Even Old Morose Bats Can Get Soft

“Well... we shall see about this...”

Snape closed Umbridge's office door with a snappish snap. An oddly expressionless expression was frolicking on his visage. The man teetered between two problems, unsure which one he should draw under his hooknose for further inspection.

Unnoticed, his fist clenched around the handle of his wand. Dolores with her acts of utter stupidity had only irked him more. Oh, how much that clawlike hand wanted to point this wizardous weapon towards that insufferable ministry minion, how much his throat wanted to croak a hoarse Crucio... Or how about a nice little Imperius, and the Giant Squid might have a new pal... But no. Illegal curses were illegal, how much he ever would have wanted to spare one for an extremely rainy day. He had his debt to Dumbledore, and perhaps the old sage allowed no third chances. And this moment was definitely not suited for rash actions. Moreover it required sleek patience, with a pinch of greasy cunningness strewn onto it.

“On probation... I, the mighty Master of Potions...? Pfft. And she dares...” he shortly snorted, burying then completely the desire to perform some Dolores-torturing. More important was the scene occurring in the major frog lair, behind this very door. Only a blink earlier, Draco Malfoy had come to yank his sleeve, telling that the Headmistress wanted to see the professor. An uncanny sight had awaited. Umbridge's office had been stuffed with struggling students, the infamous Potter in the very middle. This scar-stamped teen had been using the toad-fire - undoubtedly to quickly visit Grimmauld Place - and then been caught in mid-action with his cronies. The bearer of the pink lacy nightmares had demanded Veritaserum to find out what Potter had been up to.

A definite toughie. Although Snape was no super-skilled Legilimens, and mainly had to squeak spells in order to filch someone's intracranial secrets, he had been able to read some alarming news in Harry's eyes. Even before the kid had slipped out the babble about Padfoot.

Snape smoothed the black whiskers growing on his strong jaw with a finger that was adorned with a badly manicured, yellowed fingernail. Should he coil behind the door for a while and eavesdrop? Or should he immediately flit down into his bat-cave and contact the Order? He could not just sit down to play Exploding Snap, but had to operate swiftly.

Black at the Department of Mysteries? The Dark Lord torturing him...?

This sheer notion was completely absurd. Yet, Potter had not self-sketched that blurry image of the Animagus crouching between the shelves filled with glass orbs. Someone had planted this phantasm in his mind. Was this now finally The Ultimate It Dumbledore had been afraid of since last December? When You-Know-Blaablaablaa would finally take the upper claw of Potter's dreams, and make the Teen Celebrity to believe in something thoroughly false? Yet... Black was a rash personality and could have gone looking for trouble... But even though the latter possibility existed, it was not very likely.

No other justifications were offered. Severus threw a last cold glance towards Umbridge's door, and swept down the stairs. So... Potter believed his dear Godfather to be in distress and wanted to play the world-saving superhero once more?

“Oh, how utterly typical...” the Potions Master murmured irritably while brushing along the archways like a giant black broomstick. “Never took even the slightest initiative to heed my instructions on how to close the mind from external penetration! He plainly is weak, pathetic, and yet so arrogant that does not even comprehend to hearken to those who are more eminent with wisdom and age! Indeed in vain I offered him my precious time, and I quite saw this coming. Just splendid.”

Sulkily he pushed his withering office door open. It bore so many scars of maltreatment alike the solitary dweller beyond. The hole left by Monday's pigeon panic had been hastily repaired with a piece of oak boarded over it. Snape had scared the living Flobberworms out of the bird in such a way, that it had not only dashed through the bedroom exit, but also demolished the main door. Ah the magical wonders of nature...

In his dark, shadowy dungeon, the Potions Master arranged some haberdashery onto a small round table that stood on spindly insectlike legs. He was going to contact Grimmauld Place and find out whether the doggie really had turned utterly lack-wit and pounded straight ahead to Voldemort's Kennel of Doom. The professor also needed further instructions concerning The Grand Toad. As the old tart resentment towards the Potters existed, he did not care a flying piggybank's hind leg if Umbridge gave Harry a thousand years worth of detention or confiscated his whole property till the last pair of socks. Yet, he did not want the spectacled messy-hair dead or too much hurt. This included keeping the kid safe at Hogwarts, away from Voldemort's sweet green-flame charms. And also away from other factors that might have caused irreparable damage.

