Empire of The Senseless

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Empire of The Senseless

by

Anna L. Milton

Chapter Three: The Return of the Kink

Ginny sagged. She was not accustomed to sagging. She was accustomed to be an observer of events, to watch from the sidelines, to react rather than act - but she was a spectator much in the same way as a stone wall is a spectator. She was as used to sagging as a cardboard box is used to playing the piccolo. Nevertheless, she was finding that hoping not to feel something by reason of ignorance was akin to thinking that droughts couldn’t possibly be real because fish didn’t understand the concept of "sun".

She glared at the wizard. He seemed to be ignoring her politely and had taken a few brisk, efficient steps towards the door, behind her, shutting it firmly, before returning to the side of the late Mr. Crockford.

"Who would have thought it," she finally said, still holding up the dossier like a shield. She wondered if it could be used as a weapon against the undead. Well, you never knew, did you? That purple colour probably constituted a breach of peace all by itself.

"Yes?" the wizard said nonchalantly, brushing her aside. He then looked at her haughtily. "What are you doing here, exactly?"

Ginny Weasley had a great deal of self-control. Her anger was elusive like a celebrity and logical like an equation. It can almost be said that Ginny only got angry through thinking, because she didn’t hold any truck with any of that distasteful glandular stuff. Nevertheless, at times her thoughts moved with the speed of a large amount of beer going through a weak bladder. Right now she had discovered a corpse and a man who had been officially dead for over ten years had just ambled in like a salesman and was eyeing her with the expression of someone about to brush off some irritating insect.

It was definitely one of those times.

"What am I doing here?" she snapped in tones of tranquil menace. "I don’t know, being alive? Not barging into rooms like the Ghost of Christmas Past?"

The words poured out of her mouth like ice, motionless and burning. The wizard still looked at her, his beetle-black eyes bearing probably the most disapproving gaze she’d ever seen. Before she had gone to Hogwarts, her brothers, kind souls to a fault, had imparted with an encyclopaedic amount of horror stories concerning Potions Master Severus Snape. When she came to meet him in person, she verified without much surprise that all the stories were entirely accurate (although she supposed the ones about eating raw puppies probably had some element of exaggeration); Professor Snape seemed to find teaching in general and teaching Weasleys in particular as pleasant as a concrete enema (then again, as someone who had frequently been in the receiving end of Gred and Forge’s entire raison d’être, she felt this attitude was not entirely unreasonable). The man had seemed to generate some internal depressive field. You got the feeling that if it were raining kisses, he’d be the only one carrying an umbrella.

However, much as she dreaded the prospect of the Potions Dungeon and awaited the end of each class with even more eagerness than in any of the other subjects, she had come to crawl out of the pit of abject fear that some people seemed to feel towards Snape. Certainly, she found him about as obnoxious as a broken sewer in a very big city in a hot summer, but nonetheless, she had also come to realise that he was not likely to bite her head off (at least as long as the only contact she had with him was in classes - she assumed that he would be more adverse to cannibalism while in company). Unfair, disagreeable and irritating though he was, he objectively presented as much danger to her as a bathroom slipper. She had not fit in much at Hogwarts; her sheltered life at the Burrow, with parents that, lovable as she supposed they were, thought that making their nine-year-old daughter still believe that babies were brought by Mr. Stork was entirely appropriate (she had long discovered the truth of the matter, but felt that drawing attention to that fact was unnecessary) had not prepared her to the sudden complexities of life in a boarding school. The fact that her first friend had been an evil diary had not helped, either. So she had resorted to making the least possible fuss. It was a strategy that served her well; professors were less inclined to be mean towards you if they could hardly notice you, except as some furiously listening presence. It had even worked with Snape, who had treated her more or less as badly as the other students, without unduly singling her out for attention by virtue of being a Weasley, probably because he couldn’t remember she was one.

"Marley," he said calmly, like someone explaining an evident truth to an extremely dim-witted child.

"Excuse me?"

"It was Jacob Marley who barged into rooms after his death, as you so eloquently put it, Miss… Weasley, isn’t it?" The mockery in his tone was unmistakable. "And I’m not dead, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before."

She lowered her eyes. She did not fear Snape, but the delayed shock was right on time, and talking to the erstwhile dead in a room occupied by the erstwhile living was not something that tended to crop up in her daily schedule between watering potted plants and feeding the kneazle. If fact, it was amazing how often she didn’t found dead bodies upon entering a room. She fumed inwardly. "I really don’t know how am I supposed to tell the difference," she said, just loud enough so that it could be heard, and low enough to leave her unscathed.

