The Truest Master

Part III

Mippy runs a hot lavender bath in the guest-wing's only ghost-free bathroom, routes a few of the Old Man's own afghan-sized towels onto a chair by the tub, and goes to shoo her master into it. Of course he's in the kitchen, hunkered morosely before the cold stove's open door. He hasn't even removed his boots yet.

"Out of that!" she squeaks, flapping her arms like wings. "Mippy says get out of that and into the tub right now!"

Startled, he slams the door on his hair and stands up quickly. "Ow! Merlin's-"

"Master Severus had better not say 'balls'," she warns him.

"I was going to say-" Rather unsubtly, he focuses on her enormous eyes. "Er, 'eyeballs'."

"Much better." A twiggy finger points imperiously. "Outer robe and boots."

He shudders, pulling the robe's loose cuffs down over his fists. "I'm cold," he says flatly, after a moment.

She bites her lip. "Just boots, then," she says, more gently. "And may Mippy brush you, so you doesn't get dirt on the rugs?"

With a barely perceptible nod, he sits down on the floor to unbutton his boots- always a very solemn procedure. She brushes him magically, trying not to touch him at all. A stubborn plaque of mud remains beneath the outer robe's collar. "You has mud in your collar," she says.

"I'm-not-a-complete-prawn-so-just-get-on-with-it-please."

It's still moist, home to two somnolent sowbugs and one bristling, deep-orange centipede. She crushes the centipede in her fingers, not wanting him to know what has been riding against his skin, and drops the sowbugs on the floor. Master Severus hunches his shoulders nervously. "What are you doing back there?"

"Wiping Mippy's hands," she says, wiping Mippy's hands. "You is very muddy."

"Can I get up now?"

Good thing his father isn't here, she thinks. Asking a house-elf for permission! A moment later, he realizes his mistake and stands up quickly. "When Master Severus comes downstairs again, Mippy will have dinner ready," she says to cover the moment.

"'Master Severus' will be too busy cleaning the kitchen to eat." He does his best to tower over her, though now his boots are off the top of her head comes up to his chest. Lowering her eyes in stifled amusement, she sees his socks don't match. Skurry really was skiving off, she thinks, startled. Her master looks down also and sees the socks: one black, one blue.

"My socks don't match!" he bursts out, standing on one foot to rip off the blue one. His bare foot touches the floor, still lightly streaked with Skurry's blood, and jerks up again. "Oh, Merlin, I stepped in it- I've been sitting in it-" he yelps, and runs for the foot of the stairs.

Evidently, his tolerance has been reached.

"Mippy will clean the kitchen." She uses the soothing, singsong voice left over from early years of night terrors. "Master Severus will take his bath. Go on..."

He stands on the second step, clutching the boots and blue sock to his chest, and regards her unblinkingly. "Where will you be?"

"Mippy will be right here. Cleaning the kitchen," she adds, since he seems to be unclear on the concept.

"Until I'm done?"

"Until Master Severus is done."

"Where are the other house-elves?"

Hiding from you, she thinks. "Working," she says.

"Will they sneak up on me?"

"Certainly not."

"Tell them not to." She nods. He relaxes a bit- enough to muster a faint scowl. "And don't look in the stove."

"Mippy will not look in the stove while Master Severus is bathing," she agrees.

"Or while I'm getting out of the bath."

"Or while you is getting out of the bath."

He peers at her suspiciously, wrinkling his nose. It makes him look like a nearsighted eagle. Mr. Snape's son, despite her lies. What a family of barristers!

"Mippy promises," she says, quite slowly and clearly, "not to open the stove at all until you comes back, and then we will open it together."

Finally, he blinks, and turns to climb the stairs, holding a filthy boot in each hand. Flakes of mud drop onto the risers. She decides against mentioning it for fear of prompting another debate, or, worse, a complete collapse. It's only a little dirt. Instead, she shouts across the kitchen, "Call Mippy if the water gets too dirty!"

"I know how to drain a tub, Mippy," he grumbles, crossing the landing.

His footsteps are utterly silent.

Children are supposed to thunder upstairs 'like a herd of elephants'. A shame and a waste, she thinks sadly. Maybe he's just tired... Maybe he'll be able to sleep for once, with his mother out of the house. She once heard him asking his paranoid aunt how to ward a room against Apparition.

Maybe she can stand guard.

Only after his footsteps have crossed overhead does she let herself begin, trying not to think about the smell- a thin, brownish sort of smell, like burnt leather and grief. She tries not to remember him sitting there beside the stove, legs folded awkwardly beneath him like a marionette with its strings clipped, where they had left him. Alone.

It's just a memory, one among so many.

