Severus Snape, Jack-of-all-trades Quiz
Severus Snape is a brilliant man. Just ask any fangirl. What will he do after the war? Potions or teaching, you say? Nah, it would seem his career choices are only limited by an author's imagination. Luckily, the good ship SSHG has some very imaginative authors! We present Severus Snape, Jack-of-all-trades.
Thanks to keladry_lupin for this wonderful theme!
This week's quiz was chosen by sc010f after proving herself to be quite the faithful warded_portal fangirl. Way to go, Scoffy!
The first fangirl who posts a perfect score will get to choose the next quiz. Who knows Severus' CV inside out?
Match the quote to the story title:
Dark Santiago by lariopefic
Example of Widowhood by sc010f
Improbable Felicity by subvers
A Conspiracy of Epicurean Proportions by geminiscorp
Toby Snape and the Wholly Holy Hideout by hayseed_42
Mea Culpa by floorcoaster
A Taxing Affair by dickgloucester
A Pinch of This, A Dash of That by iamstarmom
The Trail of the Black Star by mundungus42
Everybody Comes to Snape's by elise_wanderer
Judging Books by Their Covers by melisande88
The Queen and Her Prince by junewilliams7
1. "I'll call you when I've finished the next."
"'Course you will, darling." She blew kisses at his retreating back and imagined the dirty look he would have given her if he'd seen. It gave her shivers. "Oh, John?"
"What?"
"You're not planning a happy ending for the next one, are you?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"For your next book, I mean. Will Thayne ever stay with one of the girls? In every one of your books, I get the feeling that this girl is the one for him. This one will make him stop wandering. But he always leaves in the end. I'm hardly complaining, mind you. It's earned you a Kleenex endorsement and allows for sequel after sequel, but as your publisher I'm entitled to know if and when you're planning to end the series."
A wry look twisted his features into a semblance of a smile. "As much as it pains me to say, I do not foresee a change in the formula anytime soon."
"Oh, that's good." She toasted him with the pint glass. "Have fun in Peru."
He inclined his head in the slightest of nods before sweeping off in the direction of the loo.
Meg took another drink from his abandoned beer and took out the manuscript. If the first few pages were any indication, this was going to be his best to date. It wasn't until she was wiping away the tears for Mimi, the abandoned lover, that it occurred to her that she never saw him leave.
2. A sound from the next room interrupted Hermione's thoughts, and she bit her lip and then stood to pace for something to do. She thought about Claire and wondered if she and Snape were lovers. A tiny, nearly imperceptible twinge of something akin to jealousy pulsed through Hermione.
Hermione looked at the gun on the table, the hard evidence that she knew little about the man, despite all the research she had done on him after his disappearance. And yet, he had protected her ... at the café, and now with his colleague. It was further proof, if she had needed it that he was the same man who had protected children he hadn't liked-hated, even-with his own life.
She spun on her heel and paced in the opposite direction.
The fact that Snape was a spy surprised Hermione. She had always assumed he had only accepted his former role out of guilt, fear, and an attempt at both revenge and absolution. He was excellent at the brewing of potions, and had she been asked to hazard a guess as to his occupation, would have said he worked in that field. There must have been some aspect of being a spy that had appealed to Snape beyond the magical component if he sought a life as the Muggle version.
The door opened, and Hermione looked up to see Snape and Claire enter the room. She felt frustratingly out of her realm.
3. "Mr Snape, why are you still here?"
"A few things needed finishing, sir," said the man, extracting some files from the teetering in-tray.
"You ought to be knighted, Mr Snape," the PM smiled wanly. "You are probably the only person in this whole establishment who ever finishes anything."
"I prefer to do without the publicity, sir," he said. "You should get some sleep. It's Questions tomorrow."
"Plenty of time for sleeping when I'm dead," was the PM's grim response. He picked up some papers but found himself regarding Snape instead.
