Even Old Morose Bats Can Get Soft

Two days later, the huge-beaked bird of prey was swishing his dramatically billowing robes and ascending the outdoor staircase of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place. His cold, gloating smirk resembled the one of a hungry cartoon falcon that had just spotted an especially juicy bunny prancing happily in the grass. His glee consisted of cackling at the cost of another fauna similitude: Dolores Umbridge, the Official Supreme Toad of Hogwarts. Alike the other non-ministry-bootlicker teachers, Snape admitted having quite a lot of fun while observing how students and ghosts broke havoc rather uncontrollably, spanking Umbridge with deliciously evil pranks. On the other hand, knowing Severus, he never was one hundred percent passive when it came to such mischief management. Always there was a proper time to dock house-points and grant detention... especially when it came to certain Gryffindors.

In any case, Snape’s mood had improved a great deal after the cranky night. He had drawn his consciousness away from the Tonks theme, whereas the tingling in his fingers had ceased the following morning. At Hogwarts, every professor carefully kept the comfy little distance to him during more or less idle gabbling. Hence, there hardly existed such fatal dangers as to be held by your hand, or generally anything that normal non-paranoid people would consider as friendly acts.

It was a rather cool evening that day. An icy drizzle came whipping down from the gray sky. The Potions Master had his cloak tightly wrapped around him to avoid the wind’s cold merciless grasp. His bony knuckles knocked on the house’s front door. Soon, a series of clicks and other mechanical music, played by the opening lock systems, followed. Lupin appeared in the gap and gesticulated at the teacher to enter. Thus, together they continued to march down the hall towards the kitchen with hushed tones, so that the ultra-lovable framed mistress of this shack would not start singing her joyous welcome chants.

“We’re still waiting for a few folks to come. They may be a bit late; it’s been a busy day,” Remus explained while he pushed the kitchen door open.

“Hmpf. Better arrive in time. I do not have the whole night to lollygag here as though I was merely a lazy lapdog at leisure... I have to travel all the way from Hogwarts, and I daresay that I am never late,” Snape sneered, setting a delicate emphasis on certain self-praising pronouns.

“You’d be late if you had been in the same situation Alastor and the others were today. There’s been again trouble with the ministry...” Remus sighed, noticing the side-glance as acid as vitriol Severus was throwing at him. “Well, you’ll hear it all when the meeting starts.”

Thus, the Potions Master stepped in to accompany the little crowd of other Order members. Some were perching on their seats, some just standing and confabulating with each other. He also decided to remain standing after finding a nice, shady nook where his batlike being blended in perfectly. He however did not begin hanging upside down from the ceiling like real bats did, but merely lolled against the wall and scowled.

Blanggg, glonnnggg, blonnnggg... Relatively frantic clanks were coming from the front door, making it sound like a badly tuned grandfather clock.

“Merlin’s beard, why can’t they keep it quiet?”

Lupin rushed to open the door, Mrs. Weasley closely at his heels. The latter one was throwing quick glimpses around the lobby in a jittery sort of way. The threat of Mrs. Black springing awake from her nap was looming ominously on the horizon. Behind the exit was Tonks, looking rather jumpy and out-of-breath. She had obviously run a good marathon against the raging wind. She was furthermore panting, and her locks were sprouting towards every cardinal point imaginable.

“A-a-am - am I late?” she wheezed, and attempted to smooth down her hair. The bluster outside had not served as a very skilled hairdresser.

“Not too much. We haven’t started yet. Now come in, dear, before you catch a cold out there.” Mrs. Weasley directed her in. “Why are you alone? Wasn’t Kingsley supposed to be with you today?”

“Uh... eh...” Wheezing somewhat, Nymphadora clutched at a stitch in her side. Her poor lungs seemed having severe trouble to filter the sparse oxygen molecules from the house’s moldy, stuffy air. “A-Alastor and he are coming as soon as they can. We - we...”

“I know, dear, you’re not the first one to tell about today’s problems...”

Motherly, Molly patted Tonks on the back. The young Auror tottered towards the main estrade, looking more ungainly and windswept than ever. Mrs. Weasley and Lupin decided to stay in the hall and wait for the missing birds.

