Valley of the Shadow, Act II

The dossier landed with a loud thud on the table, but the boy didn’t flinch.  Typical.

At least, it was typical for a suspect to be too hardened to flinch when their dossier was that thick.  Only, the boy wasn’t a suspect, exactly, even if he was going to be treated like one for as long as he was in this room.  He didn’t have the usual toughing-it-out you-don’t-scare-me-auror look, either.  If  Alastor had been asked to name the expression he was seeing, he would have said the kid was irritated with predictable melodramatics.    

And, for a final atypical, the dossier wasn’t full of crime but of complete shite.  Not entrapment shite Alastor or his department had made up, not today.  Nobody ever twisted their arms/gave Grimesby permission for that at the beginning of an investigation.  This was just the kind of personal-feuding snipefest that would have been well on its way towards a formal duel anywhere this side of the Atlantic twenty years ago, or a lawsuit in the States.

A couple of the boy’s schoolfellows had registered suspicions about him for a year or two after their graduation, only recently tapering off, and a few of his own friends had, in turn, registered complaints about them harassing him.  None of it had ever gone anywhere.  Notably, the kid never got in contact with the Ministry himself, either in complaint or in protest.

Alastor had noted that he was from a poor neighborhood, mind; a muggle one.  Stood to reason he might think all coppers were useless or worse whether he had anything to hide from them or not, where his wealthier friends more likely felt the DMLE was a service they could call on when they needed it.  

“Quite a collection,” he said anyway.

He might have mistaken the answer for pure dumbness or smart-arsery, except for the cool, thinking shift in the dark eyes in the second before the boy spoke.  “I did start brewing quite young,” he said, lowering his eyes modestly.  Alastor could tell at once that he’d also, started, quite young, to use his voice.  “And, of course, the patent information does have to be detailed, in case of contested claims.”

“Don’t piss me about, Snape,” Alastor grunted, leaning over the table on his palms.  “You know damn well this is your Ministry file.”

Snape, evidently, was still not impressed, but he did cut out the coy codswallop.  “If the Ministry’s files don’t contain citizens’ achievements, the Ministry is more shortsighted than I had supposed.”

“Even more, eh?”

“Don’t put words in my mouth, if you please, Auror.”

“Did you know you’ve got blood on your face?” he barked, changing tacks.

“Yes, I did know, thank you,” Snape snapped back, annoyance ratcheting up.  “I was informed it was evidence and I wasn’t allowed to wash it off, and I would find it very strange that no one has come around over the course of the hour and a half since I was told this to collect said evidence, were it not such an obvious pre-interrogation nerve-scraping tactic.”

Alastor shrugged a little—it seemed to have worked, all the same—and tossed him a collection vial.  Snape ran the rim over his face, still twanging with annoyance, and handed it back to Alastor when all the blood had been sucked in.  “You know how to use one of those.”

“If you’ve read that, and it’s worth the paper it’s printed on, you know I’ve been employed in research at St. Mungo’s for several years,” Snape said crossly, folding his arms.  He had a calculating look, though.

“Don’t think I have read it, eh?” Alastor guessed.  He hadn’t in-depth, of course, but he’d skimmed closely enough to feel prepared for the one-on-one.

Snape shrugged.  “You have a lot of witnesses to process.  The Ministry has time-turners, I’m aware, but if it were standard practice for Aurors to use them to catch up on their case files during investigations… well, I suppose it might be the DoM combatting the shortened lifespans, rather than St. Mungo’s, but youthening potions are hardly cutting-edge and secret.”

Alastor stared at him.  “You really do think this is padded,” he concluded, thumping the dossier and eying Snape.  “Huh.”

The boy stared at him as if he were demented.  Alastor was not unaccustomed to that sort of stare, but he hadn’t shouted good advice at the snotty little brat even once yet.  Weird.  Usually the rope in a legal tug-of-war between ‘noble’ Houses at least knew what it was, whether or not it had volunteered.  

“All right,” he conceded, kicking the chair across from his witness out and thudding into it.  This didn’t get him the wince or sneer of your average pureblood snot, but the slightly sardonic eyebrow and wry mouth of a Slytherin from the sticks who had, eventually, been persuaded that it was to his benefit to never do that slouching sort of thing himself again.  “Snape, Severus O, Slytherin class of ‘78, ten NEWTs, about ten thousand detentions, Quidditch reserve Chaser, music club with no performances, never a prefect—”

“There’s no need to say it like that,” Snape remarked, eyeing him critically. Alastor wasn’t surprised when a suspect cottoned on to that particular bit of needling (‘never Head Boy or Girl’ worked just as well), but it usually worked anyway. Snape didn’t look defensive. He looked as if he thought Alastor should have known better, almost certainly did know better, was probably being strange on purpose for a reason that might just not be the obvious one, and might possibly, at any moment, turn into a small wheelbarrow full of rabid chipmunks. “You don’t get a badge, in Slytherin, either because of having earned it or because it’s your ‘turn.’ It’s decidedly an aristocracy.”

Alastor gave him the rabid-chipmunk hairy-eyeball back, just to throw him, which worked better. As though he hadn’t been interrupted, he continued, “Just quit your second job at Damocles Belby’s lab, having previously worked for Cognoscat Emptor for a couple of summers as a junior apothecarial and potions assessor.”

