Even Old Morose Bats Can Get Soft

Time had advanced with light speed since the notorious kitchen cyclone. Hogwarts had enjoyed its Easter holidays, and was again teeming with more or less chaotic life. After the short but sweet armistice, the war between the Evil Umbridge Empire and the rebellion students was blazing again in the castle’s vast corridors. Even though the battlefield had lost its two bravest soldiers, Fred and George Weasley, this was not the combat’s end. Countless other bold pioneers dared continue the mutiny against the dark amphibian forces. Peeves gave a helping see-through hand every time there was a need to maul the dictator - which naturally meant that he became a merciful aid every other minute.

The poltergeist had also persuaded several other ghosts and even paintings to join the feast. One night, in the slithering sly murkiness, some sneaky, shadowy painted figure had gone to decorate Umbridge’s dear gamboling kittens with horns, batwings, pokers, and Hitler moustaches. Whispers in the frontier told that Moaning Myrtle had reversed the plumbing of some toilets, as if she had taken expert classes from Willy Widdershins - the master of regurgitating toilets - himself. In any case, several Slytherins belonging to the Inquisitorial Squad had one day caught an amazingly revolting fragrance. It kept joyfully residing in their oddly humid clothes. It was of course possible that their antiperspirants had failed horribly, but very rarely pure sweat had that particular scent of an old privy.

Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place had gone through another minor renovation besides the continuous destroying of rotting old junk. The water in the kitchen had sat tight like a foot in an overly small cowboy boot, showing no interest to evaporate. Nevertheless, when the last days of the holidays had approached, Mad-Eye Moody had found a neat de-monsoon charm in the dusty cavities of his skull. Thereupon the shallow indoors pool had vanished. Due to these special conditions, the Order meetings had been kept a while in the drawing-room, in separate smaller groups.

Now however the gibbering mass of spies and other lurkers were back in the normal space. Somehow the gloomy, dreary old kitchen appeared slightly less dismal these days. Nymphadora’s freshening rain had admittedly been an improvement. The water had washed the ancient soot from the uneven wall stones, and the floor had received a far lighter shade of gray than in decades. The rickety chairs and the exploded table had been restored with a Bob-The-Builder spell of some sort. They were no more rocky or creaky. On the other hand, they probably soon would fall back into their former abysmal state - at least if Nymphadora was nigh. Someone who was prone to tangle up with her own legs could not be very injury-healing company for poor innocent furniture.

Snape and Tonks had not seen even a millimeter of each other’s cloaks during these quickly leaping weeks. But this did not make his fuming and squirming inners feel any easier. Moreover, they were setting a new record of some kind in the chaos rate. At first, during the few following days after the hands-holding shock, the phobic bloke had swept his emotions fairly well under a carpet, and wished he would never ever again need to meet that silly child.

Yet somehow, the sentiments had only matured under the carpet. One terrifying night they had bounced out of their hidey-hole and ferociously attacked the professor. Thus... as much as he these days kept banging his greasy head against conceptual granite, as much as he wailed and ululated and yawled in his self-accusations, as much as he tried to remain as cool as solid hydrogen, certain images just did not leave him alone. They resided in his awareness from hour to hour. A pair of dark, beseeching, unprejudiced eyes, twinkling under a healthily green bush of sprouting hair... The moths flew back inside his stomach as he felt the recurrent tingling of his fists. As if some invisible bogey had jeeringly tickled them.

This psychological uproar of course caused several dodgy fallouts in him. The professor kept increasingly talking to himself aloud. Sometimes he addressed himself with adjectives he usually would award only to those insufferable dunderheads that managed to melt cauldrons during the Potions lessons. Or Harry Potter. His normally so steel-piercing eyes had often an oddly glazed coating, as though a cloud of swamp gas had hovered before them. A few teachers asked him if he had gotten enough sleep lately, and whether visiting Madam Pomfrey would be a good idea. Since nobody had ever seen the cranky old bat daydreaming before, it was automatically assumed that a fatiguing illness of some kind had bitten the fellow professor.

Indeed, Severus Snape occasionally had these weird daydream-esque moments. Their contents were relatively unclear, but the dulling mental miasma was wrapped in rather mellow warmth. And every time Snape startled awake in such a pond of sickening schmaltziness, his brains warped inside out, and he was near to puke out the pancakes.

