SB: Chapter 15 - The Place of Turning Roads (Part I of III)
Title: Chapter 15 - The Place of Turning Roads
Author: Mrs. Hyde and das_mervin
Word Count: 11,590
Summary: The end.
CHAPTER 15 - THE PLACE OF TURNING ROADS
PART I
The cheap little Muggle alarm clock on Snape’s bedside table went off with a horrible clattering din as if the very chariots of hell were beating down upon him, a sound that raced up his spine like a bolt of lightning to burn inside his brain. He shot up in bed and immediately regretted it; his head was pounding like a cannon, the light seeping beneath the drawn curtains stabbing into his eyes.
He picked up the wretched clock and threw it, smashing it against the wall with a horrific clattering crash that drove railway spikes into his ears.
He groaned in agony and nearly fell back into bed before he realized why he’d set his alarm in the first place-it was Wednesday.
It was also the Day of the Dead, and if he wanted to get out early enough to buy the pickled murtlap essence that he needed later this week (to his fury he’d discovered the day before that the stocks he’d bought from Fernando were not merely water-thin, but were also contaminated) before the revelling started, he would have to get up and go out just after sunup.
But the fact that it was Day of the Dead meant that yesterday had been Halloween-and so it was that this morning, like the morning of every November the first for the past twenty-five years, Snape had a raging hangover.
He stood, wishing he hadn’t, tottering on his feet and doing his level best not to vomit all over the floor-or worse, in his bed-and he lurched out of his room and across the hall into his workroom. He’d had the good sense to set out a vial of potion for himself the day before, and so he picked it up with trembling fingers and forced the contents down into his rebellious stomach.
Oh, thank God… The throbbing pulse of the kettledrums in his head eased, and the light no longer hurt him so.
He staggered down the stairs and into the bathroom, and leaned heavily on the toilet tank as he pissed for what felt like an hour. When he was finished, he splashed water on his face and ground the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to make himself feel even the slightest bit like a human being again, and not like something picked out from between a giant’s toes.
It didn’t work. His mouth tasted like something vile had crawled in it and died, and he grabbed his toothbrush with still-shaking fingers and tried in vain to scrub away the sour taste of sleep and stale whisky.
When he was finished in the bathroom, he dragged himself back upstairs to get dressed. He’d slept in most of his clothes, and he didn’t bother with anything new, just put back on the rumpled shirt from last night and slipping on his shoes before crossing the hall to collect the bottles to be returned.
He went back downstairs and didn’t stop in his kitchen; the thought of food made him physically ill. He didn’t even want any tea, although the caffeine probably would have helped him at this point. But he couldn’t muster the energy or the inclination so make any, so he just crammed a peppermint in his mouth as a substitute, grabbed his high-collared coat and his hat, donned his sunglasses against the stabbing forks of sunlight in his eyes, and let himself out into the still-cool quiet of the morning under the soft periwinkle sunrise sky.
At least, it was quiet near his house. It was barely seven, and yet he found that the revellers had already started nearer to the centre of town. He would never understand this country and their obsession with this macabre holiday glorifying death. Everywhere he looked, great hideous skulls grinned down at him, from the huge creations of paper mâché that leered from the tops of buildings, to the horrible, horrible lady skeletons, dressed in flowing veils and gowns and clutching bouquets of lilies in their bony fingers, that stared accusingly from store windows.
Dear God, how he hated this place.
Despite how utterly wretched he felt this morning, he made it to the chemist’s in record time, such was his desire not to be outside any longer than he had to. He knew it would still be open early, as were most shops on this holiday, hoping to do a little business before they closed up shop and went out to join the festivities. Snape clattered through the door, the tinny little bell hanging above him jarring his aching head abominably, and he briefly contemplating cursing it into smithereens.
Fernando was slouched behind the counter, the very image of the slovenly, oily, stereotypical Mexican sleaze; how ironic that Fernando was really the only wizard he knew in this country. He grinned greasily around the toothpick in his mouth when he saw Snape standing there.
“Buenas dias, amigo,” he said, turning to put his hands on the counter, facing the door. “What can I get you today?”
Snape slammed down the three bottles of murtlap essence that he’d only just bought last week. “You can stop trying to cheat me by watering down what you sell me, you four flushing crook!” he snarled at the man. “These are as diluted as the beer they serve in that bar across the street-not to mention that what you thinned in the first place was full of murtlap hair! How do you expect me to work with this rubbish?” he demanded.
Fernando’s grin was a little on the hard side, but he held up his hands. “Calm down-lemme see.” He picked up the brown glass bottle and held it up to the guttering light bulb over his head while Snape crossed his arms and glared at him.
