Chapter Text
“Norm life, baby
I'm just a sample of a soul
Made to look just like a human being
Norm life, baby
‘We're rehabbed and we're ready
For our 15 minutes of shame’”
I Don’t Like the Drugs – Marilyn Manson
“And that was when you killed the ice cream man?”
“He wasn’t an ‘ice cream man’ like the sort that drive around offering ice lollies from the back of a van playing Greensleeves—”
“I—”
“He was the proprietor of the ice cream shop in Diagon Alley. And a famed, amateur Magical Historiographer.”
“Of course—” the doctor tried to interrupt again.
“And no, that wasn’t when. We also went to abduct old Mr. Ollivander that day. He didn’t die, of course, but it was a close thing.”
The man Snape was meeting with waved the hand holding his biro around in the air before him, either to urge Snape on or to dismiss this correction as being irrelevant.
“By your count, the ice cream man brought your tally up to—?”
Snape leant back in his chair. His knees were spread wide before him as he sank into the comfortable upholstery, and he didn’t miss the slight flinch from the psychologist seated opposite when he reached for the paper cup with his tea. Delicately, he picked up the tag and flipped it to the rear of the cup where it wouldn’t interfere with his mouth when he took a sip.
Bitter. Astringent. Cheap.
Brilliant. Just how he liked it.
“By my count somewhere north of forty.” Severus sniffed as he examined the oils floating atop his beverage. It had over-steeped. “He was one of the last.”
“Somewhere north? It seems to me, Severus, that you kept meticulous count—”
“Forty-nine.”
“Of fifty.”
“Of fifty,” Snape agreed.
“And your former employer was forty—”
“Eight. Forty-eight.”
Affecting a mien of agreeability, Dr. Foster sat back in his own chair, perhaps to mirror Snape’s own relaxed pose. “You know, you really lived out some men’s dreams. I can’t tell you the number of times I fantasised over braining some of my tutors in University. Or after, when I had some real sticklers during my interning years. I had one bloke try and hold up my paycheque over some paperwork I was meant to have done, and—”
“I would have given anything to not have had to kill Dumbledore,” Snape’s mouth tightened, and his tone could have frozen a coal fire. He sat up straight once more, partially because he no longer felt like relaxing and partially to be contrarian.
See the doctor try and mirror his energy now.
“So you never imagined defenestrating your employer before you—ah—threw him from the... what was it? The Astrology Tower?”
“Astronomy. The Astronomy Tower.” Snape sniffed again at his paper cup of tea, the walls of which looked as though they might begin to dissolve at any moment, despite the wax coating. He tossed back another slug. “I regularly considered killing Albus; but defenestrating him—as you say—is hardly my style, given any choice in the matter.”
“And what, would you say, is your style?”
“Poison.”
“What percentage of your victims would you say you used poison on? That is to say, how many?”
Snape pretended to think, even though he found the line of questioning boring. They always asked the same questions, and the account usually always went mostly the same way, with slight variations depending on his doctors’ areas of specialty or pet interests.
Severus found himself preferring the psychoanalysts and Rogerian oriented practitioners over those trained on the relatively newer discipline of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. The former usually let him do most of the talking and ran with the premise that Severus was being truthful. In the case of the later, the effusive empathy and too-frequent interruptions seeking to validate parts of his experience (never the murders, but whatever his feelings were surrounding the “supposed” murders) while obviously not taking his story at face value, were grating.
He’d not yet figured out Dr Foster’s particular flavour yet, but it hardly mattered. The result was always the same. Recommendations for new psychiatric assessments, group therapies, or art therapy and the like. One woman had recommended his television privileges be slashed, as Snape’s grasp on reality was clearly too tenuous. Severus hadn’t taken any chances with her. He’d taken his wand late at night and made sure to contrive a paper trail leading to a scandal great enough to ensure that she was never invited back. On the other hand, the other lady doctor who regularly told the orderlies that Snape deserved double pudding rations and extra sessions with the dance instructor on Samba days had her performance review updated to reflect how very pleased he was with her.
The one thing he’d give the CBT specialists was that they always piled his plate high with art therapy, even if they were eye-rollingly mushy about it.
He liked the art therapies.
Of course, if anyone actually did believe him, he’d be in trouble, but he still found the ones who at least acted as though he really believed what he was saying and confessing to be the most entertaining. The psychoanalysts usually only ever broke that illusion at the end when they began trying to delve into what his murderous confessions probably meant, symbolically speaking.
“No fewer than twenty, but probably not greater than twenty-five. Half or thereabouts.”
The doctor raised his head up to look at him, blinking slowly. “Five of them you don’t remember?”
“Seventy-nine and eighty were a bit of a blur for me,” Snape confessed. “A whole forty-five of the men I killed were done in between seventy-eight and eighty-one. Most of those were directly at the Dark Lord’s behest, and any that weren’t were casualties of raids I was sent on at his pleasure.”
“And these you killed because...? Explain if you would. Did you simply want to?”
