The Mystery Wife

Sevanna and Draco walked back to the pub in tense silence, their ears straining for sounds. Draco was still carrying his rusty pipe, Sevanna her knife. The light and the rush of cheerful noise from the Bull's Head Pub ahead of them made them feel safer after a block or two, safe enough to breathe at last.

"Were these streets always this bad?" Draco asked.

"Not this bad, no," Sevanna said quietly, her features still set in hard lines. "Poverty is on the rise, therefore crime is as well. But I grew up on these streets, pitting my fists, my wits, my wild magic, my knife and occasional broken bottles against whoever wanted to tangle with me on any given day. The quick and casual violence of the place has intensified, but it has always been here."

She spat a neat stream of blood onto the sidewalk.

"Good training for later life," she shrugged.

Apparently, it had been. Everyone on both sides of the recent war had feared Severus Snape.

"Do you want to make a spectacular theatrical entrance?" she asked, one corner of that bloodied mouth curling upward.

"Best kind," Draco replied, his mouth also taking on a smirk. He examined his perfectly manicured fingernails, ones that were currently gracing a hand with split or bruised skin on every knuckle. "Provided it's not the sort to get me laughed at again."

Sevanna laughed and shook her head. It got a little easier to think of her as Sevanna every time, but only a little. "They'll laugh for a few seconds, before they get a really good look at us. And then you'll be a hero in the truest Gryffindor style, and every idiot in the pub will want to buy you a drink while they fuss over me. Think you can carry me?"

A snort of laughter escaped Draco before he could stop it.

"I once had to drag Crabbe and Goyle out of a closet," he drawled. "Knocked out with Sleeping Draughts, the pair of them. I think I could manage you. Especially now."

Snape...Sevanna...was tall, but light as a feather as Draco swept her up into his arms. He stomped hard on the rush of purely masculine...something, he refused to call it enjoyment...at the notion of carrying a woman around like a stevedore. Particularly this woman, sharp-tongued, shrewd, deadly, utterly terrifying, and incongruously soft and light in his arms.

No! he yelled at himself, squelching that line of thought right there.

Only it wouldn't quite be squelched, as a lock of Sevanna's hair drifted across his cheek, smelling of cassia and cloves and sandalwood and Merlin knew what else, but the scent drove Draco out of his mind.

"My hero," Sevanna drawled, audibly amused, her breath warm on Draco's throat.

I am not thinking about this, I am not thinking about this, I am not thinking about this, Draco chanted to himself. I am thinking of Filch and McGonagall going at it in a broom closet. I am thinking about a house elf orgy. I am thinking about sex with Horace Slughorn.

There. That did it. That killed any inappropriate arousal, probably for the next several years of his life.

He carried Sevanna through the door with thoughts of being buggered by Horace Slughorn, in that omnipresent stupid fez, sustaining his admirable lack of an erection all the way into the pub.

The place erupted as soon as they'd made that spectacular entrance, with the oddest collection of cheers, gasps of horror and nervous laughs as everyone took them in.

Draco carried Sevanna to the table where Richard was still holding court, and Richard fairly leapt up from his chair and helped Draco ease Sevanna into it.

"Whisht, ye taistril," he bellowed at Draco, along with a lot of other things Draco found impossible to parse. The message was plain, though, even if the words weren't. Richard thought Draco had hit his sister.

Sevanna, mercifully, chose that excellent moment to pretend to come around. Her eyes fluttered open, and one of her hands shot out to catch Richard's in her patented pincer grip.

"It weren't 'e," she said in a faint and die-away voice. "Calm thy passions; tha'st got it backwards. We ran into two mack-off radgey blokes out t' pub, lookin' like offcumdens as we did. T' lad...'e..."

She swooned theatrically in her chair, sending everyone in the pub into an overprotective fuss, for cloths to wash the blood from her face, strange little salts to hold under her nose, something stiff for her to drink immediately afterward, and Merlin knew what else. And Draco was clapped on the back, hard enough that he almost went sprawling.

"An' ye brayed 'em, laddie?" Richard asked Draco, looking fierce and proud and offering him something that smelled like scotch.

Draco took the glass with a wry and lopsided grin. "Dunno what 'brayed' means," he shrugged in a judiciously self-deprecating way, briefly showing his damaged knuckles, "but if you mean did I punch them a lot, then yeah. Is she going to be alright? One of them... hit her... before I knew what he was about."

Richard frowned as if he'd gotten about half that, guessed at the rest, and nodded darkly. "We used to get worse from t' old lad, Tobias. Sev's 'ard as Toby Malone, bird or no. An' she's swoonin' an' beefin,' 'tis for thee, lad, ta make a brussen man o' thee."

He nodded gruffly and clapped Draco on the shoulder again.

