Headmaster's Office, Hogwarts
“Now, as I understand it,” Dumbledore said pleasantly, “when Professor Flitwick asked you if you thought you could handle the duties you’d asked Professor Slughorn to resign in your favor, you answered him, and please do correct me if I’ve been misinformed, ‘Sod if I know.’ Is that substantially correct?”
Severus’s shoulders slumped. “Nrg,” he admitted. It had been a half-baked idea in the first place. He had panicked, there was no way around it, and getting shot down twice by the same allegedly nice-kind-and-caring bastard in one summer was only what he deserved for losing his head.
“You’re hired.”
Severus blinked. “Really,” he responded, not so much suspiciously, dryly, or skeptically as with the tone as one who’d just been tone the sky was a lovely shade of houndstooth. Not that he’d entirely put it past Dumbledore to make that happen, should the man wake up one day and decide that fireworks were overdone and Muggles explained away grosser violations of the Statute every day.
Which, of course, they did.
“Not quite,” Dumbledore assured him happily, “but it is most encouraging.”
Severus pursed his lips and tried not to think you are a nutter so hard the roof actually fell in or started raining cashews. He reminded himself that Dumbledore was from the House of Hubris, where people thought his was the House of Bluff and Lies. It might be almost reasonable to suppose that a Gryffindor would expect a Slytherin who confidently said he could do a job without a strong resume to back it up to be pulling an everyday white-lie sort of con.
Except that Dumbledore had not only met Severus but had spent quite a bit of time with him over the last month. He ought to have bloody well understood by now that when it came to estimating one’s own abilities, Severus was about as close as a human being could get to having an accurate picture. A solid one, at least, human measurements and human brains not being especially well suited to the task. But as close as anyone was going to get: he could tell because he was still in one piece, and sane enough to converse with others and only have them look at him as if he’d grown horns or antennae… oh, perhaps thirty percent of the time. Forty at most.
And more, because he knew himself and the world and well enough to want most badly what (who) were best for him. And had slowly become, since choosing the House of careful thought (or, at least, rejecting any House that wouldn’t teach him thought at all), able to work with what he had to give them the parts of himself that they wanted (needed) without thrusting himself on them so hard and fast as to frighten or repel them away. There were, to him, harder things than that, impossible things. Even, between the two, a very, very narrow category of things that weren’t impossible but were still too hard to try, and he knew what they were, knew better than to try them. What he could do was not a matter in which he could afford to be deluded.
“Now, as I understand the matter,” said the wizard either delusional or, more likely, infuriating enough to offer him sickeningly cloying sweets every time they met, and twice when he was in trouble, “your concern isn’t the removal of Professor Slughorn, but to occupy your time in a way that leaves those you report to satisfied: that is, by becoming closer to me.”
“That’s the immediate and pressing concern,” Severus said slowly. This, clearly, was not a simple summation of his position as stated: Dumbledore was trapping him into something. Just because the old wizard was sure it would be beneficial for Severus (as was clearly the case; today’s twinkle was pure ‘I am brilliant and you’ll appreciate it soon even if you won’t admit it’) didn’t mean that it was, or that Severus should let himself be trapped.
It was a fair summation, though (if you put aside the way that Slughorn just stood aside and let things happen to even the firsties if the prefects didn’t step up, and how utterly useless the old gasbag had been at teaching basic things like knifework, compared to Mam). Besides, if you didn’t let your allies exert themselves on your behalf, there was very little point in having them.
“Severus, my dear boy, was it your intention to present the appearance that you had confunded me?”
“Confounded. No,” he explained, straightening his back and trying very, very hard not to have any thoughts about whether anyone wearing brocade in August (or, really, in the twentieth century at all) needed help in presenting that appearance. “He thinks you’re credulous and soft; I was going to play into that impression.”
“But surely, Severus, credulity can only be bent so far?”