Cronking odd Latin caws, Snape poured some fuming green potion from a small bottle onto a shallow silver plate. Instantly the carvings of the dish began shimmering with acid-green light. Spiraling billows tinted with this same ill hue started eddying from its surface. The man bent over the dish, and took a few deep inhales of the steam, which smelled slightly of old unwashed socks. This niff was however a sweet rosy fragrance compared to the moldy, damp stench of the ancient dungeons. No wonder his overlarge nostrils seemed enjoying the reek so much. As he had enough savored the charming foot-sweat stink, the bat sunk his face completely inside the vibrating green smoke.

*******

At Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, a glum-looking Sirius sat at the drawing-room table. With a tart side-glance, he frowned at Snape's head, which was bobbing and wobbling on a similar kind of silver platter. Severus looked positively repulsive, as his thin sallow countenance oozed upwards from the dish's bottom as a smoky ghostlike projection. His greasy hair spiraled like slimy snakes in the green swirling fumes, his skin having almost a putrid look on it. And his loathing, toothy grimace crowned perfectly the whole freak-show.

The two merry school pals had barely finished a glare-and-scowl, bark-and-hiss conversation about the Umbridge case and Harry's Floo adventures. Sirius was in a way smug about his godson's courage to take such risks, but also very alarmed because of this unforeseen whoobub. The Animagus was alone at the Order Headquarters, and thus also the only one to answer the call of the silver platter. This walkie-talkie dish was one of the stealthier means Hogwarts used to keep in touch with the birdwatchers.

“And tell me, Snivellus... you probably left Harry and the others at the mercy of that old hag, with nobody looking after what she's doing now? Huh?” Sirius rasped to the loose Snape-head.

A snarl emerged from the plate. “Indeed... Of course, it is highly comfortable for you to loll and be lazy in your puny hidey-hole and criticize those who are given more responsibilities and actually execute things for the Order... How very much like you, always seeking for the broad and easy route... So, perhaps you can tell me, how am I supposed to exist in two places concurrently? Or am I all of a sudden supposed to acquire a twin brother and send him to save your wee precious Potter from the claws of the icky Grinch? Pssht. Of course I had to make sure first whether he is beholding factual visions or not. But it is neither my fault if the dear pop star brat is being brainwashed by the Dark Lord, nor that I am forced to select whether to be in place A or B or Z."

"Oh now it isn’t, what?" Black let out a hollow laughter. "Look, you stinking Slytherin, who..."

With a sour retort, Snape cut short Sirius's bellow. Although the Potions Master did not want to admit it, his old rival had a lot of sense in his growls. He perhaps should have skulked outside the toad warren just a tad longer, and ensure that he knew surely what was happening. And had not the prudent Albus warned him about knotty difficulties equal to this...? The Umbridge-hazard was not to be overlooked, whereas the Potter gang had the habit to cause unexpected calamities... Hence Severus wanted to end swiftly this blame contest and soar back upstairs.

"I do not possess unlimited time for online chatting, especially if I am supposed to be in so many places simultaneously. But you indeed ought to use your prolonged holiday more wisely and inform at least a part of the Order that the Dark Lord is planning something. It is not a mere coincidence that he has been summoning the Death Eaters so frequently and that Potter is seeing these visions."

"Fine! And you..." Black started, but in the wing beat of a hummingbird, the pasty phiz had vanished from the plate, and the frizzy fumes began slowly dying down.

*****

“And he has the guts to call me names, slouching there like an idle amoeba and performing nothing useful...”

Maundering morosely under his breath, Snape rushed up the escalators. A few curious students peered wondering at the speedy professor. However, they quickly shifted their gazes elsewhere when meeting the teacher's callous black pupils. There was always the threat that their house might have just lost a few hundreds of thousands of points.

