Promises to Keep

It took him a long time to realize that something was wrong with Snape. It started the

afternoon after Lucifer turned up, when Draco came in from reading in the garden. He could hear Snape talking to someone in the kitchen, and he stopped for a moment, half shy of someone new seeing him, and half curious as to the identity of Snape's unexpected visitor. "This is the way things are now," Snape was saying, in the too-formal, gloating voice Draco had thought he'd reserved for giving bad exam results to his students. "Yes, I'm sure you don't like it, but there is nothing I can do. The war--."

And then he must have seen Draco, because he paused for a second before he said, "The war changed everything, and not all of it for the better. We are not what we once were." Draco suspected that that was his cue. Besides, he was dying to know whom Snape was talking to. He wheeled himself into the kitchen and looked around as subtly as he could. There was no one there but the cat.

Lucifer, at Snape's feet, sat as still as an Egyptian statue, his pale eyes on Snape's face. "Were you lecturing him?" Draco asked. "You remember he's a cat, right?" He knew it was a mistake as soon as he said it. His father had always said that Snape had his virtues, but a sense of humor wasn't one of them. "Snape, I--." He couldn't think how to finish the sentence. He'd known Snape since he was a child--he'd called him Uncle Severus when he was very small. But the grim, angry man Snape had become during the war was a stranger. "I'm sorry," he finished, and he knew it sounded stupid.

But it was enough, at least for the moment. The corner of Snape's mouth twisted up. "No," Snape said. "You're absolutely correct. He is a cat. He's the one who seems to have forgotten. I've just been reacquainting him with that fact. He's gotten a bit too independent."

Draco looked at Lucifer, and back at Snape. It didn't make sense, not Snape talking to the cat and not Snape having a cat at all. Snape hated animals as much as he did people. He wasn't the sort to keep one around unless there was something in it for him. On the other hand, it seemed unlikely that Snape would be plotting anything with a cat, and Draco had no intention of turning into the Mad Eye Moody type who saw conspiracies behind every closed door. He let it go, but he didn't forget.

The conversation with the cat was only the beginning. The longer Draco and Snape were alone in the little house, the odder Snape grew. As summer turned to fall and the weather cooled, he spent more and more time in the rooms upstairs where Draco could not easily follow him. Draco considered again that he might be up to something, but Snape seemed too distracted to carry a conspiracy. He alternated sleeping a great deal with not sleeping at all, he did not eat and he bought Muggle liquor Draco assumed he drank by himself.

Out of self-defense, Draco developed a routine of his own--it was that or going out of his skull with boredom. He had taken over almost all of the housework, but the house was so small and had been so heavily spelled against dirt and time that cooking and laundry and shopping were the only real drains on his time. Snape had pointed out the laundromat on the next block the second week, and once Draco's initial fascination with the machines had worn off--Muggles really were clever--he'd managed to persuade one of the other customers to show him how it worked, and he'd taken such copious notes that by the fourth time he did it, his laundry actually seemed clean.

Laundry used up one morning satisfactorily, and shopping used up three others, since Draco only bought what he could carry. Money was another revelation. Draco had a plastic card with Snape's name on it that drew on Snape's account, and all he had to do was forge Snape's signature on the charge slips. Because he was in the chair, and probably a little because of his age and his accent, everyone was brilliantly friendly and willing to believe him.

The problem was that even with shopping and laundry and weekly trips to meet his friendly parole officer--and Potter was obnoxiously, determinedly friendly despite Draco's best efforts--Draco was very, very bored. Eventually, curiosity won out. He waited several days for Snape to go wherever it was Snape went, and then he went upstairs to see what Snape was doing.

It was not quite that simple, of course. The stairs were narrow and slippery, and his arms were still not as strong as they could be. He'd spent a great deal of the last two years in a hospital bed, after all, while his wounds healed, and later between surgeries to remove shrapnel the battlefield medics had missed. In the end he went up backwards, and it was surprisingly quick and painless, if undignified.