Severus, through sheer force of will, refused to acknowledge that insult. Evan hadn’t thought the idea of his applying was mad, and Evan was biased but was also dead-set against Severus doing things Evan thought would be bad for him. And Severus was rather inclined to agree with the ‘most people have to be tricked into walking into hell’ face Flitwick had made, and Evan had been right there the whole time Hogwarts had been becoming as much hell as home for Severus, mostly fretting more than Severus had. If Evan thought it wasn’t mad, thought the question fell weightier on the right side of the cost-benefit balance sheet, it at least couldn’t be frothingly insane, could it?
Slughorn also hadn’t thought it was mad, and all right, he might not have been in quite his usual frame of mind when the idea had been put to him, but Evan was sure that it had been one he’d been primed for and toying with already, if not one he’d meant to put into place so soon. The Dark Lord hadn’t thought it was unnatural at all: it had been his idea in the first place that Severus should apply for the DADA job. While that didn’t necessarily mean anything, Dumbledore hadn’t thought it was so crazy that he’d refused Severus an interview, either.
So it was definitely an insult. Dumbledore was probably testing his temper again.
“You’d be amazed what ‘he’s a soft weak person who thinks with his squishy red moist bits’ covers, put properly, when you’re dealing with someone who considers human connection a bafflingly foreign and rather distasteful vulnerability which was put on earth for the strong to exploit. Besides, I had a plan,” he insisted, trying not to cringe outwardly as he remembered it.
Dumbledore passed a meditative hand over his beard, only too obviously hiding a smile. “Was it a good plan?”
He hunched his shoulders. “Define your terms. I hated it, so he was going to love it.”
One of the bushy white eyebrows lifted. “Why is that?”
“He’s been on a bit of a humiliation kick lately. I believe he would have thought that embarrassing myself on purpose would be a sterling demonstration of loyalty.”
Dumbledore paused. “We’ll come back to that. Both aspects. I don’t believe anything complex or dramatic is needed at this time, but if it’s sound, we’ll keep it in reserve.”
Outwardly, Severus only inclined his head. He had to admit, though, that it was a a relief both to avoid having to put Operation Gilded Lily into place, at least for now, and to have a serious discussion with someone who could both stay on topic and demonstrate a sense of priority.
A sense of priority in which Severus’s personal well-being was not so dramatically overinflated as to get in the way of all other considerations. That it did, in Ev’s case, probably should have made him feel (in addition to cared-about, naturally) smug or guilty, but was in fact mostly a bit worrying.
“In the meantime, you may be pleased to know that Horace did, in fact, come to me to resign, although I have not accepted his resignation for this coming year.”
Severus was pleased, actually, in a bitter, well at least there’s that sort of way. He might have hopelessly overreached in trying to pressure a decision out of Dumbledore from a distance, he might be staring into an abyss that he could already feel not just staring back but creeping out, but at least he wasn’t completely shite at tactical scene design.
While he had certainly unnerved Slughorn as intended, unless he very much missed his guess he hadn’t done it in a way that should have put the old man off him—at least, not badly or for long. Sluggy would still want to help him after this; would certainly want to find him another out and would almost certainly trust that he’d want to take one (even if there probably wasn’t another one that it would be possible to take).
He’d drunk Severus’s tea, after all, apparently without thinking that Severus might have taken an antidote to something in it in advance. And he’d take the fact that it had turned out to just be tea as reassuring, when he remembered the possibility and panicked and checked himself for everything under the sun. After all, Severus didn’t have a House reputation for the sort of doublethink that might have suggested to Slughorn that Severus, by only serving tea that was tea, had intended him to be reassured.
Severus rather felt that his House should have remembered that the vast majority of his socialization had been done by Narcissa Black, even if he’d never had the forced-opportunity to display any skill as a host himself. Even if the subtle giving and withholding of tokens of approval and the like was neither his preferred method nor really within his current means. It was their responsibility if they allowed themselves to forget and be fooled.
“However,” Dumbledore continued. There was, in his voice, a note so irredeemably and uniquely Griffish that it took Severus a moment to sort it out. There was some confusion and some concern, and altogether it sounded to Severus like you’ve missed your cue to argue with me, dear Wild Thing, aren’t you feeling well?