She tackles the leaded glass cabinets first. It's strangely satisfying, working dried gore out of the hinges. Takes elbow grease, as Skurry would have said. Just a mess, she tells herself. Just blood and worse than blood in rivulets, pools and clots, soaking her master's robes and caught in her master's hair, a dark and viscous thread strung over his lips like some hideous scar.

It wouldn't wash away, of course. Memories never did.

Deprived of her dead friend's eyes, she found herself focusing, instead, on the eyes of this child- realizing, to her chagrin, that he was still a child- and suddenly, she wished she had the nerve to become visible, so he would look back at her. So he'd look at something, anything, just to make sure his eyes and mind still worked.

He didn't look.

He started to cough, face buried against his knees. The cough turned into dry retching, with nothing left to bring up anymore, and when he finally lifted his head, sight and sense had returned. He clawed the false scar away from his mouth and pronounced a summoning charm. Milk and liquor bottles, jam jars, the tiny crystal confections that had held his mother's perfume- collection bottles, the tools of salvation- his trunk upstairs was full of them. The boy who couldn't catch a quaffle caught the bottles easily and arranged them according to size.

"Obtempero," he said quietly, tapping his wand against the floor. It made a tiny spattering sound, like one more droplet falling.

He raised his left hand and traced it across an invisible surface, as though smudging a chalk line with his thumb, and the fluid between flagstones stirred. It began, almost sheepishly, to retreat from him into the marbled puddles behind it. He opened his hand and drew something unseen toward him (the fabric of his lost mother's skirt? The fabric of reality?) The coalescing pool writhed, seemed to roll over- grew long, narrow and bright, leaving a colorless liquid in its wake- and, reminding her of the Old Man's pet snake, stretched itself out lazily on the stone floor.

By age five, her master had become adept at calling water up out of drains, saliva from his sleeping father's mouth, and pumpkin juice out of the pitcher at breakfast, impressing his alchemist aunt, but few of the People Who Mattered. Now he coaxed with slight, repetitive gestures the colorless liquid into two streams. One, slower and less transparent, paused to examine bumps in the stone. The other eagerly climbed the recycled gin bottle. A moment later, the crimson snake crept up and into the milk bottle's mouth.

From pumpkin juice to blood...

Still, his face was tranquil.

Unheard by human ears, she thanked every god she'd heard of- and Merlin, for that matter- for collection bottles, while the other house-elves murmured in horror. They'd seen him do this before, of course, but never to one of their own. Feathers from his grandfather's owl, the eyes and claws of his cousin's rabbit, ash from the pyres of his father's horses, even his pet niffler met eternity as the contents of pouches, bottles and jars. She remembered the look on his mother's face when she found him clipping locks of Erichtho's fur. It was wistful, verging on tender- until he exchanged the scissors for tweezers.

"What are you doing, Severus?"

"Plucking eyelashes." It had been nearly a year since he'd last called her 'Mother'. He held his trophy up to the light, then dropped it into a small, silk bag made to hold calligraphy nibs.

"What next?" she sneered. "The poor thing's teeth?"

"Whiskers, then teeth," he answered impassively.

"And then what?"

Her master looked up, ebony eyes meeting obsidian. "Why do you ask when it will only upset you?"

"I am not upset," she snapped. "I am angered by your lack of respect for the dead."

After a moment, he bowed his head low over the small, cold body, as his still-braided hair could not hide his face. "I respect Erichtho," he said, very softly.

She left him then, white teeth and white hands clenched.

Erichtho's eyelashes went into every one of his 'experiments' over the next few months, back at the small, gray house near Titchwell. Most of them simply fizzled; a few stank so badly that a specialist had to be called in; the last he set out in a sealed flask, warning Mippy not to touch it under pain, not of death, but "a fate so hideous as to beyond your limited imagination." Mippy, whose imagination wasn't at all limited, avoided his bedroom entirely.

On their next visit to his grandfather's, she caught him with a handful of test tubes in the breakfast room. He bore an eerie resemblance to his mother at that moment: black hair and pale skin, the sylph-like back (a child's, she told herself) bowed over an uncle's absinthe glass. She watched in silence as he crept around the table, switching tubes from hand to hand over a palm-sized Chinese teacup and a glass soup dish. The bound end of the queue slipped off his shoulder and into the dish before he could catch it, drawing a hiss of irritation between his teeth. Mippy took a quick step backward. His head jerked up.

"Another dish," he snapped. "Quickly." She twisted the frayed hem of her pillowcase and thought of slavery, but he mistook her hesitation for a different kind of fear. "Please?" he said, with ineffable sarcasm.

So, she brought it; he administered his poison with the surety of one who had done such things before; and she retreated to the kitchen, murmuring unheard pleas for mercy. The dish belonged to a feeble-minded and frail elder cousin of his, who spent all her waking hours playing chess. Mippy thought he was fond of the girl. Eliminate Personal Ties- yet another step along the road to this untimely adulthood, along with his darkened eyes and whispering in the dead of night, when more wholesome children slept.

