Chapter Thirty Two: Morning
Another failed cure. A week of dreadful (and quite expensive) treatments and Remus could tell it hadn't done a bit of good by the slashes on his chest and the sunlight spilling through the gaps in the shutters over the garage windows. If Mum and Dad didn't waste so much money on every werewolf cure every crackpot tried to sell them, they'd be able to afford to get on the Floo Network and he wouldn't have to put up with the embarrassment of having his mum or dad Apparate him over to the Potters. He could just Floo in like Peter did.
The worst of it, though, was that no matter how hard he tried not to, he always got his hopes up and it always hurt worse than the transformation itself when they were dashed. The latest crackpot had been a "Dark Arts specialist" by the name of Lockhart.
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Lucius was furious with Avery. He had let Snape slip through his fingers. And go to Rosier, of all people! It would have to be an upstart family, able to trace their bloodlines a mere four centuries. And Evan's father was an ally of his father's, but not actually obligated to the Malfoy family. Which meant that he would only keep the Rosiers if he managed to forge an alliance of his own.
He had heard of Evan's "friendship" with Snape and had hoped to use the low-blood as a bargaining chip. Now it was Evan who had the bargaining chip instead.
Lucius didn't believe for a moment that the heir to the pureblood Rosier family had a real friendship with the near Mudblood factory boy. But Snape had more than lived up to his promise. Fifth year and already he had mastered the Cruciatus, an Unforgivable! Lucius had no one else in his entourage with that kind of spell power. Even Bellatrix hadn't mastered it yet. And it was a favorite of the Dark Lord's.
Lucius grimaced. He had come close to experiencing the Dark Lord's favorite curse himself, recently. It had been bad enough to watch Roddy take the hit for him.
Lucius had been dipping into the family fortune behind his father's back for the Dark Lord. He had come to realize that his main utility to the leader of the Death Eaters was his money. He shuddered to think what could happen if Father cut him off. It was imperative that he build other areas of utility to the Dark Lord, as well as other sources of income to make sure he would remain useful to his dangerous master. He had hoped to present Snape's skill with the Unforgivable as an additional asset. Not to mention the possibility of using the threat of Snape as a source of income.
His rage and frustration threatened to perturb his impeccable composure. He extracted his wand from his robe pocket and coolly and methodically began to destroy the furniture in the sitting room attached to the chambers he and Narcissa occupied at Malfoy Manor.
He called Dobby, who narrowly avoided a blasting spell aimed for the legs of an armchair near the door. One side of the chair thudded to the floor. The house-elf bowed to Lucius, which served the dual purpose of showing respect to the obviously angry wizard while also keeping his head out of the line of fire.
"Dobby, fetch Master Rodolphus. I want him to meet me in the west gardens in half an hour." The two remaining legs went and the other side of the chair fell heavily to the ground.
"Yes, Master Lucius." He trembled as Lucius sent a final curse at the chair, ripping the upholstery neatly in the shape of a snake, incidentally leaving a slash on Dobby's left ear as it whizzed past.
Before he Disapparated, almost as an afterthought, Lucius added, "And clean up this mess."
Dobby didn't dare to raise his head or bandage his ear until a loud crack announced that the Malfoy heir had left. Lucius was headed for the west garden, his mind clear, ready to pace and consider his next move while he waited for Roddy to show up.
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James felt that, at the age of 16, he had left his childhood behind him. Risking his life to save Snivellus -- no, he told himself firmly, Snape, not Snivellus -- right on the heels of Lily's blow-up at him had hit him hard. And now, Sirius had been kicked out of his family on account of James's scheme to get him out of the house. "Well, I got him out, all right," he thought grimly. "All the way out." Sometimes, he couldn't figure Sirius out. Almost getting Snape -- and James -- killed by Remus didn't seem to faze him at all. And he seemed so glad to be gone from Grimmauld Place and blasted off that stupid tapestry that it was almost scary.
No, Sirius wasn't able to take care of himself. As his best friend, it was up to James to make sure he didn't mess up any more. He grimaced. "That means *I* can't mess up anymore either." He squared his shoulders and composed himself before knocking on the door to Sirius's rooms at the Potter manor.
"Hey, slugabed," he called through the door, "thought we were going hunting today."
The door opened abruptly, just as he was leaning in to knock again and he fell into the room and into Sirius. The other boy had clearly been waiting for exactly the right instant to open the door for that very reason.
"Whoa, boy, a bit clumsy, yeah?" he grinned as he caught James to keep him from falling.
"You did that on purpose!" James accused, fighting to keep from laughing.
Sirius kept on grinning as if James had just complimented him. James had been acting much too somberly lately -- he needed someone to loosen him up a bit.
James gave in to his laughter. It was impossible to stay serious when Padfoot grinned like that. But he didn't forget his determination to keep his best mate out of trouble.
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This time, there were three black-robed figures, faces hidden, attacking the flat the Evanses occupied in the ten-unit council building in the Lewisham borough of London. Lily was trying to fight them off, all alone. Somehow Severus knew about the trouble and was telling her to hang on; he was bringing help. There was a flash of green light and Petunia was down. There was another flash of green light and she jerked awake, just as she was going to see what it felt like to be dead.