Severus looked up at him, sharply and warily. Oh, he was unquestionably being herded into a trap, there was not the smallest iota of doubt about it. He hated how thick-skulled Dumbledore made him feel sometimes, but it wasn’t really stupid not to be able to follow the thought processes or predict the conclusions or ideas of someone who not only seemed but could be assumed to be, as a reputedly legitimate bell-curve genius, completely crazy outside his areas of brilliance and, therefore, logically speaking, unpredictable in any areas by reasonably intelligent and reasonably sane people. Was it?
Of course it was. There was no such thing as an actual genius: genius was a thing declared of people by people. There were no really, genuinely, scientifically reliable measurements, even among muggles. Intelligence was a quality whose nature was highly, highly debatable: not an absolute, but something that could manifest in a person in any way from ‘enough intelligence in enough categories to more or less prevent having any friends ever’ to ‘not much in any’ to ‘just about enough to get by on in just about enough to be getting on with’ to ‘awe-inspiring amounts, but absolutely-only in sort-of-one-depending-on-how-you-define-your-categories.’
Dumbledore was acclaimed as a genius, and the wizarding world didn’t use any reliable measures for that sort of thing. Worse, he wasn’t so much acclaimed a genius generally speaking as deemed a savant in the field of alchemy, which was largely a lost art.
Acclaimed largely by people who knew very little about it, who largely didn’t even know that when they said he was doing alchemy they mostly meant he was doing alchemical technomancy these days. By people who were probably easily impressed once they’d met him and been bowled over by his faux Olde Worlde courtesy and frankly ridiculously oversized magical presence.
Ergo: Severus was just making excuses out of self-dissatisfaction and looming hysteria, which was unaffordably self-indulgent.
He got twinkled at again. Ugh. “While I feel that such an extreme transition would not be good for the school—you must recall, Severus, that we are already planning to begin the school year with two new teachers, since the loss of our Divinations professor and our most recent DADA instructor. In addition, Professor Slughorn has been the master of Slytherin House for over sixty years now. While it might be of some help that many of the current Slytherins will remember you—”
Delicate of him not to mention that other upper-form students would as well. Severus supposed he might have taken as a compliment that Dumbledore didn’t choose to believe he needed reminding, but frankly he didn’t feel the choice merited it. Too bloody obvious by half.
“—The switch to such a young Head in such an eventful year would be too much of a shock, I feel.”
“There really isn’t any other Slytherin on the faculty but Kettleburn-who-hardly-counts?” Severus asked in disbelief. He felt that someone who kept on in a career despite losing more than one body part to it more properly belonged in Gryffindor, himself, and Kettleburn had never struck him as being particularly serpentine.
On the other hand, Flitwick had said he’d changed schools constantly as a student, and you needed Slytherin qualities to survive that kind of childhood without either withering completely or coming to the very firm conclusion that real friends were for other people. Kettleburn didn’t isolate himself, and didn’t have that glossy feel that the popular-and-friendless like Lockhart and Lucius and the Dark Lord had.
“Oh, I would offer the position to Professor Babbling, should the need arise, and I suppose her seniority would lead her to be insulted if I didn’t,” he began.
It hadn’t quite been a question, but Severus nodded firmly, if not actually fervently. He’d never been on Professor Babbling’s bad side, and while he didn’t know of any special reason to fear landing on it, that didn’t mean he was eager to when it wasn’t necessary. It would especially rankle to find himself there just because someone else had been clumsy.
“But I can’t imagine anything that would induce her to accept it. If I were fool enough to offer it to her twice while in her office, in fact, I hope I would be wise enough to do so in full plate-mail armored with a strong protective charm. She keeps displays of runically-etched weaponry on her walls, you know.”
“…Either you need to review your hiring criteria or Slughorn’s policy on explaining to people that tomorrow’s Ministry is populated by today’s firsties must be really interesting.”