Sighing now, Snape eyed the bottom of his cup. It was empty. When had he emptied it? He mashed his eyes closed and gave his head a small shake. Some of the medication he was taking was new, and that could always bring on a bit of brain fog. In any case, his plight didn’t go unnoticed and the doctor rose to take the cup from him, moving to a rolling cart where a tea service with an electric kettle sat.
“What’s your poison?”
“Usually Draught of Yew.”
With an expressive sigh of his own, and a chuckled oath, Snape’s newest doctor (in a long, long line of doctors), shook his head at him. “Tetley Original or Yorkshire Gold?”
Snape’s mouth opened a bit as he pantomimed an ‘aaaahhh,’ of acknowledgement. “Yorkshire. Always Yorkshire.”
The cup was handed back to him and Snape grunted his appreciation.
“So. The ones on the raids, Severus?” His doctor prompted. He took a long moment to settle himself back into the chair he’d taken over as his own, shifting to get comfortable before he took his legal pad back up again.
Snape had looked it over while the older man had been preparing his drink. Often he could find out a good deal from inspecting the notes while his doctors and therapists were otherwise occupied, but this newest specimen was a bit of a dark horse in that he used short-hand.
Finally, he shrugged and took a small sip. Since his root canal, hot liquids could cause discomfort. He usually had to wait for his tea or coffee to cool now before he could drink it as quickly as he was accustomed.
“At the risk of sounding entirely mercenary: they got in the way.”
The man opposite him nodded, his face as unreadable as his notes had been. “And was there, perhaps, just a small part of you that hoped they would get in the way? Or... ah. That’s not quite the way of putting it, is it? Could it have been that they weren’t so obtrusive as to warrant being dispensed with—?”
“I’m afraid I still don’t understand what you’re driving at.” Snape crossed one lean leg over the other at the knee and began bouncing his foot.
“Were they really in the way? Or did you want to kill them?”
Smirking now, Snape sat back to admire this latest doctor. Now here was a specimen. Usually they didn’t indulge him to this degree.
“Herr Doktor—”
“Don’t call me that,” the doctor interrupted, his placid face finally showing a bit of irritation.
“I cannot claim that I never wanted to kill anyone, but I was never fortunate enough to wind up killing any of the people I actually wanted to. With the exception of my employer, whom I wanted to kill many times over the years. Of course, when it came time to actually do the deed, I would have rather had any other option.”
“Don’t call me ‘Herr Doktor.’”
Hmmm. Snape frowned and began tracing at the seam of his chapped lips with his pointer finger. Apparently, that was a sticking point if he’d returned to it even after Snape had gone back to talking about his murderous ways.
“What would you prefer I call you?”
“I introduced myself to you when we sat down half an hour ago,” the older man answered, his eyes expressing a certain firmness that he hadn’t before evinced.
Snape’s finger slid to pull at the space between his droopy lower lip and his jutting chin, which exposed the sorry state of his lower teeth. “Remind me. I forgot,” he lied.
“I believe I introduced myself to you as Doctor Foster, but if that is too difficult to remember, Doctor—or Leland, even, if you prefer—is acceptable.”
“And Herr Doktor isn’t because...?”
Dr Foster sat back in his chair after laying the legal pad down on the desk between them and rested his folded-together hands on his rounded belly. His mouth quirked infinitesimally as he stared Snape down. He’d made no attempt to obscure his notes. In fact, he’d turned them so that Snape could read them as he liked, little good it did him.
“Because you are mocking me.”
Scoffing now, Snape added his half-empty cup to the rapidly cluttering desktop. He used the freedom from it to now cross his arms mulishly over his chest. “And you’ve never been mocked before?”
Foster’s smile widened and he snorted a bit.
“How used to being mocked are you, Severus?”
This brought about a black scowl. It was odd... he’d almost forgotten what scowling felt like. He’d almost forgotten what losing felt like. His dislike for Doctor Foster intensified.
“I’ve been mocked enough in my life to sometimes have a hard time knowing when I’m being treated with sincerity,” he answered, truthfully.
So seldom did he lie now that he’d mostly given up on it. His waking moments were given over to every therapy known to man and practised by the NHS. Rather than get pulled into the undertow, he had learnt to just go along with it. Besides, he wasn’t quite cynical enough to where he didn’t find himself hoping that someday one of these bloody headshrinkers wouldn’t say or do something to actually help him.
He was open to that possibility. Open to being helped. He took whatever pills they shoved at him. He drew with whatever implement they placed in his hand. He participated in circle time whenever the squishy ball made its way around to his possession, and he sambaed forwards, backwards, and sideways to whichever Bossa Nova track their dance instructor chose for the day. No one could accuse him of not trying.
But what did help look like when he couldn’t properly articulate what was wrong?
Oh, by the Muggles’ standards he’d never get better. He expected that that would mean he’d need to stop “compulsively lying.” But as for what he was there to accomplish, given a choice?