He glared at her and leaned over the late Mr. Crockford. "Don’t touch anything," he ordered, waving her impatiently away.

She shoved the dossier onto the secretary with rather more force than necessary and crossed her arms icily.

"I don’t feel you are in any sort of position to go around giving orders." Her fury had by now succeeded in not only overtaking her shock but also in shoving it into the roadside with its wheels spinning. "You’re no longer my teacher and you never were my father, thank the gods. I am not used to being bullied by dead people, and I have a perfectly good reason to be here, so I feel I am owed a phenomenally good explanation." He opened his mouth to reply, but before he had the chance, she added disdainfully, "and don’t think you can scare me, either. I’m twenty-seven, not thirteen. I’ve seen scarier things inside some people’s pants."

He threw her a venomous glance that was nonetheless mildly amused. "No doubt you have, Miss Weasley. Nevertheless…" He reached into his robes’ pocket tiredly and took out his wand. "Surprising though it is to find a Weasley actually managing to come up with some witty repartee," he said, in a voice that was neither honest nor mocking, "I’m afraid I cannot people going around knowing things that are really too cumbersome for them."

He raised the wand towards her.

"Getting rid of me will be amazingly counterproductive," she breathed. Her heart had contracted so fast that the words were out of her mouth even before she had time to think much about them. Despite that (or perhaps because of that), they seemed to be amazingly effective. Snape lowered his wand, somewhat puzzled.

"Good grief, woman, it was only going to be a Memory Charm. I’m not in the habit of going around killing people, you know?"

"Apart from yourself, you mean?" She couldn’t have stopped herself from saying it for a cartful of Galleons. In either case, this situation was so absurd that she could only face it either as a comedy or a tragedy, and she frankly preferred the former.

He glared at her. "The reasons for my past actions are none of your business. And neither is this matter," he added, and then narrowed his eyes suspiciously. "What do you mean, ‘counterproductive’?"

Ginny was about to explain the meaning of the word, but something in Snape’s expression told her that her wit was not going to be received with great praise. It was not that he was looking particularly mean; ten years of supposed death seemed to have done him good. They had marginally improved him, although this was not exactly astonishing; given the nature of his former persona, any changes would inevitably be betterments, with the possible exception of wearing mauve. Now he wore his hair short and appeared to have gained a few pounds; he also appeared to be pushing fifty, but since he was one of those people who are born middle-aged, this really didn’t constitute much of a change. His expression, though, had passed from a generalised malignancy to a much more focused one; it was as though he was supremely happy for having got rid of teaching, and was now free to perform much more directed viciousness. He looked like he was a scalpel trying to dissect her mind.

Doing that to Ginny, however, was entirely useless. Her poker face would have made her reflection in a mirror give up and walk away in frustration. When she spoke, the tone of her slow and precise words could have created a skating ring in Hell.

"First of all, there are three people who know I am here, and many more who saw me come in. They may not remember me, but they again they may; are you going to gamble with all their memories too? Secondly, even if you alter my memory to make me think I came here and found nothing unusual, when they examine the body they are going to find out he was dead before I arrived, and since I won’t be lying, they will get highly suspicious, and I don’t suppose that will be entirely to your liking. And thirdly and more importantly, you seem pretty much convinced this was not accidental, and if you’re right, my memory may hold some unknown clue, so erasing it does not seem like a very intelligent strategy."

He seemed to give this some consideration, looking very much like a suspicious cat prodding a limp fish. Ginny wasn’t very fond of cats, although her father seemed to assume she was, which was why he had offered her Cheshire. Finally, he seemed to reluctantly concede her points, and restored the wand so quickly to his pocket she hardly saw it.

"Eugenia, isn’t it?"

"Virginia," she corrected frostily.

"Or that," he said dismissively. "I can’t be expected to remember the names of all those revolting brats, can I? Tell me, Virginia, did you actually see something?"

She gave this some consideration.

"Even if I did, I’m not really eager to impart with it. I’d prefer not to have my memory wiped, if it’s all the same to you."

He ignored this.

"What do you do, Virginia?"

"What I do is my concern."

He seemed unaffected by this.