He didn’t blame Professor Babbling; neither politics nor philosophy were her fields. The school should have been overrun with Slytherin teachers, though. Everyone with an axe to grind should have wanted Slughorn’s job, and at least one or two should have been qualified enough and with harmless enough axes to make Dumbledore think they were worth it.
For pity’s sake, even considering the school’s slow rate of turnover, Dumbledore’s office and the Board of Governors should both have been flooded with offers to replace Binns for years. Many of those applicants should have gone to a great deal of trouble to make themselves more than attractive enough to be very tempting propositions even if Binns had not only refused to go but thrown a tantrum and threatened to join Peeves in poltergeistery. So was the problem with Dumbledore’s intransigent bigotry, or in Slytherin?
“The latter, I think. Would you like to know the name of the last Slytherin who applied for a professorship, before yourself?”
It was a tone with a cunning hook in it. Severus stared into the innocent blue eyes and asked slowly, eyes narrowing as he allowed a touch of temper into his voice, “Is it by chance a name I recently asked you not to say in my presence?”
“Oh,” Dumbledore said placidly, “I do apologize, Severus, how careless of me,” and popped a sweet into his mouth.
It was just as well, because he was on a completely different sweet by the time Severus’s vision had cleared of the fog of red. He carefully refocused his eyes, relaxed his throat, and unclenched his fingers from around the knobs of his chair’s arms. “Is there anything,” he asked evenly, “which might induce you to reconsider accepting Professor Slughorn’s request?”
Dumbledore was eyeing him in an interest which wasn’t quite alarm yet but was in no way casual. “Why do you ask, my boy?”
“I believe,” he said, trying to choose his words carefully and keep his hands from shaking in rage at the same time, “that it would be well-done of you.”
“And why is that?”
“Because,” he said, using every scrap of discipline Narcissa had ever kicked into him to force his voice cordial and his mouth into a smile, though he couldn’t ungrit his teeth and he knew the skin around his eyes was white, “ it isn’t healthy for a House to have at its heart a Head who’s given up on it.”
Dumbledore sat back, bemused. “I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Severus.”
“You just confirmed my supposition that he’s been gently steering everyone in his own House away from thinking about having any influence on children other than their own,” Severus said flatly. “What is there to follow?”
“Have you considered that he might simply prefer to have this field of play to himself?” Dumbledore asked curiously.
Severus eyed him. “‘Simply?’” he repeated, not bothering to hide his offense on behalf of his Head of House. He might be angry with Walrusface himself, but there were limits. “Professor, I appreciate your attempt at solidarity, but there’s no need to humor me by being gratuitously insulting.”
“Whatever can I have been thinking,” Dumbledore murmured, hand over his beard again.
“I did consider that to have been his primary motive,” he said, reminding himself he was dealing with a Gryffindor and therefore opting to be crisp instead of annoyed, “but now that you’ve raised the possibility, a lack of conviction—a lessening of attachment to the House, of pride in it—fits his behavior better. I’ve always been pleased that both Lily and the House’s reputation benefited from his very loudly liberal attitude, but it was always clear that he was surprised when a non-pureblooded student performed well, and, after all, there’s no proponent so vociferous as a recent convert. Those who haven’t had to be convinced about an issue and have no unease seldom bother to protest their opinions.”
If asked, he would have had to admit that he was aware that he himself bothered to explain his opinions rather more often than ‘seldom,’ but that was because a) people were stupid and b) he sometimes felt Lily’s eyes on the back of his neck being challenging or reproachful at him despite the Narcissa-voice in his head telling him that keeping his peace would be the intelligent and tactful option. And sometimes, when it was disappointed instead of nagging and ‘tactful’ more than ‘intelligent,’ the eyes had it.
“Horace is hardly the first to have relaxed his viewpoint on certain matters over the last several decades. Regardless, I confess I refused the last Slytherin applicant for the reason you suggest,” Dumbledore mused.
“Me?” he asked sharply.