“I know when my ingredients are quality-just as I know when they are utter trash,” Snape said frostily. “And if you want me to keep you in Pepperup and Wit-sharpening potions, you had better provide what I need for my own brewing.”
Fernando sighed, clearly having realized that he’d been found out yet again, and he scooped up the little bottles and trundled into the back of the store-where he kept his magical items. Snape stood impatiently out in the shop proper, under the cold, empty stares of the skulls that were hanging in his windows.
He turned at the rattle of the beaded curtain that separated the two halves of the shop; Fernando was back, clutching three new bottles of murtlap essence. Snape snatched them up the moment he set them down on the counter, taking care to inspect each one, holding them up to the light and uncorking them to smell for the strong, sour scent of properly pickled essence at the appropriate concentration.
They were passable, he supposed, and he tucked them in his pocket. “You don’t expect me to pay for this,” he said coldly.
Fernando looked like he wanted to argue, but he was half-afraid of Snape, for all the trouble he put him through, and so he just shook his head in the negative. “Good,” Snape said shortly. “And I’ll have your next batch of rust-repellent next week.” And he spun on his heel and left the shop.
He hurried home through the growing throngs of party-goers in Deaths-head masks, feeling progressively worse as he went. It was too crowded even for him to find a place where he could Apparate-although even if he could he probably wouldn’t. Few things in this world were more horrible than Apparating with a hangover.
He finally made it home; Calle del Sombras seemed eerily silent after the shouting and celebration across town, and it was with a rush of relief that he let himself back into the quiet dark of his house.
He went upstairs, his eyes hot and his head full of broken glass, and put his fresh murtlap essence away on his stock shelf. He paused, and then grabbed a vial of his own personal, more potent headache cure, and the bottle of the double-strength sleeping draught that he favoured when his head was too crowded with memories and regrets to sleep.
He trudged wearily into his bedroom, swallowing down the headache cure as he went, and then tiredly peeled off his shirt and kicked his shoes in the corner. He aimed a half-hearted Reparo at the pile of cogs slumped sadly by the skirting board, but there wasn’t enough force behind it to do much more than pull them into a jumbled wad of metal that was vaguely clock-shaped. He gave up after the first try and tossed his wand on the bedside table with a clatter. He didn’t bother undressing; he just took a long swallow of the sleeping draught and fell into his bed.
Snape woke up hot and sweaty and out of sorts. He sat up; his headache was gone and he was ravenous. He got up and went downstairs, still in his stocking feet and his undershirt (the air was nice and cool on his skin but felt odd on his atypically exposed throat) to go to the loo.
When he emerged and went into his kitchen to make himself a cup of tea and some lunch, he was shocked to see that by the clock on the wall, it was nearly eight at night, and a glance outside at the gathering darkness confirmed it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept so long, even under the effects of alcohol or a potion. He just stared at the clock for a moment, and then lit the stove under his kettle and opened the icebox.
It was getting pretty thin in there, honestly; he’d planned on waiting and going out for his weekly supplies on Friday morning, when the furore of the holiday had died down, and while he’d deliberately purchased enough for a few extra days on top of his regular rations, times were definitely lean.
It looked like he was back to his old staple, and with a sigh that was more weary than angry, he got out the cheese and the pickles and, after a moment’s thought, the margarine. He could at least have a hot meal, even if it was just a sandwich.
He put a pat of margarine in his skillet on the stove and laid out the bread for one sandwich-and then another. He was hungry, dammit-he hadn’t eaten all day. He put the sandwiches together in short order, the way his father had taught him, and had them browning in the pan just as his kettle began to whistle. He flipped the sandwiches to toast on the other side as his tea steeped, and he pulled out a plate to receive them when they were done.
He set his meal out on the table and went out into the living room to retrieve the paper than he’d taken to having delivered, ever since Santiago moved away with his young wife. It cost extra, but it was a luxury that he felt he could afford these days, particularly if reading between the lines kept him abreast of any particular unpleasantness that would warrant active measures on his part to avoid.
He opened the door, and there was his paper, resting on the porch where it should be. It never got here early in the mornings, like a proper paper should, but it didn’t really matter-he preferred to read in the evenings anyway. He did have it stolen once or twice, until he’d put a mild hex on his doorstep. He’d been just sitting down to his breakfast one morning shortly after that and had heard a loud crackling pop and a howl of pain; he had thrown open his door to find some young hooligan flat on his arse in the street, dazed and faintly smoking.
He hadn’t seen the little miscreant since, and his paper was always waiting outside, no matter what the hour.
