”
Shrugging, Severus posited, “Let’s operate on the hypothetical that we’re discussing a power which can manipulate governmental committees—political bodies—and has the ability and the will to also manipulate magical creatures and nonhuman sentients.”
“Such as giants,” Filius said neutrally.
“That species would fit that description. So would werewolves.”
“All right, operating on that hypothetical. But you’ve already confirmed who has responsibility for the giants, even if it’s not information we can do anything with publicly. Why are we treating this as a hypothetical?”
“Because we’re guessing this time,” Evan reminded him. Severus made an insulted noise, and he amended, “Okay, not ‘guessing,’” and rubbed Severus’s wrist comfortingly. Filius swallowed his smile, and also the line of Doyle that was too obvious to need voicing.
Severus settled his shoulders, like an offended cat letting its fur fall flat. “What does ending the project do?” he prompted.
Evan coughed. It sounded, to Filius’s amused ear, rather a lot like the word professor. Severus looked indignant, and his fingers flashed in admirably rapid hand-ogham. Filius read, I-F / I-U-S-T / A-N-S-U-U-E-R / I-O-U / S-A-I / I / L-E-C-T-U-R-E, with clever little swiping motions replacing the usual straightforward tap at the letter-point when an I stood in for a Y or J. Evan laughed and squeezed his shoulders.
“What does it do in what sphere?” Filius asked tolerantly.
Severus, unusually in Filius’s experience, looked pleased to be pressed for more specificity rather than giving Filius the irritated what else would I have meant look he and his chicks so often got. “Werewolf-wizard relations, for a start.”
Dryly, he asked, “We have some?” Courting couples had relations. Treating and allied nations had relations. Wizards and goblins had relations, wizards and dwarves did. Even, in a hands-offish sort of way, wizards and centaurs. ‘Relations’ implied a certain amount of give and take, some balance on the see-saw, a state of mutual accord, however grudging or suspicious it might be on either side. Farmers and chickens did not have relations (unless the chickens were even more unlucky than usual), and neither did wizards and trolls, or wizards and werewolves.
The look Severus gave him wasn’t just a flat don’t you be flippant about this. It had an eye-flare at the end that made Filius sit up, reminded him of Severus telling him and Albus that there were things he wouldn’t be able to tell them. Things like names.
It also didn’t escape his attention that Severus had just made him sit up, change his attitude, and pay attention with a look, without moving anything but his eyes.
He was predisposed to be well-inclined to Severus, of course, and his attitude hadn’t been a belligerent or mutinous one. One instance in a person’s own home, quiet and safe, was not a common room, or a classroom before the lethargy of a meal or its attendant sugar high of pudding had worn off. Then again, Filius was Severus’s elder by many, many years, and he hadn’t actually decided to straighten his spine and close his mouth, he’d just done it.
“I don’t know how many werewolves there are in Britain who’ve managed to avoid being tagged by the Werewolf Registry, but at least some who began as wizards come to St. Mungo’s when they’re bitten, or bring their children, instead of, say, leaving the country, if necessary by swimming the Channel at two AM. They have also not attempted to commit mass suicide by attacking the Ministry, either at full moon or on any day in the month while armed with machine guns. Which, believe me, would not be beyond their imaginations, considering that not all of them were born to wizarding homes and not all are divorced from their families or all access to funds. Yes, we have some.”
“Armed with what?” Evan asked curiously.
Severus hesitated, looking reluctant, but when he answered he didn’t dodge. “If you could use a small reductor curse like a high pressure aguamenti.” Evan blanched.
For a moment, Filius questioned the wisdom of giving a sheltered pureblood as vivid (and accurate) an image as that. He found the things frightening and depressing himself, and he’d both handled them and developed enchantments to turn clothes to armor against them. Nothing he’d seen so far had suggested that Severus would treat Evan in any other way, though, and after the first recoil Evan took it stolidly enough.
“I strongly suspect Grindelwald failed to take over the Muggle world because it had already passed the point of possibility, not because he was stopped,” Severus told him, almost apologetically.
“I’ve always said it would be too much trouble,” Evan waved that away.