And still... every time the sensation of a gentle light brush lingered on the back of his hands, he wished it would stay there a tad longer, just a tad longer... Or that those small, soft fingers would literally be back, holding his fist again, caressing his scarred, life-beaten hand...

---

It was just another Potions lesson with the particular class Severus mostly saw as insufferable oafs that beat even jellyfish in insipidity. Of course he sleekly exalted his pet pupils in Slytherin House, but some of this favoritism was mere false acting. Behind everyone’s backs, he rolled his eyes at the poor of quality of their potion samples. Especially Crabbe and Goyle’s splendid works were so dismal, that mere dishwater was closer to the delicate composition that was supposed to season in the cauldrons.

Indeed, it was again one of these classes with the fifth-years. Potter and his henchmen - or rather to say henchkids - crouched in the far end of the dungeon. This lesson however was not the common kind. Usually the teens were botching the rotguts themselves, accompanied by an outburst of differently colored mushroom clouds coming from their pots and pans. Today however, the hook-nosed male himself was demonstrating the progress of a rather difficult potion. This soup was so explosive, that he preferably cooked it up by himself. Otherwise his classroom might have soon looked as though a minor nuclear war had swept over it. This potion was one of the very last vital OWL topics to revise before the exams.

It was not affirmed whether it was safer to let the children or the half-manic professor brew the potion. The Pensieve ghost haunted him: Snape’s facial muscles twitched as if he had received a set of high-voltage electric shocks every time he glanced at Potter. He obsessively believed that the scar-head had babbled every by-passer what he had seen swimming in the ancient dish. Naturally nothing such had occurred. But would the biased teacher even consider that Potter truly might have zipped his lips? No.

Severus cursed his youth, cursed his nightmares. Nobody was supposed to know about the bitter humiliations of the past! Was now half the school aware of what color his seldom-washed underpants had been when he was fifteen? Those ignorant puny snots, gloating around at the cost of him, plashing in their wicked glee... And why was he now forced to bear two concurrent nuisances inside? The Potter pest and that other one... How utterly intolerable.

He took an attempt to concentrate on the potion he was brewing.

“As you may have noticed, I shall add only six drops of Hairy-Shinned Puffsnuffle’s foot sweat. I am generally aware that some feeble-minded lack-wit, who also considers attention-paying to be above his or her precious swollen head, could have easily made the unforgivable mistake of putting seven drops of the substance into the cauldron. And I daresay that such persons do exist among us in fairly large quantities...” he sneered silkily, adding some icky-colored goo into the gently fuming cauldron. He evaluated at the graveyard-silent class down the violently curving bridge of his long nose. This indeed was the only way to draw his attention away from the pent-up hatred: to act superior to everyone else, and praise his own talent with sleek smugness. His self-assurance was the most fondled by the fact that most of these pestilential youngsters were quite terrified of him when he was present. They huddled here in this cold dim dungeon, following his every smooth gesture with frightful awe. Ah, he had the estrade! This was his moment of glory!

“...I shall say this only once. And even the most subnormal twits in this very room ought to recall it, if they ever - for example after the unsuccessful school time - lay their untrained fingers onto topics they cannot understand. Seven drops, and your cauldron shall burst into flames higher than six feet. Twenty drops, and Hiroshima will look like a stunted set of fireworks, figuratively saying.”

He seized a moment to smooth his goatee with a long yellow finger, and leered at the class with a wicked curl of lip. “Forthwith, you ought to note the following sequence of ingredients I shall add next. It is precisely the order of how I drop the components into the cauldron, while the liquid must be constantly stirred in anticlockwise. Primarily, add forty-two berries of Zaphodsprout, then an old sock... It is not relevant to whom it has belonged, but it has to be well-worn and preferably slightly dirty. Next, you shall insert a pinch of dried batwings, then a very delicate puff of bottled poo gas...”

It is peculiar how a person’s mouth works parallel to his thoughts. The previous one can continue to blather almost anything even if the latter ones fly in utterly different spheres. While the potion matured, the aforementioned phenomenon happened to the professor. It was gradual, tardy and inadvertent sinking into the dreamland. His slickly gloating tone never died away, his hands kept dumping more putrid muck into the pot... But somehow, the scowl began wandering along the rear wall partly devoured by the shadows. The man’s regard passed several glass jars where something unnamed and rancid floated. A few empty chairs crawled past, then an old, weathered broomstick whose brushes were sticking out in every direction imaginable. The latter fellow had seemingly lolled rather long in the humid dungeons, since a delicate layer of fungus covered the brushes.

