FIC: New Quarters (PG)
Title: New Quarters
Type: Fic
Age-Range Category: Three
Characters: Severus, OFCs
Author: iulia_linnea
Rating: PG
Click to View [Warning(s)]For non-Euclidean- and Time-related Fuckery.
Note(s): Thanks, H.P.L., you crazy f-ck!
Summary: Severus finds himself at a loss in his new quarters.
"Good afternoon, Severus Snape."
Severus turned to look at the woman standing in his new quarters, the woman who shouldn't - who couldn't - have been standing in his quarters because he'd locked his door. His first impulse was to draw his wand, but with a blink, he realised that his wand was in the strange woman's hands.
"And a fine one it is, too," she said, as his wand slid itself up into a hidden sleeve pocket in her robes.
"Why . . . can't . . . I move?" Severus ground out from between clenched teeth.
"Because I don't want you to, of course." The woman, clad in black robes, her white hair bound up into a spiralling braid that crowned her head, surveyed him dispassionately. "You're not quite what I expected."
"I didn't . . . expect you at . . . all."
"No one ever does, dear."
Severus' eyes narrowed at her words, and he examined her face more closely; he could not, he decided, determine her age. At first glance, she appeared to be in her early twenties, as he was, but upon very close inspection, the lines about her eyes were those of an elderly woman.
The woman laughed.
"Don't . . . laugh at me!"
The cessation of laughter was abrupt as the woman told him, "It's not always about you, dear," before sighing. "But of course, sometimes it is."
"Who . . . who are you?" Severus demanded.
"I'm the stranger standing in the quarters of Hogwarts' new Potions master," the woman said, holding up her hand as if to prevent him from speaking further. "My name is unimportant. My job title is what should concern you."
"Well?"
"I'm a Chief Investigator from the Department of the Prevention of Time Fuckery."
Severus just stared, his mind blanking.
"Yes, I know. It doesn't sound professional at all, but when my department was created, things were . . . fraught."
"Fucked, even," Severus managed to reply.
"Precisely," replied the Chief Investigator.
Severus was appalled to find how easily he believed her. "You're a Legilimens?"
"No, I'm a mind reader. There is, as I know you are aware, a difference."
"There is . . . no . . . such thing."
"Didn't used to be, yes, but we've made advancements and discoveries since your time."
"Release me."
"I can't, Mr. Snape. Even as young and inexperienced as you are now, you're still a danger - even without your wand."
"Why are -"
"Apropos of everything," interrupted the Chief Inspector, "I'm very sorry for your loss."
"Lily."
"Yes, Mrs. Potter. But really, Mr. Snape, what did you expect? You asked for her, as if she were an object, a gift, to be given. You asked a madman to give you another person. Did you truly believe that such a request could be granted?"
Severus, too astonished to speak, glared at the Chief Inspector, who was glaring right back.
"Oh, I dare because I know your history, your future. I dare because on two future occasions, both of which will cause me great difficulty to correct, you vex me by attempting to 'fix' your mistakes. I dare because I can, stuck here with you as I am, and I really have always wanted to know what the hell you were thinking. . . . But I see now you are as I've always been told, just a man, and as stupid and shortsighted and selfish as any man of any age."
The Chief Inspector began to pace. Severus forced himself to relax inside of his unseen bonds.
"It won't work, dear. You're going to remain Mostly Frozen until the danger has passed."
"Release . . . me."
"No, Mr. Snape."
"Then answer -"
"No, I don't think so. It's not as if you'll remember me when I've gone, but it's too much of a risk to say anything more than I have."
"Why say . . . anything at . . . all? Why interact . . . at all?" asked Severus.
"Rule-breaking curiosity. I'm not a good girl, I'm afraid."
Severus noticed the Chief Inspector's dark eyes shifted in colour, turning from almost black to the very darkest blue and back again. He wondered if magiceuticals were involved.