"Pity. Because since you’re so very clever" - this time the sarcasm was obvious in his voice - "I might have some use for you. As it is, though, I will just have to let you go out of the goodness of my heart, and expect you to tell everybody that Mr. Crockford here was alive and well when you came in. Of course, as you so well pointed out, people may not believe you. Deary, deary me, they may even start asking inconvenient questions. And some people really don’t like inconvenient questions, so you may eventually find yourself floating face down in a river somewhere. And not necessarily in only one river." He grinned at her. "Nothing personal."

She pursed her lips. Her face kept motionless. Inside, her brain was churning. Ms. Ladylike charged at her like a screeching banshee; Ms. L certainly didn’t find that going along with the scheme of some dodgy bastard who had supposedly been dead for ten years was the sign of a sane mind, and possibly, not of a live mind either. Another side, Ms. Pragmatic, simply said, Ginny, you’re up a certain creek either way; but if you say yes, at least you have a change of postponing Mr Shit’s meeting with Mr Fan.

And Ginny was a very pragmatic woman.

"All right, have it your way," she said. "But I want everything made clear. Whatever ‘job’ it is you’re talking about, I want to hear it all explained nice and clear, even the small print. I was in the war like everybody else and I saw some things generally not found in the society salons, but if you think you and those shady characters you are avoiding to mention by name try to, say, sell me into a brothel in a Third World country, certain relatives in high places will enjoy making you wish you had really died. People generally do, when they have their toes sticking out of their ears. Without the nails, Professor Snape."

She spoke in perfectly unemotional tones that managed to convey her message: this is no a threat; it is merely a fact. Snape’s poker face was almost as good as hers, but she could not fail but notice certain hints of caution and, if her eyes did not deceive her, even a grudging respect.

"I see your presence may prove to have been not completely disastrous. At least better than Miss Patil’s. And it’s actually Mr. Snape. I no longer have the pleasure of teaching at Hogwarts, as you know," he added evilly.

"Parvati? You’re not telling me she was supposed to find the body, are you? The poor girl faints at the sight of a dead mouse. During the War she was about as useful as a chocolate teakettle. She would have run screaming at the sight of that poor bastard there."

Already she was adapting to this reality, in which she was talking to a man returned from the dead about a man evicted from the living. From the minute she had left the Burrow, her life had been reduced to the pitiless reality of the survival of the fittest and Ginny had come to develop a particularly effective form of fitness. She survived by using a chameleonic accommodativeness that ensured that she was simply not disliked enough to be relegated into the encyclopaedia of Nature’s failed experiments. She found that she was one of those people who are always picked last in the great Team Game of Life, but that allowed her to trickle out of the playing field unnoticed, and she had come to learn that the spectator often sees most of the game. It was a strategy that had served her well in every milieu so far; it was not exactly dashing, but grey and drab birds didn’t tend to find themselves with their bottoms shaved.

"No, she was not supposed to find the body. Nobody was supposed to find the body, you silly girl, because there wasn’t supposed to be a body. Haven’t you realised that yet?"

Her answer was frigid like an iceberg.

"I’m not intimately familiar with Mr. Crockford’s arrangements concerning the afterlife. For all I know, he might have been trying to kill himself every Tuesday morning and only succeeded now. What I do know, is that you seemed to be absolutely convinced of his death. It appears to me that there’s a pretty obvious conclusion to be drawn here."

Ginny could have sworn she had seen him sigh almost imperceptibly. It could have been just a trick of the light, though.

"Do you think I killed him?"

It was an actual honest question, rather than badly disguised huffiness. She could feel she had a great variety of answers from which to choose. She looked at him for a moment, before finally saying, "No. I think you’d have dealt with me right away if you had. You could have got away with it, of course. Who would suspect a dead man? But you didn’t, so I’m willing to lean towards the negative. Which doesn’t mean that I’m certain of it, Mr Snape."

Snape seemed almost bemused.

"You surprise me, Miss Weasley. Who would have thought your family could produce more than one ounce of brains at a time, eh? You’re not going to do anything without an explanation, are you?"

"No, I am not. And I should also warn you that being rude about my family doesn’t have much of an effect upon me, Mr. Snape."

He could see that she was absolutely right. It was her eyes, he reasoned: they were a muddy brown, completely unremarkable in themselves, but somehow their stare made them striking. The woman had the oldest gaze he’d ever seen; it could have belonged to a trilobite. He had the distinct sensation that lesser people (a term that comprised the vast majority of the human species) probably found their will vanishing like a bottle of water in a very hot day beneath the cold attentions of that gaze, with about the same movement and mercy as the wall of a cliff.