“The Ministry keeps a record of one’s detentions?” Snape demanded, his annoyance jumping through the roof again.

“Doesn’t have to; Wizarding Britain’s a hell of a small town.”  Alastor grinned a thanks for confirming that grin at him.

“You needn’t grin,” the brat snapped.  “It’s the sort of fact that’s easily confirmed or denied, had I chosen to be cagy, for god-knows-what-reason, and force you to go to the herculean effort of a floo call, at need.”  Scowling and winching his crossed arms tighter, he added, “Perhaps I ought to have.  Had you, indeed, enquired of my Head of House, he would have informed you that the trouble I got into was never my idea.”

“Uh-huh,” Alastor uttered, although he was inclined to believe it.  Snape had clearly been exactly the kind of boy who every other boy in any school he’d ever walked into wanted to pop in the mouth just for being himself. And too Raveny book-smart hall-stupid to understand why, at that—or just too stiff-necked cut-off-his-own-substantial-nose spiteful to do anything about it.  “You want to argue with any of that?”

“No.”

“Anything to add?”

Snape’s head tilted and mouth pursed a little, consideringly, but in the end he decided, “No.”

“You sure?” He lifted a piece of paper and rattled it meaningfully.

Snape just gave him the are-you-mental look again.

“Your written statement here says you came to the Ministry today to get an International Portkey for the purpose of going to the continent on business.”

Are-you-mental turned into So?

“What business do you have if you’re unemployed?”

“What on earth does that have to do with anything?”

“No idea,” Alastor said, with what he’d been reliably been informed was truly awful cheerfulness.  “Let’s find out.”

Annoyed again, Snape huffed, “I don’t consider myself unemployed, as such.  I’m taking a short break from having a daily schedule to do research towards the thesis which is one of the requirements for membership in the International Association of Master-Brewers.”

“Says here you already have your MP from the Most Extraor—”

“That’s the equivalent of an OWL, amongst serious brewers,” Snape interrupted him tersely.  “I’m after my NEWT.”

“In what?”

He got a new look, and decided to call this one Is Your Brain Made of Porridge.  “Po-tions,” the brat enunciated slowly.

At the same pace, Alastor replied pleasantly, “No—shit.  What are you doing your thesis on?”

“What does that—”

“No idea!”

Snape gave a disgruntled sigh, resettling his shoulders like a mangy pigeon.  “There are two curses,” he said, “that only affect humans—wizard or muggle.  Alter them forever, and it can be a quite long forever.  Both are curses not cast but implanted by some quality of the penetration of living—and therefore fluid-coated—teeth into the victim’s bloodstream. Affected parties are thereafter not much affected by other curses, including ones that can be lethal for unaffected humans—or, at least, not permanently affected.”

Alastor wondered whether Snape was going to check, at some point, to see whether his audience was following along. It hadn’t happened yet. The kid was too frowningly wrapped up in (Alastor presumed) trying to dumb it down for him to check whether it was working.

“If we can discover whether this is a trait unique to these particular curses—one of the ways in which they, as a part of their structure, as it were, change the humanity they infect—or…” he trailed off, made a speaking gesture of frustration, and then cupped air with one hand.  “Do you know what cells are?  As in, body cells, not gaol.  Animal and plant cells?”

“Let’s pretend I do,” Alastor drawled, curling back lazily in his chair. He wasn’t a cruel man, when he didn’t have to be.

“Say that human cells—it would have to be cells, rather than our magic, because it’s the same for muggles—say that the cells of our bodies are like chalices.”  Snape lifted his cupped hand.  “We are cursed, hexed, enchanted: magic comes in, the chalice is filled, a little. And yet, no other nonlethal spells change our very nature and do it intractably. Either most magic fills this chalice so very little that it takes more than a lifetime to stopper us, or, between time and external treatment and our own magic and the defenses we share with muggles, the chalice drains, or what’s in it evaporates.  We are hit with one of these two curses: something is different.  Is it that the quality of the magic is different—that it alters the nature of the cup,” his hand turned claw-like, “or draws the chalice closed around it.”  

His hand closed for a moment, and then he cupped it again.  “Or is it that the curse is so much stronger than other spells that the chalice is filled, to the brim, and that this means things which would otherwise happen can’t happen?  To extend the metaphor, perhaps the chalice was coated with some substance which,” he slid his other hand down into his cupped palm, so that the back of that hand molded against it, his two palms together in a lazy two-layered U-shape, “comes down over the surface and helps to evaporate or drain the water.”

Maybe because he saw Alastor’s skeptical eyebrow, he elaborated, “To loosen the magic, that is to say, so that external treatments or the weakening effects of time can pry it loose entirely. But it needs to be able to come over an exposed wall of the chalice and reach the surface of that water.  If the chalice is entirely full, this substance is entirely under the water, the magic, and can be of no use.  If, however, it’s a matter of the curses acting as viruses rather than being simply strong, they may alter the body’s cells to… that is, they may cast an eternal re-filling charm on the chalice.”

With another shrug, he let his hands fall.  “If we knew which it was, we might have more success in treating them.  Belby’s palliative, flawed as it is, is remarkable, but even that isn’t a cure.  No one’s ever found a way to shake either lycanthropy or vampirism, but that’s not surprising once one realizes that they behave unlike any other curses we know and we know nothing about the mechanisms, as it were, of their magic.”