"No, they are not," the Chief Inspector said. "Colour-changing is tied to my mood, which is affected by Travel."
"Time 'Travel'. I hear it."
"The capital tee?" asked the Chief Inspector. "Yes, that is intentional."
The air behind her began to split, and light in thready beams of white and yellow spilled into the room.
Shrrrrrrrrp!
The Chief Inspector's spell ripped through the air to cauterise the tear, and it was suddenly rather dark in the room.
"Shit."
"I don't know . . . that spell."
"It hasn't yet been invented."
"I believe you," said Severus, "but that didn't look like 'Time Fuckery'."
"And what do you suppose Time Fuckery looks like?" asked the Chief Inspector.
"What did I do? Why is this happening? Who . . . what is coming for me? Why can't I . . . help?"
"Ah, Mr. Snape, I see that you've found a way to relieve the constraints of my spell." The Chief Inspector waved her hand in his direction.
"Damn it!" shouted Severus.
"I'm impressed, dear, but again, I cannot allow you to -"
"Let . . . let . . . go!"
Before the Chief Inspector could speak, a sound akin to tearing paper, though it held a disturbing and undesired "wet" quality to it, rose in the room.
I smell blood, thought Severus, trying to panic.
The Chief Inspector turned away from him as she took on what appeared to be a fighting stance. "It's not blood. It's ichor."
Black shafts of slouching beams of unlight broke into the room.
"Close your eyes, Mr. Snape. Do. Not. Look!"
Severus obeyed her with many, ruthlessly suppressed internal questions, squeezing shut his eyes so tightly that they burned. He was frightened. No, he was terrified. He was helpless to do anything but trust some strange, possibly insane witch - for he could not doubt that she was a witch - to protect him against an enemy he did not know. The haze of grief and self-hatred in which he'd been wallowing since Lily's death burnt away as his reality caused him to become fully present.
Where is everyone? he wondered, as the oddly sulfurous shrieks of the Chief Inspector's spellwork slurped past his head, hot, cold, and otherwise blessedly undefinable.
"Shit!"
"Are you . . . are -"
"Don't speak!"
Shrrrrrrrrp!
Severus heard a final spell before silence fell and the hellish scent in the room subsided. He didn't speak. The Chief Inspector didn't, either.
"Chief Inspector?"
She did not answer.
"Chief Inspector?" Severus repeated, growing more concerned.
He didn't know her binding spell. He didn't know how to release himself. He was trapped!
"Chief Inspector, report!"
"Pre-resent."
"Alive. Good. I would . . . hate to . . . think . . . that a witch . . . from the . . . Department of the . . . Prevention of . . . Time Fuckery, had . . . permitted . . . Fuckery of any . . . kind."
"Must sleep."
"Don't you . . . dare!" Severus shouted, inadvertently opening his eyes. "Fuck!"
The walls and ceiling and floors, all stone, had a melted quality to them. His furnishings lay strewn in blasted and deformed splinters and lumps about the room. The fire was blazing blue in a shade with which Severus was quite unfamiliar. And the doors to his sleeping chamber and the corridor into the dungeons were smoothed over and appeared now to be painted into the walls rather than functioning.
"Shite! Shite! Shite!" Severus screamed, frustrated to discover that he was still quite thoroughly and utterly trapped - and then realisation dawned. "I can speak. I can move again!"
He looked down at his feet to find the Chief Inspector, quite unconscious.
"How are you still alive?" he murmured, momentarily stunned by the blood, the Chief Inspector's blood, pooling about her body. He moved then, and quickly.
~*~
"How rude of you to rifle through a witch's private wand pocket."
Severus turned to reqard his patient. "I didn't think there was Dittany enough in the world to Heal you."
"I imagine you didn't know if it would work at all," she replied.
"No, I didn't, but I had to try - and it was all I had."
"Yes, the Record says as much."
"The 'Record' records that I always keep Dittany on my person?" asked Severus.