Nonetheless, it seemed that Snape no longer had to plagiarize James Bond. As he arrived in the Umbridge corridor, he instantly perceived that not everything was right. The office door was ajar, the aisle unguarded. Ominous, somehow suffocated meows and whimpers were emerging from the door's gap. Cautiously he prodded his eye in the chink, the thick black brow above it quickly dashing upwards. Dolores and the kid prisoners were nowhere. Instead, the floor was littered with the Inquisitorial Squad. Some of them were unconscious; some of them struggled with hideous hexes. In one corner, Draco Malfoy was being attacked by a battalion of bat bogies, the bold Slytherin aristocrat mousily puling with anguish and trying in vain to shoo the flapping foes away.

Snape’s lip curled hideously. That served the puny gossipmonger right... Severus never had become oblivious of the Knockturn Alley slanders. Ah how the revenge tasted as sweet as sugared strawberries with ice cream...

"Fun to cackle at my appearance with your Big Tycoon Daddy? Oh but the parts may change sometimes..." the semi-villain sniggered in his mind, when next heading for the Hospital Wing and leaving the gamboling Technicolor kittens to guard the cumulus of cursed for a while. Madam Pomfrey would sort out the jinx mess. Nevertheless, Severus had no coffee breaks ahead. More quickly than Hermione invented another pointless elf right, he would need to figure out whether the Giant Squid had gorged Umbridge and the Potter flock, or if there was another less fribble explanation for their complete absence.

---

"Alright, mates. Who's ready for a little magical mystery tour?"

Despite that Sirius’s gaze was rather grim, his gaunt face was drawn into a mischievous, rather puerile grin. An octet of curious eyes stared at the Animagus around the kitchen table. Moody, Shacklebolt, Lupin, and Tonks had only a blink earlier popped in the house. Black had indeed utilized well his unlimited leisure time and sent a few hollers around the wizarding suburbs. The three Aurors and the Big Non-Bad Wolf had caught the alerts first, and taken them seriously enough to dart to Grimmauld Place immediately.

“It was Sniv - krh - Snape, for the second time,” Black whisked a finger upwards to point at the drawing-room somewhere in the deep shadowy bowels of the ancient house. "He told me Harry hasn't come back from the forest, and assumes that my godson is no longer anywhere in the proximity of Hogwarts."

The ex-Azkabanian cleared his throat, leaving intentionally bits of the conversation untold. A major plotline was the assortment of foul nicknames these two pals had invented for each other. However, the fact that Severus had requested Black to remain at the Headquarters if the Phoenix troops would decide to have an unauthorized picnic in the Ministry of Magic tonight, became instantly a certain kind of sally for him. As if Sirius was going to grow fungus in this putrid flytrap when the others got a chance to kick some bandit booty...

Lines grew deeper on Lupin’s forehead, as he knit his brows. "So... This would mean that Harry and his friends have really gone to the Department of Mysteries to save you..." He looked up at Sirius, whose bearded visage was furthermore smirking somewhat haughtily. "Voldemort has finally succeeded in his plotting... But what else can we do, but to go and help them? We all should be ready. Something like this would have happened sooner or later in any case."

A series of serious nods replied from around the table. However, Lupin's concerned gaze remained aimed at the daredevil dog.

"But... shouldn't you still stay here, Sirius? I know you don't like what Snape asserted, but... is it wise to reveal yourself in public? And besides, Dumbledore will be here shortly. Someone ought to remain and tell him what has happened, and where we have gone."

Black's barklike laughter boomed heartily in the kitchen, as though a huge bulldog had been sniggering at a kitten it had just chased up into a tree.

"Me? Ha! I don't care a ruddy Merlin's chamberpot about what that ol' slimehe... Erm -" He swallowed the rudeness, recalling abruptly the anti-bash oath he had sworn to Tonks concerning Severus. “Hrhm. No, blimey, I'm coming! How'd Harry know for sure that I'm alright if he doesn't see me with his own eyes? And I can delegate those boring things to Kreacher. Finally that insulting sloth gets something reasonable to do.”

While these two males gibbered about today's major mêlée, Nymphadora in her nook was roaming in the firth of sudden silence. Absent-mindedly she stared at the table's battered sooty surface, the black rings left by tankards, the grooves made by knives.

This was the first time since Sunday she had heard anything from Severus. The week had shambled onwards wearing robes of utter discomfiture. The girl had expected the blanching days to bring in some enlightenment... but there was nothing. No letter of apology, not even a square millimeter of parchment sacrificed for the sake of her. What was that bloke playing at, deliberate hide-and-seek? A small geyser of resentment was bubbling inside her, making her cheeks briefly shimmer with hair-matching pinkness.

