Wizard's House

Wizard's House

The light, quick, knocking at the front door of his house on Spinner's End took Severus Snape by surprise. He glanced at the single window in the room and set his wine glass down silently on the rickety table, next to the chair where he had been sitting and staring into the shadows with unseeing eyes.

A sliver of midnight darkness was visible through the gap in the faded and ragged curtains, and the lamp light from the room picked out golden splinters of rain. Taking up his wand, he rose quickly and moved silently and cautiously to the door. Wand ready, he opened the door to the length of its security chain.

Standing on his front stoop, blending into the darkness, was a slender, blonde-haired figure swathed in a black traveling cloak worn over a dark blue velvet robe.

"Narcissa?" he breathed softly.

"Please, may I come in?" she asked, her voice hardly more than a whisper.

"Yes, of course," Snape murmured, taking the chain off of the door and then opening the door barely wide enough for her slender form to slip through into the room.

Severus closed and chained the door again, and then turned around with his back to it, surveying his late night visitor.

She stood there in the middle of the small book-lined room, a slender figure looking like an exotic flower amid the worn and tattered furniture, her head bowed and the lamp light highlighting flecks of rain on her shoulders and hooded head.

"You're out late, Narcissa," he observed.

"I did not know if I would find you here," she said quietly. "I read in the Daily Prophet that you had... had done it and I thought you might have gone..."

He held up a warning hand, and then pointed his wand at a section of the bookcase on the back wall, where gaps in the book shelves showed the presence of a disguised door. There was a slight disturbance of the air, as if something had moved the dust, but nothing more. Severus laid his wand down neatly on the small table next to his chair.

"Wormtail is supposed to be in his room upstairs, but he is a light sleeper and has a distressing habit of listening at keyholes. I do not feel any need to provide him with free information."

"No, no of course not. But you're still here... "

"Not for long. Eventually someone will think to check the old student records and will find that this was listed as my home address. I intend to be gone before that happens. Now sit down, Narcissa, and tell me why you came looking for me."

She threw back her hood and fumbled at the throat fastening of her cloak with trembling white fingers. He made no move to help her, merely returning to his chair and watching her with somber black eyes, elbows on the chair arms and his hands tented in front of his lips.

Narcissa dropped her cloak across one of the worn and frayed arms of the couch, and then sat down, looking at him with bleak blue eyes. Her pale hands, with their long red-lacquered nails, twisted together in the lap of her velvet robe, making ridges and furrows in the soft nap of the fabric.

"I came to thank you, I suppose," she said.

Severus shrugged.

"You fulfilled the plan so that my son would not have to do it. You killed Dumbledore."

"Yes. I killed an old man who was unarmed, sick, and had never been anything but kind to me; a man who trusted and believed in me." His voice was cool. "That's something to be really proud of, isn't it?"

"But, the Dark Lord... "

"Yes! The Dark Lord," he repeated mockingly. "Now that I am no longer useful as a spy at Hogwarts School, or in the ranks of the Order of the Phoenix, it seems that he no longer has any particular use for me."

"I thought he would be pleased; that he would reward you!"

"He was pleased," Severus acknowledged. "He is usually pleased when one of his tools operates as he intended it to do."

"Then you have seen him and... and Draco?"

"Oh yes," Severus said, leaning back in his chair and straightening his black robe over his long outstretched legs. "Your precious son and I apparated to the manor house in Little Hangleton. A moment more and I would probably have been shredded by the Potter brat's pet hippogryph, but I made it through the school gates and into the presence of the Dark Lord--who thanked me for my service and told me that he would call me again when I was needed."

Severus picked up a dust covered bottle that was standing on the shabby little table and poured the last of the wine into his glass.

"Then Draco is still with him?" Her voice trembled.

"As far as I know," Severus said, setting the empty bottle down on the floor with a small thud. "That is where I saw him last, two nights ago. "

Narcissa's hands clenched together, so that the knuckles showed white and her long red nails dug into her palms. "I thought that it would all be over when Dumbledore was dead, but it isn't, is it? The Dark Lord has Draco, and he will have to do whatever he is told to do. It's not over at all."

"No, it's not over. I'm sorry if you thought that it would be."

"Then it was no use, me asking you to make the Unbreakable Vow." Her voice trembled.

"None whatsoever, Narcissa. Draco belongs to the Dark Lord now and only the death of one of them will ever set him free. I can't help him." He picked up his wine glass and drained it, setting the glass back down on the table with careful deliberation. The wine felt rough at the back of his throat and he decided that finishing that second bottle had probably been a mistake.

"Then why did you do it!" she demanded suddenly. "Why did you agree to take the Vow?"

"I did it because I could never refuse you anything, no matter what you asked of me." Severus took a deep breath and closed his eyes wearily. His lank dark hair framed his sallow face like curtains.

Narcissa was silent for a long moment, and then he heard the whisper of her velvet robes and wondered if she was preparing to leave. But a moment later he felt one of her cool slender hands cover his, where it lay on the tattered arm of his chair, and he opened his eyes to her questioning gaze as she knelt on the floor next to his chair.

"I never realized that you cared anything about me, Severus."

"No? Well, why would you? When we were at Hogwarts you were the unapproachable, untouchable, ice princess and I was the dark ugly boy with the second-hand clothes and his big nose in a book all of the time. And then you married Lucius... "

"Yes," she said after a pause. "I married Lucius. Do you know what life with him was like?"

"I have never tortured myself enough to wonder," Severus said, pulling his hand out from under hers and getting to his feet. He could hear the whip of pain in his voice, and wondered if she noticed. "I have had far too much to drink. You had better go home, Narcissa."

"Home!" she said with a short, humorless, laugh. "The Malfoy house has never been home to me. I hate the sight of it! Now my husband is in prison, and my son is in a worse sort of prison. The place is overrun with aurors and the Ministry's spies. What reason do I have to go back there?"