Reacting with the copper basin, the milk-blue potion turned viscid lilac and slid reluctantly down the drain. Perhaps a silver spoon would cause the same reaction, easily visible through a thin broth?

As the other house-elves bustled about her, preparing this and serving that, she began to wonder why she cared.

It wasn't her place to get involved; she'd only earn more curses that way. And the sooner this family finished itself off, the better.

Even the crippled ones.

Even the children.

Barely five minutes later, her dismay gave way to blank surprise when the chess-playing cousin slid silently out of her chair- and on upward, like a Muggle's toy balloon.

"Egnatia, what are you doing?" the girl's mother droned, dribbling clotted cream into her porridge. Her daughter hit the ceiling, mouth forming a surprised "o". She made a desultory effort to get down again, paddling her limbs, and then just floated. The "o" returned to its natural state: a pacific smile. As the alchemist aunt came up beside her, she took hold of a trailing, amethyst sleeve and in a stage whisper informed her, "You too!" The alchemist aunt patted her gently.

Master Severus didn't spare a glance for either of them. Hands clasped in front of his mouth, he was watching his uncle... who sipped absinthe and watched him back. Gradually the attention of the entire table turned to the absinthe-drinking uncle. He showed no signs of rising from his chair. Master Severus sighed.

"My Levitation Solution," he said when questioned, careful not to lisp in the gap from his front teeth. "Seriphion, distillation of elder pith, Aethonan ash, chalk, flying rowan cotyledons, niffler eyelashes, and I took hair from their combs-" a small finger pointed. "And his shaving brush." The earthbound uncle, already pleasantly inebriated, raised his glass in a general toast. "It's a signature potion, like polyjuice."

The alchemist aunt clapped her hands, bobbing gently against a stone corbel. "That's why it didn't work on Darwin," (who silently raised his glass again). "Common wormwood and seriphion don't mix."

The boy began to look crestfallen; the Old Man snorted. "Forget the seriphion. Who'd have thought of niffler eyelashes?"

Not caring about his teeth, for once, her master actually, honestly smiled.

"Next time," the Old Man growled, "you test it on me." And the boy positively grinned.

Now, straightening out the kink in her back, she surveys the gleaming kitchen. There will be no more burials today. She doesn't pretend to understand humans, the games they play with their cauldrons and wands, but perhaps something may be done with what remains- some small cure, or flight of fancy. When her master returns, she will ask permission to place Skurry's skull amongst the delicate skulls of rats, and half-calcined Aethonan bones.

She doesn't think Skurry would mind.

He, too, had liked to see their master smile.

Part IV

He doesn't want to get out of the bath.

In the bath, he knows he's clean. If something seems to cling to his lips and slide over his skin like a gossamer hand, he may scrub at it until it goes away. The water, twice drained, begins to run cold, despite charms on the boiler (stupid Muggle contraption). He casts a gradual warming spell upon the water in which he sits, until it's as hot as he can stand and his submerged limbs turn lobster-red in stark contrast to sallow hands and spindly, spidery knees.

The lavender-scented foam has long since given way to a slick froth over the surface. He feels a pang of shame at not having luxuriated.

Eventually, the house-elf comes to find him.

It isn't Skurry. He has a momentary vision of a headless body, skin shrunk close in death, tottering through the open door - but no, it isn't Skurry. It's Mippy, whom he hasn't killed yet, and she looks at him with strange dismay that makes him want to cry.

"Isn't you clean yet?" she should say. She doesn't. Instead, she takes one of the towels and approaches him, obviously choosing her words. "Time to get out," she says.

He pokes his toes out of the water, studying them. They look pickled, white and shriveled... A dead boy's toes. He could argue. He could tell her that when he closes his eyes, in the red darkness there, once again it all goes wrong and he feels it wet on his face, warm gobbets tumbling into the neck of his robe-

He opens his eyes wide and looks down. His own little-boy body (when will he grow up?) glistens raw pink from an hour of scouring. One of his nipples seems to be bleeding. He touches it lightly, sticks his finger in his mouth. Blood, yes; but he feels it, the sting that makes blood happen, and that makes all the difference. It gives him, in fact, a peculiar satisfaction.

Silently he stands up. The tub begins to drain and Mippy wraps the towel around him, tending him, as she hasn't done since his Dad decided he was too old to be coddled. Passively letting himself be dressed, he listens to her homely mutterings, looks down at her large blue eyes and imagines them gone, the stump of tongue blindly probing from a gaping throat. He wonders when he went mad, and then thinks maybe all grown-ups are like this. Has he grown up, at the tender age of nine?

