Lord (Voldemort) Knows Where (Probably)
The Dark Lord looked coldly down at the bent head of his servant. "The Dark Lord," he said softly, "is not accustomed to being summoned by his servants, Severus."
"Summon you, sir!" Severus repeated, astonished, his head jerking up. "My lord, my intention was to request an audience, and I am grateful to have been granted one."
Mollified, Lord Voldemort sat back and stroked Acanthus's elegant triangular head as she coiled around his shoulders. Perhaps, now that he considered the matter, Severus's rather stark wording could be attributed, judging by the inkblots, to excitement rather than a peremptory manner.
And, after all, it hadn't been so very disrespectful, merely lacking in the floral language that his older and better-bred correspondents annoyed him with. Only yesterday he had remarked to himself that if he thought they knew the dreadful, common name his weakling of a mother had hung on him, he would have thought they were doing it on purpose to mock him with the poverty of his upbringing.
"Very well," he kindly allowed Severus to live pain-free. "Stand. You have news that could not wait?"
Rising, his devoted made a little shrugging gesture with his hands. "I thought my lord would wish to know straight away." He straightened his shoulders into a reporting posture, oily-looking rainbows repositioning themselves in his dark hair. "Since my failure to obtain the position of Defense against the Dark Arts instructor at the end of May, I have, sir, as you know and as instructed, taken advantage of Dumbledore's addiction to feeling himself a do-gooder to continue my association with him: by presenting myself as helpless against my own mind and in dire need of occlumency instruction."
"I do know," the Dark Lord agreed, giving Severus an I have only so much patience look.
Severus swallowed, but it wasn't the noisy gulp he'd been getting from some others since he'd made a point of making an example of someone in each of his little groups of Death Eaters. Many of them, of course, had never known what endurance meant. He'd had to use the cruciatus curse with Severus right from the beginning just to get the boy's attention.
As he had it now—and without those irritating wet fumbling assurances the merest suggestion of the lash had started to bring out in those who called himself his faithful but had only begun to realize he was not playing games—he asked, "And how does it progress?"
Severus turned a hand. "It progresses, sir, but that wasn't what I wanted to speak to you about."
"Well?" He tapped his fingers on Acanthus's smooth side impatiently, and heard her tongue flicker by his ear.
Usually, Severus kept a grave and sober face with his master, except when he'd just been punished. Now he lifted his black eyes to the Dark Lord and they were glowing with satisfaction, and as much as he fought it, he couldn't completely hold back his smile. "My lord, while I still have not been appointed to the position you originally sent me to try for, I have obtained a post in the castle for the coming school year."
He'd probably been as taken aback as this since the sanctimonious old fart had set his wardrobe on fire, but just now he couldn't think of when.
Rather blankly, he said, "It's August." Hogwarts always opened on September First.
Severus's chin lifted slightly, and he gave the Dark Lord a look that said if you were anyone else I would be taking umbrage right now. Sir. Stiffly, he said, "You gave me a mission, my Lord. Having a set-back doesn't mean that if I see a way to fulfill it I'll let that pass."
Lord Voldemort ground his teeth together in frustration. He had just gone to a great deal of trouble—or, rather, put some of his more influential followers to a great deal of trouble—to see to it that Severus's talents would be available to him as he escalated the growing unnamed threat for the politicians he backed to stand against. It was all very well for his eagerly bloodthirsty to kidnap the helpless and make them disappear, and for his cleverly cruel to curse everyday merchandise for muggles to take home to keep the Improper Use of Magic Office busy.
But what Lord Voldemort could do with a potions-brewer who could walk softly and understood factories, breweries as muggles meant the word, milk-processing plants.
And he couldn't rip the interfering fool who was trying to ruin his plans into shreds. Not when the ruination was done in devotion, in obedience to his last instructions. It would set a terrible precedent. He didn't want his Death Eaters thinking they should be able to read his mind or anticipate changes in his orders. Some of them might try.
But perhaps… "How final is it, my own, that you will be taking… this position?"
Taken aback, Severus began to look worried, as well he ought. "Well," he said slowly, "fairly. I jumped at it, of course, as I thought you wanted me to—don't you?"
Lord Voldemort waved a hand. "I had developed other plans for you, my own, since the first was not successful, but we shall see. Go on. You said 'fairly'?"