Filius made a cool note to ask in what context he’d ‘always said’ that, and what he’d considered the alternative should be.
“It’s too much trouble the moment they get past the point of having walled city-states that don’t expect to talk to each other and realize magic is bigger than their priests can control. You haven’t told anybody they have weapons like that, Spike.”
“Neither has a certain personage who’s demanded all my future communications to him be in cursive, Ev,” Severus retorted. “I can’t tell you what his reasoning is, but I would not scream ‘fire’ in the Great Hall at suppertime unless not only was there one but I was sure it couldn’t be put out. People get trampled even in happy mobs; you think Quidditch fans are bad, ask me da about Manchester United some time he’s talking to us again.”
“You can write in cursive?” Filius demanded, outraged at the memory of seven years’ good use of magnifying spells over scrolls of cramped quillwork. Of course, Severus’s cursive might not have been much better, taken all in all, but there were fewer opportunities for pretentious little crabbed hooks on one’s letters when most of the letters were joined up.
“EVERYTHING,” Severus announced, after staring at him in appalled silence for a good five seconds. “ALL ENCOMPASSING IS THE HATRED AND THE LOATHING.”
“Because you would have preferred to write your essays like that or because of the tangent?” Evan asked him soothingly.
“I couldn’t have written anything using a muggle handwriting style at school,” Severus said grumpily. “I had enough trouble keeping Mulciber and his ilk on the ‘reasonably-friendly to at-least-off-my-back’ spectrum as it was.”
“That means ‘both,’” Evan told Filius, most of his private little smile angled away. “He does go faster like that, even if I’m not entirely convinced it’s really English.”
“Everybody goes faster like that, once they get used to it; going faster is the point,” Filius explained. “All right. Yes, we have some sort of rudimentary relationship with werewolves. What do you think ending your project would do to it?”
“What the project’s existence has done to it is prove that there are, at least, a faction of wizards that remember on a day-to-day basis that they exist, and that the Ministry is willing to extend resources in their direction in a nonviolent way,” Severus said flatly.
“That’s… rather basic.”
“Those are the only things it actually proves,” Severus shrugged. “It suggests that some of us might think of them as sick or cursed people rather than a plague on our society. It suggests that some of us want to help them, or at least would rather work on a cure than undergo the practical and public-relations nightmare of a committed werewolf hunt.”
“No one would brook anything that smacked of a witch hunt,” Filius protested.
Severus dumped another disenchanted, quelling look on him, and snarled, “Bet me your wand. Go on. First they came for the Socialists.”
Filius flinched, and started, “That’s hardly—”
“What?” asked Evan, looking back and forth between them in confusion.
“That’s exactly,” Severus said, hard-voiced. “It doesn’t matter who. Nazis, Inquisition, Colonial witch-hunters, Crusaders. Let it be knights, Round Table or Walpurgis. Let it be aurors. Royally-backed Protestants, royally-backed Catholics. Normans. Doesn’t matter. When one group is in charge and armed and in agreement, whoever they say is out is bloody well out, and no one, not even one of their own, is going to lift a voice or finger in dissent. In case they’re fingered next.”
He smiled nastily, bitterly, showing crooked teeth, and crooned, “First they came for the smug and secret criminals, but I was above reproach. Then they came for the tax evaders, but my accountant was better than their bloodhounds. Then they came for the hidden criminals, but my record was clean. Then they came for the scandalous, but my life had been terribly dull. Then they came for those who’d said offensive shite in public, but I have ever been measured of speech. Then they came for those who’d been caught in factual errors, but I had learned to speak only from carefully-researched notes. Then they came for the dress-code deviants and those who forgot to empty their pockets of office supplies of an evening, but by then I had learned the discipline of terror. And then they came for those who seemed so squeaky-clean they were obviously hiding something, and by then so many careers had been scuttled that the market was glutted and there weren’t any job openings left on which to hang the hope of a new life and everyone was too terrified to hire a Shamed One anyway.”
“Argumentum ad absurdum,” Filius accused.