Mippy ties the dressing gown at his waist and pats him on the back, a gesture evidently meant to propel him toward the door. "Master Severus must eat," she says.

His stomach lurches at the idea. "Master Severus isn't hungry."

"Master Severus must still eat. How about a sandwich?"

"There's nothing in this house I'd want in a sandwich."

"Not even your Uncle Darwin's marmite?" she says coyly.

He stands there looking at her, picturing the thinnish stuff that ran down Skurry's leg as he floated him carefully across the kitchen stoop. Politely he says, "No, thank you", they haggle a bit and eventually he finds himself munching a chocolate tea biscuit with a vague sense of unreality, as though the world has reversed itself. The house seems otherwise deserted. He knows the truth. They're hiding- from him. He's joined the ranks of the Dark.

And one of them leads him downstairs now, brittle fingers linked with his... Doesn't she know he could kill her? Doesn't he know he could fling her small body over the banister, send Conterus after her, and not even the Ministry would punish him for this?

"You're a bit dim, aren't you," he says through a chocolate mouthful.

"Mr. Snape would say 'don't talk with your mouth full'," she says, turning her blue eye on him. "How is Mippy dim?"

He blinks slowly at her, thinking of his father (feel nothing, reveal nothing). "You don't see it. I'm bad," he says, matter-of-factly. The mere admission leaves him feeling somehow desolate.

"You is not bad," she answers.

"I'm a Dark wizard."

They have reached the kitchen. A slight, acrid taint still hangs in the air. He wonders whether it is worth burning cinnamon, or whether this would lose him points in the upcoming inspection. The stone floor gleams dully, eyelike chips of mica winking here and there; glass shines. The impressionistic splatter is gone from walls and cabinet doors.

"Looks better," he says grudgingly. Mippy plants herself in front of him, hands on hips.

"How can you possibly be a Dark wizard? You is only nine years old!"

His brow furrows in a frown, the best he can do toward a glare of searing contempt. "Consuoris is a Dark curse."

"Master Severus didn't cast it-"

" 'Master Severus' ballsed up casting it, so 'Master Severus' is a bad Dark wizard!"

"You will listen to Mippy," she says sternly, stumping over to the stove, and opens its door on cold ashes. "Stand up straight- and don't say 'ballsed', it isn't couth... Mippy has an idea." She turns around with the skull in her hand, and the world flip-flops again, though the taste of chocolate remains in his mouth. Random details make themselves known- seared flesh clinging to cheek and brow ridge, the withered cusp of an ear- and he holds the last biscuit tightly, hoping it will keep the world from flipping yet again into some still more terrifying version of itself. Mippy wraps Skurry's head in an old dishtowel. It seems so mundane, wrapping a head. He doesn't know whether to laugh hysterically, faint, or wait with apparent calm to receive it from her. He does the latter, and she beams up at him. "Mippy thought you might find it useful."

"U-useful?" he echoes, with only the slightest hint of a stammer. The skull is dreadfully light in his hands. He tastes chocolate and bile.

"Like niffler's whiskers," she says. "Like bones of flying horse."

"I don't have a crucible large enough."

Mippy's face falls. "Skurry liked to be useful."

Useful. He tries to reconcile the word with his image of a living Skurry, a Skurry who could like things, and sees instead his own hands, his wand, reducing the skull to manageable fragments (Contero!), peeling away the cooked-hard flesh. It seems, then, the world does turn- slowly- and once it has settled he knows he will find a way. Everything has its uses...

Perhaps this is what Grandfather is always talking about.

"Yes," he says rather blankly. "All right..." Points his wand at the stove's open door and casts Evanescus, emptying it of the reeking ash. Before he knows it, Mippy has taken his wand from him, which shows he isn't up to snuff. No one takes a wizard's wand- least of all a house-elf.

"As for Master Severus being a Dark wizard," she says, poking him in the sternum with it, "Unicorns aren't bad."

He snatches the wand back and glares down his reddened nose at her. "A single hair is not an endorsement."

His father's words, less powerful since he can't muster his father's voice. Mr. Snape's in-laws were all been perplexed by Master Severus' wand pairing. As one of his cousins said, "Unicorn? How drippy!" Four months later, said 'drippy wand' removed said cousin's thumbs, vindicating both Mr. Snape and his son's supposedly Dark heart.

"You is only nine," she hisses. "You can't be a wizard at all until you finishes school. You is not Dark yet- and in two years, Master Severus will spend most of the year away from home."

He stares at her blankly, seeing himself reflected in her eyes, a white boy-face with eyes like tunnels, revealing nothing, going nowhere.

"Two years is a long time," he says.

She takes his hand again, pulling gently, leading him back upstairs and to sleep. A tremor bespeaks her silent agreement.

Two years is a very long time.