Severus nodded, more worried. "For his part, the offer is contingent on my fulfilling certain conditions, which I thought reasonable and, in fact, sensible, and," he winced apologetically, "I'm afraid that I've already told him so. He seemed to regard the matter as settled, and, as I told you, I was quick to accept a way to insert myself into the life of the castle. While I suppose I could pull out, I think I'd need a quite good excuse to keep him from being suspicious, sir.
"And," he added wryly, "with his vanity, when I say 'a quite good excuse' I may be rather understating the matter. He might concede that an apprenticeship with," he waved a hand helplessly, "Nicholas Flamel would trump a lowly staff position at his humble school, but frankly, I doubt it. Death of the entire family? 'Tragic, my boy, you must take time to heal. Join us on September the Fourteenth.'"
The Dark Lord snorted agreement, genteelly. "Very well, Severus, what is this 'lowly staff position?' I suppose that the caretaker has access everywhere," he mused, "and the mediwizard sees students at their most vulnerable, but," he added severely, "I don't believe that you would be very much use to me as librarian, and I can't believe that Dumbledore would ever rid himself of that oaf Hagrid. Although a liason to the creatures of the Forbidden Forest could be useful…"
"Not that lowly, my Lord," Severus said dryly.
"Hogwarts has no other staff in residence, save its faculty and elves," Lord Voldemort said, letting his tone be the warning.
"Perhaps the word was poorly chosen," Severus retreated from his uppity foray into irony with a bow of his head. He did look as though he was already regretting it.
"Severus," Lord Voldemort sighed sadly, changing his mind, "if Dumbledore's vanity is his patronage, then yours is your wit. If you would beard the lion, you must learn to put your judgment before your tongue. Your master will teach you."
He was pleased to note that Severus was already closing his eyes in resignation and settling to his knees as he spoke. In recognition of this submission, he rose to put a fatherly hand on Severus's hair—and then thought better of that and moved it to his shoulder before touching the dubious-looking stuff.
He had thought to keep his hand there for the entire cruciatus, to give encouragement even in the midst of the harsh lesson, but Severus was moved by it more powerfully than usual, convulsing violently to the ground in the first paroxysm, although he controlled himself better afterwards. It had been some time since the Dark Lord had felt called on it to punish Severus, he recalled. Perhaps one could grow inoculated, to some extent, and grow unaccustomed again. It would be an interesting experiment.
He was just as pleased, really, that the spasms had pulled his servant away from his touch. It turned out to be rather distasteful to feel the warm twitching against his hand—not at all what he remembered from when he'd been younger and his body had been hungry, nothing like the cool, calming, unobtrusive slide of his snake over his robes.
It flickered over his mind that Bellatrix's fierce, dewy-eyed, prideful devotion with its accompanying bodice-accentuating tailoring had started striking him as increasingly tedious since she'd had the colossal audacity to play dress-up with his Horcruxes. He dismissed the thought; of course he was impatient with her. She'd been a fool, and he'd nearly had to kill her, and then he would have had to deal with uproar in her very arrogant, wealthy, and well-connected family. Naturally he'd been more concerned with her foolishness than her décolletage since she'd proved an unfit guardian for any but the weakest and least-cursed of his treasures.
He sighed, putting his wand away. It was all weakness, anyway. If the full-stop of death was secondmost as a horror only to the Hell those doughlike fools of muggles had tried to frighten him with as a child, then surely the moist and panting indignity of humanity was at least fifteenth on the list. He'd lost count of the number of times he'd been told by the magicless clods that the biggest room in the world was room for improvement, but (he smiled mirthlessly) even a stopped clock was right twice a day. His mind was clearer every day, and even his skin felt purer, somehow.
Perhaps, maybe, hopefully just a bit purified himself, Severus scraped himself back to his knees, shaking with the uncontrollable tremors the curse left in its wake, and said wearily, as usual, "Yes, sir."
"As this was a lesson, my own, and not a punishment, you may take your remedy."
Severus, eyes downcast, pushed out a few grateful-sounding words and did so. The muscles of his mouth must not have been quite under his control yet, for all he managed was a mumbling, "'Kyou-sirr."
"Now, what is the exact nature of this position you have been offered?"
He raised his eyebrows when Severus, somewhat recovered in the wake of his potion, had explained. He noted, "Hogwarts does not usually have such… assistant professorships."