The thesis story probably wasn’t thestral crap, then, all right. Although in Alastor’s personal opinion, if the kid was stupid enough to go trying to research vampires in the field, he deserved whatever he got.

Then again, the last thing anybody needed was a new vampire as bright as this brat clearly thought he was.  On the other hand, vampires who thought they were cleverer than they were didn’t last long. And if the kid really was smart, he might avoid getting turned in the first place.  Maybe.

Still, Alastor wrote down a note to make sure he’d be met with a good, reliable babysitter. Assuming the DMLE cleared him to leave the country in the first place, after today.  

As his quill scribbled into his notepad, he said gruffly, “All right, you’re a whiz.  What you’re not is a mediwizard.  You had a hell of a lot of cheek acting like one with some of those trample victims.  I see you’re a half-blood, but you’ve spent long enough this side of the Veil of Secrecy to know Good Samaritan laws don’t work when buggered-up magical first aid can do more harm than just moving a patient that shouldn’t be moved.”

Snape sighed, looking aggravated.  “Yes, I can see I’m going to have to get some sort of licensure,” he said, half to himself.  

Alastor drilled him expectantly.

After a moment, Snape said, ‘politely,’ “I do beg your pardon, was that meant to be a question?”

Resisting the urge to roll his eyes (he swore they were getting younger), he asked, “You have some reason other than being an over-confident berk for wading in instead of side-alonging the patients to St. Mungo’s?  You do have an apparating license, I see.”

“Well, yes,” Snape said, now puzzled.  “St. Mungo’s was going to be overwhelmed and running about like a chicken with its head cut off. At least, I thought it would.  I assisted during the giant attack; I know what it’s like on that end during an emergency.  On-site triage and first aid is more valuable to them, and to anyone who can be helped immediately.”

“How did you assist during the giant attack?” he asked skeptically.  He didn’t remember seeing this kid, and he would have remembered that nose.

“In the temperature damage unit.  The one in Creature Damage, obviously,” he added punctiliously.  “Although calling beings who have a language as well as a hierarchy ‘creatures’ is not only stretching the definition and bad international relations but a good way to get judged by history with disdain.   You can ask Belby, or Healers Ganush and Scrimmage.”

“History buffs, are they?”

The kid wasn’t bad in the glaring-and-such department: he actually almost felt, for a second, like a total moron.

“I was assisting them,” Alastor was told, very clearly.  “During the giant attack.  In the temperature damage unit.  In Creature Damage.  On the first floor.  At St. Mungo’s Hospital.  Because two healers there weren’t enough.  Because frostbite complicates everything.”

At a more normal pace, possibly because he could see Alastor wasn’t impressed, or annoyed enough, or whatever he’d meant talking to him like a six year old to do, he added, “Buggered-up magical remedies, as you said.  Applying any standard healing charms to frozen or frostbitten flesh is a quick recipe for gangrene.”

“Not exactly your specialty,” Alastor pointed out, folding his arms.

“It’s within my specialty,” Snape told him.  “At certain stages, the Wolfsbane potion requires that the cauldron be subjected to precise and delicate temperature control, at different and very specific speeds.  Thawing human tissues in a manner comparable to warm water exposure is hardly more difficult than that, except in the number to be treated quickly.”

“Well, big of you to pitch in,” he said, injecting just a tinge of skeptical sarcasm into his voice.

“I’m sorry?” Snape was looking at him as if he was mental again.  No, Alastor decided—more as if he’d suddenly started speaking Sanskrit.

“Everyone around you starts running all over each other, heading for the doors, and you throw up a shield around the head of the DMLE as if he couldn’t do it himself and then start sticking random witches and wizards  to the ceiling by their feet—”

“They weren’t stuck,” Snape interrupted, crossing his own arms and looking the most annoyed he’d looked yet.

“—and you don’t even try to get out like everyone else, you wait until it’s over and then start on healing work you admit you’re not trained for.”

“I never said I wasn’t trained.”

Alastor flipped a page back in his notebook, pulling the dictaquill away.  He read, “Yes, I can see I’m going to have to get some sort of licensure,” and, letting the quill return to its work, raised his eyebrows at Snape.

Who sneered a little.  “Certification means bugger-all in a world of old-boys’ networks and nepotism,” he said dismissively, even contemptuously.  “If I find I need formal acknowledgement of what I know in order to be permitted to do what’s needed when it’s needed without being harassed afterwards, I’ll get it.  It hasn’t been a priority to date.  In any case, when one is a potioneer who’s friends with a hypochondriac or a hypochondriac by proxy, or who is—or has a relative who is—subject to minor complaints all the time, it’s convenient to be able to tell them to go bother the Healer they pay because I’m not even a mediwizard.”

Alastor leaned over the table a bit.  “And where’d you get this under-the-table training?” he barked.

“‘Under the table,’ I beg your pardon,” Snape snapped back, eyebrows clanging together.  “From my mother, from books, from assisting Madam Pomfrey in those of my ‘ten thousand’ detentions when someone other than my Head of House was assigning them and didn’t feel I needed a particularly serious punishment, from not wanting to bother her every five minutes.  How many times have you wanted to punch or hex me since you sat down?  And you’ve got to fill out paperwork if you do, which I imagine would at least make you think once about it, if not twice.”