“Thirty-four year wager?” Severus challenged, offering his hand with the most cynical expression Filius ever wanted to see on someone his age. “1984 was written around 1950[2] or so, I believe; use that length of time as the standard for predictions? Moot if interrupted by civil or world war?”
“Anything could happen in that length of time!”
“If it’s less absurd under unforeseen circumstances, then it is not extrapolated to absurdity, it’s merely a horrific possibility you hope won’t be nurtured by circumstances that would encourage it along.”
Plaintively, Evan told him, “Just because you’re gambling on something what I have no ruddy idea what you’re talking about doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to win a bet, Spike.”
Severus smirked, rather widely for him, and pointed out, “Ah, but it’s not a bet with you.”
“And I can’t tell you which side to take if no one explains it to me,” Evan said, in the triumphant manner of someone laying down a winning hand at cards.
“I take the side which I think most likely to win, but on which, in losing, I win more,” Severus told him sedately, with a sly slide of eyes that made Evan suck in an indignant and thoroughly captivated drop-jawed breath which Filius did not want to know anything about.
“Your friend,” Filius answered the original question, looking reproachfully at Severus, “has, in adopting the common sense of your House, forgotten that the world mostly relies on people being more passionate, by which I mean driven by love or anger, than sensible.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Severus retorted, “but I shan’t rely on it when the world mostly runs on people being more afraid and greedy than any of those things.”
Evan looked between them, this time with a sort of sighing resignation, and said, “Spike, had you finished explaining about the lab grant?”
Looking a bit wrongfooted, Severus slowly answered, “...No..?”
“Well, you know I’m always happy to listen to you go on, and I’m delighted you’re getting something useful out of everlastingly chinwagging about those be-toga-ed blighters with Lucius, personally I would have told him by now he’s dead boring and how about those Borgias, but if we’re going to be here all afternoon, I think I’ll make some tea.”
Severus’s eyes flew open as if this were an outrageous threat, quite blow the belt, and, glaring in indignant defeat, said very quickly indeed, “Cutting the funding suggests, as I was saying—”
“Half an hour ago,” Evan murmured, smiling, into his cider.
Severus shot him a dirty look. “Suggests that even if all we end up with is a functioning palliative that leaves werewolves harmless or sane while transformed, the public could be brought to see that under those circumstances lycanthropy could be treated like any other transformative curse. Then any harm done by transformed wolves could be treated normally by the DMLE, as purposeful crimes or a criminal neglect of mandated medication. In which case werewolves would be, functionally, ordinary wizards or cursed-muggles until the disease aged out of the population and vanished. All that assumes everyone acts and feels sensibly, though.”
“But how careful are the people who come to your clinic about just believing what’s only proven, Spike?” Evan asked softly.
“Not bad, in fact,” Severus told him sardonically. “Their lives have, largely speaking, not cultivated optimism. But those who come and aren’t incurable optimists, they come because they see the possibilities and they think even the chance is worth putting themselves through the side effects and the treatment they get on the way. Not, in most cases, because they think it’s much of a chance, but because it gives them purpose, because they prefer to grind themselves up in the machinery of a hopeless chance that was at least aimed in the right direction than to do nothing for their own.”
“…Fair enough.”
“Fair has nothing to do with it, but as the most contemptible do-nothing moral coward I know keeps trying to throw himself into the grinders like a lemming living next to a glumbumble nest no matter how many times I boot him out of the office, the impulse must be overwhelming.”
“That’s… nice of you?” Filius commented, raising an eyebrow, utterly unable to decide whether to put any sarcasm in his tone or not. If Severus did mean Lupin, he might really be doing him a favor, and yet.
“It’s not my fault he fails the screening critera,” Severus complained, and waved a dismissive hand. “Still, take away even just what’s proven and I know how I’d react.”
“Now, hover your broom,” Evan told him, frowning. “Don’t choke on your cider, but you’re not giving the Ministry enough credit.”
“…Let me see that bottle,” Severus demanded suspiciously, turning to Filius.
[1]Filius doubted he himself had been spared during other teachers’ classes, but you could at least say about Rosier that he was always polite.
[2]It was 1949, so Filius is getting a one-year handicap.