He shrugged one shoulder, rather asymmetrically. “If being mocked bothered me anymore, then I would stop telling everyone about all of my misdeeds.”
Infuriatingly, Doctor Foster clucked his tongue. “Indeed, you invite your fair share of head-scratching, going about as you do. You maintain you don’t mind being mocked—”
“And I don’t. Not anymore. No one here calls me names.”
“You aren’t aware, then, that you’ve earned the rather unglamorous designation of ward Pinocchio?”
Snape only tapped his nose. “You don’t grow up with this schnoz without hearing every joke in the book.”
“They’re not making fun of your nose, Severus—or at least I don’t think that’s the real point of the joke,” his doctor for the day pressed, his sedate, brown eyes trained upon Snape’s slouched figure. “You’re familiar with the story, are you not? Pinocchio’s nose grows when he’s lying—”
Unperturbed, Snape canted his head. He wished he could take another swig of his tea, but decided against it. Somehow he felt as though he’d lose ground if he did so. “As I just explained: my nose has always been this size. It’s not grown since I got here.”
“Fifty—”
“Fifty men.” Snape uncrossed his legs and sat up so that he could stare the doctor down. Seated, they were of a height, although standing, Doctor Foster had three inches on him.
“No women or children?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“It is a point of pride that I avoided adding their number to my casualty count. Granted, there was...” He sighed and looked away, slouching once more as his eyes studied the certificates framed on the far wall, hung above a mid-century Magnavox console. He hated talking about Lily still. He’d done it before. Sparingly, yes, but still. If Doctor Leland Foster was at all familiar with his new patient’s files then he would likely already know the story, insofar as Snape had related it to various professionals over the years.
“There was one,” he picked up the thread. He couldn’t bear to look at Doctor Foster just now, so instead he studied the woven panels on the Magnavox that allowed sound through the speakers. “One whose death I caused. And where I was not the instrument of her demise... I killed her just the same.”
“Is she one of the fifty?”
“No. Neither is her husband. Had he been, he would have been the only person in that number who I’d have hated enough to want to kill... but his death I regret, now.”
Annoyingly, Doctor Foster was nodding along. Such a show usually signalled the kind of empathy that screamed CBT, and yet he wasn’t exactly showing his hand yet, in all of this. Had Snape his wits about him, he might have tried harder to figure out what it was that Foster himself personally believed... but that would have only been possible if what it was that the bloody man was doing wasn’t actually working so very well.
“His death you regret?”
“All of their deaths. I regret them all. Every last one.”
There was that nodding again. Like a witless owl.
“Well, truthfully, there was one bloke I’m a bit proud of, but that’s only because he was known to eat people.”
Finally—finally—the head-bobbing ceased as Doctor Foster was brought up short. Snape did a little mental jig (that probably was closer to his bloody Samba-ing) when the other man’s mouth actually parted a bit in... something. Probably horror. He hoped it was horror.
Foster’s next words were a bit breathless and emerged in only the faintest echo of his normal speaking voice. “You don’t say...?”
“Caliban Yaxley.”
“Is... er... is eating people de rigueur amongst wizards?”
Snape treated Doctor Foster to a bland look. Instead of answering, he leant forwards and deftly plucked a few Twiglets from the bowl before him, tossing them between his molars where they produced a satisfying crunch.
Silence reigned for a few moments.
“You’re trying to put me off.”
“Yes.”
“So. Do you wizards habitually eat people?”
“We do not, no.”
“Well,” the doctor tapped the end of his pen absently on the desktop. “That is a relief.”
“Quite. Had there been more deviants like Caliban in the rank and file, I imagine I’d have had to come up with a great deal more excuses for dead compatriots.” Snape drawled with a small chuckle.
Perhaps this Foster wasn’t so bad, if he was game to play along like this. Of course, it had all begun with Snape’s quest for quiet oblivion. He spun a yarn to the doctors about his life as a wizarding spy, and they kept his little paper cup full of sedatives and anti-psychotics (which he always managed to Vanish without taking). Over time, however, he’d begun to enjoy little things here and there about his stay in Fogarty Wode.
There was nothing but downtime, for one. That was something he’d never had before. He had zero responsibilities. No one expected a damn thing out of him, particularly given that they thought him a complete and utter loon. Or, as was Foster’s view, a compulsive liar. Snape didn’t really care which view any of the staff took towards him, so long as he got his telly time. If ever that was threatened, woe betide whoever sought to wrest the clicker from his long, bony fingers.
“Have you ever thought of writing, Severus?” Foster asked. He’d rested his forearms on the desk and was leaning over them, his professionalism and self-imposed distance appearing to waver. Snape smirked back at the older man.
“Merlin, no. As a creative, my gifts lie in research and development, not story-craft.”
“Don’t they?”
“No,” Snape answered. He winced. A piece of one of the Twiglets had lodged itself between his gum and his tooth and he probed at it with his tongue, before he began fishing behind his lip with his pointer finger, seeing if it were possible to evict the irritant. He could just feel it, but it resisted being moved when he scratched at it with a stained nail.