---

Nymphadora jostled the kitchen’s door open. A puff of warm air skimmed her cheeks. Down here, the fireplace crackled, and a cozily yellow candlelight greeted welcomingly the incomers. However, after the long grim shadowy staircase, the pools of light blinded her eyes for a moment.

Tonks squinted. Still the white blaring spots fluttered jeeringly across her visual field. Someone nearby yapped a brisk hello, but the girl hardly could distinguish the speaker in this semi-unsighted state. She took a few paces forwards, her hand rising up to rub her eyes. Its sister, which had been inside a robe pocket holding her wand, was equally heaved up. Together with the wand.

Unfortunately, this small random movement was the beginning of a miniature Armageddon. Added to the seemingly irrelevant fact that Sirius Black was wearing a tad longer cape today than usually.

Oh the woe, alas the destruction. The unfortunate girl already resembled a seasick mammoth in china store. Now, half-blinded and still exhausted after the rush in the sheer storm, she succeeded to become the messenger of an apocalypse. She advanced a few more steps, and managed to nod hello to the particular someone, of whom she still could make neither shape nor sight.

Splat.

Her boot trampled on the floor-dragging hem of Sirius’s cape. If Black had not right at the moment gotten the hazardous whim to leave his current post and go to sit at the table, perhaps the darker than dark phantom menace hovering upon the scenery would have perished.

But, Sirius took his move. The mishap bore likeliness to as if a carpet had been pulled away from under Nymphadora’s soles. With an audible squeal, she tripped over, and smashed directly onto the floor slabs. This time it was not a bowl of salad that made pirouettes in the air, but her wand. A few meters further, it fell clattering onto the floor just like its owner, but additionally sent a dazzling set of red sparkles into the air from its other end. Perhaps her screech had inadvertently been a forgotten ancient spell of some sort, or then the mischievous wand had its own mind. The sparks gamboled and leapfrogged hither and thither. Those individuals who had caught up with the situation, quickly moved aside. But not the one man who was back against the whole bedlam, deep in conversation with another person who seemed initially just as unaware.

A few minutes ago, Snape had stopped playing a morose mole and had dug himself out of his hole. Despite the promises to start the meeting in time, the waiting just seemed to stretch like well-munched chewing gum. Thence, he had selected the nearest person and knitted up a small chat, which gradually had turned into a more severe discussion about Voldemort’s possible schemes.

Suddenly he woke up to notice that something was causing sharp pain in his shins. Something feeling very hot, like open fire...

“Aiigh! Yayyygh! Auch! Squiiiik!” Screeching shrilly, the Potions Master pranced up into the air. Both his robes and the hem of his traveling cloak were on fire. And the flames were spreading amazingly fast. He did not have the slightest clue of why and how this had happened; the whole scenario resembled merely a bizarre nightmare. Like a lunatic kangaroo, he kept jumping up and down on the spot, ferociously groping his pockets and attempting to find his wand. The rest of the crowd were gradually becoming aware of the circus and retreating towards the walls, away from Nymphadora’s wand that still sprinkled those demonic red sparks around.

Tonks saw it all as a slow-motion film in front of her wide-flown eyes. A picosecond earlier, she had survived the dizziness of her fall, now lying on the floor supported by her elbows. What was happening in front of her, made her digestive system twist into an overhand knot.

The man she had by mistake smeared with lettuce and tuna, was jouncing around, robes on fire... And was not that HER wand sending those sparks?

Nymphadora had no general idea what to do, but something had to be done to stop this fast-spreading anarchy. A very sudden mallet of nervousness had smacked her hard on the top of the head, but still her reflexes worked. Her gaze speeded across the kitchen; why nobody else was doing anything? Or were they so surprised and shocked that they had completely turned into popsicles? At least that was how the world presently appeared in the girl’s awareness.

With a leap, Tonks reached her wand. The atrocious shrieks and curses of Snape were spinning around her head, hooting, tooting, trilling, and swirling manically like a pack of cloned Pigwidgeons. Her brain cells were sinking into quicksand. All abruptly, she could not recall anything that would have simply made the flames vanish. The only spell she incidentally remembered, was a rain-summoning charm she never had learned properly. This situation with all the stress within just made her recall the NEWT examination she had attended years ago.

