The Truest Master

Part I:

He holds the wand as steadily as he can, guiding the shrouded bundle through a maze of saplings and scrub. "Acids and bases," he says aloud. For once unconcerned with the sound of his own voice, he sends the words ahead, a beacon and a warning, to let the boggarts and centaurs know he is a Man of Insight. He will trust in his night vision and considerable common sense. He will let the magic words guide him. It will be all right-

His wand hand wavers slightly.

Before he can correct the error, threadbare white linen snags on a twig. The tablecloth slides, exposing a bleached jade foot with rigid, tentacular toes. He lunges to catch it and finds himself poised uncomfortably between two extremes. He can't step forward, or the

bundle will move with him. He can't step back or the shroud will fall.

The magic words have abandoned him. My voice, he thinks, mine, but still they won't obey.

A layer of cellophane-thin flesh covers the ribcage under his hand. Will it tear if he presses too hard? Will it slide like his makeshift shroud, opening the abdominal cavity and letting all manner of horrors loose? How quickly do house-elves' bodies decay? Holding his breath, he reaches to snatch up the hem, but even this slight movement sends everything bobbing merrily off again. The shroud slides further, and this time he can't stop it. Spindly hip, hand-arm-and-shoulder and a jutting, blood-streaked jaw-

He feels it all slip and turns away quickly, dropping his wand on the grass. A soft thud follows. The shroud collapses, like a parachute, against the backs of his legs.

Boots- his mind's voice, dreadfully childish. Boots, these are my boots. The contrast inverts suddenly into unearthly pallid mud and white leather. Black frost glazes the silver grass.

His uncles are right. He can't take it. He will indeed go mad.

"Acids," he hears himself whisper. Darkness is a Lethifold, creeping stealthily over his back. "Acids and bases."

He spits out the taste of bile and closes his eyes.

When he can open them again, the night has drifted a little lower. Glancing back toward the house (or citadel, rather, massive against the violet sky), he sees his footprints stamped clearly across the wet lawn. It makes him want to swear. They will see, of course; unless some brainstorm arrives before dawn, They will follow his solution and criticize it roundly.

Circumspection, idiot boy! Grandfather roars inside his head. Learn to cover your tracks!

So teach me the effing footprint spell.

He bends to retrieve his wand, eyeing the black ground dubiously. A practical digging charm would also help.

There's always the Demergus Curse. Even his pig-ignorant cousins can cast that one. Still, the way this evening's going, he'll probably find himself up to his neck in mud and centipedes until They return from Caernarvon, while every badger within miles zeroes in on the scent of his sweat.

"Acids and bases!" he says, quite loudly.

No. Demergus is out.

He clears his throat and tucks the wand into his pocket so he can gingerly flex both hands. Feels like glass in every joint. He tries to be grateful the botched Curse didn't kill him instead, but it's hard when no one else seems to think so either. House elves don't grow on trees! You'll just have to stay behind and clear up this mess. A nearby tree even looks like her, twisted, tall and pale, with roots like the scalloped hem of her dressing robe.

He wants to stomp his feet and scream (Bitch-witch! Go have another baby!), but instead snatches the wand from his pocket.

"Mobilihumus!"

The very earth rears up.

Yards thick, underside furred with living roots, it bucks him over onto his back. Shrubs stoically ride the wave. The smaller trees, their branches thrashing, tilt against the sky-

"C-Cessacantio!"

Everything drops with a massive floomp, drenching him in mud.

Like a bug, he flips onto his stomach and crawls blindly away until grass tickles his palms. The sweetly herbal smell, so much cleaner than he is now, makes him want to cry like a little kid. "Practice your Curses- living target- not on the carpet, idiot boy!" Someone will pay for this humiliation. Not his grandfather. Not his father- they're too powerful. Said pig-ignorant cousins, maybe. Will he ever make them squirm.

Inconcinnus. Serpensortia. Why? Because you're here!

Still not crying, but gritting his teeth, he sits up to survey the damage.

The vegetation, rustling softly, seems to be in order. He still has his wand, but his hair and clothes are filthy, with dirt driven under his robes and the familiar grit of dirt in his teeth. Something glints pallidly in his peripheral vision. Hoping it's only the tablecloth, that the 'evidence' has been buried, he slowly turns his head to catch a whiter glimpse of bone.

Acids and bases, remember.