Sirius was stagnating nearby, grilling a random chair in the green flames emitted by his wand, as though quickly practicing on how to broil a Death Eater. Impulsively a rather silly idea popped in her mind, and she gave an insecure query.

"Umm... Sirius, is... um, is Mr. Snape by any chance still there...? Erm... at the plate?"

The simper faded from Black's face. His sharp eyes adopted an odd, hostile-esque glint. “No. He said he's going to the Forbidden Forest to do some searching. Why are you asking...?”

Under her cousin's scrutinizing stare, Nymphadora flushed involuntarily to the roots of her hair. Suddenly she felt so naïve, so ashamed because of this microscopic question. The Order members were preparing to have a death match against Lord You-Must-Quiver-And-Cringe-And-Whimper-If-You-Hear-His-Name and here she was worrying about one stupid kiss? How utterly childish.

"Umh... nothing,” the girl gulped, wishing she would find a secret badger-hole where to slink with her embarrassment. Black's bushy brows remained crumpled for a while. But by the time the Phoenix buddies left the old rotting house, his waxy, almost scull-like face had softened back into that juvenile grin. Finally he was able to go and perform some wand-jiu-jitsu against the lackeys of the Dark Side...

...not foreseeing that a Death Eater would turn him into a dead eater under the fading stars, before the new morning's first sanguine light.

*****

"Grrhhmmmpfffghghgrrrrrrpfff..."

Purple twilight blazing with orange arched above the summery vista of the Hogwarts grounds. But what was the dreadful lopsided figure that was emerging from the Forbidden Forest? Its ripped, fraying garments were glued against its thin frame. Its deep growling echoed silently under the dying sunbeams. Every time this monstrosity limped a step onwards, it made an odd squelching sound, as though it had been a self-bouncing plastic bag filled with water.

But no, the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was not in a fatal danger because of this forest gorgon. Some nearer inspection confirmed that the shadow was none else but a certain Potions Master, who was returning from the Potter hunt. However, Lady Fortuna had quite not awarded him her sweet kisses, but moreover spanked him with misfortune. The only positive result of this forest hiking was that now Snape with 500% certainty knew that the scar-head's gang indeed had weaseled all the way to London, and apparently with a pack of Thestrals. It was not a trick for the old lurker to see such gloomy creatures. His dank past concealed such deeds of utter darkness inside itself, that many people would have considered second chances far too merciful for him.

What came to Umbridge, her fate had also been confirmed. The professor had found a pink bowtie, decorated with something that distinctly resembled Hello Kitty -figures, hanging from a random bush. The nearby undergrowth had been trampled with hoof-prints. From this evidence, the batman drew his own conclusions, but did not care a wombat's whisker about her dolorous destiny. Or... in a sense, he did care. The worse it was, the more he had these tasty cookies of glee to munch.

Until then, he had managed to keep his robes almost in a Lockhart-like perfection. But on the way back, while he had strolled along the bank of a surgy brook, he had been horribly attacked by a ravenous Oolated Squigg. This dreadful beast had stealthily risen from the water, and pulled the unsuspecting man into the cold, splashing torrents with its slimy tentacles. The near history tells that a short but heated battle between these two magnificent forces was fought. It included a lot of screeching, sprinkling showers of silvery water, a variety of differently toned sloshing splatters, and lastly a fierce Avada Kedavra slurred with a voice that sounded like as though its owner had had his mouth full of mud. A tad later, the valiant Squigg-slayer had egressed from the foaming swells. The brute was oozing now somewhere under those whitecaps, its thread of life bisected. Severus had lost half of his robes. His right trouser leg and buckled boot had been chewed with good appetite, and his soggy hair was dripping greenish sludge. Despite the bruises, he had been eager to leave the scene rather swiftly. The green light head-chop had been a poky 'oopsie', and probably had caused severe harm to the forest's delicate ecosystem. Perhaps Oolated Squiggs were a species on the verge of extinction, and maybe this one had been the last of its kind. And as the old scarecrow was not really supposed to use the Unforgivable Curses... not even on these stereotypical horror story monsters that always had to spring up at some point of the plot.

