The Mystery Wife

Draco bid his parents a distressingly non-tearful farewell shortly afterward, and went to Yorkshire with Professor Snape. To a dingy little brick hovel on a street called Spinner's End, to a dusty, lumpy, rickety bed where he went immediately to get away from his new Master. Mistress. Whatever.

Snape didn't bother locking or Warding him in. Draco was perfectly free to go, apparently, now that Snape had a fat bank draft from his parents for his keeping. He thought idly about escaping, but where Snape went, so went the money, and no Malfoy could live without money.

So he stayed, and he tossed, and he turned, and after an hour or so of boredom in the dark, he decided to light the room and have a look around.

Draco had larger closets at Malfoy Manor, two of them to be precise, one for his robes and one for his shoes. This 'bedroom' was barely big enough to fit the small, cot-sized bed that was one of its three pieces of furniture. And the term 'furniture' really ought to be carefully overturned and examined, Draco thought, as the nightstand beside the bed turned out to be nothing more than an odd empty cube of some unrecognizable blue Muggle material that was neither wood, stone nor glass.

The chest of drawers was at least recognizably wood, if cheap and battered.

The wallpaper was peeling, and there were no pictures, no banners, nothing to indicate that the occupant of the room had ever had any particular interests at all. A search through the drawers made Draco wonder if the room might have been Snape's, growing up; everything in them was dull, unrelieved black except for one brown t-shirt in the bottom drawer that read, 'The Who.'

"The What?" Draco frowned, considering the shirt from every angle. It looked like a band shirt, but he'd never heard of a band called The Who. Must have been Muggle. Come to think of it, he couldn't imagine Snape doing anything so human as listening to music.

Draco found himself wondering idly if the Weasleys' hovel was anything like this one. Impossible to think of the polished, sharp-tongued, undeniably brilliant Snape having come from this Muggle dunghill.

There was a photograph in a box under the bed...yes, he'd looked under the bed, he was that bloody bored...of a younger Snape laughing his fool head off with an admittedly pretty red-haired girl. It was one of those bizarre Muggle frozen photos, a single moment seized and caught in time, unmoving. They were strapped into what looked like a bucket of some sort, with wheels, on a track, and the girl was screaming, red hair flying around her, and Snape's head was thrown back in a laugh.

Merlin. Had Snape ever laughed at anything?

There was writing on the back of the photograph, and Draco read it.

Sev,

I hate you for laughing at my warm red terror. Die, die, die, arsehole!

Love always,

Lily

Draco snorted a surprised laugh, and flipped the photo over again. The girl looked to be about his age. Pretty. Fun. Game for a laugh. Draco wondered who she was, and if Snape had been in love with her. She wouldn't have been of much use socially, beyond the purely ornamental, that was clear. Too outspoken, too...vivacious. In the circles the Malfoys had always moved in, that could be quite an embarrassment. His mother was quite the perfect society wife, Draco thought; beautiful, poised, serene, with exquisite taste and no original opinions.

Then again, Snape probably had to take it wherever he could get it.

A sudden hubbub of voices startled Draco into stuffing the photograph back into the box and shoving it hastily under the bed. He snatched up his wand and crept quietly over to the door to listen, out of a mixture of curiosity and old habit.

"Gi'or! Tha'rt as seck as a Cleethorpes donkeh, tha' chuff boggart!" a man was saying loudly, and laughing. Draco mentally replayed that sentence, and the only word he understood in it was 'boggart.'

"Sitha," said a bossy female voice that sounded impossibly like the new Professor Snape's, except that the new Professor Snape could not possibly speak this alien language. "Whisht, tha' maudy bray-britches claht 'ead! Tha' reasty barmpot! Look a t'chusty get twonk!"

"Tek' rod out-yer-arse, Severus!" the man said, still laughing. "Skit on thee, tha radgy shrew! An' tha'rt a bewer na', art tha' not? Though I've seen better legs on a table."

That last, Draco caught, and his jaw dropped. Were they insulting each other? Who was the man? And what the hell foreign language were they gabbling in?

"I'll slap thee daft," Professor Snape drawled, sounding for all the world as if she were actually enjoying the wrangling. "Get theesen on afore I get a pod on! Shall we off f'a slurp?"

"I could tek a bit o' snap," said the man. "I could eat a scabbeh donkeh 'tween two bret vans."