Alastor’s mouth tugged up a little, he couldn’t help it.

“Besides,” Snape said wryly, “I didn’t make up having friends like that.  I can’t always put them off.  They keep thinking I’ll have all the answers in certain areas, so, really, I have to have them.”

Alastor had three flashes of conviction in brief succession.  First he was sure the kid was playing on Alastor’s old school House’s ideals, trying to play him.  Then he was scolding himself, reminding himself that Snape had no reason to know that Alastor had been a Hufflepuff; he certainly couldn’t have known who would be interrogating him today.  Then it occurred to him that Snape was a Slytherin who was used to being in trouble, and for all Alastor knew he might have made sure to know as much about all the Aurors as he could.  Not a comfortable thought, so it was the one  Alastor decided to bank on.

“Well, let’s see if you do have all the answers, then,” he said sternly.

“Oh, really,” Snape murmured, looking irritated again.  “Transitions.”

“Say what?”

“I only said,” the kid said with a nearly-Knockturn sort of bravado to the set of his chin, “that I’d expect more grace of Dashiell Hammett.”

“Yeah?  Well, try not to expect a martini, either.  Why do you want me to know you read muggle books?”

“Maybe I want to stop you before you fall into one of the more appalling noirish clichès, or maybe I’ve just been mistaken for a cardboard-cutout of other Houses’ ideas of Slytherin often enough to recognize the warning signs.  Why was it important to you that I know you could cap my reference?”

“I’m asking the questions,” Alastor reminded him. He’d meant it to be stern, but he knew he’d lost control of the interview, just for the moment, when the little twerp made a graceful and ever-so-slightly-mocking acquiescing gesture and his own eye twitched in violent impulse.  Pretending that hadn’t just happened, which was the only possible way to get the control back without giving the masochistic little chit yet another victory, he squared the folder on the table.  “Let’s say my idea of a cardboard-cutout Slytherin is one who has a reason for what he does, Snape.  What do you say to that?”

“I say a world where anyone acts for no reason at all would be a terrifying one to live in.  Even children throw tantrums because they hope to make an impression on their fellow-beings, to communicate feelings and if possible to change behaviors they don’t like.  Even that isn’t wholly unpredictable.”

“Yeah, well, ‘preventing noir clichès’ isn’t a very good reason, when you’re being questioned—”

“Certainly it is,” Snape interrupted, an eyebrow sliding up cockily.  “Your features fall into the category of rugged, I live in monochrome, and I do not wish to be either choked by tobacco smoke or kissed.”

Alastor centered his elbows on the table and leaned forwards.  He demanded, “Do you think you’re capable of not being a smartarse for five minutes put together?”

“…History suggests not,,” Snape answered.  This time, though, he actually sounded a bit abashed, if not actually meek.  Alastor thought it might have been as close to apologetic as he got.  “In fact, history most likely says ‘surely you jest’ and falls over in its chair in paroxysms of mirth, re-breaking my nose on its way down.”

Alastor sighed, and pinched the bridge of his own nose.  “You might want to get a handle on that,” he suggested.

“I do,” Snape assured him glumly, “only it doesn’t take.”

Alastor sighed again, and pinched harder before letting his hand fall.  “I think,” he said, folding his arms on the table and putting his scowl back on, “you want me to know you read muggle stuff because you know our friends today were an anti-muggle group.”

Snape frowned.  “It’s possible,” he said slowly, “although I didn’t intend that. Yes,  considering the blood-status related pattern in the disappearances, I suppose I could have acted on that intuitive assumption, without realizing I was.  Although I wouldn’t actually assume it; the style of this attack was completely different.  But, yes, there is at least a superficially apparent motive for those… Still, I should hardly have said ‘know.’  I know no more than anyone else: what we all saw.”

“Oh, but is that really true,” Alastor countered, leaning forward skeptically again.  “‘Anyone else’ was just rushing to get out—”

“Regardless of whomsoever was in their way,” Snape muttered, his eyes flashing with ire.  “Sodding cattle.”

“—And you just turned over a bench and hunkered down to thin out the herd, cowboy.”

Snape sat bolt upright, the eye-flashing now aimed at Alastor.  “By moving some of them to reduce their running over each other,” he clarified angrily.  “Don’t make it sound as if I killed them.”

“You stuck them on the ceiling,” Alastor reminded him.  He was, himself, a bit stuck on this point.  It wasn’t a spell he’d ever heard of before.

“They weren’t stuck!” Snape insisted.  “I didn’t glue them there to be targets!  They were perfectly capable of running outside the anti-apparition field like everyone else.  Just upside down.”  

“St. Mungo’s reported about twenty concussion cases,” Alastor mentioned.

Snape shrugged.  “Me da and his mates watched Newcastle and Nottingham at St. James in ‘74 on the telly,” he said.  “I heard all about it.  Incessantly.  All that summer.  And the Manchester United business, that year and the next, and the stabbing at Blackpool.  You don’t mess about with a stampede.  Concussions aren’t half so dangerous—well, not quite so dangerous. Not unless they’re repeated. Especially with prompt magical attention.  Anyway, tell me at least three-quarters of those concussions weren’t on people who’d also been stepped on, go on.”