“I think you’re positively gifted,” Foster continued, in a conversational tone. Had Snape not been banking on the fact that the doctor wasn’t supposed to believe him, he might have thought it terribly disrespectful for the man to be calling him a bald-faced liar, but then another part of him almost had to respect Foster’s moxie. Usually, his doctors just played along and then afterwards shot him pitying looks as they conferred with the on-call psychiatrist about his dosage of Risperidone.
“On the other hand—”
Snape snorted. “You have some criticism to offer?”
With a sheepish grin, his doctor spread his hands with his palms open wide. “Cannibalism always sells great, of course, but perhaps it would be more compelling to have more than one?”
“More than one cannibal?” Snape deadpanned. “Is one not more than enough?”
He considered the doctor’s wry shrug of the shoulders for a second before he offered a concession. “Fenrir Greyback was known to partake here and there, but that was usually when he was transformed. He wasn’t principally a people-eater.”
Foster checked his notes. “Greyback...”
“A werewolf. He enjoyed turning children. And if he sometimes bit a little too hard and ended up with a tasty snack instead of a pint-sized, ankle-biting cub, it couldn’t always be helped. I suppose he wasn’t one for waste.”
Snape’s words earned him a low whistle for his trouble. “Werewolves,” Foster muttered, scribbling that down on the paper.
“The world-building alone...” he marvelled. “You could make a mint off of an idea like that.”
“I could do,” Snape nodded, extracting the finger that still probed his gumline from his mouth. He’d all but given up before he remembered the small pack of toothpicks in the pocket of his dressing gown. He withdrew one and handily used the tip to liberate his teeth from the tiny crumb.
Toothpicks were contraband on the ward, but Foster didn’t blink at the fact that Snape had seemingly produced it from nowhere. Of course, he wouldn’t, given that the wizard had enchanted every last one of them with Notice-Me-Not charms.
Mission accomplished, he began chewing on the end of the wood and re-crossed his legs, using the opportunity to flip his dressing gown over his lap and draw the waffle-woven material tighter around himself. He crossed his arms.
“Would that that were possible, of course. It’s quite expressly forbidden for me to disclose the nature of our world to the Muggles,” he somehow managed to say, without a trace of the irony that the words should have held. “I’d be behind bars for such a large breech. Of course, I’m not sure how the Ministry would manage to cover up something like a book publication, particularly if it had wide enough circulation, but, for my own part, I’m certain it wouldn’t matter.”
The pen in Foster’s hand was set down, and he levelled a piercing look in Snape’s direction as he canted his head to the side. It was the sort of stare that seemed to say ‘Really? Do you even believe what you’re saying now?’
“Which is naturally why you’ve told everyone in the building—”
“And the itinerants, like yourself. And the police. And—”
“You don’t think your Ministry would take issue with that?”
“I don’t think they’ll ever find out what I’ve told you lot, because who would believe such a thing?” Snape asked, rhetorically. He worked the toothpick from the left corner of his mouth to the right with a little flick of his tongue and stared down at the tendons of his right hand where it gripped his tracksuit bottoms at the knee.
Unaccountably, for the first time since he’d walked himself into the A&E, spouting off about magic, he found himself wishing that someone (Leland Foster or anyone, really) might actually believe him.
With that realization, his mouth twisted into something approaching a sneer. “We’ve run over by five minutes, Dr Foster.”
Foster’s eyes darted up to the clock face and he nodded slowly. “You know, I haven’t got anyone after you, today. My next appointment was cancelled—”
“Ah, but mine was not,” Snape drawled, standing. He wiped his greasy, salty fingertips on the outside of his dressing gown, near the hip, and stared down at Foster, who was now openly staring at him with an expression that Severus couldn’t hope to interpret, even with the aid of a touch of wandless Legilimency.
Finally, Doctor Foster heaved a sigh through his round nose, the force of it making the hairs of his moustache fluff out a bit. “As you wish, Snape. We’ll speak again next week.”
At the door already, Snape turned. “Oh, don’t be glum, Herr Doktor. There’s always Group on Wednesdays.”
The door was shut behind him before Foster could voice his objection to Snape’s mockery once more.
“Finished up in there, have you?”
Snape turned to see an orderly, standing sentinel outside the door.
“For the week, yes.”
“And where are you meant to be now?” The burly man asked in a pronounced Jamaican accent. He eyed Snape mistrustfully.
Really, the constant supervision ought to have stuck in Severus’ craw, but he felt no sense of being entrapped or imprisoned, as perhaps he ought. It was merely part and parcel of living on the ward. Since living on the ward was what he wanted, so was this level of paternalistic overreach in all things.
Shrugging like a carefree adolescent, Snape shoved his hands into the pockets of his trackies and scuffed the toe of his slipper on the floor a bit. “Would have been with Ms. Montrose in the multipurpose room today, I suppose, but Dr Swain had me meeting with him,” he jerked a thumb at Foster’s temporary office, “instead.”