They are magic words, deep magic, leaving no room for horror or guilt as he walks slowly over, looks for a moment upon the space where a head should have been (the withered lower palate, the voiceless stump of tongue), and drops the shroud to cover it. He'd burnt the head in his first panic, tossing it into the stove, but the rest of the body was too large; it would have taken hours and still probably left traces. Nonetheless, he begins to think a funeral pyre preferable to this ignominy of trees and twigs and mud, though it would have earnt him days in the cellar for casting Incendius unsupervised. Mother insisted on this rule after he immolated her wardrobe. Mother refused to believe Grandfather when he said the boy was still too young to control a blaze once started. Mother would have risen to new heights of paranoia had she been able to read his thoughts: I could set a Fire Doll on you. I could kill you while you sleep.

They'll be Apparating back shortly before dawn. He has yet to dispose of the body, clean the kitchen walls and floor, clear out the stove (how much remains of the house-elf's skull? Will he have to bury it too, or can he curse it into powder and cast it to the wind?), wash his clothes, take a bath, stow away his collection bottles and somehow remove those footprints- without leaving more footprints- without the footprint spell!

It isn't fair. He's so tired.

More than tired... He's Unutterably Weary.

He plops down again, right next to the shrouded corpse, and scratches at the earth with the tip of his wand. The slow way, then, by inches... or perhaps a banishing charm? Focusing on a patch of ground, he modifies the classic sweep and soil shoves neatly over, leaving a shallow groove.

"Aren't I creative," he says dully.

Sweep, rest. Sweep, rest. Dirt patters against a nearby yew. The moon rises on a scented breeze. It seems strangely particular, courting with light the dewy mud and clods, a late-budding twig- even the shroud, for pathos, he supposes- while he sits alone in a circle of stagnant darkness.

Just playing in the dirt, like any other child.

Part II

She watches invisibly, waiting, as always, wondering if she has waited too long.

These masters are worse than the last ones. Serving them gnaws away at her heart and sense. The dreadful secrets she keeps, the conflicting orders she follows- and the curses, flung at her by children! Could this be enslavement at last, tightening about her like a noose? And if not, what is it?

Surely not loyalty. Surely not love.

As always following an injury or death, the other house-elves work in darkness, not daring to light a single candle. They bow, scrape, cringe and cry... and so does she, of course. She doesn't know what the others think; they never speak of it. She only knows she doesn't want to be a slave. She doesn't want to abandon her smallest and truest master to the Dark creatures he calls family.

Although he has cursed her in his turn, he is still only a child.

Quietly, as a servant should, she steps into the world.

It smells of a freshly dug ditch. The small, dark figure continues with his excavation. Sitting cross-legged just out of the moonlight, with his black head cocked to one side and the wand moving in steady rhythm (sweep- pause, sweep- pause), he looks like he might be playing, for once. After dark, in the bush (despite his terrible fear of centaurs), without another human for miles (though he might be better off without them)...

And digging a grave for a friend. Of course.

"Ahem," she says in her tiniest voice.

He turns quickly, pivoting on his knees and one hand. A scattered arc of darkness follows his wand toward her face. Hearing a sound like hail, she closes her eyes.

It stings like a hex. It tastes like... dirt.

She opens her eyes and sees at once she has waited too long. His face is masked, like the faces of the older masters who Apparate out of locked rooms in the dead of night. Oh, Lady and Lord, they're taking children now... And she tastes ozone, like the air before a rising storm, heating blood and bone until it seems if she traced a finger across the sky, its glassy indifference should melt.

These are not a house-elf's thoughts. Displacing horror, even grief, it feels almost like will-

"Sorry," he says, round-eyed, before it occurs to him he's apologizing to a house-elf.

She can see his eyes.

Not one of those masks, after all. He's only very dirty. "Master Severus!" she says, her voice now seeming abnormally loud. "What has you been doing?"

He gives her one of his patented looks and sits back, shoving the wand base-down into a clump of earth. "Digging a hole the hard way," he says with asperity.

"Let Mippy clean your face," she offers, stepping forward.

Another look- the considering one. Mud is caked in his eyebrows. Then he lowers his gaze and retrieves the wand, flipping it up into his palm with practiced grace. "I'm supposed to do it." And he turned away from her.

Like a good house-elf, she stands quietly and watches.