There had been a question about this particular charm in the paper... How did it go, how did it go...? Her tongue was hastily forming the magical mumbo-jumbo. Meanwhile, her fingers curled around the wand’s handle...

Something that sounded like part Danish, part Klingon, sprang out of her mouth. The kitchen’s ceiling began suddenly swirling. Dark, massive clouds were forming up there, accumulating above Snape’s head. And then, a great downpour burst out of them, accompanied by fierce thunderbolts. One lightning hit the table, making it explode. A second one turned a few stools into matches. It was now almost pitch black in the room; the candlelight had been quenched by the indoor rain. Initially also the fireplace resembled more like an oddly shaped bathtub. Only the occasional thunderbolts created purplish flashes.

The kitchen was in ultimate disarray. People were running out and yelling, the deluge ever continuing. There was at least four inches water on the floor, and gallons more showered down every second. The staircase was likewise beginning to overflow. In mere panic, Tonks continued to stutter a dozen of different mantras. And then, out of the blue, the right endocranial pinions bothered to function. Gibberish caroled together with the thunder’s rumble, and zap! Swiftly it was all silent again. The rain had died down.

“Lumos!”

With a small crack, the tip of her wand blazed up into light. Only to reveal the heart-rending destruction caused by the cataclysm calamity.

Half of the room’s furniture was in splinters, swimming in the black water that filled the whole floor. In the middle of everything stood Severus Snape, looking more miserable than ever. His traveling cloak was completely burnt, his robes were charred until kneeline, and he was thoroughly soaked. The drenched clothes were glued onto his body, his - for once - deep-washed hair drooping over his face. The thin, whitened lips were mumbling silent swear words. And, with a prompt stir, he raised his regard. The factors were easy to sum. That girl standing two meters away from him, plus the wand in her hand, plus the guilty look on her face... plus that on top of it all, the person appeared to be Nymphadora Tonks.

Something very hot was bubbling and boiling deep inside Snape’s lungs. His eyes began reddening with anger, his face was deforming into something indescribably hideous...

But before Severus reached the crucial point of madness when he would have erupted like Vesuvius, the small group of people that had fled the room - initially peeking in through the open doorway - burst into a choir of howling hee-haws. The view was just something utterly absurd. It was not glee, but merely uncontrollable amusement that made tears of hilarity to glimmer in the eyes of a few persons. But this cackle chorus did not troll for long, since Mrs. Weasley, closely followed by Lupin, came bustling into the room. And more bawling was coming from upstairs. Mrs. Black had lost her interest to daydream...

“Oh my dear child, what has happened here?” Molly shook her head, and grabbed Tonks by the arm. There was no real need to repeat what had happened. The despondent panorama spoke for itself. More light had been conjured in; the little sea on the floor glittered gracefully with different wandlight colors. Molly started dragging the girl out of the kitchen. But the Auror hesitated. She felt absolutely awful; her chest was heavy with compunction and embarrassment, her cheeks scarlet with shame. Tonks would have wanted to scream the apologies out loud, but it felt as though someone had put duct tape over her mouth. No syllables came out even to resist Mrs. Weasley. The Metamorphmagus kept glancing over her shoulder to see what her soaked victim was doing, but the men returning to the scene of terrors were blocking the view.

From the threshold, Tonks heard Sirius’s bark-like laughter booming, “Had a good bath, Snivellus?”

******

The day was completely flushed down the toilet. The Order’s meeting had to be cancelled due to a multitude of reasons. The water that invaded the kitchen remained stuck there in a bullheaded manner, despite the dozens of different Vanishing Spells the wizards and witches shot it with. Mad-Eye Moody was the only chum able to exorcise it. He nevertheless arrived so late in the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, that majority of the Order members had already left. The reason for this latter incident was that they could not find another chamber suitable for so many people to squeeze in. The drawing-room perhaps could have granted some space, but initially Snape had been dragged there to dry up. And, then the myriad of other complexities... It took eons to gag Mrs. Black and her monstrous opera, ages to find the right incantations to dry up everyone’s soggy shoes... and so on and so forth. Nobody else fortunately was that nastily drenched as Snape and Tonks. Gradually the Phoenix population began swarming out of the front door, leaving the deluge behind, and entering a storm that was a tiny serene whiff compared to the kitchen typhoon.