“You know your options then,” the orderly drawled, pulling himself up to his imposing height of somewhere approaching six-foot four. “Your room or the Commons. Your choice, Snape.”
Severus sighed and buried his hands into his pockets, shifting his weight a bit as he considered things.
“I don’t suppose you know what’s on at this hour?”
“You know as well as I do that I’m here to work and not to watch telly. There’s a TV guide in the Commons, if you’re curious.”
Knowing full well that he was already bound to be sat on his arse end for at least an hour, watching whatever it was that was on, Snape still made a play at deliberating.
“Come on, mate. You can rest up or you can park it on the sofa, I don’t care which; but you can’t hang out in the hallway. You know that.”
“Alright, alright.” The wizard heaved a put-upon sigh and waved a dismissive hand through the air. “I’ll go try my luck in the Commons.”
“Atta boy,” the larger man snorted. “I’ll buzz you through the door.”
Being called ‘boy’ ought to have really chafed. But it didn’t. Severus merely approached the reinforced steel door and waited patiently for the locks to release so that he could step through into the modestly appointed Commons.
Given the time, it was mostly empty. Tuesday afternoon was usually chock full of opportunities for different activities. Severus himself usually availed himself of one of the offerings for recreation, thus, he wasn’t entirely certain what to expect of the television programming at that hour.
Grabbing up the TV guide from atop the crusty, old set, he plonked his arse down on the squeaky, vinyl sofa and wiggled a bit in an attempt to make himself comfortable.
A quick look around the Commons revealed that there was no one he should expect to join him. At one of the long tables was sat a woman named Sandra, whose chief occupation most days was in reading (and rereading, and rereading again) large-print romance novels. She never had time for anyone but the heroes in her books. Behind the sofa, at a small, café-style table by the windows, was a chap called Max. He preferred bird watching, and his nose was a scant inch away from the windowpane as his hawk-eyed gaze tracked his avian friends swooping through the airspace near the hospital.
Neither of them would give him any issues, nor would they compete with him if he chose to watch...
Well, what was even on?
He flipped through to Tuesday afternoon.
The Avengers. Good stuff. His hand found the power button on the clicker and he quickly surfed through the channels.
Once there, he found, to his great disappointment, that he’d tuned in near the end of the episode. Checking the guide once more suggested that another episode ought to follow, however, so he accepted the fact that by this point in the story, Emma Peel was tied to a log making its way towards a buzzsaw and that he wasn’t to be privy to how she’d gotten there.
Fawning over her were two Bela Lugosi-esque gothic characters. They easily could have passed for wizards had the intent not so clearly been to channel the mystique of Eastern Europe. Probably they were meant to be vampires then... But then there was a man going about directing their acting…
Who knew. Mentally, he shrugged.
“And vhat do you tink of zhat, mein liebchen?”
“I think I’m in danger of becoming a split personality.”
Severus’ low chuckles were interrupted by Max softly hooting out the window. The other man was trailing his fingers along the glass, his eyes filled with a desperate and wistful ache.
Snape snorted again, trying to train his mind back onto his programme. It felt more difficult than it ought to have, and he realised he had become keenly aware of the rhythmic ticking of the clock on the far wall by reception.
With renewed dedication he stared forwards with an unwavering gaze, watching as Peel’s lime-green suited form made its way toward the enormous circular saw—
Sandra let out a soft shriek and grinned down at the passage she was reading. Seemingly out of a sense of excitement, she wriggled in her seat as her eyes moved over the page at a startling pace.
Snape’s own eyes mashed together and he produced an irritated little grunt. Luckily for him, that was the last such interruption for quite some time.
Somehow, while he’d been too on-edge to pay proper attention, Peel had been saved from the saw and the episode ended. The first moments of the new episode—after he’d been made to wait through the commercial break—made him blink stupidly for several moments.
Swirling patterns of black and white had momentarily thrown him for a loop. Unlike the previous episode, this one wasn’t in colour.
There was blessed silence from the other occupants of the room, and it lulled him to complacency. Nearing the end of the story, he finally slumped haphazardly on the sofa he had all to himself. He even brought up one leg to drape over the cushions beside him.
“The object of the exercise is to drive me insane. How will you know when you have achieved it?” Emma Peel asked the computer, a perfectly manicured brow rising above her eye.
“Be-cause, you, will, kill, yourself,” the computer spoke back, in a heavily robotic voice.
“How?”
“You, have, key. Key, unlocks, door, at, end, of, machine.”
“And then?”
“Suicide, Box. Once, inside, gas, released. You, will, feel, no pain. No pain.”
Inside the purported suicide box was the body of a man who’d presumably already succumbed to the gas in the chamber. With no other way of exiting the house she’d become trapped within—each hallway led to the same central room—Severus was on the proverbial edge of his seat (though, of course, he was actually sunk comfortably into the cushions).