She worries about her Master Severus. She worries that his eyes are so old and he never plays, except with the crucibles and alembic an aunt gave him for his birthday. She worries that no one, himself included, seems to understand his sense of humor. She worries that he'd rather shatter all the windows than cry 'like a little kid'. She worries that his mother only seems to breathe easy these days when he is locked away. She worries about what his mother has become.

In the beginning, she'd been a mother.

In the beginning, she had been human...

Sweep- pause. Sweep- pause.

His hair hangs limp, a ragged crow's wing across the nape of his neck. A couple of months ago, Mrs. Snape hacked off the queue he wore to emulate his father. He won't let anyone take care of it. He says it doesn't matter. And even knowing the Old Man's rules (Constant Vigilance, Circumspection, Self-Reliance), she worries that he won't let her clean the mud from his face.

The grave has become a perfect oval. "Skurry would like that," she says quietly. "Skurry liked things to be tidy."

His shoulders hunch, breath snagging on a moment of brittle silence. Then his lips start moving again. She realizes with a mild shock that he's been speaking all this time- just like his paranoid aunt, who comes downstairs to every meal muttering a counter-curse. After a while, one simply doesn't notice.

"Acids and bases, just acids and bases. Acids and bases. Acids and bases..."

A shiver runs up her spine; she doesn't know whether to hug herself for comfort or slap her own stupid, servile face. She's heard it before, this unchildlike husk of a voice. Waited far too long...

"Master Severus?"

"Hm?" he says dreamily, not breaking the rhythm of his mantra.

"These words you is saying- what do they mean?"

He does seem pleased that she asked. One last sweep and he turns to face her, resting the wand's tip lightly on the fingers of his left hand, and faintly smiling. Not a child's smile, no; the smile of a priest about to unfold some terrible mystery.

"They're chemicals," he says. "The Muggles have special paper to test for them. I don't know why they bother," he adds contemptuously. "They're everywhere."

"Muggles?"

"Acids and bases," he says, too patiently. His eyes are opaque. "They're in me-" tapping the wand on his palm- "and in you." He points it at her. She can't help but flinch, and if he were himself, it would break his heart. "It's a theory I have- deep down, we're only chemicals. Acids and bases. That's why we can do magic, and why magic works on us."

She says nothing. There's nothing she can say.

"Of course," he adds, turning back to Skurry's grave, "It also means none of this is real."

"Skurry isn't really dead?"

He rocks forward slightly, tightening his mouth. "No," he snaps. "I is- am saying that the... if this is all we are, then there is nothing. Nothing to worry about." The smile returns, malignantly serene. His rocking stops. "Nothing," he says, sounding rather like her former master under the Ministry's Veritaserum. "No thoughts. No feelings. Acids and bases."

He gestures, and the grave dug itself.

She sits beside him. She looks down into the deepening hole. She looks up into his young-old face. She sees, just beyond him, the rumpled tablecloth beneath which her friend Skurry lies dead.

(Who is your truest master, house-elf?)

The storm remains inside her. She just has to call it up.

"The shroud is a good idea," she says deliberately. "Skurry always liked to be decent."

His lips draw back in a grimace; she sees his teeth glisten wetly in the moonlight. A child's teeth, the incisors still serrated... Then he sucks in his breath, and the muttering starts again.

"Acids and bases. Acids and... and bases..."

"Mippy knows why Mr. Patriarch picked on Skurry today. Skurry was skiving off on his chores. He was getting on." She hears a minute clicking, like a handful of water-worn pebbles. It takes her a moment to realize its his teeth again, a muscle working in his narrow jaw, anticipating the texture of something he'd love to bite. "Maybe Master Severus did Skurry a favor. At least his way was quick."

His wand-hand jerks violently- swish! Clumps of rooted earth fly like bludgers, punching holes in the undergrowth. And then he says, his voice a little higher than normal, "'Master Severus' made a mess of it."

"Made a mess of what?"

"The Curse. The Consuoris Curse..."

"Mippy isn't concerned with Curses," she answers, not quite truthfully.

There is a brief silence. It smells of rotting leaves, of earth... and, oddly enough, of lightning.

He turns abruptly to stare at her; his eyes, perfect chips of obsidian, reflect her small, pointed face. They aren't truly black. She knows this better than anyone, after eight years of questions, conflicts and nightmares. It is an illusion caused by darkness.

"I'm-sorry-he's-dead," he says, all in a rush.