"Trivialities," he said with a wry smile. "Expensive clothes, fine foods, house elves at your beck and call. You are now the possessor of the Malfoy fortune, without the minor drawback of having Lucius Malfoy around to annoy you."

"You are cruel!"

"Yes, I have that reputation," he said with assumed carelessness. "Your son is as safe now as he ever will be, Narcissa. There isn't anything more that I can do for you." He took a deep breath, and added in a barely audible voice, "I wonder now if there is anything I can do for anyone."

"There is a great deal that you can do for me," she said, almost as if she were speaking to herself. She gathered up her robes and rose gracefully to her feet. The scent of her perfume floated on the air like a kiss of springtime.

"Another Unbreakable Vow?" he asked bitterly.

"No. Just... just make me feel wanted, Severus," she said softly, holding out a hand to him.

"Wanted?" His voice was harsh and he caught his breath in a quick little gasp. "Do you remember when we were fifteen and that filthy Marauder bunch--James Potter and his gang--hung me upside down outside of Hogwarts castle?"

There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of his ragged breathing.

"I remember, Severus," she said finally, her voice softer yet.

"And I have never been able to forget! I've never been able to forget that you were one of that crowd of elegant, well-dressed, girls giggling and watching. Do you think, after that kind of humiliation, that I could ever admit that I wanted you, that I..."

"That you loved me?" Her breath quickened.

Severus shook his head and waved a dismissive hand. "Maybe I did, once. Years ago. Too long ago."

"Lucius never loved me," she said, her voice rapid and hushed. "He never even wanted me. His... interests... take other directions. He married me because he needed an heir, and because my family was pure blood and suited his purpose. I felt rejected from the day that I married him. Haven't you ever wondered why Draco is our only child?"

She took the two steps that brought her close to him, so that her soft sweet perfume filled the air around them, and she looked up into his face with half-hooded eyes. Severus noted with abstract interest that her pupils were dilated, giving her blue eyes a look of dark and deepened mystery, and he wondered vaguely what that meant, if anything.

"Won't you let me thank you, for what you tried to do for my son?" she asked, resting her soft warm palms on his black robed chest.

Severus recollected himself, and felt his hands ball into fists. "I do not need your pity, Narcissa!"

She shook her head slowly and murmured, "Perhaps it is your pity that I need." She lifted her arms, running her hands over the tense muscles of his shoulders. "We may never see each other again, after we part tonight. Let me give you what I can, Severus."

Narcissa moved even closer to him, so that the velvet-covered swell of her breasts brushed against the slick black fabric of his robe. Her hands moved downward from his shoulders to undo the fastenings of his robe, and then along the lean length of his body. Rising up on tiptoe, she pressed her mouth against the thin line of his lips.

The pressure of her warm supple body against him made him lose his balance, and he stumbled backwards, sinking down onto the threadbare couch. Narcissa fell back with him, her mouth still locked on his as they sank down together, her long pale hair spreading out like a cloak over them both. He wrapped his arms around her then, crushing her to him, his mouth opening to the sweet insistence of her lips and tongue. She matched him kiss for kiss, with a passionate intensity that he had never guessed she possessed.

He moaned as her searching hands found the erection that he could not deny and she stroked him lightly, her fingernails drawing fierce shocks of pleasure through his body. His own hands cupped around the sweet swellings of her breasts and he felt half mad with wanting her.

She drew back away from him, and he groaned with frustration. "Gods, Narcissa!"

"Hush," she whispered, as she slipped out of her soft velvet robe. He reached out to her and she settled back into his arms, her body locked onto his, and then there was no thought, no reason, just the hot sweet passion of their naked bodies moving together until they climaxed in a glorious explosion of pleasure.

"Severus, I wish I had known what it would be like with you," she murmured after a while.

"It wouldn't have made any difference," he said softly. "We were both too young. But even so, I wonder... "

His whispered questions and her gentle answers floated through the room like the ghosts of what might have been, and they lay there together for a long time, holding each other closely on the tattered old couch, with the golden lamplight flickering over them.

"You should go now, Narcissa," he said after a while, his lips moving against the pale halo of her hair.

"I hate leaving like this," she whispered back, and he could hear the tears in her voice as her breath warmed the soft skin of his throat. "I can't lose you now; not this soon. I want to be with you, always."

"Things have gone beyond what any of us want," he said, as his fingertips stroked along the golden tresses of her long pale hair.

"But... "

"Shhh," he said, and silenced her with another kiss, before adding, "You are not guilty of anything; you are only the wife of a wizard sent to Askaban. The Ministry may watch you, but that is all. I, on the other hand, am wanted for murder. It would be disastrous for them to find you with me. In any case, this house is not safe for more than a few days longer. Someday... " His voice trailed off.

"Will there there be a someday for us, Severus?" she asked, pulling back from him a bit, to look into his somber dark eyes.

He didn't answer her for a long moment and then he asked, "Do you want there to be one?"

"Yes, I do. We have lost so many years, Severus! I want a chance to make up for all of the time that we could have shared together."

"Then we will have our someday, I promise. There are too many things that I can't talk about now, but when the time comes..." He captured one of her hands and pressed his lips to her soft fragrant palm.

The tears gathered in Narcissa's blue eyes, but she nodded in acceptance as she reached for her discarded robe.

"Where will you go?"

"I haven't decided, and it is best if you do not know. "

"I will wait for you, Severus. That is my promise."

Narcissa fastened her robe, then picked up her cape and settled it over her shoulders. She bent to give him one last long lingering kiss. A few moments more and Severus Snape was alone in the book-lined front room of his shabby house, and only a faint trace of perfume lingered on the air to remind him of her passing and of their promises.