Funny-looking man, he was. Always in that black three-piece suit, ruthlessly buttoned up summer or winter, with only a crisp white shirt and dark green tie to break the monotony. And that hair. What the hell was any man in his forties who wasn't a member of Status Quo doing with long hair? Granted, it was always severely tied back, but still… And the face. The PM had never seen anyone who looked quite that grim. Not even Putin on the day the American ambassador gave him a teddy bear. This Snape, all angles and hard lines, never seemed to raise his voice, but he always, always, got his way. The PM had privately nicknamed him "Ming the Merciless" for the way the undersecretaries and junior ministers scattered before him, and envied him the ability to command a perfectly made cup of tea whenever he wanted one. Even the nation's highest office didn't have that kind of influence.
4. ‘I’m so pleased to see you, Miss Granger. Thank you for coming. Shall we go to my office?’
Hermione agreed and followed McGonagall down the corridor. As they passed doorways, Hermione glanced in curiously. In the second office on the right, she saw two wizards struggling with a device that resembled a deployed airbag in an automobile - except that it was continuing to grow and expand. One wizard stood at the wall with a long metal pole, poking at the rapidly growing airbag, whilst another had leapt up onto his desk and was ineffectually stabbing at the airbag from above. Hermione bit her lip to keep from laughing out loud and glanced at the sign on the door as she hurried to catch up with McGonagall; the sign said, Department of Alternative Measures.
At the end of the hallway, Hermione and McGonagall entered a large room flooded with sunlight from the floor-to-ceiling windows occupying two walls.
‘I would say Security Solutions is doing well,’ Hermione said admiringly.
‘Very well,’ McGonagall agreed, indicating that Hermione should sit in one of the straight-back wooden chairs before the large, tidy desk. ‘I don’t need all this space, but the larger clients appreciate the appearance of prosperity, so it is necessary.’
Hermione nodded. ‘Do you have an alternate office in which you meet with the Muggle clients?’
McGonagall seated herself behind her desk, shooting Hermione a sharp glance from her beady eyes. ‘You know about that, do you?’
Hermione shrugged. ‘You have premises with an entrance on Diagon Alley and another on Charing Cross Road; you have a Muggle reception area and a Muggle receptionist as well as wizard ones. You’re obviously doing business on both sides of the street and succeeding admirably.’
5. She crept back into the bedroom and through the hall, until she heard voices. Trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, she went to investigate.
She reached a door and heard voices.
"I want raised ont' darn train. I'll slap thee-daft, wazak!" The man spoke like a Yorkshireman.
"You calling me a wazak?" a second man asked in an American accent. "A wazak is a bad thing, like a fool?"
"Tha's not as green as tha's cabbage looking."
She heard someone grunt. Glancing around the corner of the door jamb, she froze at a haunting sight. The clothes were fashionably tailored and the hair was attractively cut, but the man's coloring, posture, dark eyes, and nose gave him away. What was Severus Snape doing here? And by the Gods, alive, if what she was seeing was true. She dared not blink, lest this mirage, hallucination, whatever it was, disappear.
Hermione watched in fascinated horror as her old Potions master taught the American man how to speak with a Yorkshire accent.
6. She brushed lightly against the lever on the underside of the bar. The boss would want to be alerted.
The tinkling Sneakoscope alarm that sounded in the office over the bar was the merest whisper, a subtle suggestion of something worth investigating. The proprietor looked up from his contemplation of the receipts and scowled. He moved toward the spy hole hidden just behind a small oil painting of a pastoral landscape and flicked through the mirrors that gave him a variety of views of the room beneath him.
Almost immediately he spotted the man at the bar, and his breath hissed softly in recognition. His first thought was, He's out, and his second was, Escaped, paroled, or released?
His third was, And why is he here?
He slid the painting back into place. It couldn't be a coincidence. Not with everything else he'd been hearing. The rumors had begun as whispers. Gradually, the decibel level had risen. Lucius Malfoy's arrival on his doorstep was part of the chatter. Which meant that the rumors, a few of them at least, might just be true.
7. He takes her right hand in his left and holds it open on the spindle legged table before him. His thumb traces idly over the creases and lines of her palm. It is an act, of course, a prelude to the moment in which he will meet her eyes and his right hand will twitch beneath the table-Legilimens!-but it is a part of the act that he has found to be essential. This is one more thing he has learned about people: they don't like for him to just know anything. He has to work for it.