“No, no, my boy, the one before you that I mentioned. In June, first and foremost I had more experienced applicants.”
Severus nodded, although he let a trace of skepticism show. It was a perfectly legitimate answer, except that he didn’t believe ‘first and foremost’ for a moment.
“And now, as I said, I’m refusing to accept Horace’s resignation, for the moment, for the reasons I’ve already laid out. However, as I was going to say—really, Severus, you needn’t look as if I were threatening your pet kneazle.”
Severus had, once, had a pet pigeon. For about a week. Or maybe two days that felt like a week. He couldn’t exactly remember; his first few days at Hogwarts had been nightmarish and had seemed to stretch on forever. Actually, his friendless first year and a half had. Oh, Lily had still been his staunch friend (of course she had; he hadn’t had any other friends for her to disapprove of) but he’d only had two classes with her. Every other hour had dismally dragged that hadn’t flashed towards his eyes like fists and knives. His time sense had suffered shockingly before he’d adjusted his old tricks to life in a stone castle full of shouting.
So it might have been anywhere from a day to a week after he’d looked around in King’s Cross, realized everyone else had a cat or owl, and secured the first luckless bird that moved too slowly that someone else’s pet possibly-kneazle had eaten it. Probably Avery’s; , Avery’s cat had been less spastically insane than Mulciber’s and therefore more likely to succeed in a hunt, if that meant anything. But he didn’t remember that with excessive clarity, either, since Evan had somehow (if there had been an actual conversation involved, Severus had not been present, but there probably hadn’t. As far as he’d ever been able to tell, Ev and Narcissa mostly made things happen by osmosis) gently and definitely explained to everyone that the beginning of the Christmas hols would be the end of animals in their dorm room. Forever.
Which was months longer than Severus had been plagued with his pigeon. He hadn’t even got around to naming it anything better than ‘Gerroutofit You Bloody Bird.’ This moniker, it transpired, had been prophetic. No one had so much as pretended to be sorry, including Severus.
So it probably didn’t count as having had a pet. Even if it did, he was sure that ‘fervent relief accompanied by mild annoyance about blood and feathers all over one’s bed’ was not the reaction to pet-death that Dumbledore was thinking of.
“As I was going to say, Professor Slughorn has been teaching for over sixty years. Now, I simply can’t let the old fellow run out on a whim a month before term starts, but if he’s genuinely ready to retire, in a considered and responsible manner, why, that would be another matter.”
Severus eyed him. Warily.
Dumbledore eyed him back. Affectionately. It wasn’t the sort of threatening to make him want to flare his insubstantial hood, but he could definitely feel the hackles he didn’t have spiking up. “Severus, you’re looking at me as if I’m threatening your kneazle again.”
“I haven’t got a kneazle.”
“Crup?”
“I don’t keep pets, sir, and if I was supposed to try and read your mind I would have appreciated some sort of prearranged signal.” He winced inwardly at himself, but reminded himself that even if a cobra was one of the most embarrassing serpents it was possible to be, it was still a snake and no one could say it wasn’t. He could almost hear Ev being fond about him for it, but Ev was loony and really didn’t count.
Anything was a step above threadsnakes like the Carrows, of course, which was some comfort. Severus supposed that Narcissa, as a Black, could get away with things like that. He thought he would have at least tried to find a less blazingly obvious show of contempt to brand his Housemates with forever, in her shoes, though. Even if they had completely deserved it for being caught charging third-year Ravenclaws a ‘tax’ on their Honeydukes purchases after Hogsmeade weekends.
She hadn’t even bothered to give them individual and differentiated blazons of scorn. This, although there was some precedent for twinning twins, had inspired Severus to name his next flavor of malomel ‘Geminus’[1] and leave sample bottles lying conspicuously around, out of sheer admiration for a fellow-artist. When it had been pointed out to him that there weren’t any magical or otherwise interesting ingredients in the mead, he’d shrugged innocently and dismissively and said he didn’t feel it had merited any.