Alastor hadn’t thought he’d made any faces of confirmation, but Snape nodded sharp satisfaction and said, “The human body isn’t as good at twisting to break a fall and absorb its impact as the feline, but it does generally make an effort.  Even an adult wizard’s magical reserves will also kick in with ‘accidental’ magic during that sort of an incident, or we’d run through Quidditch players a good deal faster.”

“You going to tell me you were relying on magical reflexes to stop falling injuries but not trampling ones?” Alastor growled.

Snape raised an eyebrow.  “What I’m telling you and have told you is that you don’t mess about with stampedes.  However, if you ask me now that I have a moment to consider the problem… I haven’t studied the matter but would expect the data to support the hypothesis if such a study were made.  Falling is a single moment of sharp, clarifying fear.  One knows what’s going on, one can see what’s approaching, the problem is defined. Being run over by a mob, whether angry or terrified, is confusing, I should think.  With falling, the answer is simple, if it can be enacted: soften the impact or don’t hit the ground.  In the other case, with assault coming from all sides…”  He made a tight, uncomfortable face, and his shoulders hunched a bit.  “Not so easy, perhaps, to know what to do, even reflexively.”

Alastor would have bet his third wand that he now knew what it looked like when Snape was lying, and it was the way his mouth had gone bitter and ashamed when he’d said ‘perhaps.’  Saving that tidbit for when he needed it, he said, “You say ‘you don’t mess with a stampede,’ but you stayed put right in the middle of it.  In the middle of the attack, too.  Knew you’d be safe, did you?”

Snape curled half an upper lip at him, just slightly, more in disappointment than contempt.  “Knew?  Hardly.  But once I had gotten cover and had a chance to look, I could see that it was only hexes being thrown about, not curses.  Thoroughly schoolyard, really, and more sparks and noises than hexes.  Most of the initial damage was people throwing up defensive spells that ought not to have been used in crowds—knocking each other over and into benches, using mirror spells that made the hexes more powerful and worked like actual bloody mirrors, sent them off at angles of deflection, not back at their casters.   Only useful in a duel, when you’re standing directly across from each other in a warded circle,” he added in disgust.

“Good of you not to try to get out in all that chaos,” Alastor said brightly, letting his eyes be as cynical as he could manage.  “Guarding Crouch, too.”

“I didn’t give a toss about Crouch,” Snape said with an expression that meant he was thinking that rude, self-important wanker.   It was an expression Crouch inspired in a lot of wizards, although most had enough sense to try and pretend he didn’t.  “Except in that he had the sense not to panic, and anyone competent who wasn’t either panicking or attacking was useful in that moment and welcome behind our bench and my shield.  I’d just been introduced to his aide, though,” he added thoughtfully, “and he seemed a worthwhile sort of person.”

“You’re going to tell me you set up a barricade instead of getting yourself out for the sake of this secretary bloke you’d just met?” Alastor demanded, letting his eyebrows crawl up.  “When you could have got out by the ceiling yourself, I assume?  Or are you such a decent bloke you did it just to cowboy?”

“Not a verb,” Snape muttered under his breath, a muscle under his eye going tick-tock as he glared at Alastor.  Louder, he said, “If you must know, I’d come here with my flatmate, and he’d proven to me only yesterday that he doesn’t react quickly when assaulted.  Taking cover was the only option.”

“How did he prove it?” Alastor pressed instantly.

One of Snape’s shoulders hunched again, apparently in resentment of the question.   “A girl slapped him.  He… stared at her with his eyes crossed for nearly a full minute, and then drifted into the other room and sat down on the sofa in a shocked stupor for a quarter-hour.  It’s… it’s not a helpful reaction to being surprised, and I couldn’t have dragged him out quickly enough, right side up or otherwise.”

“What girl?” Alastor asked, in case he needed to follow up for some reason, or Rosier pressed assault charges, or the girl pressed other charges.

Snape made an exasperated how-should-I-know gesture.  “A girl.  He’s a portraitist, he wines and dines his clients all the time. They expect it. Well, I say he does, but I understand his grandfather has relatively clear guidelines about when it’s done on the firm’s sickle and when they allow the clients to play host. A matter of who does and doesn’t live on their interest, I expect. Is the portraitist a potentially fretful artiste one is patronizing, or is the portraiture process a perhaps never to be repeated purchase of great moment or luxury? In which case, it should be treated as such, and the client should leave feeling greatly respected and very well served. If only, although in fact not only by any means, for the purpose of word-of-mouth advertising.”  

“You must have some idea who it was. It was in your flat, wasn't it? You were there,” Alastor pointed out, dragging Snape back to the important bit by what felt like main force.

Snape made a deeply disgusted noise, and scorned, “I don’t take note of everyone who thinks it means something profound when Rosier blinks too fast trying to keep awake and they think he’s batting his eyes at them.”

“But you must have seen her, right?”

Snape raised an eyebrow full of distaste.  “It’s a two-bedroom flat, and that’s not counting his studio and my lab. I prefer my own private life to be private, and while the baseline state of humanity is largely one of self-delusion, I like to think I extend others who don’t flaunt their own the same courtesy.  You don’t imagine a lady would slap a man and then stick around while he stared silently into space for fifteen minutes, surely.”