At first, he had hated all the touching, all the humanity traipsing in and out of the trailer, all the smells, all the willful ignorance and the terrible, pathetic need. But he has come to a strange tolerance for these Muggles, for they are believers in their way. Unlike some of their kind, they believe that magic is possible beyond the realm of their experience, and like him, they are hiding and hopeful in equal measure.
"Someone you love is missing," he says as his thumb come to rest on the heavy line that bisects Alice's palm, as if the knowledge comes precisely from that spot. He keeps his voice low and soothing with the faintest tinge of a question. He has found the accent to be of great use. American women stutter and stare when he speaks, a fact he finds exasperating and amusing by turns. American men are more suspicious, but then, they are more wary of the process in general.
8. “I can’t let you go to all that trouble. Let me call someone to take care of this.”
He started shoving his tools back in their box. “It’s no trouble, vicar. Besides, they’d overcharge you and screw up all the wiring in any case.”
“Still...” She sounded unconvinced. “I don’t want to see you hurt, and Owen won’t--”
“Owen knows how to do this sort of thing, too. Or, he knows how to help me carry stuff around, at any rate. Don’t worry about it, vicar, or I’ll have to tell your boss that you’re not following His rules,” he said with a thin smile.
“I don’t recall anything in any of the Gospels regarding water heater replacement,” she replied.
He quirked a sly eyebrow at her. “Sure they do. Somewhere near the fifteenth chapter of John, I distinctly recall a passage along the lines of, Love thy neighbor and let him do mindless plumbing jobs for you for surely otherwise he will pester you endlessly.”
Laughing, she just threw her hands into the air in defeat. “Obviously I’ve been reading the expurgated version all of these years. Far be it from me to go against St. John when he’s bringing plumbing into it.”
“Very wise of you.” He snapped his case shut.
9. Hermione froze. Since when did the gardener do his work after dark? Sliding her wand down from her sleeve, she stepped off the little porch of the mausoleum and looked around. Upon the path, lighted by low lamps, stood a tall figure swinging a rake, gently moving the gravel around.
Unable to restrain her curiosity, Hermione stepped forward and onto a twig. The loud crack resounded through the graveyard, and the figure straightened up and looked towards her. Black hair surrounded a white face that seemed to glow in the dim light. Hermione brought her hand to her mouth and gasped.
"Professor Snape!" Suddenly, the world seemed to spin and go dark. The next thing she knew, she was on the ground leaning against the unsightly statue of Ron. At her side knelt the ghost Severus Snape.
"Not 'Professor Snape', Mrs. Weasley," growled the ghost.
"Wha...?" Hermione waved her hand in the general direction of the apparition. "Ghosts. I've been in this damned graveyard too long."
"Why would you assume I am a ghost?" inquired the shade. "I assure you, Mrs. Weasley, I am as real and as solid as you and that eyesore against which you are leaning. Surely it would take more than a serpent and a weasel to lay me low?"
"Wea - weasel?"
"Your departed beloved."
"Oh, gods. You're the groundskeeper? Ron told me you had a job, but I wasn't expecting..." she trailed off.
"Obviously not," Snape replied, shifting so his long legs were stretched out before him. "For your information, I am also the Executive Vice President for Excavation and Exhumation at this particular facility. I don't just sweep up."
"Executive Vice... Are you having me on?"
10. The door slammed open unexpectedly, causing a knife to slip out of Hermione’s hand and fall to the floor with a loud clatter. Feeling her cheeks redden, she dove to retrieve it and froze when she heard a familiar voice begin to speak.
“You are here to learn the subtle science and exact skill of the culinary arts,” he began softly.
“There will be no books in this class, no relying on others to do your thinking for you. You alone will create the magic required to construct your masterpieces.” He spoke in barely more than a whisper, but the class had stilled, not wanting to miss a word
Hermione felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. She knew that voice, had listened raptly to the knowledge spewing from those lips in reluctant admiration for years.