“Now, I’ll get you some hot chocolate, dear...” Mrs. Weasley fussed about around Tonks. The girl was sitting in a sofa somewhere upstairs, a warming blanket wrapped around her.

“Alastor is still working on how to get the water away and we haven’t repaired the furniture yet, but I think I can fetch you poor girl some warm drink.” Molly’s tone was not at all blaming, especially because the Auror looked so worriedly depressed.

Tonks sat quiet, broken-hearted, her fatigued gaze staring at the dust bunnies on the floor. It was all her fault, her mind repeated jadedly. It was perhaps sometimes jolly to be the comic relief, but not when her clumsiness caused ill fortune to individuals she hardly even knew.

And, this case was even worse. First the salad bowl, and now this. Tonks had not deliberately plotted maleficent schemes behind Snape’s back like some sneaky villain. All it was just extremely bad luck. But why on Saturn had it twice fallen upon the same person in such minute time limits?

“He must hate me. I just have to apologize somehow,” the girl muttered so silently that the older woman remained unwitting.

“Uh... Do - do you know if Mr. Snape is still here?” she mewled nervously, addressing Molly now with a less suppressed tone.

“Oh, I’m not sure. I think Remus might’ve taken him into the drawing-room. But don’t you worry about that now, dear. I’ll get you something warm to drink, just wait up here.”

And with these utterances, Molly waddled out of the room.

The course was clear. Like a secret agent on a spy mission, Tonks sneaked out of the chamber. In a serpentine way, she slithered down the stairs noiselessly, keeping constantly watch that no extraneous eyes were following her. The stuffed elf heads on the wall of course had eyes, but they were no longer capable of seeing these shadowy mysteries. It was shockingly astounding how she managed to keep so quiet, and did not trip over the thin air during that time.

The hall was sepulchral and quiescent as vacuum. Mrs. Black and her minions had shut their traps and returned in their mummified state. But just when Tonks tiptoed along the corridor leading to the drawing-room, she collided with Lupin. She recoiled as if meeting an enraged Chimaera. Yet this Wolverine, who was not a member of the X-Men crowd, was not pissed off at all. Only somewhat stern.

“Uh... Is - is Mr. Snape still here?” Tonks grimaced uneasily. The apprehension was wriggling up and down her spine like a hatful of slime-coated Flobberworms.

“Yes, he’s in the drawing-room. But... I don’t know if it’s a good idea to go there, he is on a really bad temper. I’m going to get him some better clothing. We could not repair the ones you burnt.”

As Lupin walked past her and disappeared behind the corner, she felt as though she had just swallowed a golf ball. This lump in her throat definitely did not help hushing down the lamenting conscience. All her fault... But she had to apologize, she just had to do it! Thus, gathering the remains of her feeble-gone determination, she pulled the drawing-room’s door open.

Severus sat in a chair, right opposite to the entrance. A dim candlelight created eerie shadows to ripple along the walls. Instantly his icy scowl rose up, shooting pure venom towards her.

“You...” Snape whispered with a cold, snakelike hiss. In this wane light, his pallid skin had a nasty greenish tint in it, as though some hideous disease had mangled its natural color. His uneven teeth together with the unnaturally long fangs were bared, and painted with the same nauseating hue. It was like watching Count Dracula draped in rotting, tattered rags.

Her heart sank somewhere to the level of her knees. For the first time, she was afraid of that spiteful male who both looked and sounded gruesome.

Nevertheless, something made her overcome the initial fright. Perhaps it was solely the horribly scorching guilt. She had to apologize, she had to apologize...

The following antsy rhapsody plain gushed out of her mouth. She scampered towards the ‘martyr’, and seized his clenched fist in mid-air.