Nevertheless, he was not one of the lesser people. He prided himself upon that fact.

"Inside," he hissed, nodding towards the door he had come through. "Now."

She could not stop herself from showing an inkling of hesitation, and saw him leap at the chance like a fish at a particularly life-like dry fly. Before she could make a gesture, he was pushing her towards the room, using not force but rather an imperious certainty. Trying to disobey it would be like telling a rock it would be able to vanquish gravity through positive thinking.

"What do you think you’re doing?" she barked angrily, failing nevertheless to remain still.

"Get in there, shut up, and listen."

His tone of voice brooked no dissent, with the possible exception of the kind that wanted to commit very inventive suicide. Aghast and baffled (a feeling she was also most unaccustomed to during her adult life), she let herself be shepherded in, lips pursed together so tightly you could have used them to store classified documents.

Her suspicions were up, but instead of some poor relative of Room 101 (possibly, room 202b), she entered a small and innocuous archive room, lined with filing cabinets that occupied all the available wall space except for the one reserved to a little service door at one end. Rarefied September light came in through a square and pristine window. Secretly, she was not surprised - dark dungeons weren’t ordinarily a feature of modern-age magical buildings, except perhaps in the really complete ones (possibly wedged between the drawing room and the solarium). The existence of a torture chamber was not generally among the first things prospective buyers looked for in a new home. Well, broadly speaking, at least. The only torment likely to be found in this would be acute boredom.

"Sit down," Snape commanded, ushering her towards a chair. It stood next to a dingy little table, and both were the kind of furniture that appear to have been chosen in hope of never being used.

"What are you going to do?" she asked dully, still motionless, as Snape shut the door with a shove of his elbow.

He stared at her, his expression nauseated, as though finding her still vertical was akin to realising that the lump on your pie is not a particularly large blueberry.

"Excuse me, Miss Weasley, did you fail to grasp my meaning?"

Out of no particular motive, Ginny cracked, like a full shelf snapping in two after you’ve put "just a little knick-knack" upon it. She felt as though all the things that had happened to her in the last fifteen minutes - finding the body, finding the ex-late Snape, being thrust between the devil and the deep blue sea - had ganged up and were rushing towards her impassive façade with a battering ram. She felt something rising in her throat, but as she had standards to keep, it emerged as a chuckle. Mostly a chuckle, at least.

"What do you think you’re doing?" she said, her voice shaking slightly out of her control and trying to make a valiant bid for freedom.

The wizard was quiet for a moment, looking at her thoughtfully. She could see he was striving to look absolutely neutral, and succeeding almost completely. Nevertheless, could she see in his impenetrable black eyes an inkling of - pity?

"Are you frightened, Virginia?"

"I think you already know the answer to that," she answered dryly, after a few moments.

His expression smoothed somewhat.

"Let me tell you a story, Virginia," he said. She almost felt like asking whether it would involve fluffy bunny rabbits, but something in his tone made her keep silent. Perhaps the way in which he spoke with the unstoppable serenity of a glacier, about to descend onto assorted humans like the rerun of an Ice Age.

"You said you were twenty-seven. This happened years ago - long before you were born. In those days, I was one damn fine potions maker. But I also found out quickly that being one damn fine anything isn’t nearly enough. You were in the war. Did it teach you anything at all?"

He looked at her, eyes probing like a fiscal auditory. She generally found that the whole idea of the secret world, veins full of sin and sizzling nerves exposed, was something that morbidly attracted people whose most exciting activity was putting an extra lump of sugar in their tea. But she knew the gutter - and here it was somehow honest, like it had been in the war, about as romantic and mysterious as a paper clip.

"Yes," she answered calmly. "The world is either utterly indifferent or outright malevolent. Is that what you wanted to hear?"

He grinned unpleasantly.

"Unadorned by the rose-tinted glasses that seem to be welded onto every Weasley at birth, I see. May wonders never cease." The sarcasm in his voice was as discreet as an explosion in a gunpowder factory. "You are, of course, exactly right. The world has the charming custom of devouring its young, and at times it doesn’t even bother to reach for the cruet."

"Perhaps it finds it quicker that way," she quipped. He seemed unaffected by her interruption.

"No doubt it does, Miss Weasley. No doubt it does. Nevertheless, I decided it was better to run with the pack than to end up as dog-meat."