"Among other potions, yes. Thank you, Mr. Snape."
"Thank you, Chief Inspector. . . . This is not how I expected my first night in my new quarters to go."
"No, you expected steak and kidney pie and pumpkin juice, a long cry, and a longer book."
Severus inhaled abruptly but didn't speak.
"Breathe, Mr. Snape. I didn't come all this when to have you die on me through 'natural' causes."
"How - the doors. How do we repair them?"
"Ah," answered the Chief Inspector. "Give it a moment. A recovery team should be here soon enough."
"Can you not tell me anything about what just happened?"
"You're smart enough to know the answer to that."
Severus was, so he asked, "Will the threat return?"
The Chief Inspector shook her head. "I don't know. I don't think so, at least, it shouldn't return until it's actually expected."
"I don't like this at all."
"I don't blame you, Mr. Snape. Non-Euclidean bullshit is a well-documented pain in the ass."
"Says a Chief Inspector of the Department of the Prevention of Time Fuckery."
"Yes," she replied, reaching out an arm. "Help me up."
The remains of the lumpen cushion on which she'd been resting dissolved - dissolved! - as Severus helped the Chief Inspector to her feet.
"It's alarming, I grant you. Worry not. I'll set your quarters to rights - oh! They've been."
Severus followed the Chief Inspector's gaze to the door leading into the corridor and then to the one leading to his sleeping chamber - and as he turned back to look at the Chief Inspector, his gaze took in his restored sitting room and he gasped.
"Magic!" exclaimed the Chief Inspector. "How lovely. They've even left us proper tea and biscuits - and is that ham?"
"Ham?" Severus echoed, as he joined the Chief Inspector at the little table laden with all manner of welcome food and drink.
They didn't speak but ate in a relatively companionable silence for some time.
At last, the Chief Inspector said, "Again, thank you for Healing me."
"Thank you. For, er, everything."
Through a laugh, the Chief Inspector replied, "No, not everything, merely one vexing Time Stream."
"That I'm always, er, interfering with?" asked Severus.
"Nice try, dear," the Chief Inspector told him, rising.
Severus swallowed nervously. "Are you going to Obliviate me, now?"
"What? Obliviate you? No! No, we don't do such things anymore."
"Then how will -"
Severus blinked. He stood alone in his as-yet-unexplored quarters, a Potions master and soon-to-be professor.
Lily, he thought.
Of late, it was all he could do not to weep her name every minute of every hour of every day, but duty kept him silent; he would honour Lily by protecting her child, and until Harry's arrival at Hogwarts, he did not know how he would keep himself sane.
"How did I get here?"
Pop!
"You is here like everyone else is being here, Professor Snape!"
Severus hadn't even started at the pop of the house-elf's arrival. "And how is that?"
"You walked in the door!" the elf exclaimed with prodigious cheer. "I am being Bissy, and the Bloody Baron says I am to be your house-elf because I am being the 'most sober' of all my sisters! Brothers, too!"
Severus' eyes widened at Bissy's words, but not at the Baron's selection. He'd always got on well with him.
"May I have a -"
Poof!
"It is being here, the big book you is wanting from the Librarian Lady."
And there was a book, A History of Hogwarts' Masters of Potions, Compleat with Their Most Glorious Draughts, Listed in Abecedarian and Historical Order, floating in between himself and Bissy.
"Oh! And there is being a steak and kidney pie and pumpkin juice for you, and tartlets."
"Tartlets?" Severus asked, not recalling having requested them.
"Tartlets!" Bissy assured him. "Sweet ones and savoury!"
It was then that Severus caught scent of cheese - and ham. "Tartlets!"
And so it was that Hogwarts' newest Potions master passed his first, unexpectedly calm evening as a professor reading about past masters of his craft by the fire over a meal that featured not one, but two plates of ham tartlets.
Pumpkin juice and steak and kidney pie were well enough in their way, but Severus loved ham.