Naturally, the worst time for an interruption.
Her voice had always had the worst quality of carrying far further than it ought to have. Whether she was seated at Gryffindor table, taking her dunderheaded friends to task over their study habits, or whether it was from behind a cauldron, as she regurgitated yet another rote-memorised answer she’d plagiarised from the assigned readings.
When Hermione Granger spoke, there was simply no ignoring her.
He peeked over the back of the vinyl sofa and glared balefully out at her. She was speaking to the receptionist, her palms braced against the counter as she communed through the tiny window.
“Yes, we’ll be back tomorrow for the rest of the cleanings, but when I called earlier, I was told that I’d be free to visit.”
“Until five, ma’am.”
“That’s perfect. I probably won’t need more than a few minutes...”
“Most of our patients are busy this afternoon, of course. Tuesday afternoons are usually reserved for activities overseen by volunteers.”
Granger clucked her tongue. When it looked as though she might glance his way, he ducked his head back behind the back of the sofa.
Somehow Peel had contrived yet another escape and he’d missed it. Again.
Damn Granger. Damn her.
A low growl escaped him and he drew his legs up onto the couch so he was lying sideways on it, taking up the entirety of the available space. He crossed his arms over his chest and did his best to burrow into the protection offered by his thick dressing gown.
“I’m mostly interested in speaking to Severus Snape. Is he around this afternoon? Or is he busy?”
“Snape? You’re in luck, Ms. Granger. Usually on Tuesdays he’s with the volunteer group—we have an instructor that comes to teach dance—but he had a conflicting appointment today and came back here to spend the rest of his time.”
‘No. I’m not here. I’m not here—’
“He’s over there in the corner. You see the telly? He’s on the sofa.”
‘Bugger.’
He heard her stupid shoes clacking against the floor before he saw her. She poked her head around the edge of the sofa before she stepped fully into view.
“Forget something, Miss Granger?” He scathed, purposefully not looking at her.
That was difficult to accomplish, given how very much he wished he could blatantly stare. She looked altogether different from the last time he’d seen her. Of course, he didn’t expect the same gaunt-faced, bloodied warrior that had loomed above him as his blood and memories were pouring out of him onto the dusty floor of the Shrieking Shack... but she also looked entirely unlike the Hermione Granger that had appeared in his office with Lovegood and had alerted him to the Death Eaters in the castle. The final moments where he’d been her teacher before he was made to flee the school.
Even as he tried to pay attention to whatever tripe was being advertised to him on the tiny screen, he couldn’t help but to notice her out of the corner of his eye.
She looked as self-important as ever—no... scratch that. She looked more self-important than ever.
He’d noticed the day before that she’d seemingly chopped all of her hair off. Of course, he had too, or rather, he’d allowed the barber to chop his hair off when they’d brought one in on another volunteer day. He’d grown tired of his rope-like hair tangling around his neck as he slept, and he’d grown tired of the very involved process of managing it, particularly as he’d gotten into the habit of actually taking daily showers since he’d come to stay on the ward. Washing and combing his new style took only seconds. It suited the decidedly small amount of time he was willing to invest in personal hygiene.
Besides that, he’d thought it had been time for a change. The new cut suited him in that he’d wanted a clean break from life before to life now. Hell, had it not required a boatload of paperwork, he might have considered changing his name, too.
He wasn’t so very certain that the new ‘do suited Granger, however. His brow furrowed as he darted furtive looks towards her out of the corner of his eye.
Annoyingly, she seemed to realise that he was sizing her up, and she stood there, enduring his appraisal, even as it was clear he was trying to act as though he wasn’t paying her any mind. Granger took a step closer and stood up straight, her well-groomed hands coming to rest on her hips.
She’d always thought too highly of herself, and it was now apparent that that self-occupation of hers had downed a Strengthening Solution. Her self-regard radiated off of her in waves. It was sickening.
She declined to answer his initial question and tapped the toe of her patent-leather shoe against the edge of the rug.
Oh, but that was worth staring at... at least a little. Four-inch heels (stilettos!) and fully-fashioned nylon stockings. Doubtless the cheeky kind that had that irresistible seam up the back. He felt his mouth pursing a little bit as his eyes roved higher up her shapely legs—
The blasted girl was smirking at him now! Smirking!
He scowled and resolved not to stare at her a moment longer. No matter that her mid-thigh length skirt was tight enough around her backside to show off how perfectly lithe her midsection and hips were. No matter that he had always appreciated a woman in a well-fitted suit...
No matter that her stupid, pixie-cropped hair seemed to beckon him to twine his fingers through the short curls, even if only to yank on them.
Unwelcome thoughts, all.
“I asked if you forgot something, Granger. A bit of dental floss, perhaps?” He flashed a snaggle-toothed canine her way and deliberately licked it with a short flick of his tongue against the enamel. “I’m afraid you can’t have it back. Bit sick of you to want it, anyhow—”
“What are you doing here?”