Her hair... how it had twigged everywhere like that, even the shade of green was almost perfectly the same...

A little tingling sensation made his hands shiver lightly.

That touch had been so soft... so warmly soft...

A tiny wriggle squirmed down his spine.

If he only could feel that touch again... Someday... perhaps just a lingering second, but that it would be back there, once more...

Snape’s maw was mumbling something utterly diverse. “And then I shall add five milliliters of Beetlejuice...”

Nonetheless, the breaking point of rationality was bound to come eventually, as the inners of his skull furthermore drifted in wholly different galaxies. And then the words would fail...

Snape indicated the minuscule blue crystal bottle between his thumb and index. “Then, add a strict quantity of this Tonks - erm - tonic...” His brains corrected the gaffe amazingly fast, but still swirled somewhere above the ionosphere. “The dosing of this tonic needs Nymph - Nimph - nimbleness of fingers. Henceforth, observe vigilantly how many drops I shall...” His hand was shaking too much. It accidentally toppled the whole bottle into the frothy gook bubbling inside the cauldron. The students were furiously writing down notes.

The Potions Master woke up from his daydream when an indistinct yellow blur whizzed inches past his eyes.

“Wha-” The glazed gaze had vanished. The now darkly dagger-sharp pupils stared at the empty flask in his clutches, and then shifted upon the cauldron. More yellow mist zoomed past, accompanied by peculiar quacking sounds. Something very weird was befalling inside the unlucky pot. Most of the students had flung themselves up from their seats, gawking at the more ludicrous than plain ludicrous scene from behind their desks. It was just too absurd to exist. The whole probability calculus failed to calculate the likelihood of this farce.

Little yellow rubber ducks - the very same that some eccentric Muggles used as their bath buddies - were bouncing out of the cauldron. The greenish mud wobbling inside it seemed literally spawning them. Uncountable amounts of little yellow rubber ducks emerged from the ooze. They quacked happily, as they landed at first on Snape’s desk, and then continued to rollick around the classroom. So far, there were tens of them, perhaps over a hundred. And the improbable odds promised that this flock of unlikely artificial animals would grow exponentially, if nobody annulled the effects of the impossibility mixture. But providentially Snape’s reflexes were working this time. Nobody was causing him heart-rending petrification by gently holding his hand.

In any case, the professor quickly extinguished the fire from under the cauldron. He shot the duck-generator with an angry vanishing spell. The greenish slime disappeared into the thin air with a small pop, but the plastic creatures remained to gambol around the dungeon. The students were bemused and unsure of what to do. Some had wane smirks on their faces; some merely cringed under their desks. Something had gone badly awry with Severus Snape’s supposed-to-be-perfectly-flawless class.

“Order in class!” the teacher bellowed, leaving his desk with an ominous swing of black robes. He was going to start a daring one-man fight against the foul ducks, but was shortly cut short by a brain-splittingly irksome 'hem hem' coming from the doorway.

Everyone’s heads swung viciously towards the exit, some of them turning rather painfully over 180 degrees in one shot. Dolores Umbridge simpered from the dungeon’s threshold. She was draped in a hideously lacy pink tent that only enhanced the bulging aspect of her as-wide-as-tall, slightly potatolike figure. Like so many times before, she was on a mission to obliterate the infernal rickety going on right outside this classroom, and had come to ask for help. Some of the local rebels had set up a merry mess-the-school celebration once more. In mere panic, Filch and the Toadmistress had hobbled down into the dungeons to stop it. And as usually, their tricks were as futile as trying to hush a crying brat in a rush hour bus. Nevertheless, now Dolores was quite shiftless. An infernal rickety also reigned over the place, from where she had believed to find help?

“Excuse me, Professor Snape, but what is going on here?” she trilled with her honeyed voice.

Snape’s synapses were buzzing ferociously. He had to invent some quick cover story to hide his own potion bloomer. He hardly could believe this. His gneiss-hearted self had again erred to swim in the lake of namby-pamby sentimentality, and thus he had muddled up his glorious potion? No! He would never ever confess the truth!