He picked up his paper and stood, but paused just before going inside, and he tilted his head. There was a strange quality to the light tonight, and the air was ghostly and still. He looked up at the pink-stained clouds streaking across the purple sky, and listened; beneath the distant sounds of the celebration in town he could hear nothing, just an ear-splitting silence ringing all around him.
Then he went back inside, shutting his door on the hot, humming energy of the night outside.
Snape sat and ate his usual quiet, solitary supper, reading the paper and doing his best to ignore the prickling feeling the heavy, stagnant atmosphere was raising on his neck. He didn’t like it, but he was used to feeling horrible-one way or another-on All Souls’ Day, so he did his best to ignore it.
When he was finished with his supper, he washed his dishes and put them away, as he always did, and then took his paper and his teacup into the living room. There was still a record sitting innocuously on the turntable where he’d left it the night before, and an empty whisky bottle was sitting on the table next to an overturned glass.
He looked at them, and then set his paper down and picked up the bottle and glass; binning the former and washing the latter so that he could put it away in the drinks cabinet; he put Zeppelin away while he was there, and then sat back down to finish his paper.
He was just contemplating trying his hand at the crossword when he heard it.
The wards that he’d erected around his house to keep out the racket from that contemptible pig in Number 15 were cast so that he could still hear anything out of the ordinary-like the heavy thud and wooden slam of someone kicking the door open next door.
He looked, up, wary, and eased his wand from his pocket. His wards kept out any sounds of speech, so all around him was silent as he listened.
And then the shooting started.
He was on his feet with the first gunshot-the familiar sound of Sands’s favourite weapon, the one that he had on or near him at all times, like some kind of security blanket (or a wand). Snape’s own wand was drawn and ready, and he was tense and waiting when the second shot rang out, a resounding BOOM that was nothing like any weapon he’d ever heard Sands use-that one had to have been from a shotgun.
The bloody fool had done it now! With a furious snarl, Snape raised his wand, ready to lower the side wards to find out just what in the devil was going on over there.
He never got the chance.
The spell that was on his lips emerged as nothing but a strangled shout as two men came crashing through his wall in a tangle of limbs and a hail of debris, shattering his lamp and plunging the room into darkness, sailing through the air and landing right in the middle of him. Snape was crushed beneath their flailing weight, and he heard his wand clatter to the floor and skitter away, out of sight and beyond his reach. Snape coughed painfully, the wind knocked out of him and his throat clogged with dust as he tried to claw his way out from under the combatants to find his wand. Sands was snarling curses; Snape could hear him laughing and swearing and baying threats to whomever he was fighting-and all the while the other man didn’t say a word.
Dammit, where is my wand?! Snape thought furiously as he struggled to free his legs from the tangle of fighting, flailing limbs that had him pinned to the floor. He kicked violently, and the two finally rolled away, off him and to the side, giving Snape the time and room he needed to heave himself across the floor and scramble through the pile of plaster and laths on the floor as he coughed and choked, desperately looking for his wand.
“Get out of here, Snape!” Sands suddenly bellowed. “Leave him to me! He’s mine!”
Snape bared his teeth, looking under his tables and chairs in the dust-filled darkness as Sands launched himself at the other man; they crushed his coffee table beneath the heavy fall of their combined weight, Snape barely managing to get out of their way, falling backwards as he threw himself out of their path. Snape saw stars as the back of his head collided with the end table; he heard a great grunt of pain as the more slender of the two forms was thrown to the side, slamming painfully into Snape’s drinks cabinet. The bottles inside rattled and clanked angrily, and his record player was thrown to the floor with the impact, snapping the arm in two and sending the turntable wheeling crazily across the floor before spinning to rest in the corner.
Dragging himself to his knees, Snape rubbed at his burning eyes full of grit and dust, trying to clear his ringing head, trying to hear, to see, to breathe, when his arm was suddenly seized in a grip like iron and he was hauled to his feet as if he weighed nothing. He had the briefest glimpse a face shadowed behind long locks of dark hair before he was spun around like a rag doll, and a powerful arm snaked around his neck and shoulders and pinioned him in an impossibly strong grasp.
Snape grappled futilely with the arm around his neck-where was his wand, dammit?! But the powerful noose of bone and sinew just tightened around his neck, pulling him hard against the wall of muscled chest behind him, and he could hear his breath whistling down his throat as it squeezed tighter and tighter, constricting like a snake, crushing his windpipe and throttling any fight out of him.
He hissed with what little breath he had and went perfectly still when he felt the sudden, bruising press of the cold steel of the barrel of a gun jam painfully into his kidney.