Lily sat up in a cold sweat. It was only 6 a.m. and as long as she got her own breakfast and did her chores, Mum didn't care when she got up during the summer hols. It would have been nice to sleep until 8 a.m. at least. But no, it was one of those nightmares. The "Daily Prophet" reports of Death Eater attacks on Muggles and Muggle-borns were starting to get to her.
Well, no use trying to get back to sleep. She glared over at Petunia in the single bed next to her, sleeping peacefully, in their shared room. She clicked on the lamp next to her bed, not caring whether the light woke her sister. It didn't, of course. No sense starting her chores any earlier than usual. She opened her book. "On a great day the thing that makes it great may fill the least part of it--as a meal takes little time to eat, but the killing, baking and dressing, and the swilling and scraping after it, take long enough. My fight with the Prince took about the sixth part of an hour; yet the business about it more than twelve."
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Severus woke to the ringing of the alarm clock. It was a mechanical clock that he had to wind every night, since the house had no electricity. He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. A mouse was scurrying across the floor. He slid on his slippers and stopped it with firm pressure from his foot. Once the creature was immobilized, he slowly pushed down, enjoying the sounds of tiny bones cracking and frantic squeaking. When he was sure it would be too injured to move, he removed his foot and picked it up by its tail, looking at it with a nasty smile. Then he abruptly twisted its neck, ending its pathetic jerking and mewling and tossed it in the wastepaper bin.
"Blasted rodent," he thought, lips pressed tightly together. It had taken him by surprise, before he had had time to steady himself. He closed his eyes. "Always clear your mind first thing in the morning," Madam Pomfrey had instructed him. "The urge to harm will be strongest first thing in the morning and whenever you are tired or ill." He sighed. It was true enough, but he also felt so powerful first thing in the morning. Until he cleared his mind and stored his bloody thoughts behind the carefully constructed walls the nurse had taught him to build.
Barriers up, he took one more look at the dead mouse, shuddered, and went down to the kitchen to prepare breakfast for himself and his dad.
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Florence lay in bed, trying to recover her dream. As often happened, she had been trying to solve a problem. It wasn't a real problem -- something she had been working on in real life. It was a weird dream problem, like trying to figure out how to read the alien instructions on a bottle cap before the earth blew up. Or how to tell red from blue by smell. Often, she would remember the logic of her dream solution and it was somehow satisfying, even though it was totally irrelevant to her waking life.
Ah, that was it. She sighed happily and sat up suddenly in bed, stretching her arms to the ceiling. Then she jumped out of bed. Time for breakfast.
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Breakfast was taken care of and none of his potions needed tending at the moment. Severus sat at the kitchen table with a ball-point pen and Muggle notepaper. The Snapes didn't waste their precious Wizarding money on anything they could get as cheaply in the Muggle version. They still had more disposable Muggle income than Wizarding.
With no phone and no owl, Severus communicated with his friends via Muggle post. First, he was going to write Florence and confirm that her folks could pick him up in June to spend a few days with the Andersons. Then, he was going to see if Lily could put him up in London just before school started, so he could sell his potions and get his supplies at Diagon Alley before catching the Hogwarts Express.
Mr. Evans would be happy to see him. Severus had a potion that was the only thing that helped his migraines. Lily could make it herself, of course, but she didn't have the setup for making potions that he had on Spinner's End.
He didn't know about the Andersons, though. His witch mum trumped Florence's two Muggle parents at Hogwarts, but in the Muggle world, middle class Surrey outranked working class Manchester. Normally, he could provide some "herbal remedy" to impress the Muggles, but so far Florence had given him no hint of what might be useful to her parents. Well, everyone got colds and the Muggles had no cure for them, so Pepper-up was always appreciated. Still, he wished he had something that would make more of an impression.
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The lights on the Altair 8800 were flashing.
Florence had gotten the last of the eight installments of her computer kit back in October of last year, when she had just started her fifth year at Hogwarts. She'd read about it in her January issue of Popular Electronics and by February had convinced her folks to provide the £286, plus shipping, from America, in eight easy payments. But she hadn't finished putting it together until the spring holidays and hadn't done any programming until this summer.
The plain rectangle, about the size of a breadbox, had toggle switches to input the program and rows of red lights to display the results. Not much of a computer, really. Her Sinclair Oxford scientific calculator could add, subtract, multiply and divide and display up to eight digits on its LED display. Still, she couldn't program her calculator. But what if she connected the display from her calculator to the computer chip in the Altair 8800? And used the number pad from the calculator for input? Florence started sketching a diagram.
She couldn't do magic over the hols, but Muggles had their own kinds of magic.
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Life was good. Sirius much preferred the Potters' country estate to the awful, gloomy city house the Blacks maintained in London. He was helping James dress the hind they had brought down in the hunt that morning. The groundskeeper could have done it, but James' parents thought there were some things a gentleman should know how to do for himself.
The Potters had quite a different outlook on things than Mum and Dad. Mum, especially, would be horrified at the thought of the heir to the Noble House of Black gutting his own kill. That made it even more fun.
Best of all, Remus was coming over this afternoon as well as Peter. They were both staying over for three nights. And one of them was the full moon.
Posted by Madmaxime at February 6, 2008 05:55 AM