Draco heard them make their way to the door, and head out, and he doused his wand light and scrambled to the window. They were walking down the bloody street. Just leaving him here.

Bloody hell, that wasn't on.

Snape hadn't even offered him dinner. Not that he'd wanted dinner when he came here, but he wanted it now, and it sounded like they were off to eat scabby donkeys or something like that. At the least, Draco wasn't staying in this hellpit alone.

He snuck down the street after them, following them at a distance until Professor Snape, not even bothering to look back, called out in the dry, excessively cultured tone Draco remembered from years of Potions classes, "You might as well come catch up with us, Draco. We're off to the pub."

The accent was so flawless, so perfectly upper crust that it could not possibly have come from the same mouth that had just been spewing rough and incomprehensible insults in rolled Rs and thees and thas. The man beside her was looking sideways at her, a little mystified, as if he no more understood what she was saying now than Draco had understood what they were saying to each other. Or perhaps he was simply as surprised to hear Snape make that sudden switch as Draco was.

Draco kicked himself a little for just how easily he'd apparently been spotted, sighed and came to join them. At a dignified clip. He refused to rush to catch up to these apparent pirates, even if the promise of food was involved.

"Oo's the chuffy brussen britches, then?" the man asked, eyeing Draco from too-impeccably-groomed head to Milanese-shod foot, and taking in his expensive Muggle getup.

If one must wear Muggle clothing, Draco had long since reasoned out with himself, it might as well be in the first stare of fashion.

Snape smirked at the man's question, and Draco took it that there had been an insult in it. Probably several, as if this scruffy vagabond had any to-do with laughing at a Malfoy.

"Malfoy," Draco announced proudly, not offering the man his hand to shake. "Draco Malfoy. And who are you, you scruffy unwashed mass?"

"Wot's 'e chunterin' aboot?" the man asked Snape.

Snape gave him an explanation so swift Draco couldn't even pretend to follow it.

"What the hell language are you speaking, anyway?" he interrupted his Master rather rudely.

Said Master...Mistress...whatever...gave him a baleful look. "We are in Yorkshire. Cleckheaton, to be precise. The village of Millsbridge, if you care. The dialect here is impenetrably strong, save to the locals. Do yourself a favour and don't even try to keep up. Just remain silent, if you can manage it for more than two minutes at a stretch, and try to blend for once. In fact..."

She moved closer and started rumpling Draco's expensive, hand-tailored clothing.

"Hey, what are you on about?" he protested, leaping back. The enormous bear of a man watching them fell apart laughing. "And who the hell is he?"

"He is my older brother, Richard. A Squib, not that it bothers him," Snape said calmly, tugging out one of Draco's shirttails with one hand, and mussing his impeccable hair with the other. "Better," she said. "Slightly." Draco glared balefully at them both.

The Squib was still bloody laughing at him.

"It's a bad job, Sev," the man gasped. "F'r all thy nankling, e'en blathered up, 'e ain't exactly got the dawks o' a day-tale man."

"True," Snape murmured thoughtfully, those black eyes scouring Draco from head to foot.

"What?" Draco snapped defensively. "What did he say?"

"He said, and rightly, that you'll have a hard time passing muster in a Yorkshire pub. Your hands are too lily white and soft."

"Well...so are yours!" Draco glared.

"The tools of my trade," Snape shrugged. "It is the mark of a poor and careless Potions Master to allow his hands to be stained and scarred by his creations. It so happens that I am neither. Nevertheless, Richard is right, you're altogether too clean-cut and good looking, and we're going to get into a barroom brawl if you aren't very quiet. In fact, I might pretend you're a mute."

"And why the hell should I?" Draco demanded heatedly. "Why should I care what these people think of me, when I can simply hex them into oblivion?"

"I should think you and I have both had more than enough of hexing people into oblivion," Snape replied wearily. Draco ran a hand through his already tousled blond hair in pure nervous reflex, tousling it further.

"I'm clemming o'er 'ere," Richard complained. "We bahn?"

"Aye, we bahn," Snape sighed. "Richard...Draco. Draco, Richard," he introduced them shortly.

"Ah-reet, kid?" Richard nodded at him.

"A pleasure," Draco nodded back somewhat icily. Richard didn't seem put off by it in the least. He clapped a hand on Draco's shoulder (which would not be shaken off) and chatted with him amiably, if incomprehensibly, all the way down the street and into the pub.