Still, even if cobras were better than bugs’-egg-eating practically-worms, and certainly legitimately snakes, Severus thought it would be nice if someday he could learn to employ a little subtlety when he was actually in a conversation with someone and not just sitting quietly in a room plotting carefully to himself with a quill in his hand. He might someday forgive his mother for how doomed a prospect that probably was, but most likely they’d just have to get on as they were.
Once she was ready to talk to him again at a reasonable volume, at any rate. Bloody elves. He couldn't blame her. For once, he didn’t blame either of his parents. But what other cover story would have worked? And even Da liked Lily, so he’d get over it. Severus would get Lils to visit him with the baby; that should do it.
It would be completely explicable. She’d spent so many summers up his way it would be odd if she didn’t take her new baby around to meet her old neighbors. The old hens would never forgive her if she didn’t. And they would find out, and probably had already, because Lily had almost certainly not thought to tell her mum not to write everyone she knew to gloat about being a grandmother. Entirely certainly, in fact, since Severus hadn’t thought of it, until just now. Ugh. Had Evan? He would have if the Evanses had been magical. Maybe he had and he’d just realized right away that, since Dobby had let the Dark Lord know (via Mr. Rosier via Linkin) about the two boys’ mutual birthday, there was no point trying to keep it under wraps.
Severus hoped that was it. He was, if he was honest with himself, a little afraid to ask. Ev was astonishingly good, for a pureblood, about treating everyone he was introduced to in the same way (i.e., being charmingly drowsy at them until he was given a reason to believe they were interesting). However, while he thought instinctively about the probable reactions of entire networks of wizards he’d never met and what was due to them, he couldn’t be relied on to realize that a muggle he hadn’t been introduced to so much as existed, even when he was at that moment speaking with their immediate relative.
Then again, Ev had spent more time travelling than a lot of British wizards. It might just be that he was operating on the unconsciously arrived-at premise that that speculating based on assumptions made in cultural ignorance could get a person into awkward positions if not actual trouble. Which was, of course, true, and when one was dealing with completely alien mindsets like centaurs and house-elves had, it really was best to approach them from a position of conscious, declared, open-minded ignorance. And while Severus found the idea that wizards and muggles should find each other quite so alien as that not only dubious but dangerous, he’d grown up so much with a foot in each world that he knew himself to be no judge at all. Maybe Ev was right not to try to predict muggles the way he could wizards, after all, rather than being… well, what he’d been raised to be.
“An excellent idea!” Dumbledore nodded, proving he himself was doing no mind-reading by being delighted and evidently completely oblivious to Severus’s surface sarcasm and deeper just because I don’t know what you’re doing doesn’t mean I can’t tell you’re doing it sulk. It was depressingly hard to tell with him, though. He was good at blithely soaring over Behavior He Wanted To Make You Feel Petty About. Severus had never been able to keep at least a flicker of contempt off his face when someone was being small, and glumly supposed he never would be. “We shall have to come up with one. Something quite subtle, of course.”
“You were saying?” Severus prompted, trying hard to sound more impatient than plaintive.
“I was saying that while I haven’t yet accepted Horace’s resignation, I did approve his request for, well, let’s call it a teaching assistant, for the moment, rather than an apprentice.” He paused thoughtfully and picked up what looked like a yellow Flying Saucer. Severus supposed his sweets bowl must be enchanted, but all that mess jumbled together outside their wrappers made him wince. “Well, I say ‘his request.’”
Severus sat back and blinked. His eyebrows drew together and he frowned. He looked at Dumbledore, and out the window (a blue that wasn’t particularly deceptive up here in Hogsmeade, though in London the air was getting sticky again and Severus thought another storm was on the way). Then he fished a licorice snap out of the bowl, smashing its fanged mouth flat with his fingers before it could bite him.
