Mist and Vapors

Two days later, Severus had again delivered the Wolfsbane Potion to the werewolf when he stopped in the doorframe on his way out.
"Say, Lupin..."

"Yes?" Remus looked up from his desk in surprise.

"There is a personal matter that I need to attend to. The Headmaster strongly suggested," - he grimaced - "that, as Wormtail is still unaccounted for, I take at least two Order members along. I asked McGonagall, but she was already otherwise engaged. If you feel up to the task...?"

"It's still four days until the full moon. I'm fine. Who else is coming?"

"Flitwick."

"Good." Remus smiled. "When and where?"

"Tomorrow. I need to return to my father's house. If you could be prepared to leave, say, right after lunch?"

Lupin nodded. "I'll be ready."

.-.-.-.

With soft pops, the three wizards Apparated on the poplar lined gravel path that led up to the house. Before approaching the entry, Snape turned to his two companions. "I do not have to remind you, I am sure, that anything you see today is not meant for public discussion?"

"Of course," Flitwick replied. "Our lips will be sealed. Right, Remus?"

"Oh, yes," the werewolf replied distractedly, looking up at the dilapidated front of the building, standing out starkly against the bright sky. "Certainly."

Snape shot him a sharp glance, but evidently decided that it was good enough. "Follow me, then." He turned and walked towards the door with decisive steps.

So this was it. The place Severus had grown up. Remus stared at the crumbling façade. There was an air of hostility to the place, as if the very walls resented his presence. An involuntary shudder ran through Remus as he followed Severus to the front door.

Severus turned the doorknob cautiously, his wand drawn. The other two followed as he warily stepped over the threshold. They were met by near-total silence, only interrupted by the ticking of a clock and the whirring of some appliance far off in the distance.

Finally, Snape lowered his wand arm and stood up straight.

"So far, so good," Remus said, lowering his wand as well. "What now?"

"My mother wishes to see the house sold," Snape replied stiffly. "She asked me to retrieve some personal items as well as to see to... another issue." Lupin lifted an eyebrow, but decided that Severus' face was not at the moment inviting questions.

"There are only a few things I will need to obtain," Snape continued. "All the rest will be sold with the building. If you will follow me?"

Remus looked around curiously as he walked behind the Potions master. Every room exuded an air of shabby opulence, of the decaying remains of something once quite grand. Somehow, he could not imagine a child ever living in this place. There was no trace of the fact that his former schoolmate had ever been in residence here. Even though a few framed photographs hung on the walls, Severus was conspicuously absent from all of them.

The only place even remotely cozy was the kitchen, with its scrubbed yellow pine table, pot-bellied stove and flowered curtains. The chubby willow-ware teapot on the counter was evidently on the list of things to be collected, since Severus, with a smart tap of his wand, shrunk it, wrapped it in a kitchen towel, and set it down in an empty box he had retrieved from what looked to be the broom closet.

A frownline on his forehead, the Potions master looked at a dried-out loaf of bread still resting on a cutting board. "We should probably dispose of anything perishable."

Remus wrinkled his nose as Severus opened the fridge - from the stench that arose, it appeared that most of the perishables had perished already. A bowl of something in the back, covered in black mold, looked like it was about to sprout new lifeforms.

Flitwick was standing in the door of the larder, from which similarly unpleasant odors emanated. "I'll take care of this," he volunteered with a sigh. "You two go on." Remus shot him a thankful glance - this close to the full moon, his sense of smell was more acute than it normally was. He would not have relished this task.

The two wizards left Flitwick to his clean-up work and started on the rest of the ground floor. As Severus sorted out the desired items - a few paintings and photos, an embroidered tablecloth, a set of silverware - Remus shrunk them to a manageable size and deposited them into the box, now waiting by the front door. Working together, it took them less than fifteen minutes to gather everything that was wanted on that floor. There evidently wasn't much that had enough monetary or emotional value to make Severus' mother want to keep it.

In almost no time, they rejoined Flitwick in the kitchen. Both the larder and icebox were emptied and restored to pristine condition. The whole kitchen had been cleaned to a sparkling shine. Snape looked around with satisfaction and nodded approvingly towards the Charms master. Flitwick blushed a pleased pink

"Very well," Snape said as he motioned them out of the kitchen. "Let's go up, then."

Remus and Flitwick exchanged a glance, eyebrows lifted, as they followed Severus up the staircase. The walls were lined with portraits of generations of Snapes - not a handsome family, by any definition. Severus' ancestors glared out of the portraits with severe and foreboding expressions; hooked noses and sharp features dominated their faces. None of them deigned the visitors worth talking to.