She makes herself not move. He begins to rock again, fingers twisting around the wand. His mouth quivers and sets in a feral snarl. "Didn't you hear me, you stupid house-elf? I said I'm sorry he's dead!"

"He had a name," she whispers.

"Skurry!" he shouts into her face. "Skurry is dead, he's dead, I k-k..." He hitches in breath. "I killed him! I killed him, and I'm sorry!"

The mantra has stopped.

Clumsily she scoots sideways and puts a hand on her master's shoulder. He jerks away from her. What she can see of his face is waxen.

"I really did kill him..."

"You didn't mean to," she says, very gently.

"They told me to curse him. They told me to curse him." His gaze roves around the clearing, over the mound of earth and the white shroud eclipsed in shadow, finding nothing to focus on. The wand tilts laxly in his hands. "They... they made me do it. They made me do it. They made me do it. They made me do it." Are these the new magic words, then? She can almost see them, spilling like blood from his tongue.

In that moment, she doubts her newfound will.

He draws a deep, harsh breath. His eyes find hers. They are wide and full of light. His hands reach out to her, palms up, and the wand tumbles into the dirt.

"I didn't want to do it!"

The house-elf scuttles forward and wraps her arms around him, burying her head in the

hollow of his shoulder in a futile effort to absorb the worst of it. He is wailing, moonlit eyes fixed on the darkened citadel. "I didn't want to! Oh, Merlin-" over and over and over again, crying out to the only god he knew. Fat lot of good Merlin will do, she thinks randomly, asleep in a tree somewhere.

In the end, his voice simply gives out.

She sets about plucking fragments of leaves out of his hair, as though they are a couple of clabberts with nothing better to do than sit about grooming each other. He blinks and looked up at her, bewildered. To her vast relief, she sees a hint of brown in his eyes. Ebony, not obsidian. Human eyes.

The rawest of whispers- "I didn't want to."

"Of course you didn't. Why doesn't I help Master Severus finish up here?"

"...Supposed to do it myself."

"What the family doesn't know can't hurt them." He stares at her, his mouth slightly open. "Mippy is good at Circumspection. Mippy and Master Severus will put Skurry to rest together -"

He does cry, now- not 'like a little kid', but staring up at the moon like an old man who knows his chances are lost. Tears track pale lines through the mud on his face. She attends to this as well and only succeeds in making a mess of her pillowcase. "We can't put him to rest!" he says finally. "I burnt his head in the stove!"

Black humor catching her totally unawares, she covers her mouth with her hand. Naturally, he mistakes the gesture and stumbles into an explanation, still so unlike him that it makes her heart hurt. "The Curse was supposed to seal his mouth. Grandfather demonstrated it on Father." Her mind's eye presents her with the image of supercilious Mr. Snape, lips glued shut and eyes sparking like Catherine wheels, and she has to clap both hands over her mouth to keep from shrieking with tactless laughter. "He said we were out of frogs to practice on, and cats' lips have the wrong shape... so he called in Skurry." His small face contorts in terrible self-deprecation, a hand darting up to his cheek. Wondering how she could have thought this funny, she reaches out to stop him and he modifies the gesture to brush away a lock of hair instead.

"I did it wrong," he says. "So wrong. It all flew off- his head- and stuff... and blood..." He looks up at her with a twisted smile. "So what? I've seen blood before."

"Skurry was your friend. It's different," she says, trying to be clinical. Her feet are numb. Perhaps it is the cold.

He looks at his knees. "Then I was sick. Grandfather was so disappointed... They were due in Wales in a few hours, and I thought if I fixed it quickly enough..." Hunching his shoulders, he flexes the wand between his hands until it threatens to snap. "Coward," he mutters. "Didn't want to be alone."

"But you wasn't quick enough?"

He looks up at her and smiles, a delicate crease of his upper lip, its effect spoiled somewhat by the fact that he's just lost a tooth- but still, she knows where he learned that 'smile'.

"Mother came in," he says, "and saw the mess."

Bitch-witch, she thinks. Vampire.

"Skurry can rest in two places at once," she says. "Skurry wouldn't mind."

"How do you know whether Skurry would mind?"

"Skurry was a sensible house-elf. He'd be most concerned with getting Master Severus into a bath, which Mippy will draw, since Skurry can't anymore."

More tears well, and she catches them on her fingers. The feelings that made these, little theorist- are they Acids or Bases? Then he scoots away from her on all fours to retrieve his wand from beneath a bush. The smudges of dirt make his cheeks hollow, matching that weary, wary mouth and wet eyes, which he swipes at with an equally dirty fist.