“Where is he, Snape?” Sands howled, his voice wild and joyful and desperate and mad. “I want him! He’s mine!” He had staggered to his feet again, a gun in his hand. His face and hair were bone-white with plaster dust and his sunglasses were gone, the blank holes in his head yawning black in the darkness.
The gun dug harder into Snape’s back-and he got the message.
“He’s behind me,” Snape managed to wheeze.
Sands whirled to face him at the sound of his voice, his gun swinging upwards, and Snape found himself staring down a different kind of blank black eye, this one just as deadly.
“Where?” Sands barked, no longer smiling.
“Right behind me,” Snape rasped.
A low, impossibly smooth voice growled from behind him. “Put your gun down, Sands.”
Sands jerked as the man spoke, his gun flicking to the side, but still trained on his opponent-on Snape.
“Put it down,” said the man behind him with a voice like steel, his grip tightening again in the face of the barrel of the gun. “Let this go-or else you’ll have to kill your friend as well if you want to kill me.”
He’s no friend of mine! Snape wanted to shout, but now he barely had enough air to breathe, let alone speak.
“I don’t care what you do to him!” Sands roared. “Hiding behind other people, letting them take the fall-that’s what you do best, isn’t it! But not this time! Let him go and face me-look me in the eyes when I kill you!”
“But I’m already dead, Sands.” The voice was soft and cold and unwavering, like silk-wrapped stone. “And I’m finished. If you follow this, the only ones to die will be all those you care about-and then finally you. But I’ll have no more blood on my hands. You’ll kill them-you’ll kill him-yourself.”
“I don’t care about him!” Sands snarled, but Snape could see that the hand holding the gun was shaking. “You did this to me! I’m blind, you motherfucker!”
“Yes. You are blind-and you cannot see.”
Snape realized that half the reason his throat was burning and that his lungs were screaming for air was because he was holding his breath.
“Let go, Sands-leave me and mine alone, and I’ll do the same.” A pause. “Or kill us both-and we’ll see you in hell.”
Sands was taut and shaking, his gun aimed at Snape’s heart.
Snape hitched what little breath he had; his eyes were trying to close, but he forced them open, to look Death in the eye, staring down into those fathomless empty sockets glaring back at him, and the last thing he would see not those beloved green eyes of his Lily, but the empty holes in the face of his killer.
“Fuck,” Sands whispered.
His arm went limp, flopping at his side as the gun fell from his nerveless fingers, clattering amidst the debris and destruction of Snape’s house.
Sands staggered backwards, his feet catching in the piles of plaster heaped up around him, but caught himself before he stumbled into the wall. His hand came up, the fingers limp, slowly feeling their way along the cracked and splintered wall, back to the gaping hole that led back to his own house. Snape watched wordlessly as Sands crawled back through, nearly falling as his foot caught on the splintered laths, climbed the stairs, and, a few moments later, Snape heard the door to the bedroom slam shut.
Only then did his captor let him go.
Snape jerked away, sucking in a huge lungful of air as he whirled to face him, only to find the man holding up his hands placatingly, his gun pointed harmlessly skyward.
He wasn’t very big, given his strength-only about as tall as Snape himself. His hair fell in dark curtains around his face, and his eyes were dark and intense. His face was expressionless, and he and Snape regarded each other in silence.
The other man spoke first. “I apologize,” he said quietly. Snape would have voiced his incredulity if his throat hadn’t hurt so much. “It was never my intention to bring anyone else into this,” the man went on.
A hoarse, barking laugh wrung itself out of Snape‘s throat. “But he always finds a way to involve me in his affairs,” he grated bitterly.
The man inclined his head briefly. “All the same, I did not wish you ill-nor do I now.” He looked up, and their gazes met, eye to dark eye, and Snape stared into them.
“I am finished with fighting,” the man said. “I have paid for my freedom with my own flesh-and that of my wife and daughter. I want no more bloodshed-only peace.”
And Snape looked at him, looked into him, and he saw.
“I understand,” Snape said quietly.
And he did.
The man-the mariachi-nodded once. “Then I would once again ask for your forgiveness for this,” he said gesturing to the disaster that was Snape’s living room, and Snape nodded curtly, “and I will bid you farewell.”
Then he turned and walked to the door; Snape followed him, and they looked at each other for a moment more, and when the man held out a scarred and dusty hand, Snape took it.
The mariachi’s hand dropped back down to his side; he turned and walked out, the chains on his trousers jingling merrily in the stillness of the street. Snape stood in the open doorway and watched, watched as he knelt down and tucked his shotgun away in the guitar case that rested on the porch next door before snapping it closed and hefting it onto his shoulder. He reached forward and pulled Sands’s door shut before turning and walking away, walking down the dusty cobblestones of Calle del Sombras, silhouetted against the horizon with his guitar case in hand.