“I daresay some cunning pint-sized delinquent switched my potion ingredients into something false, and...” he lied. However, the sentence was aggressively crushed by the following rubber duck panorama.

As mentioned, all the gazes had turned towards Umbridge as she had hem-hemmed. Even the ones of the cavorting swarm of plastic. All abruptly - so abruptly that nobody was unable to seize the forthcoming pandemonium - the yellow flock swooped into the air and surrounded Umbridge from every side. An odd transformation was happening in the previously happy ducks. They had suddenly grown a set of sharp-looking fangs in their beaks. Their benevolent eyes had narrowed into vile slits. The duckies were mutating into miniature monsters in a fraction of a microsecond. Soon the Headmistress was flinging her stubby arms in the air, attempting in vain to drive away the quack pack.

“Shoo! Shoo!”

No spell worked. The evil rubber duck army was pecking her, and ripping the pink laces with their newly conjured vampire teeth. Squealing, the woman blasted off from the doorway. She began to gallop down the Slytherin corridor as much as her stumpy short legs carried, chased by those vile, ruthless freaks.

This occurrence also affirmed finally the well-known suspicion that all rubber ducks are evil.

*****

Producing all kinds of snarls, grumbles, and other angry-hound-like noises, Snape swept out of his classroom. By Merlin’s toothbrush, where were the mouse-holes when you needed one? He was so ashamed, so angry with himself, boiling so heatedly that an omelet might have roasted nicely on his burning forehead. He, the superiorly expert potions maker, had been such a fool! Although the blooper had been ingeniously hidden behind the white lie, and no outsider really could see through the thick veil of falsehood, Severus had his reasons to be utterly embarrassed. And worse was that he had accidentally dumped the whole bottle of Black Crawlycreeper Extract into the pot’s mouth. His only and single flask! How was he supposed to demonstrate the Slug Diarrhea remedy to the seventh-years tomorrow? What a disgrace! And experience told him that there was not a single drop of it available in the near fields of Hogwarts.

Tearing his hair, his gorge grousing not-so-children-friendly gurgles, the black-robed male soared back into his office. What now? Hogsmeade aided in no wise. The best potion ingredients shop was closed because the nutty owner had traveled to Sweden to study the Crumple-Horned Snorkack. Would the professor need to flit all the way to London to get his extract? Even the bare thought made him grate his uneven teeth. Oh, for once he had wished to spend a calm, nice evening just by sulking with himself in the darkest, murkiest corner of his bedroom. Snape had no Order meetings today. Hence he was not bound to enter the hyper-teeming capital. Actually, the whole thought of mounting his broom, and soaring out into the icy drizzle felt so repulsive that he would have preferably asked Umbridge out. Which naturally was something he would never do even under the strongest Imperius Curse. London... bah. And raining again. His typical luck. Just like the infamous night he had dragged the oversized purple robes out of the Order Headquarters.

The scarecrow, however, had no alternative. If he would be swift in his actions, he might have a minuscule slice of time to pop in Diagon Alley. If inquired, he at least would have a jolly good reason not to stay and help Dolores or whomever else. Besides, he did not care a flying rat’s whisker about what the evil rubber ducks had done to that ol’ frog. Moreover, the mental image made his thin lips curl into a depraved, gleeful smirk.

******

Umbrella spells and other water-resistant mantras had been mandatory while darting from Hogwarts all the way to Diagon Alley. The night was falling. But the dodgiest shops of the Wizard Streets were open till small hours, attracting all kinds of nightcrawlers, hags, vampires, and other miscellaneous bats. Torches and pallid streetlamps had been lit to expel the horrid darkness creeping sneakily around.

Snape had just slipped into a gloomy, narrow alleyway branching off from the main road. This was one of those unnamed, tiny lanes that were supercharged with odd, nearly microscopic stores. Every nook was soaked with obscurity. Every creature had to be careful with his or her steps in this dismal passage. The ancient cobblestone pavement was very uneven and eaten by erosion. The only light came from a pasty, semi-dim old gas lamp that hung in a rusty hook just above the shop where the Potions Master was heading. While he swished around in his raven robes, his body blended perfectly in the background. Thus it merely looked like as if a loose, bleached head had drifted on its own in the air.