"As I understand it," Severus explained, with a demurely eyes-sidewards half-smile that all but screamed how much credit he was giving himself, "it was Dumbledore's compromise when Slughorn tried to resign so close to the start term in a year where he was having to replace two teachers already. A potentially-transitional period during which Slughorn is relieved of some of his workload." He slid the Dark Lord an ironic we-know-him-don't-we look and added, "For a given value of 'some.' I have no illusions."
"I had heard no rumors of Horace Slughorn wishing to retire," Lord Voldemort said, in the same notational tone.
Severus looked up at him, and if he wasn't smug he was certainly proud of himself and expecting praise. "My lord," he reminded Voldemort, "gave his consent for me to have close access to him for a whole week. In the vicinity of his quite elderly contemporaries and his junior colleagues, in a forum where intense discussion of advances in his field were not merely acceptable but expected. My Lord, it required only decision and stamina to make him feel how far he lags behind the cutting edge, and to make him think he has greatly slowed down and is very tired."
Severus paused. "In fact, I'm not at all sure that he has slowed down as a result of age," he added with a sort of scathing judiciousness, "rather than simply always having been inclined to be sedentary and take as little effort over the necessities as possible. In either case, in an atmosphere like that it's quite easy to draw a contrast between his overstuffed velvet armchairs and other people's eagerness to sit up half the night arguing new advances."
"How industrious," the Dark Lord murmured.
"I had thought you'd wish it, sir," Severus explained again, drooping a bit, even more disappointed than wary.
Lord Voldemort relented a bit. He couldn't quite remember whether the saying was 'let them respect me so long as they fear me' or the other way around, but where he already had devotion, it was a waste of energy to make fear his priority. "And what do you think of this 'compromise,' my own?"
Severus tilted his head thoughtfully. "It's not what I was trying for, sir," he admitted candidly. "I had, of course, hoped to replace the professor outright myself, and even for anyone else to have done it would create the opportunity for a great deal of strain in Dumbledore's school. A House under untested command would surely siphon his attention away from other matters, if it were impossible to put one of your own at its head."
"I hear a 'but' in your voice," Lord Voldemort observed, smiling.
"Yes, sir," Severus agreed, a little ruefully. "I would of course have done my best, but it would have been a massive workload to take on all at once. I know the subject and the House well, naturally, but I don't think that's all there'd be to learn. It's not usually done to begin teaching and take on a Headship in the same year. I expect it would have been quite overwhelming. Simply being competent enough not to be fired without notice might have taken up all my time and thoughts."
"But you will have time, this way, will you not," the Dark Lord mused, "as well as access to the old fool, and the chance to… stand guard over the children of my faithful under his indifferent and partisan wardenship, and you will have the library of Hogwarts and its storerooms and equipment."
He smiled as he saw the realization leap into the black eyes and take light there. "Not being a student," Severus said, mouth going soft with fascination and greed, "there would be, to me, no Restricted Section." He wrenched his mind back, with visible effort, from this tempting prospect (Lord Voldemort had to make his own effort not to laugh fondly at this very familiar difficulty), to say cautiously, "I can't answer for how much time I'll have, sir. Slughorn is absolutely sure to pass along as much of his scut-work to me as he can get away with, and considering that the excuse for my presence will be that I'm in training to possibly replace him next year, everyone will think him right to do so. But it will certainly be more time than I'd have had under the original plan."
He looked wry, and added, "Probably less than a DADA teacher would have, sir, between ingredient preparation and clean-up and the amount of written work potions classes need, but on the other hand, I won't be responsible for the curriculum."
Lord Voldemort rolled his eyes a little, but didn't punish Severus for being tedious and providing unwanted detail. Severus was meant to be thinking things through carefully, as he was not supposed to be indulging his weakness for the ready quip. "Then perhaps, my own, you may fulfill both of my plans for you. We shall see. But what are these conditions?"
"He requires me to fill the remaining time before term starts with research, my Lord," Severus said seriously.
"What research is this?"
"Onefold, sir. First—"
"You mean twofold."
Severus paused. With what the Dark Lord could see was a massive effort at diplomacy, he said carefully, "Of course my Lord uses the term as it is widely understood and is therefore linguistically, if not mathematically, correct."
Lord Voldemort rolled his eyes much more obviously, but at least the little pedant had tried. He droned, "Continue, Severus. First?"