Alastor eyed him, but Snape was glaring pure don’t even TRY asking about my private life, my private life is NOT RELEVANT at him.  There was no reason to think it was relevant just now, and he still had at least seven interviews to plow through before he could go home. Could well have been more, depending on whether Grimesby interrogated anyone else into fits of incomprehensible hysteria and whether Rufus confused too many witness into stymied or offended staring fits while trying to lead them into cunning knots of self-contradiction. Besides, he could always follow up later.

So Alastor shrugged and moved on.  “In any case, you did stay in one place during the strike, so you had a better look at the attackers than most.  Recognize any of them?”

Snape gave him the are-you-mental face again.  “How would I have recognized any of them?  They all had hoods on.”

“Any of ‘em face you?” he asked patiently.

“Yes,” Snape said—rather to his surprise.  “I don’t mean anyone stood there and stared into my eyes, but yes, I didn’t only see their backs, if that’s what you mean.”

“And?”

Snape shrugged.  “And their hoods fell over their faces rather.”

“Didn’t recognize any wands, any boots?”

Now it was Snape’s eyebrows’ turn to shoot up.  “Any boots?”

Alastor tapped the folder.  “Yeah, Snape, boots.  I do know who your friends are, hypochondriac or not.  You’ve been joined at the hip with two of your generation’s premier clotheshorses for years, with three more in and out of orbit.”

“Will you stop mixing your metaphors, good god.   In any case, I don’t know what you mean, ‘three more.’  Lucius, I assume, but other than that…”

“I mean the Black kid and his friend Lockhart.”

“Bite your tongue,,” Snape blurted, evidently on sheer appalled reflex.  “Lockhart may hang about people, but it doesn’t mean they have anything to do with him, or listen to any of his nonsense.  And Regulus Black is not a clotheshorse,” he added, offended in a different way, “he just raids his ancestors’ wardrobes with happy results.”

“Whatever,” Alastor said, gruff with refusing to laugh.  “You haven’t refuted the other three.”

“No, but I don’t have anything to do with their fripperies,” he protested, opening his hands helplessly.  “Are you mad?  I say ‘you look lovely today, Narcissa,’ thereby avoiding dire consequences, and that is the end of it.  I am not involved with their tailoring, and I am absolutely not invited to any shoe-shopping, including for my own damned shoes,” he ended, a little helplessly.  “She took a mold of my feet.”

“And you’re not even married to her,” Alastor drawled.

“Thank god,” Snape agreed fervently, shuddering.  “No better friend, but I’d sooner wed a rabid crocodile.  It would make no practical difference to me, and I wouldn’t have to duel Lucius about it.”

Alastor noted that Snape sounded as if dueling Lucius Malfoy would be, compared all the rest of it, a mild nuisance at worst, although he wasn’t sure quite what he should take that to mean about Snape, Malfoy, or Mrs. Malfoy.  “So,” he said doggedly, “you didn’t recognize anyone, then.”

“I said that.”

“Not exactly.”

Snape huffed out an aggravated breath.  “No,” he said, “I can’t say I did recognize anyone.  Or any wands.  And certainly not any boots.”

“Other people did notice the hoods,” Alastor mentioned, “but if they fell down so far that no one could see any faces, you wouldn’t think they’d be able to walk a straight line, let alone attack.  What do you think about that?”

Snape shrugged.  “I don’t know.”

“But what do you think?”

“Well, for one thing—may I?”  He raised his handkerchief.

“May you what?”  Alastor asked warily, edging back.

Bizarrely, Snape looked pleased with him.  “All right, then, have you got one?”  When he’d taken it out, the kid went on, “Hold it flat over your eyes, then.  Tightly.  Keep your eyes open.”

“Put your hands on the table.  Palms down,” Alastor instructed him flatly.  Snape held his palms up in the I’m-unarmed gesture, and did as he was told.  Cautiously, keeping his eyes on Snape until the last possible second, Alastor plastered the cloth over one eye.

The world went black-veiled, but not black.  His periphery was shot to hell, but he could mostly see okay, especially where the light was.  That being the case, he risked covering both.  Same deal.

“See?” asked Snape.  He hadn’t moved a muscle, other than to speak.

“It’s not great,” Alastor said, pulling the cloth away from his face.  “And it gets more opaque, farther away from the eyes.  A hood’s not exactly plastered on.”

Snape shrugged.  “Unless it’s a glamour.  Might not be there at all.”

“You think you can use glamours in the Ministry?”

“I don’t know,” Snape said, looking scornful again.  “I would have thought you could, actually.  Ministry workers have spots and grey hair and vanity like other people, I should think. I heard Crouch speaking in a way that suggested that he doesn’t think about security measures at all, and he’s the head of the DMLE.”

Alastor leaned forward again—noting that Snape, in response, sighed a little in irritation that wanted Alastor to know he’d used the gesture once too often.  That was unusual.  Usually, when people noticed one of the tells he was feeding them, especially Slytherins, they either looked smug and secretive or tried to pretend they’d never noticed at all.   He pretended not to notice, and asked, “You don’t think I don’t know you’re holding back on me, do you?”

“…I’m not sure,” Snape drawled, droll.  “May I have a moment to line up your auxiliary verbs?”  

Snot.

“See this?” Alastor slid a page across the table.  

Snape scanned it, dark eyebrows slowly rising, then knitting in what looked like real confusion, as far as Alastor could tell.  