When the heavenly candles were lit, and the wind began humming the vesper hymn, the crumpled and ripped bat eventually hobbled up the castle's outdoor stairs. The bare, pallid leg growing tufts of black hair did not match well the pointed shoe still intact in his left foot. With some cloth shreds, the professor tried to cover the jolly merry Dark Mark smiling so gracefully in his hairy forearm. This Swamp Thing was furthermore dripping with green-gray mire, thus beautifying the sparkling Entrance Hall floor with slippery muck. Shivers made his tall figure wriggle. The bath in the cold creek had not been any sauna experience.

"When I get that incompetent stunted vermin in my hands..." he gnarled under his breath, accusing Potter of the Squigg skirmish. He was supposed to enjoy the imperial post of being the Deputy Headmaster now that both McGonagall and Umbridge were gone. But, here he was, bruised and oozing gook. And in serious need of today's popularity: the Hospital Wing.

---

The snail of time crawled.

It crawled.

Crawled some more.

And a few inches added to that.

Inside an hourglass, the glittering grains of fine sand trickled.

The snail of time still stirred and crawled.

The snail of time got heavily bored to its dull shuffling and fell asleep.

Although the black marquee of night had been stretched over the firmament, hardly any of the teachers at Hogwarts snoozed. Six students gone, half a dozen more sprawling in the Hospital Wing, the Headmistress glutted by the carnivorous woods... the goblet of mishaps was brimming over.

The gloomy dungeon was lit only by a few shapeless candle-ends. The patched Potions Master sat at his desk. Although he tried to sink his hooknose into the ancient, tattered book he kept open on the table, he possessed not even a milligram’s worth of concentration. London there somewhere, beyond the misty miles, was ablaze. He sensed the rumbling tides of war, but did not know exactly what was going on. No news had come from the outside world in hours. This unawareness was rather galling, especially because the time always chose to drive with the slowest gear during suspense. Severus felt very fatigued. All this time with no proper sleep, and yet he had been playing Indiana Jones the whole day... Perhaps he ought to brew a small stimulant potion, since the bedtime loomed nowhere on the horizon.

But when a pasty, gray light was lit in the farthest east, something finally happened. All abruptly, the dungeon fireplace burst into green sparks. Swirling, Dumbledore's tall figure stood in the middle of the neon flames. But the old wizard never stepped forth into the actual room.

"Severus, you are needed elsewhere. I am back, and henceforth you are released from your duty here."

With the whirl of these words, Albus was gone, as suddenly as he had appeared.

Somewhat stunned by the shortness of this declaration, Snape gathered up his plastered self. Perhaps Dumbledore had his reasons to be cryptic and in a haste. Yet, from that short sentence, the professor understood that he was expected at Grimmauld Place. In addition, a great cargo of granite nuggets was unloaded from his burden. The proper Headmaster was back, and seemingly the Potter bluster somewhere in the mystery mazes had not been a total disaster.

Or had it? That lined face glimmering pearly in the green flames had been dour and jaded. There had been no mellow twinkle behind the half-moon spectacles.

******

The Order members hunching around the battered kitchen table all seemed shadow-eyed and sullen. Many were constantly wriggling, attempting to find snugger positions in the hard chairs, so that their throbbing backs and bruised limbs would sear less. This was the post-reaping of today's dark harvest, where reports were given, and causalities searched for. Severus roosted in his alcove, looking like a frostbite crow that had been dipped into an unflushed toilet. He kept rubbing his benumbed hands together, shuddering still after the nocturnal broom-ride. Although it was the deepest summer, the winds above the sleeping grounds were cruel and biting. And it seemed as though a storm was surreptitiously raising. The breeze blew more violently than usually.

The whispering in the room faded, as Mad-Eye Moody drew himself laboriously up. A nasty-looking reedy gush, still shining red, was carved across the left side of his visage. Another war memorial amongst the previous grooves. His grim gaze brushed athwart the tomb-silent room a few times, before he let his rasping tone open the meeting.

"First of all, for mine and everyone's great misery, I must announce that Sirius Black, our brave brother and friend, has left us for forever. He was killed this night by his cousin, the Death Eater Bellatrix Lestrange."