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Author: Mrs. Hyde and das_mervin
Word Count: 11,590
Summary: The end.
CHAPTER 15 - THE PLACE OF TURNING ROADS
PART I
The cheap little Muggle alarm clock on Snape’s bedside table went off with a horrible clattering din as if the very chariots of hell were beating down upon him, a sound that raced up his spine like a bolt of lightning to burn inside his brain. He shot up in bed and immediately regretted it; his head was pounding like a cannon, the light seeping beneath the drawn curtains stabbing into his eyes.
He picked up the wretched clock and threw it, smashing it against the wall with a horrific clattering crash that drove railway spikes into his ears.
He groaned in agony and nearly fell back into bed before he realized why he’d set his alarm in the first place-it was Wednesday.
It was also the Day of the Dead, and if he wanted to get out early enough to buy the pickled murtlap essence that he needed later this week (to his fury he’d discovered the day before that the stocks he’d bought from Fernando were not merely water-thin, but were also contaminated) before the revelling started, he would have to get up and go out just after sunup.
But the fact that it was Day of the Dead meant that yesterday had been Halloween-and so it was that this morning, like the morning of every November the first for the past twenty-five years, Snape had a raging hangover.
He stood, wishing he hadn’t, tottering on his feet and doing his level best not to vomit all over the floor-or worse, in his bed-and he lurched out of his room and across the hall into his workroom. He’d had the good sense to set out a vial of potion for himself the day before, and so he picked it up with trembling fingers and forced the contents down into his rebellious stomach.
Oh, thank God… The throbbing pulse of the kettledrums in his head eased, and the light no longer hurt him so.
He staggered down the stairs and into the bathroom, and leaned heavily on the toilet tank as he pissed for what felt like an hour. When he was finished, he splashed water on his face and ground the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to make himself feel even the slightest bit like a human being again, and not like something picked out from between a giant’s toes.
It didn’t work. His mouth tasted like something vile had crawled in it and died, and he grabbed his toothbrush with still-shaking fingers and tried in vain to scrub away the sour taste of sleep and stale whisky.
When he was finished in the bathroom, he dragged himself back upstairs to get dressed. He’d slept in most of his clothes, and he didn’t bother with anything new, just put back on the rumpled shirt from last night and slipping on his shoes before crossing the hall to collect the bottles to be returned.
He went back downstairs and didn’t stop in his kitchen; the thought of food made him physically ill. He didn’t even want any tea, although the caffeine probably would have helped him at this point. But he couldn’t muster the energy or the inclination so make any, so he just crammed a peppermint in his mouth as a substitute, grabbed his high-collared coat and his hat, donned his sunglasses against the stabbing forks of sunlight in his eyes, and let himself out into the still-cool quiet of the morning under the soft periwinkle sunrise sky.
At least, it was quiet near his house. It was barely seven, and yet he found that the revellers had already started nearer to the centre of town. He would never understand this country and their obsession with this macabre holiday glorifying death. Everywhere he looked, great hideous skulls grinned down at him, from the huge creations of paper mâché that leered from the tops of buildings, to the horrible, horrible lady skeletons, dressed in flowing veils and gowns and clutching bouquets of lilies in their bony fingers, that stared accusingly from store windows.
Dear God, how he hated this place.
Despite how utterly wretched he felt this morning, he made it to the chemist’s in record time, such was his desire not to be outside any longer than he had to. He knew it would still be open early, as were most shops on this holiday, hoping to do a little business before they closed up shop and went out to join the festivities. Snape clattered through the door, the tinny little bell hanging above him jarring his aching head abominably, and he briefly contemplating cursing it into smithereens.
Fernando was slouched behind the counter, the very image of the slovenly, oily, stereotypical Mexican sleaze; how ironic that Fernando was really the only wizard he knew in this country. He grinned greasily around the toothpick in his mouth when he saw Snape standing there.
“Buenas dias, amigo,” he said, turning to put his hands on the counter, facing the door. “What can I get you today?”
Snape slammed down the three bottles of murtlap essence that he’d only just bought last week. “You can stop trying to cheat me by watering down what you sell me, you four flushing crook!” he snarled at the man. “These are as diluted as the beer they serve in that bar across the street-not to mention that what you thinned in the first place was full of murtlap hair! How do you expect me to work with this rubbish?” he demanded.
Fernando’s grin was a little on the hard side, but he held up his hands. “Calm down-lemme see.” He picked up the brown glass bottle and held it up to the guttering light bulb over his head while Snape crossed his arms and glared at him.