At the stern, unyielding stares of that many Snapes following his progress up the stairs, Remus felt his skin crawl and the hair stand up on his neck. One Snape glaring at him was bad enough, he decided. At least two dozen of them giving him the once-over was positively unnerving. He breathed a sigh of relief when they reached the upstairs landing.

They worked through the upstairs with equal speed. A fine ivory-inlaid side table, many leather-bound tomes Snape collected from the library, and the contents of Saeran Snape's closet and jewelry box were miniaturized and taken downstairs. Personal items that were not wanted simply Vanished with a wave of Severus' wand.

Finally, only one room remained. Severus took a deep breath before opening the door to his father's bedroom. He let it out slowly as he walked through. The Aurors had left it in surprisingly good condition. He had expected the room to be in much bigger disarray, but for once the Ministry had actually exceeded his, admittedly quite low, expectations. He should mark the day red on the calendar, he thought with a snort.

He looked around the room for a moment and then nodded over towards the desk. "Let's just take the whole thing, I don't want to bother with sorting through papers at the moment."

While Flitwick and Remus took care of the desk, Severus grimly crouched down close to a large, rust-colored stain on the threadbare oriental carpet in front of the bed - all that remained of the horror that had happened here. So here was where Wormtail had placed his father when he had staged the scene for the Aurors. His lips tightened to a thin, white line.

A decisive flick of his wand and the carpet vanished. That did not solve the problem - the stain had gone clear down to the floorboards. Revulsion edged on his face, Severus ran his wand tip over the stain, the dried blood disappearing in its wake until nothing remained. When he had finished, he rose and turned away sharply. It was over.

"Is that all, then?" Flitwick stood waiting for him. Remus had gone, presumably to run the newly shrunken desk down to the box.

He smiled grimly. "Not yet. Follow me."

.-.-.-.-.

Remus was waiting by the front door when he saw the other two coming down the stairs. Good, he thought with relief. He had not looked forward to another run through the gauntlet of Snapes. "Are we finished?" he asked. "Anything else?"

"Severus has another task for us," Flitwick replied in his twittery voice. When Remus looked at him questioningly as they followed Snape's billowing cloak tails, he just raised his hands in a gesture of resignation.

They walked down a narrow, twisting passageway into the cellar. It dead-ended in a small, dark room full of broken tools and dust-covered glass jars and bottles. Next to an overloaded wooden shelf (holding a selection of ancient preserves that seemed to be approaching fossilization at a rapid rate) there was a section of bare, dirty brick wall. It was in front of this Snape stopped and pulled out his wand.

"Post lux, tenebras," he muttered, and at the last syllable, the image of the wall wavered and then slowly faded away, revealing another door. Warily, as if expecting some sort of booby trap, Severus opened the door and stepped through. Lupin and Flitwick followed him cautiously.

The room on the other side was cavernous, broken up by half-walls that divided it into definite sections without obscuring sight of the whole. The part of the room immediately in front of them was taken up by numerous of these bays, some of them in darkness, some of them illuminated by floating orbs that gave off a ghastly, greenish light. Remus' nose was assaulted by the smell of dampness and decay.

Each bay held a large rectangular box. Snape walked over to the one closest to them, and pulled off the burlap cover. Beneath it, they could just see small, button-shaped protrusions of a buttery cream color, pushing through a dark substrate.

"Officially, my father subsisted on the dwindling remains of the family vault. In actuality, he specialized in psilocybic mushrooms. This one would be Psilocybe Cubensis, an African import." Snape pointed over to the bed in the next bay. "Psilocybe Semilanceata, our very own English variant."

Lupin and Flitwick looked around with wide eyes. "What are they good for?" Lupin asked. "What do they do?"

Snape took out his wand as he removed the cover from the next bay. "A small - very small - part of the Muggle population uses them as recreational drugs. My father, though, thought it beneath the dignity of a pureblood to stoop to dealing with Muggles. His main interest lay in using the spores, a distillation of the fruiting bodies, and the mycelium itself to create potions that were able to alter perceived reality, with varying degrees of success. - I would suggest a heating spell to kill every last hypha before Vanishing the lot." He aimed his wand, and a glowing beam hit the nearest growing frame. It only took a few seconds for the small mushrooms to turn brown and shrivel up.