He waved towards the television set in a grand, sweeping gesture. “Rotting my brain on the best entertainment our dreary little isle has to offer, naturally.”
She spared a second’s glance to the TV, blinking at it in a way that communicated how less than impressed she was with his current occupation.
Her pert nose wrinkled and she had the absolute gall to tilt her head up a bit more, so that now she was staring down the upturned bridge of that annoying little nose at him.
After an ad for McCoy’s vinegar crisps aired and Severus realised that he’d not been able to pay attention enough to have even absorbed what it was that was being hawked to the viewer, he finally looked over, lazily returning the brunette witch’s gaze.
The standard defiance and irritation were there, but he was surprised to see that she also appeared troubled.
“Are you sick?”
Snape’s tongue probed at his teeth and he found himself sucking his cheek gently while he considered her. “Sick?”
“Ill. Unwell. Was it… was it the war? Is that why you’re…” She trailed off and spread her hands hopelessly, indicating his state of repose on the sofa.
Oh, blast and damn her. Oh, bless her heart.
He was about to become a cause.
“In the loony bin? Locked up in Bedlam?” He supplied, breathing deeply through his nose.
“That’s not what I said!” She protested, her elven features flushing. Her lips pursed and it looked as though she was sucking her teeth to restrain whatever it was that she wished she could say to him. The front ones were still over-large to the point where her cupid’s bow often framed them. They were always there, poking out. Even after Madam Pomfrey’s intervention on her behalf they were a bit too big to be contained behind her lips.
Either for a bit of harmless mockery, or because it was nearly instinctual, he found himself mirroring her expression. From the confused look on her face, she clearly wasn’t certain of what it was that made him screw his features up and suck his cheeks in the way he was doing.
“I know perfectly well what you said. You seemed as though you were a bit lost, however. Forgive me for supplying the answers you were too frightened to ask for directly.”
This earned a scowl and a growl. That was more like it.
“So you are? You’re sick?”
Groaning now, Severus rolled his eyes so he could see the clock on the far wall. Ten minutes until the facilities were locked down for the night and they kicked Granger out.
“I’m sick of this conversation.”
“They don’t just section anyone, Professor. The way I understand it, they need a pretty good reason.”
“What is it you do now, Granger?” Snape asked, pointedly changing the subject. He forced himself to sit up and waved an errant hand toward the other half of the sofa, indicating that the young woman ought to have a seat.
She eyed the proffered cushion with the due amount of caution given its source, but then eventually did perch her backside on the squeaky vinyl.
Snape noticed that when she finally sat, she flexed her feet in her pumps so that her heels rose out of place by an inch. The support of the sofa allowed for her to stretch her arches and curl her toes. The motion of it offered an intriguing little peek of the seam he’d earlier suspected ran up the back of her calves.
“I’m employed at Blackhall—”
“Half of wizarding Britain is employed at Blackhall,” Snape brushed off. “Unless you lost most of your brains in the war, I can only suspect that you’ve not been hired on as a custodian of some sort. You’re being cagey enough that I might have guessed an Unspeakable, but often they won’t even admit to being employed at the Ministry.” He drew a hand down his face and rubbed at his mouth and jaw while he thought.
“You always were a soft touch. You’re not wasting your time campaigning for the Hob Fae, are you? No? Rehoming orphaned werepups—?”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those occupations,” she interrupted, crossing her arms over her bosom, “but no, I’m not. I suppose you forgot my Dad telling you what it was I do during your appointment yesterday.”
In point of fact, Snape did remember. Even so, he persisted in his wilful ignorance. “I seem to remember Percival Weasley making it quite far in his capacity as some sort of Cauldron Bottom Bureaucrat—”
“He was in the Department of International Magical Co-operation.”
“Same thing,” Snape dismissed with a sniff. “And he somehow contrived to earn the title of Junior Assistant to the Minister. If you’re not already, might I offer—in the capacity of once and forever former Professor—the very good career advice to spend more time deeply considering the international standardisation of potions equipment? It apparently is the critical point of merit in evaluating who is topmost in line for our highest and most esteemed office.”
“Apparently not,” Granger’s prissy little mouth tugged to the corner, revealing a small grin. “He’s now the Head of Magical Transportation. He decided against running for Minister, at least for the time being. I suppose we’ll never know if that’s what truly makes for a great leader.”
“Well, let me tell you then: having been under the command of the two most brilliant, politically-savvy minds of the last century—I’d have taken Weasley.”
“I think most of us would’ve,” she agreed, drawing up one leg and swinging it over the other. She clasped her hands together by lacing her fingers and settled them around her nylon-clad knee. “But you can rest assured, Professor Snape: I have no interest in the highest office of the land.”
Severus sneered, his black eyes rolling. “Oh, don’t you?” He asked, sardonically.
“Really! I have no designs on the Minister’s chair.” She smirked, as though she thought this should intrigue him greatly. As though her apparent abdication of the ambition every Professor had pegged her for from her first year ought to be some sort of all-important revelation to him.