“I n-never meant this to happen, I’m so sorry! I don’t understand how I was so clumsy again! Please, don’t be mad at me, Mr. Snape. I - I don’t hate you or anything like that. I didn’t mean the s-s-salad thing to happen and I didn’t mean t-this either! I’m really sorry, please don’t be mad at me...” she faltered on. Tonks hardly was aware of how her hands had opened his fist and begun squeezing it with a firm grip, while her fingers were doing some sort of massaging movements.

“It was all just an accident and I...”

Abruptly she fell mute. Every inch of the fierce expression on Snape’s visage had evaporated, and something else grown instead. Nonetheless, this stupefied, almost disgusted countenance the girl knew almost too well, from beyond two days...

This weird man had gazed at her in a manner very much alike, after he had detached his grip on her... That glazed, warped grimace... As if she had been the most abominable thing of the galaxy, something putrid, accursed...

His large, sinewy hand in her hold was rigid as granite. The long, whitish fingers had stiffened into uncannily crooked hooks.

A shudder went through her body, as she looked straight into his black, piercing pupils. Not comprehending what was going on, her hands still kept clasping his one, even beginning to smooth it.

“Pl - Please don’t look at me that way... I - I d-didn’t mean anything bad, really! And why did Sirius call you that way? It wasn’t nice of him at all! I - I know we don’t know each other all that well, but p-please don’t start hating me for this! We - we’re working on the same side, right?”

And Snape, before those pleading girlish eyes of Tonks, could not get a squeak out of his mouth. He merely felt like a cartoon duck that had been hit on the top of the brainpan by an anvil. His head was buzzing like a beehive under attack; his stomach was lurching as though he had just eaten a whole barrel of dragon dung. Severus did not see, he did not hear, he only felt.

Her little fingers were massaging his hand, smoothing it, squeezing it...

Tonks’ foggy form was stirring in front of his glazed eyes, gibbering something as blurry. Although he mastered English perfectly and had no bananas in his ears, this feminine murmur had transformed into something that the Little Green Men from Mars might have gabbled. His hearing organs could no longer catch the message, whereas his vision was full of smog. The phobia of being touched had bewitched him worse than ever. And the most horrifying was, that he could not draw his hand away. Every nanosecond his brains were requesting and moaning, giving orders to jigger the arrested limb away from the gentle prison of Nymphadora’s hold. But something malfunctioned badly under his cranium. Simply nothing worked. And it appeared that some kind of tomfoolery had bewitched also the other entrails. His stomach had abandoned the dragon dung excuse and was now dancing tango, his heart was playing basketball with itself, and his spine wriggled like a fierce boa under attack. Syllables were ferociously forming on his desert-dry palate, but they did not slither out. And still nobody was there to free his poor hand from the warm clutch of those little soft fingers.

Snape piled up his scattered concentration. He arduously succeeded to lift his other hand up into the air, and transport it to the spot in the near three-dimensional space where the second one currently withered. He obliged his skeletal index in the middle of the whole fist mess, in order to disengage Nymphadora’s grasp. In the meantime, an incoherent queue of consonants finally managed to plop out of his mouth.

“S-ssss-ssss-sss... Sss - Ssss!”

The confused man was obviously trying to utter ‘Stop it!’ But naturally succeeded to lose wholly the thread of words. And alas, all this laborious struggling pushed the things only deeper into the pit of tribulation. As Tonks spotted his second hand so keenly poking itself into the handholding tangle, she ceased it too, and set it to accompany its brother. Her fists were a bit too small to hold an entire pair of these large clawlike hands, but succeeded in any case to create a good, firm grip around them.

Although Snape’s heart had already zoomed around his chest like an especially manic Snitch, now it went into downright hysterics, and was about to sprint through his ribs.

“S-sssssss! SSSSSS! Ssss-ssshhhssssshhh!” he hissed and spluttered.

“I - I hope you didn’t catch a cold or anything, Mr. Snape, because y-you got soaked through and all!” the girl jabbered on in an angsty state of mind. The embarrassment was shimmering on her cheeks, especially because the victim of her blundering was acting so thoroughly odd.

“Ssss-sss! Sssssshhhhsssssss!”