"You joined the Death Eaters," Ginny answered flatly. It was no secret; the names of known associates of the Evil Underlord were more or less out in the open for whoever wanted to know them. There had even been rather spectacular trials after the end of WVII, which had attracted the media like rotten meat attracts vultures, and for pretty much the same reasons (although, truth be told, there are wizarding reporting stories even vultures won’t eat). The story of the Hogwarts Professor-cum-Death Eater-cum-spy was just one of the bubbles in the foetid swamp of recent history, and although occasionally repeated with relish by Mr. Snape’s former students, it wasn’t something that was dredged up frequently. After all, his Death-Eaterdom constituted as much a surprise as finding a selfish cat, even though his change of heart, spy work and (now decidedly non) posthumous honours didn’t quite fit in the script of first impressions.

Snape didn’t seem in the least perturbed by her frankness. In fact, he seemed to be considering her words for a moment.

"Yes," he finally said. "Yes, I suppose that was The Thing’s name, then. It doesn’t really tend towards originality. I did join the Death Eaters, as you so succinctly put it. And then I realised that the light at the end of the tunnel was an oncoming train, and so I wanted to walk away. But you never do, not really. You have to pay your dues. And I did so, for a while, and I did not mind doing it." A corner of his lips raised in a little dry, cynical smile. "I actually enjoyed it. But then you realise you will go on paying. And paying. And then they will forget how much you’ve paid, only that you have to pay. How much you owe them, they will always remember. How much they owe you, they will never recall. Because you are branded in their eyes, do you understand?" His right hand twitched almost imperceptibly towards his left arm, but Ginny’s sharp eyes caught the movement. Ginny’s field of attention would have caught a sneezing bacterium. "Forever. They don’t just want their pound of flesh, Virginia. They want everything, and then a point comes when what they take is everything, and what they give you is nothing. That was near the end of the war, for me. That was when I realised that they’d thrown me a line, all right, and it was made of barbed wire. One cog in the wheel, and if the push came to shove, I’d be as important as spit on a hot stove to the Light Side." His final words were so abrasive with sarcasm that you could probably use them to scour cesspools.

Ginny remained silent and motionless. None of this was exactly a novelty for her, even though her major worry and strategy during the war had been coming up with reliable methods to cover her arse. But even though the details were new, the concept was as familiar as the smell of an old carpet you just can’t bring yourself to throw away.

" ‘I was a Double Agent and all I got was this Bloody Medal’?"

He threw her an evil glance, but she didn’t budge. She was perfectly familiar with evil glances, and she could see this one was rather sub-standard. It was an evil glance that spent its holidays at Torremolinos.

"Pretty much, Miss Weasley, pretty much," he ended up by conceding. "So when I got word that my status had sunk to ‘expendable’, I decided I didn’t want to find out if the end of the tunnel was really on fire. So I ‘died’ for them, as it was the only to get on with my life. Do I make myself clear?"

She nodded gravely. His tone of voice managed to very efficiently transmit the message that jokers would find how much did their sense of humour fare with a colony of Acromantulas. "Perfectly clear, Mr. Snape."

"So I died for the world, and imagine what, it suddenly became the mollusc of my choice. Despite everything, Miss Weasley, I was very good at what I did. Very good. I might have been one damn fine potions maker, but I came to realise I was an even better spy, and so I kept on doing it. On my own terms," he added, with a carnivorous smirk.

Ginny looked at him. This was a big wave, but she had become an expert at riding them, and she had come to learn that once you got the hang of it, the principle really didn’t change.

"Is that what you call yourselves? Not any of those fancy terms like ‘intelligence operatives’ and so on?"

He looked vaguely displeased.

"There is no ‘us’ in my line of work, Miss Weasley, there is only ‘I’. And you can forget about the pot-boiler terminology too. The goal is to confuse your opponent, not yourself."

"That’s why you’re here, aren’t you? This is part of your ‘line of work’. Who paid you, Crockford? If I’m going to be vanished, at least satisfy my intellectual curiosity, and tell me on whose command."

He smiled cattily once more.

"I told you no harm is going to come to you if you play along."

"And I trust you less far than I can throw you, and after your little story I don’t feel my scepticism is exactly unwarranted. No offence meant."

"None taken. I see you are a smart woman, Virginia. But I also need your help, as much as it pains me to admit it. Why do you think I haven’t Memory Charmed you yet?"