"Right," he says, and gets to his feet.

An incantation, a seemingly desultory gesture and Skurry's shrouded form rises, rippling with false life. She watches in silence, having shed her own tears many hours before, but her master makes some sound through his teeth, a sort of stifled whine. His left hand winds white-knuckled in the robes beside his leg. She reaches to hold it and he shakes her off. "Don't touch me!"

Skurry's 'boat' falters. It dips. It takes a nosedive, snugly into the grave.

"Well. That was very nice," she says comfortably.

"Merlin's balls!" says Master Severus. He glares at the shroud's trailing hem, tears drying silver on his cheeks. "I'm not brave! I'm not brave, Mippy!"

Strangely comforting, hearing her name used as an expletive again. "I thinks you're brave," she says.

He closes his mouth and looked away.

Filling the grave proves easier- two sweeps and it is done. The moon is at its zenith, the air crystalline-cold. She wants her child inside, but still there is the issue of...

"Rocks," she says.

Master Severus blinks at her. "Rocks?"

"To keep scavengers out of the grave," she says bluntly, and regrets it a moment later, when his eyes go hollow.

"Oh," he said. She wrings her hands as he backs up against a nearby tree, the hollowness leeching away what little color he has left beneath the mask of mud. "Well. I don't think we can."

"Why not?"

"Because I can't summon them. I don't know where they are..."

"Then let's go back to the house," she says.

"I'm not going back to the house!" he screams at her, quite suddenly, wrapping both arms around his thin torso as though to keep himself from flying apart. "I'm not going back, I'll stay here and keep watch, or else something will dig him up and make bits of him, and Grandfather will make me look at them, and I won't look! I'm finished looking! I'll just stay here and look at dirt, so LEAVE ME ALONE!"

He's trying to glare her into the ground, a trick that works on some of his cousins. She daintily skirts the edge of the mound to stand beside him, hooking a spindly finger into the pocket of his robe. "Mippy will stay and watch also," she says tranquilly.

"Occludostium," he says.

"What?"

He's staring off at an angle, frowning slightly. "Occludostium. One of Grandfather's wards. It seals doors and apertures. A grave has a 'mouth'..."

Mippy squeaks. "Master Severus has an idea!"

"Either that, or Master Severus is about to blast Skurry's leftovers into orbit." He pushes off from the tree, bits of lichen crumbling over his shoulders and onto her bald scalp. "Go stand on the lawn."

She obeys, feeling a bit quizzical, frosted grass crunching underfoot. Her master, a small black shadow surrounded by shadows, stands martially before the grave.

"Has you ever done this before?" she shouts.

"No!" he shouts back. "So stand back!"

She takes a quick step forward.

"Occludostio!"

A white light flashes. Her foot comes down.

They are both still here.

"Did it work?" she squeaks.

Holding the wand defensively out before him, Master Severus pokes at the mound of earth with his toe.

Then he treads on it.

Then he jumps on it.

Then he dances around in a little circle, chanting, "Yes I did it I did it I did it and-I-didn't-screw-up!"

The dance ends in a spin that fans out his hair and robes around him and almost topples him off the mound. He grins at her, eyes glittering fiercely through the dissipating cloud of white vapor around his face. Never mind his dancing on Skurry's grave- somehow she doesn't think Skurry would take offense.

"Master Severus will take his bath now," she says in a tone that brooks no argument.

Half the smile falls off his face; the other half hangs crookedly, uncertain of the joke.

"I have to clean the kitchen," he says. "And wash my clothes, and hide the footprints, and somehow hide this too..." He waves his hand at the bare mound of earth and surrounding chewed-up greenery.

"Mippy will help," she says.

His jaw drops. "You can't help. Grandfather said so."

"Mippy wants to help," she clarifies.

He seems to find it unfathomable. An hour ago, she would have herself.

"Grandfather will sack you!"

"The Old Man won't know."

"Of course he'll know! He's... he's..." He casts about for a metaphor strong enough. "He's like Albus Dumbledore!"

"The Old Man," Mippy says and smiles, "believes he is my master."

Master Severus closes his mouth.

And then he lets her take his hand and lead him back to the citadel. It is so extraordinary; he has to walk facing backward once or twice, to study their paired footprints wending across the grass.