It wasn’t quite a Victory V, but then he didn’t see any particular reason that triumph and a shakingly-relieved-and-terrified two fingers held up towards everyone at not-home who’d ever been sure he’d never amount to anything to should be laced with chloroform and ether. They probably didn’t still put those into the mix, but they had when the lozenges were made in Nelson. Severus had always told himself that he didn’t understand why they’d put those in the original recipe, since he could imagine several ways to abuse the things. He had, during summers home from school, occasionally looked up from his Potions revision at the cold factory chimney, rested his head against whatever scraggy tree he was sitting against, and let himself have a moment of dark irony over the whole business.
He said, “I see.”
“You understand, my boy, that I can’t offer you anything permanent at the moment,” Dumbledore warned. “This may be a one-term proposition, or we may begin to have you taking a class or two in January, or something in-between. We shall have to see where we are at Christmas.”
“Presuming we all live to Christmas,” Severus said dourly.
“Why do you say that?” asked Dumbledore sharply.
Severus blinked at him, and then waved a reassuring hand to show he didn’t have any particular reason to think they wouldn’t. “Because something important has, during its crucial juncture, failed to go explosively wrong,” he explained.
He didn’t feel that the way Dumbledore didn’t stop laughing for far too long, however annoying it was, really balanced out that very worrying fact.
Shouting, “MURPHY WAS AN OPTIMIST,” at him should have made Severus feel a bit better, except it only set the old goat off again.
On the plus side, clearly being cooped up in a castle with this man and people who could tolerate him and actually having to interact with them was going to be torturous. Maybe if he focused on that, the malicious universal force that masqueraded as karma so it could look righteous while it fucked with him would only run over him repeatedly and not drop on him from a great height.
Unless he had that the wrong way ‘round. He probably did.
He sighed. On the other plus side that wasn’t really a plus side, as long as Dumbledore kept laughing, Severus was not having to ask about money. Or whether he was going to have to actually live in the castle. Or, if he did, how usual it was for Hogwarts staff to have extremely discreet permanent guests. And, if that was unheard of, to explain that it was about to be heard of, although obviously only by Dumbledore, because unfortunately his acceptance of a position that had just been created for him, for reasons that were much more important than he was, was going to have to be contingent on it, due to his being almost medically pathetic.
Because he wasn’t going to explain about what happened when Ev got bored and lonely. The obscene way the warm, inviting, flickering hearth glassed blue and smooth and distant over splintery, frostbitten shards would not be part of the discussion. The only reason Severus didn’t feel guilty about letting his safety be on the priority list, would never let anyone make him think himself a coward for it, wasn’t information anyone needed, or ever would.
Murphy was an optimist, too, because before Severus even could screw his Bullheadedly Pragmatic up enough to begin the discussion of practical matters, Dumbledore wiped his eyes and asked seriously, “Severus, you do understand that an integral part of this position is that you will, as you would not as a full-fledged professor, have some, ah, free time on your hands, although perhaps not so much as you would with a position supplied by others.”
August iced over. “So just implosively wrong, then,” he said levelly, and the words puffed out white from his mouth.
“Think about it, my dear boy,” Dumbledore said sadly—almost beseechingly, if it hadn’t been so clearly a command.
“It hardly takes thinking,” he snapped, folding his arms tightly. He shouldn’t have been surprised at all. Of course Dumbledore wanted the Dark Lord’s brewer, if there was going to be Someone Doing That Job As A Job, to be someone he himself could control, who would talk to him. “But if he uses someone else, it’s not likely they’ll be so good that you, myself, and Professor Slughorn couldn’t decipher their work fairly quickly.”
“Perhaps not, but will he use someone else for more than grunt work, if he has a loyal brewer of your skill, even if not so much of your time is dedicated to creative pursuits as he might have preferred? Surely, if he can have none of your time at all, he could have all the time of a second choice. And I don’t think, Severus, that we should leave ‘fairly quickly’ to chance if we need not. There may come that one time when it would be worth discarding artifice to prevent the harm that would be done by an unavoidable delay.”
Severus stared bitterly past Dumbledore’s hat. He would not, would not say You were supposed to stop me, like a child, but the words were ringing in his head and nothing could get past them.