"Personal enchantment?"

"How I am laughing, Miss Weasley. Yes, I worked for someone who was, how shall I put it, part of the late Mr Crockford’s circle. I was tipped off to the possibility that Crockford’s life would soon become briefly and excitingly event-filled, and here I am. Is that what you wanted to hear? Will that be enough for you? Because even if it isn’t, it will have to do," he said curtly, reaching out for his wand once more.

Ginny remained perfectly unruffled. She had the sudden certainty that, if human civilisation was wiped off from the face of the Earth and the tattered survivors were forced to resort to eating cockroaches, Snape would be one of the people demanding much more commitment on the side of insect-gatherers.

"Excuse me," she said calmly. "But do you exactly intend to do?"

"Me? Oh, I am just going to call, shall we say, an expert."

"Indeed?"

"Indeed, Miss Weasley, indeed," he answered nonchalantly, and raising his wand, muttered a string of incomprehensible words to it, like the baby talk said to a small child who, in the circumstances, happened to be a stick. The wand glowed purplish for a moment, and then returned to normal, like a lamp fading out. He returned it to his pocket, but managed to convey the unmistakable impression that it would remain handy, ready to spring out if needed, like a better mousetrap.

"We must remain in here," he added. "He won’t want us to have disturbed the other room before he arrives."

"You don’t say." Ginny could feel his strategy, prodding her, trying to cash on her curiosity. However, doing that to her was like attempting an arse-kicking contest with a porcupine. Ginny was used to digging pits of silence so deep people scrambled to fill them up. Their eyes met, her brown and his black, and she wondered if he was aware of that, and if he knew that she knew that he knew.

"You know, don’t you?" he finally said, in a calculating tone.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Stop playing naïve, Miss Weasley. I know you’re aware that if I’ve let you come this far unscathed, then you’re in. That’s what you wanted me to tell you, isn’t it?"

She was silent for a moment, then looked down to her robes, picking off a piece of lint with an off-handed grace.

"No," she said, still looking down, with the voice of someone narrating the results of a pie-making contest in Upper Droightwidge. Then she raised her eyes once more, all impenetrable steely brown. "It means that now there’s no turning back."

* * *

The following ten minutes were productively occupied with great displays of brick-thick silence. Snape had apparently crossed Ginny out of the field of existence and had sat down on the solitary chair, taken out a small book from the inscrutable depths of his robes and was now reading it with all the air of someone enjoying a little sojourn at an outdoor café, rather than someone who was a few yards away from a corpse, accompanied by a witch he hadn’t seen for ten years, and sitting on a chair that had probably been designed by the Inquisition. Ginny herself hadn’t behaved much differently, simply walking towards the window that gave to the garden down below and spending her time in what seemed to be a determined bid to become a statue, if statues could generate effluxes of unnerving quietness. She tended to move as little as possible, as she considered that pacing was the sign of an untidy mind, and needless locomotion was something reserved to people who had obviously nothing better to do with their time.

She studied the situation dispassionately under her cover of her utter indifference. In some odd way, all of this was infinitely better than the shag-related embarrassment with her former boss and Edward the Cad. Oh, yes, she was now inadvertently mixed up with something whose contours would probably not score too highly on the amiability scale, and her reluctant guide was not only a spy but also someone who, as it came to dangerousness, would probably make an aggravated rattlesnake look like a feather boa, and yet, somehow, she could not help but feel a sort of low-grade smugness. L’affaire Edward had left her reeling, in the annoying grip of her baser instincts, and that was not something she appreciated. It was the sort of thing that tended to precipitate evil diaries and related events. She found it much better to stand on her brain, regardless of the squishiness of that particular metaphor.

She had always been good at chess. In fact, it was the only thing she had ever been good at. When she was five years old, her brother Ron had inherited their grandfather’s chess set, and had set to work upon it with the doggedness that was his hallmark concerning everything where he could hope not to be overshadowed by his brothers, and which she could feel even despite her tender age, or perhaps because of her tender age. Love-filled as the Weasley household might have been in the Dark Ages of her spirit, it was also the sort of place where long-lasting toys called Mr. Boot, were, in fact, boots, and no amount of little blue birds of happiness and chequered aprons was going to change that. So she had come to gravitate towards the chessboard herself, and Ron, despite generally being as welcoming to his sister as a monastery is welcoming to a horde of Viking pillagers, had let her, because even back then he enjoyed moments of personal glory, even if they came as the result of trouncing his little sister at chess.