The second floor of Snape's house consisted of two rooms, opening off of a bookshelf-lined hallway. It was substantially smaller than the first floor, and Draco wondered if this was by design, or because the magic had run out. The first bedroom had clearly not been used for some time. Draco thought that, given the faint rodent-y smell, it had probably belonged to Peter Pettigrew during the time Snape had kept him as a pet.

There wasn't much furniture: a bed, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a big trunk, and another bookshelf crammed to bursting. Draco ran his fingers across the spines of the books, and decided reluctantly to leave them for another day. He was less than a quarter of the way through the ones downstairs. The bed had been stripped, the stained mattress left bare. Draco looked away. He knew that his father had died in this house, but he did not want to know where. The chest and the wardrobe were empty.

He blew away the top layer of dust on the trunk and fumbled the latches open, expecting the lid to be charmed shut. Draco knew what it was. He'd had one himself, with the same crest and labels. It was full of folded clothes, things Snape had laid aside long ago but been unable to part with. And on top, a few more personal items: Snape's teaching certificate, a tangled handful of jewelry and medals, and a wand.

Draco picked it up with trembling fingers. It was made of a dark wood he did not recognize, and it was smooth and cool and heavier than it should have been. Full of magic, even now. In his hands it was no more than a piece of wood. There was a sound in the doorway behind him, and Draco turned too quickly and lost his balance, fell onto his back with the wand still clenched in his fingers.

When he opened his eyes, Snape was standing over him, not quite grinning. "I wondered whether you'd manage the stairs," he said, and bent to offer Draco his hand.

Draco took it and let Snape haul him into a sitting position. "I'm sorry," he began," but Snape brushed the words away and took the wand Draco held out.

"It was my mother's," he said softly. "She died in Azkaban, a long time ago."

Draco looked up at him, lost. Snape never, never told anyone anything he didn't think they needed to know. But the look on Snape's face was one Draco had seen only a handful of times, one Snape had always reserved for Lucius Malfoy. Draco ran his fingers down the smooth edge of the trunk, and wondered what to say. He missed his own mother, but it had been years since he'd seen Narcissa, and he'd never quite forgiven her for the things she'd said about his father the night Draco had taken the mark. And of course, she wasn't dead. He missed his father, too, but that was not a wound he could share with Snape, or share at all: it was still too raw for that.

He'd let the silence drag on too long. Snape turned and set the wand in the trunk, staring at its contents as if he'd never seen them before. "I should get rid of these, I suppose," he said, holding up a black t-shirt with a glittering logo. "There's an Oxfam shop in town."

Draco reached for it. "I could use them," he said. "If you're just going to throw them out."

Snape snorted. "A Malfoy, taking leftovers from a Prince? Your grandfather would roll over in his grave, Draco."

Draco blinked at him. "Because I haven't been dependent on you to survive for the last two months? My grandfather might roll over in his grave, but my father would have said that a Malfoy does whatever he has to do to survive."

Snape smiled, in honest amusement. "No. Your father would say that a Malfoy does whatever it takes to get ahead. Lucius is Slytherin to the bone."

The tense was wrong, and Draco wondered if Snape realized, and what it meant. He could remember the night Snape and Aunt Bellatrix had broken his father out of prison with a clarity that verged on the nightmarish. Snape had left him at Riddle House, with Peter Pettigrew as "protection," and Apparated away. Twelve hours later he'd returned with blood on his hands, and told Draco that they'd failed. And after that he'd killed Pettigrew, and he and Draco had spent the next five months running from both the Death Eaters and the Order.

"I want to go downstairs," he said, to break the silence. Because what else could he say? His father was dead. His father had been a Death Eater, and Snape had been a spy, and the whole thing had been so pointless and so stupid. Draco blinked back tears and waited, because as much as he didn't want Snape to see him cry, he really, really didn't want Snape to watch him shuffle his way back down the stairs and into the chair. And after a while, Snape took the hint, maybe, because he left.