“I know when my ingredients are quality-just as I know when they are utter trash,” Snape said frostily. “And if you want me to keep you in Pepperup and Wit-sharpening potions, you had better provide what I need for my own brewing.”
Fernando sighed, clearly having realized that he’d been found out yet again, and he scooped up the little bottles and trundled into the back of the store-where he kept his magical items. Snape stood impatiently out in the shop proper, under the cold, empty stares of the skulls that were hanging in his windows.
He turned at the rattle of the beaded curtain that separated the two halves of the shop; Fernando was back, clutching three new bottles of murtlap essence. Snape snatched them up the moment he set them down on the counter, taking care to inspect each one, holding them up to the light and uncorking them to smell for the strong, sour scent of properly pickled essence at the appropriate concentration.
They were passable, he supposed, and he tucked them in his pocket. “You don’t expect me to pay for this,” he said coldly.
Fernando looked like he wanted to argue, but he was half-afraid of Snape, for all the trouble he put him through, and so he just shook his head in the negative. “Good,” Snape said shortly. “And I’ll have your next batch of rust-repellent next week.” And he spun on his heel and left the shop.
He hurried home through the growing throngs of party-goers in Deaths-head masks, feeling progressively worse as he went. It was too crowded even for him to find a place where he could Apparate-although even if he could he probably wouldn’t. Few things in this world were more horrible than Apparating with a hangover.
He finally made it home; Calle del Sombras seemed eerily silent after the shouting and celebration across town, and it was with a rush of relief that he let himself back into the quiet dark of his house.
He went upstairs, his eyes hot and his head full of broken glass, and put his fresh murtlap essence away on his stock shelf. He paused, and then grabbed a vial of his own personal, more potent headache cure, and the bottle of the double-strength sleeping draught that he favoured when his head was too crowded with memories and regrets to sleep.
He trudged wearily into his bedroom, swallowing down the headache cure as he went, and then tiredly peeled off his shirt and kicked his shoes in the corner. He aimed a half-hearted Reparo at the pile of cogs slumped sadly by the skirting board, but there wasn’t enough force behind it to do much more than pull them into a jumbled wad of metal that was vaguely clock-shaped. He gave up after the first try and tossed his wand on the bedside table with a clatter. He didn’t bother undressing; he just took a long swallow of the sleeping draught and fell into his bed.
Snape woke up hot and sweaty and out of sorts. He sat up; his headache was gone and he was ravenous. He got up and went downstairs, still in his stocking feet and his undershirt (the air was nice and cool on his skin but felt odd on his atypically exposed throat) to go to the loo.
When he emerged and went into his kitchen to make himself a cup of tea and some lunch, he was shocked to see that by the clock on the wall, it was nearly eight at night, and a glance outside at the gathering darkness confirmed it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept so long, even under the effects of alcohol or a potion. He just stared at the clock for a moment, and then lit the stove under his kettle and opened the icebox.
It was getting pretty thin in there, honestly; he’d planned on waiting and going out for his weekly supplies on Friday morning, when the furore of the holiday had died down, and while he’d deliberately purchased enough for a few extra days on top of his regular rations, times were definitely lean.
It looked like he was back to his old staple, and with a sigh that was more weary than angry, he got out the cheese and the pickles and, after a moment’s thought, the margarine. He could at least have a hot meal, even if it was just a sandwich.
He put a pat of margarine in his skillet on the stove and laid out the bread for one sandwich-and then another. He was hungry, dammit-he hadn’t eaten all day. He put the sandwiches together in short order, the way his father had taught him, and had them browning in the pan just as his kettle began to whistle. He flipped the sandwiches to toast on the other side as his tea steeped, and he pulled out a plate to receive them when they were done.
He set his meal out on the table and went out into the living room to retrieve the paper than he’d taken to having delivered, ever since Santiago moved away with his young wife. It cost extra, but it was a luxury that he felt he could afford these days, particularly if reading between the lines kept him abreast of any particular unpleasantness that would warrant active measures on his part to avoid.
He opened the door, and there was his paper, resting on the porch where it should be. It never got here early in the mornings, like a proper paper should, but it didn’t really matter-he preferred to read in the evenings anyway. He did have it stolen once or twice, until he’d put a mild hex on his doorstep. He’d been just sitting down to his breakfast one morning shortly after that and had heard a loud crackling pop and a howl of pain; he had thrown open his door to find some young hooligan flat on his arse in the street, dazed and faintly smoking.
He hadn’t seen the little miscreant since, and his paper was always waiting outside, no matter what the hour.