It was as though an icy, sackcloth wind had swept through the chamber in the wake of this sentence. The balmy yellow candlelight seemed suddenly sickly pale, and the fire crackling in its nest warmed no more. Many individuals bowed their heads, some stirred uncomfortably on their chairs with watering eyes. Even Severus had reacted, however rather uncharacteristically. No sneering smirk twisted his thin mouth, but a blanched, somewhat confused expression shaded his gaunt features. His dissonant mind did not seem to comprehend fully what his ears had just caught. Nonetheless, the next time Alastor spoke, the mallet of bad news was smashed against his ringing head far more forcefully.

"It is perhaps an offence for his memory to talk about luck... but we are lucky we lost no more lives. Nymphadora Tonks slightly evaded the same fate, and has been transferred to St. Mungo's. She is still unconscious, but we are expecting her to survive."

Snape in his shadowy corner had gone utterly rigid. The last pixels of color had been scraped from his face. The forest creek's soggy frostiness was out of the blue embracing him again. Moody's exhales were reverberating in his scull, a sepulchral hollowness bound to every vowel and consonant.

Slightly evaded the same fate... Slightly evaded the same fate... Still unconscious... Slightly evaded...

He felt as though some kind of gigantic, hungry parasite had suddenly started tearing his flesh from the inside. In the abrupt, somber hallucinations, he saw her twinkling, honest eyes painted with the ill glazed gleam of death... Her rosy, silky cheeks sinking and turning gray as the elixir of life was no more streaming in her veins...

...slightly evaded death...

Eventually he grasped fully this night's fruits of wrath. Through her suffering, he perhaps also understood better what Sirius's demise meant. Second by second, the old loathing was somehow curling up, diminishing. An empty black vastness was spreading instead. There the thoughts of perplexity blindly swanned, finding no route out.

Involuntarily his auditory organs seized Lupin's whisper nearby. The werewolf was timidly commenting on Moody's speech to the pale and teary-eyed Vance.

"Produced a shielding jinx and stumbled to her own robes just before her aunt's spell hit her. It was the tripping over that saved her mostly. Lestrange's shot got partly aimed elsewhere..."

******

Excluding Moody's first few sentences, Severus recalled much nothing about the meeting when he hours later stepped out into the bleary morning. The increasing winds were with swift speed heaping up darkening clouds to hover wraithlike above the summery landscapes. The reporting about the Hogwarts hassle had passed in stuporlike dullness. The chilly emptiness inside his chest was freezing his bones, hence making it ever thornier to step out of this numbness of mind. If there ever had been a white tower of joy built in his heart, now even its foundations had been dug up and crushed.

The gusty wind made his cloak ripple. Some exhausted Order members plodded past him in the yard. Their countenances carried the same gray hue as those ghostly clouds above. But perhaps the sickest tint resided on the professor's sunken cheeks. From the corner of his eye, the Potions Master saw how those blue figures shared brief hugs or pats on the back, comforting those who were still blowing their noses into handkerchiefs.

And there he stagnated, avoided by everyone, in his banal solitude. Perhaps nobody expected to meet emotion behind those cynical black pupils... The old morose bat who owned empathy and feeling as much as a casual floe.

Nobody cared, nobody understood... Nobody could see the grave reveries lingering in his vision, where her smiling softness was decaying... Those phantasms were playing a horrible, false theater: picturing Nymphadora Tonks transforming into something unsubstantial, something that Sirius Black was now.

His little precious, only slightly had evaded the same fate...

And yet nobody paid attention, nobody comprehended how he had nearly lost one of the very few individuals he had ever cared for in his narrow, closed cosmos.

---

Blib, blib, blib...

Dark, smoking liquid was slowly dripping from a distillation tank into an opaque, sharp-angled black vial. Nearby, a pair of long skeletal fingers added a pinch of red powder into a minuscule cauldron. A puff of crimson smoke obscured the petite orb of pale light. A raven cloak swished softly in the shadows.

When the night would come... When nobody would know...

He had to do something for the sake of things...