“I met Remus in the corridor. He said he’d get you some warm and dry clothes. But shouldn’t you drink something warm too? I mean, it sounds like you’ve lost your voice. I know this one potion that might work for a sore throat...”

“Ssssss! Ga-gaga... Gagggh! Agagagaga! Quack!” A bit of variation was brought into the sound effects. Although, what difference did it make? Severus still sounded like a whacked-up rattlesnake.

“Umh, stupid me. Of course you’d know, you’re still teaching Potions, aren’t you? Ermh... I... Look, I’m really sorry about...”

The Auror was cut short. The chamber’s door opened, and Lupin strolled in. He was carrying a large bundle of purple garments. Tonks winced due to the extraneous jangle and leapt up, dropping Snape’s hands.

“Alright. Here we go,” the shabby wolf man sighed, and placed the canvas heap on the table. “You do not need to return these. Sirius wanted to get rid of them anyway. Of course he wasn’t quite happy to know I would give them to you, but anyway...”

Lupin then turned to Tonks, shooing her towards the exit. “We better go now. Severus has to get back to Hogwarts still tonight. So, let’s not take up more of his time.”

He closed the door with a snap, and the duo left behind the weirdly gurgling and quaking drake.

********

Nymphadora and Lupin slowly emerged from the shady, sepulchral hallway. Or moreover, it was the girl who hesitated and crawled onwards like tortoise in thick porridge. She kept glancing angstily over her shoulder every half a second, as if willing to dash straight ahead back into the den of the beaten bat.

The male drew quick conclusions from her expression. Shaking his head, he heaved a sigh. “Look, I know you must feel awkward about what happened. But I think you should just forget the kitchen thing, and keep a bit distance to Severus from now on. I know you did not mean it, but he... he unfortunately is a person that won’t forgive certain things so easily. He - well, he was having quite a fit about your wrong-gone monsoon spell when I brought him into the drawing-room. Well... It might have been better if you had not gone to see him at all.”

Tonks gawped at Lupin, whose prematurely lined visage carried a rather stern aspect. Exhaling deep, she cast down her jaded regard, feeling even more wretched than fifteen minutes ago. She possessed such a nature that she instinctively was willing to stay on good terms with everyone. Especially with the ones that fought the nefarious Dark Side and its lurking minions. Of course the relation between Snape and Tonks had never been all that brilliant, chiefly back at Hogwarts, where she had been known to blow up classrooms and turn cauldrons into triple-ended toucans with wrong-gone spells or false ingredients. But now that she was an adult and attending the Order’s brotherhood, she wished she could have stayed at least on a lukewarm footing with the Potions Master.

“I’m really sorry about this...” she murmured, talking merely to her toes. “Umh... you sure you get the kitchen back in shape?”

“Positive. Don’t worry about that.”

Abruptly another feminine voice rang nearby - as loud as it was possible without disturbing the house’s ultra-adorable portraits. Mrs. Weasley came bustling towards the girl, and dropped a mountain of thick blankets onto her shoulders, so that she almost lost her balance under their weight. Additionally, a bucket-sized cup of hot chocolate was pushed in her hands.

“There you are, dear! I’ve been looking for you everywhere! Now let’s go back upstairs and get you dried up,” Molly scolded the young Auror motherly. Crestfallen, Nymphadora pursued the elder woman’s gaits. Her sorrowful spirits pathetically crept in the mould’s deepest wormholes. Nothing could affirm whether that half-unknown weird man would ever forgiver her. The least the Order needed now, was some imbecile yackety-yak war of lingering grudge that would gnaw the whole guild from inside. Tonks, however, believed in her dejected heart that she had just started one.

---

It took at least ten minutes to reboot Severus Snape’s jamming brain-computer and load the cerebral operating system back into its full functionality. During the elapsed time, he had kept goggling at the floor as if it had been the most intriguing object of the Milky Way, his jaw drooping open. Thereupon he became conscious of the incessant tingling of his hands. He twitched back and forth in his seat, desperately trying to shake off the uncanny sentiment that kept embracing him. And what was the matter with his stomach? Had someone dumped a whole anthill there? That was the initial conclusion, since his tummy kept tickling just as badly as his fists.