He picked up his paper and stood, but paused just before going inside, and he tilted his head. There was a strange quality to the light tonight, and the air was ghostly and still. He looked up at the pink-stained clouds streaking across the purple sky, and listened; beneath the distant sounds of the celebration in town he could hear nothing, just an ear-splitting silence ringing all around him.
Then he went back inside, shutting his door on the hot, humming energy of the night outside.
Snape sat and ate his usual quiet, solitary supper, reading the paper and doing his best to ignore the prickling feeling the heavy, stagnant atmosphere was raising on his neck. He didn’t like it, but he was used to feeling horrible-one way or another-on All Souls’ Day, so he did his best to ignore it.
When he was finished with his supper, he washed his dishes and put them away, as he always did, and then took his paper and his teacup into the living room. There was still a record sitting innocuously on the turntable where he’d left it the night before, and an empty whisky bottle was sitting on the table next to an overturned glass.
He looked at them, and then set his paper down and picked up the bottle and glass; binning the former and washing the latter so that he could put it away in the drinks cabinet; he put Zeppelin away while he was there, and then sat back down to finish his paper.
He was just contemplating trying his hand at the crossword when he heard it.
The wards that he’d erected around his house to keep out the racket from that contemptible pig in Number 15 were cast so that he could still hear anything out of the ordinary-like the heavy thud and wooden slam of someone kicking the door open next door.
He looked, up, wary, and eased his wand from his pocket. His wards kept out any sounds of speech, so all around him was silent as he listened.
And then the shooting started.
He was on his feet with the first gunshot-the familiar sound of Sands’s favourite weapon, the one that he had on or near him at all times, like some kind of security blanket (or a wand). Snape’s own wand was drawn and ready, and he was tense and waiting when the second shot rang out, a resounding BOOM that was nothing like any weapon he’d ever heard Sands use-that one had to have been from a shotgun.
The bloody fool had done it now! With a furious snarl, Snape raised his wand, ready to lower the side wards to find out just what in the devil was going on over there.
He never got the chance.
The spell that was on his lips emerged as nothing but a strangled shout as two men came crashing through his wall in a tangle of limbs and a hail of debris, shattering his lamp and plunging the room into darkness, sailing through the air and landing right in the middle of him. Snape was crushed beneath their flailing weight, and he heard his wand clatter to the floor and skitter away, out of sight and beyond his reach. Snape coughed painfully, the wind knocked out of him and his throat clogged with dust as he tried to claw his way out from under the combatants to find his wand. Sands was snarling curses; Snape could hear him laughing and swearing and baying threats to whomever he was fighting-and all the while the other man didn’t say a word.
Dammit, where is my wand?! Snape thought furiously as he struggled to free his legs from the tangle of fighting, flailing limbs that had him pinned to the floor. He kicked violently, and the two finally rolled away, off him and to the side, giving Snape the time and room he needed to heave himself across the floor and scramble through the pile of plaster and laths on the floor as he coughed and choked, desperately looking for his wand.
“Get out of here, Snape!” Sands suddenly bellowed. “Leave him to me! He’s mine!”
Snape bared his teeth, looking under his tables and chairs in the dust-filled darkness as Sands launched himself at the other man; they crushed his coffee table beneath the heavy fall of their combined weight, Snape barely managing to get out of their way, falling backwards as he threw himself out of their path. Snape saw stars as the back of his head collided with the end table; he heard a great grunt of pain as the more slender of the two forms was thrown to the side, slamming painfully into Snape’s drinks cabinet. The bottles inside rattled and clanked angrily, and his record player was thrown to the floor with the impact, snapping the arm in two and sending the turntable wheeling crazily across the floor before spinning to rest in the corner.
Dragging himself to his knees, Snape rubbed at his burning eyes full of grit and dust, trying to clear his ringing head, trying to hear, to see, to breathe, when his arm was suddenly seized in a grip like iron and he was hauled to his feet as if he weighed nothing. He had the briefest glimpse a face shadowed behind long locks of dark hair before he was spun around like a rag doll, and a powerful arm snaked around his neck and shoulders and pinioned him in an impossibly strong grasp.
Snape grappled futilely with the arm around his neck-where was his wand, dammit?! But the powerful noose of bone and sinew just tightened around his neck, pulling him hard against the wall of muscled chest behind him, and he could hear his breath whistling down his throat as it squeezed tighter and tighter, constricting like a snake, crushing his windpipe and throttling any fight out of him.
He hissed with what little breath he had and went perfectly still when he felt the sudden, bruising press of the cold steel of the barrel of a gun jam painfully into his kidney.
“Where is he, Snape?” Sands howled, his voice wild and joyful and desperate and mad. “I want him! He’s mine!” He had staggered to his feet again, a gun in his hand. His face and hair were bone-white with plaster dust and his sunglasses were gone, the blank holes in his head yawning black in the darkness.