Snape’s skeletal hand grabbed the battered, wooden handle of the somber potions store. The sooty window in his left was filled with items so creepy that they would have given instant nightmares to any Muggle kid, excluding the youngest generations that were so corrupted by the smack-and-kick video games, that they were generally immune to anything. The door opened with the typical ghostly creak that old doors in places like this were prone to possess. An old bell rattled somewhere, telling the storeowner about a prominent customer.

Half an hour later, the professor emerged from the shop with a rather satisfied simper. That tiny sinister hole had been such a bonanza concerning the delicate art of potionmaking. Ah, all those oozing venoms and stinky poisons! What a dreamland! He had bought a whole load of new fantastic substances. They were packed into a huge, crumpled paper bag. The burden had been conjured to float in midair due to the teacher’s already loaded arms. As he unfortunately did not own a third arm, it was comfier to let the cargo pursue him on its own.

There were a few tens of meters of darkness to pass before the nameless street joined Diagon Alley again. He was perfectly alone in the forbidding night. Only the grimy, almost vault-like walls were his mute company. His smirk widened. Ah, the beauty of old dark lanes... that was something those ignorant imbeciles jogging in the boring sunlight could not perceive. Perhaps it had not been such a poor idea to come here after all. The magpie had found its shiny bling-bling, and was happier than in days. And this blissful freedom to enjoy his solitude, what an introvert’s paradise...

But abruptly he saw indistinct movement in the corner of his eye. The gas lamp behind him barely illuminated the small opening just in the right. Betwixt two cloud-tickling high walls, was a scanty gap with shabby steep stairs leading upwards. Something was running down them in a clambering way, as if escaping something... In addition, it seemed that this something was losing its balance near the staircase’s middle...

A bloodcurdling shriek echoed in the air. Snape’s head swung rightwards, just to notice how the black figure came tumbling down the escalator. It was falling towards him in a way that if he did not seize it, he would also be toppled. In a spiderlike instinct, rather involuntarily, his arms caught the shady bundle in midair. They clenched around it with a mousetrap-like, hard hold. Some miscellaneous doohickeys - including an old Comet broom - clattered down the stairs after the biggest lump.

Thick, grey smoke of resentment was coming out of Snape’s nostrils. His lower lip was quivering with rage, his almost reddened eyes blazing deadly laser beams. Who the dratted, triple-cursed lamebrain dared to disturb him like this? His day had been difficult enough already! Who was this diabolical intruder? His blessed isolation was gone!

“Merlin’s beard! Watch where you are going, you...”

His maw was to explode under the pressure of the terrible blusters that additionally needed heavy censoring. However, as he cast his eyes down upon the squirming heap he subconsciously clasped against his chest with the harsh-esque pinch, the syllables were drained due to the appalled comprehension. There was something eerily familiar with that violet shrubbery of hair distinctly similar to the old broomstick he had kept so romantically ogling today...

“You... Y-y-y - you...” he hasped, dumbstruck. “You...!” Snape could not help it, his grip on the person almost triple-tightened as something lava-hot filled his lungs.

The figure in his arms had raised its regard, still semi-baffled after the drop. A few inches below his nose-tip curved the facial features of Nymphadora Tonks.

In his arms, like this? He was to lose his senses.

---

The dark, dreary alleyway stood silent like an ancient tomb in the cold earth’s embrace. The sallow gas lamp’s orb quivered in the air feebly. But a few louder thunk thunk thunks were irritably disturbing the idyllically Gothic atmosphere. Snape’s heart was jumping up and down in his thorax with salsa rhythms, his knees were clattering against each other under his robes. Someone was shoving infernally hot coals down his collars. Plainly astonishing was, how he managed to keep his jaw from twitching manically. Severus was squeezing Tonks as if she had been a half-empty toothpaste tube. His mind barely functioned. Moreover, it had been captured, put to wear a straitjacket, and thrown into a loony house. Crick, crack, snap, someone was breaking the flinty rock shells of his heart with a sledgehammer.

As usually in hyper-romantic moments, one second feels like a decade. Even now, in the most classical way. She was just inches away... So soft... So warm against his chest...