As much as he wanted to perceive, comprehend... he could not. The thing he loathed, the thing he was so afraid of... a single innocent, friendly touch from someone... This time, the after-emotion had a totally different tune in it.

Her touch had felt sweet.

But why, how could that be? Snape tried gulping, but the volleyball-sized lump stuck in his throat persisted. This sole, single notion about the incident was actually even ghastlier than Do-Not-Even-Whisper-His-Name-Or-He-Will-Jump-From-Behind-A-Bush-And-Say-Boo with a throng of his vilest lackeys.

It had been just the second occurrence. So accidentally, so suddenly. But this time, it had lasted, lasted, lingered... the soft, warm, mild touch of her fingers. And that it indeed had felt sweet. But how could that be so? It was all so unreasonable! Sentimentality was for pathetic whiny wimps, not for a hardboiled iceberg-heart like he! Once again, the teacher shuddered with nausea. He was willing to screech aloud the objections against his perception. He was not a sniveling wishy-washy boyband singer mewling wistfully about love and cherishment. No, he was the concrete-rigid almightily steeled Severus Snape who would not be dismally trammeled in the traps of squishy sappiness!

These were his deep-rooted obsessions. Anything outside their strict cage belonged to the puddle of inexcusable mortal weaknesses.

But, but, but. Furthermore there was the big, fat but. Today, even his tiniest efforts to play a cold-hearted bogeyman seemed to perish. The illusion of Tonks kept flitting in front of his eyes, with her innocent, pleading expression. It probably was her unprejudiced genuineness that kept disturbing and at the same time attracting him the most. After these ‘accidents’, she had acted quite opposite to the way the Potions Master had used to. His biased expectations tossed everyone in the category of scorn and mocking, excluding perhaps Dumbledore, McGonagall, and his flock of Mini-Voldies in Slytherin House. If someone chucked an extra-smelly Dungbomb towards him - so that his robes kept sending a strong whiff of methane even weeks after the jest - nearly everyone would cackle at the cost of him. No wonder Nymphadora’s attitude was more than confusing.

Snape was presently in such a state that he wanted to hammer his skull with a baseball bat, and dispossess every single fantasy that invaded his sullen awareness.

“That silly child...” he muttered. He had been so distracted by the emotional hubbub, that he had forgotten his mirror image. Even a weather-beaten raven with a few missing feathers would have looked more shipshape than this oddball in his burned rags.

Hence, with a metaphorical Kleenex, Snape tidied away the worst bits of the thoughts, and targeted his concentration on peeling the oddly molten and crumpled robe shreds off. Soon he was standing beside a stack of black tatters that looked like Kreacher’s nest. The desolated chamber’s chilly air bit his bare skin. If the coldness had turned him into an icicle, his pigment nevertheless would have not become any more pallid than originally. But, against the zombielike impression fought the fact that Severus was no floppy chicken noodle. Gaunt-faced and slightly stooped, the age had yet brought sinewy strength in him. Not the kind of XXL-sized lumps that merely looked like fully blown balloons, but brawn that sat tight around the bones. Perhaps this slightly enhanced the impression of thinness. So, generally there were no lifebuoys around his waist. But even if he had dared apply for the Mister World contest - referring to his rather well-formed six-pack - he still would have been kicked out because of his remarkably Nosferatu-like looks and the possible vampire threat that would follow.

Severus arranged the borrowed plumes on. Nobody had an idea whatsoever, to whom this purple robe had belonged. Vaguely to indicate the former owner, there was a single golden letter Z sewn onto the collars. The garments hung like a flabby tent on him. Their former owner had probably been over seven feet tall and twice as wide as Snape. But, at least the clothes were warm. He would definitely need some shelter against the rain’s chilling kiss out there. The journey back to the Toad Queendom of Hogwarts was no mellow summer evening stroll.

Later on, a menacing purple shadow emerged from the yard of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, its cape rippling ominously in the enraged wind. Its hands under the sagging, wide sleeves were tingling worse than ever... not to mention the hallucination of a girl with pleading, embarrassed eyes tarrying in its consciousness.

“Go away, you silly child!” Snape growled.

But the silly child did not go away.