The gun dug harder into Snape’s back-and he got the message.
“He’s behind me,” Snape managed to wheeze.
Sands whirled to face him at the sound of his voice, his gun swinging upwards, and Snape found himself staring down a different kind of blank black eye, this one just as deadly.
“Where?” Sands barked, no longer smiling.
“Right behind me,” Snape rasped.
A low, impossibly smooth voice growled from behind him. “Put your gun down, Sands.”
Sands jerked as the man spoke, his gun flicking to the side, but still trained on his opponent-on Snape.
“Put it down,” said the man behind him with a voice like steel, his grip tightening again in the face of the barrel of the gun. “Let this go-or else you’ll have to kill your friend as well if you want to kill me.”
He’s no friend of mine! Snape wanted to shout, but now he barely had enough air to breathe, let alone speak.
“I don’t care what you do to him!” Sands roared. “Hiding behind other people, letting them take the fall-that’s what you do best, isn’t it! But not this time! Let him go and face me-look me in the eyes when I kill you!”
“But I’m already dead, Sands.” The voice was soft and cold and unwavering, like silk-wrapped stone. “And I’m finished. If you follow this, the only ones to die will be all those you care about-and then finally you. But I’ll have no more blood on my hands. You’ll kill them-you’ll kill him-yourself.”
“I don’t care about him!” Sands snarled, but Snape could see that the hand holding the gun was shaking. “You did this to me! I’m blind, you motherfucker!”
“Yes. You are blind-and you cannot see.”
Snape realized that half the reason his throat was burning and that his lungs were screaming for air was because he was holding his breath.
“Let go, Sands-leave me and mine alone, and I’ll do the same.” A pause. “Or kill us both-and we’ll see you in hell.”
Sands was taut and shaking, his gun aimed at Snape’s heart.
Snape hitched what little breath he had; his eyes were trying to close, but he forced them open, to look Death in the eye, staring down into those fathomless empty sockets glaring back at him, and the last thing he would see not those beloved green eyes of his Lily, but the empty holes in the face of his killer.
“Fuck,” Sands whispered.
His arm went limp, flopping at his side as the gun fell from his nerveless fingers, clattering amidst the debris and destruction of Snape’s house.
Sands staggered backwards, his feet catching in the piles of plaster heaped up around him, but caught himself before he stumbled into the wall. His hand came up, the fingers limp, slowly feeling their way along the cracked and splintered wall, back to the gaping hole that led back to his own house. Snape watched wordlessly as Sands crawled back through, nearly falling as his foot caught on the splintered laths, climbed the stairs, and, a few moments later, Snape heard the door to the bedroom slam shut.
Only then did his captor let him go.
Snape jerked away, sucking in a huge lungful of air as he whirled to face him, only to find the man holding up his hands placatingly, his gun pointed harmlessly skyward.
He wasn’t very big, given his strength-only about as tall as Snape himself. His hair fell in dark curtains around his face, and his eyes were dark and intense. His face was expressionless, and he and Snape regarded each other in silence.
The other man spoke first. “I apologize,” he said quietly. Snape would have voiced his incredulity if his throat hadn’t hurt so much. “It was never my intention to bring anyone else into this,” the man went on.
A hoarse, barking laugh wrung itself out of Snape‘s throat. “But he always finds a way to involve me in his affairs,” he grated bitterly.
The man inclined his head briefly. “All the same, I did not wish you ill-nor do I now.” He looked up, and their gazes met, eye to dark eye, and Snape stared into them.
“I am finished with fighting,” the man said. “I have paid for my freedom with my own flesh-and that of my wife and daughter. I want no more bloodshed-only peace.”
And Snape looked at him, looked into him, and he saw.
“I understand,” Snape said quietly.
And he did.
The man-the mariachi-nodded once. “Then I would once again ask for your forgiveness for this,” he said gesturing to the disaster that was Snape’s living room, and Snape nodded curtly, “and I will bid you farewell.”
Then he turned and walked to the door; Snape followed him, and they looked at each other for a moment more, and when the man held out a scarred and dusty hand, Snape took it.
The mariachi’s hand dropped back down to his side; he turned and walked out, the chains on his trousers jingling merrily in the stillness of the street. Snape stood in the open doorway and watched, watched as he knelt down and tucked his shotgun away in the guitar case that rested on the porch next door before snapping it closed and hefting it onto his shoulder. He reached forward and pulled Sands’s door shut before turning and walking away, walking down the dusty cobblestones of Calle del Sombras, silhouetted against the horizon with his guitar case in hand.
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