“I don’t expect half of you will really understand the delicate beauty of a softly simmering pot with its enticing aroma, the subtle yet immense power a well-prepared entrée can wield, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses … I can teach you how to bake fame, braise glory, achieve distinction-if you aren’t as big of a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach.”
Thanks to keladry_lupin for this wonderful theme!
This week's quiz was chosen by sc010f after proving herself to be quite the faithful warded_portal fangirl. Way to go, Scoffy!
The first fangirl who posts a perfect score will get to choose the next quiz. Who knows Severus' CV inside out?
Match the quote to the story title:
Dark Santiago by lariopefic
Example of Widowhood by sc010f
Improbable Felicity by subvers
A Conspiracy of Epicurean Proportions by geminiscorp
Toby Snape and the Wholly Holy Hideout by hayseed_42
Mea Culpa by floorcoaster
A Taxing Affair by dickgloucester
A Pinch of This, A Dash of That by iamstarmom
The Trail of the Black Star by mundungus42
Everybody Comes to Snape's by elise_wanderer
Judging Books by Their Covers by melisande88
The Queen and Her Prince by junewilliams7
1. "I'll call you when I've finished the next."
"'Course you will, darling." She blew kisses at his retreating back and imagined the dirty look he would have given her if he'd seen. It gave her shivers. "Oh, John?"
"What?"
"You're not planning a happy ending for the next one, are you?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"For your next book, I mean. Will Thayne ever stay with one of the girls? In every one of your books, I get the feeling that this girl is the one for him. This one will make him stop wandering. But he always leaves in the end. I'm hardly complaining, mind you. It's earned you a Kleenex endorsement and allows for sequel after sequel, but as your publisher I'm entitled to know if and when you're planning to end the series."
A wry look twisted his features into a semblance of a smile. "As much as it pains me to say, I do not foresee a change in the formula anytime soon."
"Oh, that's good." She toasted him with the pint glass. "Have fun in Peru."
He inclined his head in the slightest of nods before sweeping off in the direction of the loo.
Meg took another drink from his abandoned beer and took out the manuscript. If the first few pages were any indication, this was going to be his best to date. It wasn't until she was wiping away the tears for Mimi, the abandoned lover, that it occurred to her that she never saw him leave.
2. A sound from the next room interrupted Hermione's thoughts, and she bit her lip and then stood to pace for something to do. She thought about Claire and wondered if she and Snape were lovers. A tiny, nearly imperceptible twinge of something akin to jealousy pulsed through Hermione.
Hermione looked at the gun on the table, the hard evidence that she knew little about the man, despite all the research she had done on him after his disappearance. And yet, he had protected her ... at the café, and now with his colleague. It was further proof, if she had needed it that he was the same man who had protected children he hadn't liked-hated, even-with his own life.
She spun on her heel and paced in the opposite direction.
The fact that Snape was a spy surprised Hermione. She had always assumed he had only accepted his former role out of guilt, fear, and an attempt at both revenge and absolution. He was excellent at the brewing of potions, and had she been asked to hazard a guess as to his occupation, would have said he worked in that field. There must have been some aspect of being a spy that had appealed to Snape beyond the magical component if he sought a life as the Muggle version.
The door opened, and Hermione looked up to see Snape and Claire enter the room. She felt frustratingly out of her realm.
3. "Mr Snape, why are you still here?"
"A few things needed finishing, sir," said the man, extracting some files from the teetering in-tray.
"You ought to be knighted, Mr Snape," the PM smiled wanly. "You are probably the only person in this whole establishment who ever finishes anything."
"I prefer to do without the publicity, sir," he said. "You should get some sleep. It's Questions tomorrow."
"Plenty of time for sleeping when I'm dead," was the PM's grim response. He picked up some papers but found himself regarding Snape instead.
Funny-looking man, he was. Always in that black three-piece suit, ruthlessly buttoned up summer or winter, with only a crisp white shirt and dark green tie to break the monotony. And that hair. What the hell was any man in his forties who wasn't a member of Status Quo doing with long hair? Granted, it was always severely tied back, but still… And the face. The PM had never seen anyone who looked quite that grim. Not even Putin on the day the American ambassador gave him a teddy bear. This Snape, all angles and hard lines, never seemed to raise his voice, but he always, always, got his way. The PM had privately nicknamed him "Ming the Merciless" for the way the undersecretaries and junior ministers scattered before him, and envied him the ability to command a perfectly made cup of tea whenever he wanted one. Even the nation's highest office didn't have that kind of influence.