"Well, sir, both the requirements are meant to be a preparation for next year. First, he thinks there isn't much point in a new teacher if the curriculum isn't also updated and," Severus's eyes flashed indignantly, "I must say that I agree. Slughorn's still using a book that came out in the twenties, and it hasn't had a new edition since 1950 and doesn't even dip into the interdisciplinary—"
"Severus…"
Severus's hands spasmed in continued indignation, but he took a hard breath and got to the point. Lord Voldemort forebore to applaud. "He wants, as I say, an updated curriculum for next year, and to that purpose he wants me to interview other professors and practitioners."
"I see," said the Dark Lord slowly. Severus had just been in contact with most of the British 'practitioners' of any consequence, or who thought themselves of any consequence, which almost certainly meant that Dumbledore had just given Severus leave to go spend time with well-connected Europeans.
Both potentially a gold mine and a potential disaster, but he doubted the boy would need much encouragement to take his more polished friend and fellow-servant with him. And giving the young Rosier snot a mission would relieve Lord Voldemort of the tedium of fending off his father. Darius would keep on complaining that his boy wasn't being given any chances to show his mettle, but Lord Voldemort would sooner have relied on a snail to accomplish any work he cared about. At least snails were load-bearing. "And the second?"
"Well, sir," Severus said uncomfortably, "while I do have my Mastery in Potions from the Most Extraordinary Society of Potioneers, er. To put it plainly, it's fairly common knowledge among those who know anything about potions that all a MESoP mastery means about a brewer these days is that he can follow a recipe and is either reasonably well-funded or well-connected. To take over a professorship at Hogwarts at my age and be taken even remotely seriously by the parents who matter, I'd need to be better-credentialed than that."
"And so?"
Severus sighed. "I'd need to have my Braumeistery from the International Association of Master Brewers."
He frowned at the glum look, and asked warningly, "And is that so impossible, Severus?"
"I—hm. Perhaps not," Severus said, getting that judicious look again after the initial jolt of alarm. "It hasn't been possible to get away to do it, but I suppose I could, now, unless the last leg of my research goes wrong. I've got most of what I need from working at the Wolfsbane lab; I just need some corroboratory data on vampires, and to finish and submit the write-up in time for IAMB to peck it to pieces by next summer. I don't need anything on zombies because they can be re-humanized, and I don't need inferii because they aren't sentient and should really be counted as the animated-dead rather than as humanity permanently afflicted with a viral curse and categorized as undead for lack of a better term."
Lord Voldemort didn't want to know. He sought immortality: the undead were useful to him only as minions. "So what will you, in fact, have to do, practically speaking," he pressed wearily.
"Oh!" Severus jumped a bit, sheepishly. And yet, the Dark Lord mused, he still wasn't as bad as Rookwood. "Well, the most important thing, obviously, will be the vampire research, so I'll probably prioritize speaking with the Dumstrang professors, although of course France is on the way geographically. And then, depending on how long it takes to gather my data or whether I have reasonable international floo access while in the Schwartzwald area, I've started a list of brewers and educators to talk technique with."
The Dark Lord tapped his fingers meditatively on the knee of his black robes. "Do you intend to go alone?" he inquired, in one of his lighter and more dangerous tones.
More than bright enough to hear the warning in his voice, Severus's eyes widened a bit, and skittered briefly, looking for an out without enough information to seek one properly. Which proved the Dark Lord had been right not to give it to him: it was difficult for his followers to tell him only what they thought he wanted to hear, if they didn't know what that was.
Severus settled on, "Is it required of me? It had occurred to me that Rosier's family would welcome the opportunity for him to paint such forest-scapes and expand their clientele, and, er, I thought it wouldn't be the best idea to go without some safeguard against…" he shrugged helplessly, "me talking to people."
Lord Voldemort gave his servant a dry you said it, I didn't look, and said, "It is indeed time that the renowned Rosier talent for making friends was exercised more widely. Yes, my own, I think this will all serve very well. And I shall add one small chore to your list, as well."
Severus tried to look game and eager and succeeded mostly in looking appropriately apprehensive. "Yes, sir?"
"One more interview, Severus. In pursuit of knowledge. One more new friend—or rather, a very old friend. The very, very old friend of our mutual… friend."
It took Severus a moment to work that one out, and then another to stick his eyes back in his head, but he pleased Lord Voldemort by understanding that he was not to bother his master by asking how the impossible was to be done and that he was, rather, to simply work out how to do it.