“Standard form by now.  Dumbledore sends it to us when he wants a candidate for the Defense Against the Dark Arts post vetted.  There’ve been a few real corkers tried to slip in under his nose.  He doesn’t bother if he’s not interested, though.  So I’m thinking you’ve got more thoughts about Ministry security and dark hoods than you’re bothering to share.  And I’m wondering why you’re not more interested in being more helpful, Mr. Snape.”

To his credit, maybe, Snape didn’t try to duck it, and (apparently characteristically) he only looked more annoyed yet, not fretted.  “I don’t mind being helpful,” he said crossly.  “I do mind if you decide I’ve given a matter previous consideration relevant to current circumstances, perhaps in some conspiratorial way, because I can come up with speculative solutions to problems quickly when they’re put to me.”

“How many times a week does someone remind you to speak English?” Alastor wondered idly.

Snape glared.  “I said, maybe I could come up with hyp—I could make guesses, but I don’t trust you not to say Aha, He Has Thought About These Things Before, especially if I happen to hit on something your experts think align with—that is, if I guess something your experts think is right.”

“Oh, I heard you the first time,” Alastor explained, “I was just wondering.”  Snape choked in impotent infuriation. Which, he had to admit, was more fun than you usually got at one of these dos.

Actually, he hadn’t been so much wondering as playing for time while he tried to work out whether to press the issue.  Figuring out whether the witnesses had thought about those things before was why the question was on his list in the first place.

It took him another moment to decide, and then he tore a piece of paper out of his notebook and shoved it across the old,  scarred, yellowing holly of the table with two fingers.  “That’s what they call a double-bluff, is it?” he said, not really asking.  “One of those ‘once I bring it up myself you’ll never know for sure things.”

“Does ‘if your mark knows what you’re doing it obscures the results of the ploy’ count?” Snape asked.  It looked like a serious question, not a gambit: as if Snape thought they were there to have a bloody discussion of semantics all afternoon, maybe over tea and cakes.  “I wouldn’t count that in the same category.  There’s no bluffing involved… well,” he amended thoughtfully,  “I suppose there could be, theoretically, in this sort of situation, but the principle extends to, oh, marketing, and the placebo effect, and—”

“Let’s just leave it at we’ll have to determine whether you were involved some other way, shall we?” Alastor stopped him.

Snape looked disappointed.  Not just a snot: a nutter.

Forbearing to roll his eyes, Alastor shoved the paper at him again.  “Stipulating that,” he drawled, speaking to Snape in his own language (for a second he could have sworn the kid was about to stick out his tongue), “let’s have your thoughts anyway.”

Snape shrugged, and started writing.

Ten minutes later the paper was ridiculous on both sides, with footnotes and added-on-later notes going in all directions. Alastor started to skim it.  He read:

Known anti-app/portkey field?  —NO —previous knowl. irrev’t; testable.
If anti-a/pk f:
—elf help
—‘disillusionment’ (—dissolution-ment!!*) spell until in (possibly prevented)
—disguise until in (polyjuice not preventable, unmagical disguises not p’ble, would have heard about strikes etc if attempted glamour-prohibition?)
WHY NO SNEAKOSCOPES —people travel for sneaky-not-illegal reasons, obv., would never shut up
—disguise oncein/change in WC & disillusion on way back THIS IS WHAT YOU GET FOR A SYSTEM THAT IS AT PEACE WITH GRAFT/BRIBERY EVEN AT THE LOWEST LEVELS
—hooded robes enchantable to be invisible but not obscure the wearer?  Poss?  Ask FF

* nts: write down more spell names that sound unfitting and stupid! Spells of stupid charmsmiths fail to function! (nts: work out how to get M to owl crosswords without admitting lapse. Acquire Quibbler for proof of available inferiors? Last-resort; XLgd should not be encouraged.)

At this point he looked up, putting the paper away into Snape’s file before it gave him a worse headache.  He’d fob it off on Grimesby, who’d threatened a hundred-year-old witch with Azkaban and made her cry an hour ago, just because he’d got her to say that there certainly were more Muggleborns mixing with normal witches and wizards when she was a girl and Albie Dumbledore had always been a strange one.  This wasn’t the smartest time to express anti-Muggle sentiments to an Auror, but that was pretty damn mild as they went, and considering she’d been led to it Alastor wasn’t even sure she’d meant it that way.  

The first bit was pure fact, partly due to pureblood losses during the Grindelwald wars.  As for the second, well, Dumbledore was a decidedly odd duck, and liked to play it up.  Sounded political all put together, but was it really?  No way to know, not off a dictaquill transcript and when she’d been leading-questioned into it.  Grimesby deserved Snape’s handwriting, and even his abbreviations.

The handwriting wasn’t exactly awful, as such.  It was, however, the hand of someone who was just getting over a childish, self-important writing style, and still on the ornate side, and he’d been writing quite fast.  More than that, about halfway down the first side of the page he’d realized he wasn’t going to have enough paper and his letter size had shrunk dramatically. More than that, half his footnotes and ‘nts’ things weren’t just in the margins but sideways.

So Alastor just asked, “Who’s FF?”

“Professor Flitwick,” Snape said, in a tone that said this should have been perfectly obvious to one-celled sea creatures that lived off New Zealand.