4. ‘I’m so pleased to see you, Miss Granger. Thank you for coming. Shall we go to my office?’
Hermione agreed and followed McGonagall down the corridor. As they passed doorways, Hermione glanced in curiously. In the second office on the right, she saw two wizards struggling with a device that resembled a deployed airbag in an automobile - except that it was continuing to grow and expand. One wizard stood at the wall with a long metal pole, poking at the rapidly growing airbag, whilst another had leapt up onto his desk and was ineffectually stabbing at the airbag from above. Hermione bit her lip to keep from laughing out loud and glanced at the sign on the door as she hurried to catch up with McGonagall; the sign said, Department of Alternative Measures.
At the end of the hallway, Hermione and McGonagall entered a large room flooded with sunlight from the floor-to-ceiling windows occupying two walls.
‘I would say Security Solutions is doing well,’ Hermione said admiringly.
‘Very well,’ McGonagall agreed, indicating that Hermione should sit in one of the straight-back wooden chairs before the large, tidy desk. ‘I don’t need all this space, but the larger clients appreciate the appearance of prosperity, so it is necessary.’
Hermione nodded. ‘Do you have an alternate office in which you meet with the Muggle clients?’
McGonagall seated herself behind her desk, shooting Hermione a sharp glance from her beady eyes. ‘You know about that, do you?’
Hermione shrugged. ‘You have premises with an entrance on Diagon Alley and another on Charing Cross Road; you have a Muggle reception area and a Muggle receptionist as well as wizard ones. You’re obviously doing business on both sides of the street and succeeding admirably.’
5. She crept back into the bedroom and through the hall, until she heard voices. Trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, she went to investigate.
She reached a door and heard voices.
"I want raised ont' darn train. I'll slap thee-daft, wazak!" The man spoke like a Yorkshireman.
"You calling me a wazak?" a second man asked in an American accent. "A wazak is a bad thing, like a fool?"
"Tha's not as green as tha's cabbage looking."
She heard someone grunt. Glancing around the corner of the door jamb, she froze at a haunting sight. The clothes were fashionably tailored and the hair was attractively cut, but the man's coloring, posture, dark eyes, and nose gave him away. What was Severus Snape doing here? And by the Gods, alive, if what she was seeing was true. She dared not blink, lest this mirage, hallucination, whatever it was, disappear.
Hermione watched in fascinated horror as her old Potions master taught the American man how to speak with a Yorkshire accent.
6. She brushed lightly against the lever on the underside of the bar. The boss would want to be alerted.
The tinkling Sneakoscope alarm that sounded in the office over the bar was the merest whisper, a subtle suggestion of something worth investigating. The proprietor looked up from his contemplation of the receipts and scowled. He moved toward the spy hole hidden just behind a small oil painting of a pastoral landscape and flicked through the mirrors that gave him a variety of views of the room beneath him.
Almost immediately he spotted the man at the bar, and his breath hissed softly in recognition. His first thought was, He's out, and his second was, Escaped, paroled, or released?
His third was, And why is he here?
He slid the painting back into place. It couldn't be a coincidence. Not with everything else he'd been hearing. The rumors had begun as whispers. Gradually, the decibel level had risen. Lucius Malfoy's arrival on his doorstep was part of the chatter. Which meant that the rumors, a few of them at least, might just be true.
7. He takes her right hand in his left and holds it open on the spindle legged table before him. His thumb traces idly over the creases and lines of her palm. It is an act, of course, a prelude to the moment in which he will meet her eyes and his right hand will twitch beneath the table-Legilimens!-but it is a part of the act that he has found to be essential. This is one more thing he has learned about people: they don't like for him to just know anything. He has to work for it.