He yawned.
“Good.” He jerked a nod at her and then looked over to the nurse’s window, adjacent to reception. He managed to catch the gaze of Nurse Espiritu, who was just now arriving for the early evening shift. She smiled at him, her soft gaze looking between Severus and his unwelcome guest, before she flashed him a quick thumbs up with a saucy grin.
Slightly dismayed, Snape frowned to her and shook his head, glaring pointedly at Granger’s profile. Before him on the coffee table was the paper cup he’d been using for water from the communal water cooler. He reached out to grab it and raised it high above his head, pointing at it and gesturing wildly in an attempt to communicate what it was he wanted.
This, at least, seemed to impel the older woman to action. It looked to him as though she’d sighed and then busied herself gathering his provisions for the evening.
“Good?” Granger hadn’t asked it of him directly, but more seemed to be speaking to herself. She seemed, by turns, discouraged and indignant that he’d not followed up with more questions. Or perhaps it was because she thought he ought to care whether or not she climbed all the way to the top of the Ministry chain of command.
He cared only insofar as he imagined himself shoving the determined targe off that same peak.
Of course, he’d never stir himself to do so... that would mean doing something. It would have meant leaving the comfortable life he’d finagled for himself, protected inside the belly of a Muggle psychiatric facility. Four years of institutionalised living had taught him that he enjoyed nothing so much as doing nothing much whatsoever. It was a very good thing that his pettiness was satisfied merely with the mental image of pushing her—none too gently—from atop her high horse.
“Good, he says.” She was still mumbling to herself, now having crossed her arms over her chest. The tailoring on her jacket was clearly a professional job. It fit her exactly... however it was a slim fit, and the tension produced by the action saw the bouclé wool (in the middle of summer, Granger! Really?!) stretching in a way that must have been uncomfortable across her slight shoulders and arms.
“If you only stopped in to ask if I was sick, and to inform me that you weren’t yet chomping at the bit for a scrap of bureaucratic power, then I believe your time with me for the day is coming to an end,” he twisted his lips into the semblance of a grin—or what would have been a grin from anyone who wasn’t called Severus Snape—and motioned with a wave for Nurse Espiritu to approach.
She did, although gracelessly and with obvious annoyance at his high-handedness.
“Mr. Snape,” the woman sighed, holding out a smaller paper cup than the one he’d been drinking from. “Can I get you more water, sir, or have you got enough?”
“I could use a refill,” he answered, swishing the tiny amount left around the bottom to illustrate his point.
The nurse snatched it from his hand and stomped off, tossing a disappointed look over her shoulder at Granger as she did so.
Trust the ladies in that place to be all up his nose about any visitor he might suffer. Heaven forbid, but they often treated him like some sad whelp with a scraped knee and a tear glistening in his eye.
Let this be a lesson: Severus Snape accepted pity from no one.
“Well,” Granger interrupted the snit that was beginning to brew, “that was rude.”
Severus ignored her, though he did find himself glaring into his cup as he poked through it with one finger. His favourite time of day and here she was, ruining it.
“And those are?”
God above, she was a bloody menace. Was Weasley still with her? Merlin preserve the boy’s bollocks—like as not she’d seen him gelded in a trice.
Trying to focus once more, he inspected the contents of the cup critically and continued to swirl his pointer finger through the assorted pills.
“Ah. There, Haloperidol. I’ll not be having that.” He picked it out between his index and thumb and vanished it in a puff of powder as if he were doing nothing more than pulling an annoying bit of lint out.
She gawped at him and uncrossed her legs as she leant over, attempting to crane her neck to look at the rest of his nightly medication.
“That is unbelievably irresponsible—!"
Snape responded by flicking one of his pills at her lazily. It bounced off of her cheek. “As the youth of today are fond of saying, Granger, ‘take a chill pill.’” He paused for a beat and looked at the little, blue oval, which had landed in her lap. “Not that one though—that one’s an antihistamine. My allergies have become dreadfully bothersome here. Hand it back, if you don’t mind.”
Had he not had twenty years practise at suppressing his emotions he might have been rolling around laughing at her trout-like expression. Dumbfounded outrage, that was what it was.
“Here, try this one. This one’s a Diazepam,” he offered, his expression carefree.
Hermione scowled at him. “I’m not taking that!”
“Suit yourself, Granger. You always did seem like a wet blanket to me. I suppose that bears out,” he remarked, popping the pill into his mouth.
The uptight witch bristled. “Says the man who gave out more detentions for behavioural offenses than any of the other professors combined!”
Snape offered back an amused smirk. “Ah, but I’ve seen the error of my ways, you see? It’s much better for my health to not give a toss—"
“And to take loads of drugs,” Granger accused.
“Loads,” he agreed, and he downed the rest of his paper cup regimen in one swallow.
“I don't like the drugs but the drugs like me
I don't like the drugs, the drugs, the drugs”
I Don’t Like the Drugs (reprise) – Marilyn Manson