And he had trounced her, obviously, but only for a while. They had played over Every Flavour Beans, and even though she carefully selected those that seemed to have nauseating flavours as prizes for Ron, that did not stop him from challenging her often. It was not frequent for him to find a niche where his legendary siblings didn’t eclipse him, and the occasional nuggets of earwax were a small price to pay.

With time, however, she had come to decipher the mysteries of the board. When she was around seven, she had started winning. And winning. In fact, she had begun winning so much that she had decided to start losing again, as Ron, difficult as it was for him to admit that his sister could actually defeat him at something, was beginning to avoid playing with her. It was then that she had begun to realise that intelligent people make sure everyone else knows of their intellectual superiority, but really intelligent people know that the clever thing to do is to hide the fact from the rest of the world.

This was much like a chess game, she reasoned, the cogwheels of her mind reviewing the situation along clear and precise lines. Ginny had the kind of mind that thinks in bullet points and refers to sex as a "win-win", and now it spun along industriously, a hive of silent activity underneath her perfectly motionless stare. Snape carried on with his reading regardless, but she could feel him working, too. She was certain he was expecting her breaking point, the moment where her questioning would start.

Well, he could wait until flocks of migrating pigs boldly crossed the skies towards the Southern Hemisphere. Not that she didn’t have a great deal of questions; people generally had, when confronted with a situation that had climbed the peaks of "strange" and was now basking in the happy valleys on the opposite slopes, but her doubts were mostly academic. She found that it always paid to take an interest, but nevertheless she thought that the messy, unruly sort of interest most people felt was like losing the queen in the beginning of the game.

Then again, she also thought that, if life was a chess game, most people never figured out how the "horse-shaped one" actually moved.

Suddenly, Snape got up, oddly reminiscent of a jack-in-the-box, if you could find one produced by an extremely gothic toy-maker. She glanced over her shoulder at him when she heard the faint rustle of his clothes. His book disappeared back into whatever depthless pits where it had previously been stored, and Ginny concluded not without some satisfaction that he had used it like a shield against the eternal onslaught of her silence. Not that she blamed him; her silences could have been used as a very efficient siege weapon.

"What a fascinating display, Miss Weasley," the wizard said unctuously. "I’m beginning to think it was a stroke of luck to have you barging into the room back then."

Ginny turned her face back to the contemplation of the window.

"I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about," she answered innocently.

"Very amusing, Miss Weasley. But our guest has arrived."

The panel of judges for the Great World Staring Competition jumped with delight as Ginny managed to remain absolutely impassive. Surely she would have heard… after all, it was impossible… wasn’t it? Had Snape’s "expert" simply walked through the wall? Well, you obviously never knew, with Snape, but she felt inclined to think that their guest could be broadly considered to be living, at least in a manner of speaking. But he had come in soundlessly… or indeed, he had not, she realised. He had come with all the little sounds that human senses fail to register, because they are too much a part of the fabric of daily existence. And were not her sharp flight-or-fight instincts detecting a third presence in the room behind her back, something as subtle and elusive as a silvery ghost?

"Aren’t you going to introduce me to this charming young lady?"

It wasn’t Snape’s voice. It too had an edge, but it was younger, and full of a gentlemanly drawl. She raised one of her ambidextrous eyebrows, and turned slowly on her feet. Snape was standing next to the chair. By his side, leaning against one of the filing cabinets with the ease and studied ennui of a young heir at a soirée filled with what people choose, due to a variety of motives, to call "the cream", was a young man about her age, looking as though the world was not only his oyster, it was his caviar, his champagne and his port and cigars as well.

She had the small pleasure of seeing his composure fade a little at the sight of her, but he rallied quickly, like a butler who walks into an orgy involving wooden rulers and stuffed toys and carries on nonchalantly with his duties after the briefest of moments given to the consideration of his employers’ inventiveness concerning teddy bears.

"Weasley?" he asked politely, or at least as much politeness as she could reasonably suspect.

"I should have known," she said dryly. "I suppose dead people tend to stick together."

The young man gave her an educated little sneer.

"I frankly hope discretion does not constitute a fault in your eyes."

"Not at all," she answered truthfully. "I consider it a great virtue, and I must say that dead people don’t bother me, provided they don’t suddenly become vertical again. It’s the living you have to worry about, Mr. Malfoy."

TBC…