“It may all be worry over nothing,” Dumbledore said quietly, standing up and coming around to put a hand on his shoulder. “After all, the St. Mungo’s Grant Committee hasn’t even met yet, and I hear they’ve been receiving great pressure to continue funding your project. And, as I understand it, your tip-off about pressure coming from the other direction is ephemeral. But if you have understood it correctly, Severus, and if I have understood the affair at the Orkneys correctly, and if these disappearances are indeed the warning knells I take them for…”
He was waiting for a question or a cow-eyed prompting look or something of that nature. Severus would eat Hagrid’s treacle fudge before he’d give him anything of the sort.
One thing you could say for Dumbledore, he knew when to give in gracefully on the little things (Severus, who considered that he’d never won one of the big things in his life (unexpectedly had one plop curiously into his lap was another matter, and unsnatched miracles neither could nor should be counted as anything so base or tawdry as winning), appreciated that in a person he was forced by circumstance to talk to). The sigh was almost inaudible. “…Then I am very much afraid we may have to settle not for a stopper but a bottleneck.”
“Insufficient,” Severus snapped. “There’ll have to be an origin point for antidotes to anything new, or old enough to seem new. If they come from inside the castle it’ll be suspect. That means we’ll need a workaround, and if you want your ridiculous metaphor capped you’ll have to do it yourself.”
Dumbledore considered this, and then plucked an ordinary starlight mint out of his sweets bowl. It grew into a candy cane in his hands, and developed several intricate loops and swoops. He handed it to Severus. It was hollow and, when the fanciful shape had been deciphered, appeared designed to be put into two glasses and drunk by one mouth. “I believe,” Dumbledore said, sounding pleased with himself, “that they call it a ‘bended straw.’”
Severus’s eyes flicked up. It was as he’d feared. There was, indeed, twinkling.
Despondently, he sighed, “I come with a roommate, if you think I’m killing anybody myself you can go take a flying leap; I’ve already got him to agree I shouldn’t so don’t you bloody start. I’ll work with whoever I have to but you won’t make me be pals with Potter no matter how you pull his strings, even if you suddenly start to do it less ineptly, I’m not taking a pay cut, and otherwise I give up.”
“Well, that seems more than fair, in the main,” Dumbledore said, patting his shoulder again. “I do enjoy our chats, Severus; I never know whether they’ll be baroque beyond the dreams of man or take such extreme shortcuts I’m tempted to call it apparition. It’s quite like reaching into a box of beans. Your contract already covers your ‘clean-hands’ clause, incidentally; I don’t know if you recall, but you insisted on it at some length.”
“Usually when people call me an apparition,” Severus said gloomily, “they go straight to ‘dementor.’ I brought it up again because you’re pushing it.”
“Now, now,” said Dumbledore paternally, still patting. “Save that face until you have to mark your first set of student vials.”
“I’m not worried about the labwork,” Severus retorted out of a hopelessly depressed willingness to change the subject and six years’ lucrative-but-hideous tutoring experience which, for the last two years, he had not missed at all. Doing Belby’s peer-review for him involved much more advanced work and no one gaping at him in sniffly dismay (they wrote back with furious insults instead, although, sadly, not usually very creative ones) and was therefore much more fun, although coming from adults there was absolutely no excuse for the grammar. “It’s the essays.”
“Marvelous,” Dumbledore beamed. “I can see you’ll have the hang of it in no time.”
Severus sighed.
“But we’re going to have to talk about the question of a roommate.”
It wasn’t that Severus thought he couldn’t have got away with screaming ORDER OF PRIORITY: I USED IT at Dumbledore. It was just that shouting at him twice in one conversation would have lessened the impact of the tactic, and he had a dismal feeling that he was going to need it.
[1]Cherry and pear-flavored, with the two heads of a bicephalic snake ( a horned viper, in honor of Selwyn, who in her first year as a prefect had been the one to put a stop to that nonsense from her own form, possibly by beating them up physically although no one was quite sure) separating on the label to reach for two paired cherries on their stem.