*******

The heavens roared and rumbled. Blinding and deafening was the night's symphony. Thunderbolts hurdled towards the black grounds, while an army of heavy raindrops followed every one of those flaming arrows of light. The heavenly trombones boomed and the kettledrums rattled, shaking the mountains with their divine music. Poetic souls at their desks scribbled melodramatic lyrics about Zeus' anger, totally forgetting that a thunderstorm was merely a rather boring event based on the difference of voltage between the earth and the cloud masses. This phenomenon needed no supernatural blokes soaring across the sky in blazing chariots. All those fancy-named overly muscular myth males like Thor, Jupiter, or Donar, were apparently just pathetic attention-seeking buffoons anyway.

St. Mungo's hospital was equally cringing under the sky's anger. The furious rain drummed against the windows, splattering them with wet blurry streaks. The thin walls could not muffle the Heavy Metal coming from the imaginary upper floors. Several patients tossed and turned restlessly in their beds. Others were the slaves of nightmares, others sat awake with purple blotches under their eyes, unable to return in the havens of dream.

The small private room of Nymphadora Tonks was wrapped in dark-blue shadows. The tiny window on the rear wall blinked continuously with the raving tempo of the thunderbolts, as though a clone army of Colin Creevies had been taking photos behind it. The injured Auror sprawled on her four-poster, sunken in the valley of delirious torpidity. The breaths escaping from her lips were wheezy, shallow, lethargic. Her limbo was not real sleep, but some kind of torment between the realms of reality and dormancy. She could feel the white-hot pain searing from her legs, and at the same time hear the heaven's clarion calls. The ache became merged with the booms, and conjured up horrible phantasms to agonize her.

But at some point, the reality took the upper hand. Her stupefaction was drawn aside. Slowly, the girl became conscious of the spheres around her. Arduously she opened her heavy eyelids. A glutinous haze still hovered before them. But she could sense the room that every now and then was deluged in white light. The girl squinted. The view was swirling, oddly pulsating together with the beat of her pain.

Yes... it was still the same room... Those curtains...

A brief recollection illuminated her mind. The hangings had been closed when she for the last time had drowsily observed them.

Why were they drawn aside? Or was this again a part of the dream...? Oh, if the pain only would cease...

A firebolt - which oddly bore no resemblance whatsoever to the famous broomstick model - flashed outside. But this time, Nymphadora startled fully awake. Just now she perceived the existence of the black shadow that was hunching right beside the bed, in the curtainless gap. In the light of the crackling bolts, the figure looked utterly misshapen. Yet, it seemed to be budging slightly. It drooped vaguely over the bed's edge, like a giant, prowling bird of prey... or a Dementor ready to give the kiss of death.

The following roar of the clouds suffocated the girl's shrill scream. Shocked, the Auror retreated towards the headboard. There, beneath that dangling creature, she felt as though the blood in her veins was turning into ice. This futile escaping however made her only moan in ache. An injured body allowed no acrobatics.

Although the thundering smothered most of her squeals, they were loud enough to bring the obscure ghost fully in life. The next flicker of light showed the backrest of the chair where it squatted, how it turned its hooded face towards her, and how a pair of pasty, long-fingered hands rose up to draw the cloth aside.

A rumble. The third lightning flashed simultaneously together with the second's echo.

Tonks understood staring straight at Severus Snape. The abysmal insomnia of three days had made his sallowness ever more emaciated. It was as though gazing at a yellowing skull where two black pupils burned in their sockets. The purple patches under his eyes had turned into a nasty shade of grayish blue, and the lines on his forehead seemed ever deeper. The trademarked curl of lip had evaporated, and yet, this countenance bore not even the fervent gleam with which it had scrutinized Tonks so often lately. Now, there was solely worried tiredness left, framed by curtains of greasy hair.

"M - Mr. Snape?" she hasped. The last cold quiver wriggled down her spine like a pack of scared salamanders. "Why... H - How long hhhh-have you been there?"

The man's mien stood motionless. His eyes slowly turned towards the nightstand, above which he indistinctly recognized the hands of a cuckooless cuckoo clock.

"I am... not quite sure. A few hours I daresay..."

The girl gawked at him as though he had been a radioactive mutant eggplant from Mars. It took a while to register fully his maunder.

"A f-few... hours? But..."

“I was worried, and I wanted to... see if...” he answered monotonously.