It took a few blinks from Nymphadora to startle awake from the confusion of her falling. Concerning time, its relativity depends on the observer’s point of view. Thus for her, the few elapsed time units had merely been one fast swoop of a Bludger zooming towards an unsuspecting player’s occiput. Which of course was far away from the conceptual centuries Snape was enjoying. At first, she had heard someone hissing and spluttering annoyed and overdramatic curses near her. Then, an ominous quietness had taken the lordship. Additionally, she in a flash recalled the preceding moment of her fall. She had half-manically run to shrug off the ill-omened shadow that had been following her. At first it had been only lurking, but had rapidly turned into a mere chase. Tonks had kept changing her outer appearance during the gallop. This had taken a crucial part of her concentration. Thence, if you were prone to blunder even in full senses, a grim slippery staircase was well-suited to add the cherry on top of the cream cake.

Now the not-so-frail damsel in distress experienced a moment of fright, as she lifted her regard upwards. Uttering a small startled eep, she for a second remained to stare at the ghastly, wily view that arched just a few inches above her. An ashen, vampiric face with bared yellow teeth stared at her with its hungry black eyes through a gap in something that resembled a pair of extremely unwashed curtain shreds hanging over a smutty window in the Hog’s Head. Its visage appeared oddly crow-like, particularly the scary beak-like nose-oddity slapped right in the middle of everything. This monster’s mouth was strangely warped. Its wheezing, broken respiration sounded as though someone had poorly played bagpipes. What was this terrible gorgon? Some treacherously dangerous magical creature recruited by Voldemort? A male Harpy? Or a hideous mutant alien from Mars?

No. For the Auror’s heart-warming luck, it was just a human man with somewhat vulturous appearance. And moreover someone she knew. The latter fact made her cheeks flare up with deep crimson hues. Although this very moment was supercharged with hurly-burly of all sorts and sizes, Nymphadora still could well dig up certain embarrassing recollections from beyond the few elapsed weeks. So, she had collided again with the uncanny Potions Master. How she had tried to shoo his image away from her self-accusatory awareness... Through the weeks, her conscience had kept nagging like an angry mother standing on the threshold of an extremely messy children’s room. It had granted her no nirvana about Snape’s fate. She never had found out if the important Order member had forgiven her or not. Lupin’s advice about calmly forgetting everything had just plain whizzed through her skull, popped out of her other ear, and faded into the blazing winds of the Great Britain.

And now... Here she was, nose to nose - or figuratively saying nose to beak - with the oddball crow once more. And in a very odd jumble indeed, as she seemed to be clamped up in his arms, hanging nicely several feet above the streetlevel.

“Eh... Wotcher?” She forced her mouth into a hasty smirk. She tried to rise up a nervous hand into a little wave, but the act turned out excessively unsuccessful. The whole arm that was connected to this jumpy fist was stuck inside the cage of Snape’s pinch. And, here the inauspicious atmosphere lingered again. Why was that bloke staring at her that way? Had she mustard smeared all over her face or what was the problem? This could not be the reason, since she had not lately eaten any hot dogs. That granite-splitting gaze of those two black pupils was just so inexplicable. She, of course, could not see what was beyond. Only the smoldering projection of his mental perturbation.

Then she recalled the other trouble. The flight and the pursuer. Hushing down her voice, she piped, “Erm... Mr. Snape, could you... let me down? I’m being chased...”

His face stood fossilized, his brains still fleeting in the outer rims of the Milky Way. They had thoroughly lost the ability to understand simple human speech.

So soft, warm... So young, so fresh... He only gawked, weltering in the very honey-dripping valleys of mawkishness he so much loathed.

Abruptly, running footsteps were thundering somewhere above the Gothic romance. They were coming from the upper part of the same staircase, from where the little sparrow had been dropped into the raven’s talons.

Tonks made an uneasy squirm. There it was. The chaser was jogging along the terrace roof that she had just used as a getaway. The girl had had a nice head start, and would have easily yapped hasta la vista to the nasty sycophant. But now, the Snape-collision had changed everything. Was it all too late to rush anywhere? Any quick sanctuary would be fine, even the nearest trashcan. Even if it was dumped full of semi-putrid herrings. Ripping her arms out of Snape’s clutches, she grabbed his cloak collars and shook the lone dreamer awake.

“Mr. Snape, please let me go! There’s someone after me!”