At first, he had hated all the touching, all the humanity traipsing in and out of the trailer, all the smells, all the willful ignorance and the terrible, pathetic need. But he has come to a strange tolerance for these Muggles, for they are believers in their way. Unlike some of their kind, they believe that magic is possible beyond the realm of their experience, and like him, they are hiding and hopeful in equal measure.
"Someone you love is missing," he says as his thumb come to rest on the heavy line that bisects Alice's palm, as if the knowledge comes precisely from that spot. He keeps his voice low and soothing with the faintest tinge of a question. He has found the accent to be of great use. American women stutter and stare when he speaks, a fact he finds exasperating and amusing by turns. American men are more suspicious, but then, they are more wary of the process in general.
8. “I can’t let you go to all that trouble. Let me call someone to take care of this.”
He started shoving his tools back in their box. “It’s no trouble, vicar. Besides, they’d overcharge you and screw up all the wiring in any case.”
“Still...” She sounded unconvinced. “I don’t want to see you hurt, and Owen won’t--”
“Owen knows how to do this sort of thing, too. Or, he knows how to help me carry stuff around, at any rate. Don’t worry about it, vicar, or I’ll have to tell your boss that you’re not following His rules,” he said with a thin smile.
“I don’t recall anything in any of the Gospels regarding water heater replacement,” she replied.
He quirked a sly eyebrow at her. “Sure they do. Somewhere near the fifteenth chapter of John, I distinctly recall a passage along the lines of, Love thy neighbor and let him do mindless plumbing jobs for you for surely otherwise he will pester you endlessly.”
Laughing, she just threw her hands into the air in defeat. “Obviously I’ve been reading the expurgated version all of these years. Far be it from me to go against St. John when he’s bringing plumbing into it.”
“Very wise of you.” He snapped his case shut.
9. Hermione froze. Since when did the gardener do his work after dark? Sliding her wand down from her sleeve, she stepped off the little porch of the mausoleum and looked around. Upon the path, lighted by low lamps, stood a tall figure swinging a rake, gently moving the gravel around.
Unable to restrain her curiosity, Hermione stepped forward and onto a twig. The loud crack resounded through the graveyard, and the figure straightened up and looked towards her. Black hair surrounded a white face that seemed to glow in the dim light. Hermione brought her hand to her mouth and gasped.
"Professor Snape!" Suddenly, the world seemed to spin and go dark. The next thing she knew, she was on the ground leaning against the unsightly statue of Ron. At her side knelt the ghost Severus Snape.
"Not 'Professor Snape', Mrs. Weasley," growled the ghost.
"Wha...?" Hermione waved her hand in the general direction of the apparition. "Ghosts. I've been in this damned graveyard too long."
"Why would you assume I am a ghost?" inquired the shade. "I assure you, Mrs. Weasley, I am as real and as solid as you and that eyesore against which you are leaning. Surely it would take more than a serpent and a weasel to lay me low?"
"Wea - weasel?"
"Your departed beloved."
"Oh, gods. You're the groundskeeper? Ron told me you had a job, but I wasn't expecting..." she trailed off.
"Obviously not," Snape replied, shifting so his long legs were stretched out before him. "For your information, I am also the Executive Vice President for Excavation and Exhumation at this particular facility. I don't just sweep up."
"Executive Vice... Are you having me on?"
10. The door slammed open unexpectedly, causing a knife to slip out of Hermione’s hand and fall to the floor with a loud clatter. Feeling her cheeks redden, she dove to retrieve it and froze when she heard a familiar voice begin to speak.
“You are here to learn the subtle science and exact skill of the culinary arts,” he began softly.
“There will be no books in this class, no relying on others to do your thinking for you. You alone will create the magic required to construct your masterpieces.” He spoke in barely more than a whisper, but the class had stilled, not wanting to miss a word
Hermione felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. She knew that voice, had listened raptly to the knowledge spewing from those lips in reluctant admiration for years.
“I don’t expect half of you will really understand the delicate beauty of a softly simmering pot with its enticing aroma, the subtle yet immense power a well-prepared entrée can wield, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses … I can teach you how to bake fame, braise glory, achieve distinction-if you aren’t as big of a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach.”