Slowly, they walked past the growing bays. Some of the beds were empty, some of them way past their prime - large mushrooms, tipped over and decaying after weeks of not being attended to, giving off a sickly sweet smell. At the end of the growing bays, the room opened up, the contents looking familiar to them all - obviously, a well-used potions laboratory. There were signs that the owner had spent much of his time down here; a cot with a folded up blanket stood against one wall, dog-eared books and copies of Potions Monthly cluttering the floor next to it.

Lupin curiously walked over to a cauldron still set on low heat, some content remaining thick and sludgy in the bottom. He picked up the pewter stir-stick that lay on the table next to it.

"Have a care what you touch, Lupin," Snape's harsh voice interrupted him. "Some of these potions are meant to be absorbed through the skin. And as they are experimental, I could not even remotely guess what effect they might have on your lycanthropic self."

Lupin hastily dropped the stir-stick.

Flitwick was standing in front of an open storage cabinet that held assorted phials and bottles, reading the labels with a myopic squint. "Did he ever finish any of them?" he asked. "The potions he experimented with, I mean?"

"Only one. Most of them never made it past the experimental stages. This one," he pointed to a slim, magenta-colored bottle, "will create illusions based on your sub-conscious wishes. A few drops, and the most ordinary looking witch will take on the look of your wildest fantasies. Sadly for my father, he was never able to overcome certain side effects. Few people," he added with a smirk, "are willing to put up with days of debilitating headaches for a few hours of wish fulfillment."

Lupin looked around - there was no evidence of laboratory animals. He wondered how Snape Sr. had tested his potions. Maybe he had tested them on himself. Maybe there were test animals housed outside somewhere. Or maybe he had paid human test subjects, or simply Obliviated unwilling victims after testing. From all he had heard about Snape's father, he would not put it past him. Another thought surfaced - Severus had looked awfully pale and peaky every time he had comeback to Hogwarts from holiday...he pushed the thought away as quickly as he could. Some things just did not bear thinking about.

Meanwhile, Severus pointed to another row of bottles, holding a murky grey elixir. "This one over here works on the same basic principle. It was the only one he actually managed to complete, the one that he was most proud of. If taken before a criminal attack, it justifies what you are doing to the mind. You can commit the most vile rape, the most brutal murder, and your mind will record it as consensual sex or self-defense. That is the memory you walk away with, and neither Veritaserum nor Legilimency will be able to distinguish the substituted mental images from the truth. Quite popular among some of the more squeamish Death Eaters. As the target demographic is obviously quite limited, the commercial success of the potion was anything but overwhelming. - And before you ask," he said coldly at the horrified expression on the werewolf's face, "no, I never used it."

Lupin looked like he was about to be sick, while Flitwick stared with revulsion at the row of crystal containers.

What had they expected? Severus looked at the two with a grim smile. That his father had dedicated his life to finding a cure for hangnails?

He left the two still staring at the bottles and walked over to the storage cabinet. Opening the door, he took out a jar, unscrewed the lid, and sniffed. "Still quite fresh. This will do well to supplement the school stores," he muttered, and began rifling through the cabinet. When he had piled all the flasks and jars of raw ingredients that he desired into a box, he stood up, satisfied. "Everything else needs to be destroyed."

Lupin shivered. "Gladly," he said.

They spent the next couple of hours clearing out the laboratory and the growing bays, until nothing remained of the late Augustus Snape's life work.

Finally, Snape straightened up. "If you will excuse me, I have one more thing I need to see to. I won't be long."

Leaving Flitwick and Remus to finish up, he made his way up the stairs to his father's bedroom again and stopped in front of a large, garish painting of a chimera rearing up on its hind legs, attacking something just out of sight on the other side of the gilded frame. A muttered incantation and a complicated swirl of the wand, and the painting turned into the steel-plated cover of a vault. Severus put both his hands against the door and muttered another word. Slowly, the door swung open.

He stepped inside with a derisive sneer. Large vault, very little content. The room was almost empty, except for a small pile of papers and a half a dozen or so velvet-covered boxes. His father had sold almost everything of value over the years. There were just a few items that had been in the family so long that it had seemed unthinkable to sell them.

Folding the papers up with precision, he tucked them into the pockets of his robe and then did the same with the collection of boxes. When he got to the last box - small and square, and covered in deep green velvet - he hesitated. Slowly, he sprung the lid.

Something small and golden, glittering brightly even in the dim light of the vault, sat inside. Severus, turning it to catch the light to best effect, looked at it with a peculiar expression. Then he closed the lid with a snap, his fingers curling tightly around the small box.

Everything else would go to his mother. This, he would keep.