“What the hell is ‘poss?’” He could work out note-to-self, when it was next to an asterisk, although not why Snape would write a note to himself in a document he was never going to see again.

Snape stared at him, and crossly explained, “Possible.”

“Oh, well, obviously,” he said dryly.

“You only gave me one sheet,” Snape accused, in a tone that said if he ran into Alastor at the Leaky Cauldron in ten years he’d still be harping on this grievance, and any holes in what he could have given Alastor otherwise were Alastor’s own damn fault.

That cinched it for Alastor. They went through the rest of the routine questions, and he certainly intended to follow up during the investigation, as he would with everyone, and the babysitter he intended to have the Balkan ‘Department of Magical Tourism’ (ha) sic on the boys when they got to Bulgaria and Romania would help with that.

But the flatmate had spent a considerable amount of time, going by the remote dictaquill set up in the waiting area, talking to this kid about how this couldn’t possibly be the same as the disappearances.  He’d gone through a whole litany about how it was off-pattern, the disappearances were clear pureblood-supremacy messaging unless they were something the vanished were doing themselves, whereas this had impacted a quite random group of witches and wizards—

—Including the head of the DMLE, Snape had injected at that point, and hadn’t commenced until the head of Muggle relations had shown up and stayed for quite long enough for a hunter to do nearly anything in preparation but brew a potion.

The flatmate had argued that there wasn’t any clear message coming out of this, and Snape had asked if one had come out of the giant attack. The flatmate had worried for a while over whether that attack and this one were a separate group-or-madman from the disappearances, or this was a completely third party, or what they were seeing was an attention-grab followed by mood-setting and then an escalation.  

It had been more or less like every other conversation everyone else was having, with the exception that most of the rest hadn’t known Crouch and Fudge (who’d both been bustled out as soon as possible) had been involved at all.  The only other major difference was that the DADA-post applicant had injected into it the charming pieces of information that a) even muggle serial killers had been known to get more bloodthirsty and unhinged over time as their victim count grew, and that b) he’d explained the escalation inherent in dark arts dementia to Rosier already.  

That had cut off their conversation. Rosier had been unhappy and subdued in his cheerful peaches and chocolate colored outfit during his interview.  He’d got quite distressed about explaining his mood, saying he thought Snape was probably right (he’d explained what about) because Snape usually was. Especially when you most wanted him not to have said anything at all.  

And as for Snape himself—well, Alastor wasn’t crossing anyone off his list yet, and with a double-bluffer (or whatever the kid wanted to call it) the hell of it was that you really never did know until you knew.  But he’d crossed wands across this desk with loonies and canny spiders and smooth talkers and very convincing wizards who had only slightly more soul before the Kiss than after.  He’d never had a Guilty act like Alastor was an OWL examiner who’d called ‘time’ after an outrageous five minutes on the written test.

Or a Not-Guilty either, for that matter.  

The point was that either Snape was a better faker than the sociopaths, with bludgers of solid titanium,  or he was simply and fundamentally sure that being investigated was not something he should be afraid of, however much bother it would be.    And if that all-over-the-place bouncing back and forth between situationally-idiotic snapping and easily divertable, totally-absorbed swottishness was faked, then the stage had lost one hell of an actor and Alastor would stop nagging Rufus about his tea kitty debt for a month.

So when the Aurors let them go, it was only with a tracking spell, each with a portkey that they could activate to bring them home in case of an emergency, which would activate on its own if they didn’t do it themselves when it started glowing blue and hopping.  They didn’t demand the pair stay in the country, although Alastor pulled them into his office on their way out and made damn sure they understood all hell would break loose if they lost the portkey or broke the trace.

Snape made an irritated yes-yes sort of noise, and Rosier said firmly, in a discussion-ending tone that made Alastor think all the addressing each other by surname was your classic Slytherin in-public minotaur shite, “I’m sure we shall feel all the safer for having them.”

“You should,” Alastor growled.  “Damn stupid thing to do, taking a holiday with vampires.”

“It’s research,” Snape corrected, annoyed.

“Their skin color’s supposed to be different after they’re changed,” Rosier said greedily, his eyes lighting.

“Well, that’s only sense; skin color’s affected by blood, so—”

“Yes, but it’ll mean a whole new palette—”

“Research could be even stupider, if they take offense,” Alastor went on growling.  “They’ll be faster and stronger than you and know the territory and want you for breakfast.”  He looked the better-fed Rosier up and down.  “And dinner.  If you want a hope of getting out of there alive and the same wizards who went in, you’ll have to exercise CONSTANT VIGILANCE!”

“Eternal,” Snape said, instead of looking impressed or cowed or even jumping like Rosier.  His funeral.

Also, what?  “What?” Alastor asked, irritated in his turn.

“Eternal vigilance,” Snape elaborated in a matter-of-fact sort of way while Rosier tried to hide a growing smile behind his hand.  “‘It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance, which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.’”

Alastor stared at him.  Rosier was trying to swallow a laugh, and very nearly choking himself to death on it.

Looking as if he was trying to be comforting but in fact just barely managing to be nothing worse than awkward, Snape offered, “John Philpot Curran, a few years before the Irish Rebellion.  It was about mayoral elections in Dublin.  Everyone gets it wrong.”

Alastor pointed at the door.  “Get out of my office.”