"The world missed out on a great actor," Draco agreed under his breath, for Richard's ears alone. "Yeah, I've seen... her... take lots worse, and still be stalking around biting people's heads off. Who's Tobias, then?"

A deeper frown from Richard, as he worked to parse that. He understood that last, at least. "Tobias were our Da."

A spark of intense and surprising fury ignited somewhere in Draco's head. Their Da. Their father. Their father, who apparently used to hit them harder than that bastard in the alley had hit her tonight. He glanced incredulously at Sevanna, then at Richard.

"Six feet under, I hope," he drawled, his free hand tensing, tempted to draw his wand and go find him if he were not.

"Aye," Richard nodded. And before Draco could respond to that, or ask him anything more, another drink was being pressed into his hand, and he was being clapped on the shoulder and gabbled at enthusiastically by the same men who'd been laughing at him earlier, apparently for being too good looking.

Sn...Sevanna had been right about the hero treatment. Everyone kept on buying them both round after round until Draco at least was as drunk as he was before they'd left. Drunker. And if he could only follow maybe one word in three, it didn't seem to matter, because his new friends went right on talking for as long as he was willing to smile and nod at them.

Sevanna was fussed over, cleaned up, commiserated with, and then roundly teased about Draco, from what Draco could tell. At the very least, there were plenty of people looking back and forth between the two of them, saying bloody incomprehensible things to Sevanna and laughing loudly.

It would have annoyed Draco faintly, except that the room seemed to be spinning.

When he finally lurched to the gents and threw up what felt like every meal he'd ever eaten, Richard came in and stroked Draco's back in a fatherly way, murmuring things to him he only half understood, though the intent was clear enough.

Tonight, he was too bloody drunk to object, and suddenly too tired and sad to shake off any offered comfort.

"I have eight o' me own," said the gruff voice that bore a vague resemblance to Snape's old one. "Ne'er thought I'd see Sev take a shine to one of 'er own cletch, but tha'rt a likely lad. Dinna let 'er walk all o'er thee, an' tell her Richard did tell thee so."

"She hasn't taken a shine to me," Draco said in miserable inebriation, his head still hanging. "I got myself in trouble, and she got me out of it again, and now she's stuck with me. She doesn't even like me much. And she was my favourite teacher and everything, and then I told her off and everything went to shite and I ruined it."

"What art tha bletherin', lad?" Richard asked gently, and Draco could feel rather than see the smile, with his head hanging there. Cold porcelain felt better than anything else in the world, right now, except for that fatherly hand on his back. It made him miss Lucius, for all that Lucius had never been particularly generous with gestures of affection.

"An' I tell thee she fancies thee," said the older man, "'tis the truth. An' tha fanciest 'er, 'tis plain. Why then 'ast got munk on?"

"Munk on?" Draco repeated, his head whirling as he lifted it to stare.

"Tha'rt un'appy," Richard frowned. "An' 'tis more than' bein' arsed an' 'alf dead in the netty."

Draco didn't get more than half of that, but that was enough. He couldn't tell Richard anything about what had happened at Hogwarts, though. A year of hell, ending with Crabbe dead and, for all he knew, his parents being arrested at this very moment...

"There was... trouble, bad trouble, which is why she's stuck with me now. And I can't help it," he said, "he--she--whatever--went and got really fanciable. And that voice. The voice was always bad. Merlin. But she can't possibly fancy me. She thinks I'm a brat. Even if I did punch somebody for hitting her." He blinked at Richard owlishly--and a bit hopefully, if the truth were told. "...Are you sure?"

Before Richard could parse that enough to begin to answer it, the door swung open and Sevanna sailed in, that prowling walk in evidence as always.

"I came in to see how you were doing," she said, kneeling on Draco's other side.

"Sev, tha canst not come in 'ere!" Richard protested. "Tha'rt a bird na!"

"Whisht, doylum," she said impatiently to Richard, and then her eyes searched Draco's. "It's been a bad day for you," she said with guarded sympathy, handoing over a vial of something. "Do you feel like you could make it home?"

"Yeah, I think so," Draco said wryly, and downed the potion. "My accounts are pretty much settled now." His hand lifted its own volition and lightly brushed the corner of her mouth. He really hoped it wouldn't bruise. "How about you?"

She looked startled by the contact, and sat stock still, as if completely unused to tenderness of any kind. "Fine," she said faintly, at an uncharacteristic loss for words. And then she found them again. "Come on," she said, hauling Draco up off the floor, "the sooner we're asleep, the sooner this bloody horrible day will be behind us."

Richard shot them both a knowing look as Sevanna offered him a hand up in turn. "You're ta bed, then?" he inquired innocently.

"Separately," Sevanna said in a tone that brooked no argument.

Richard apparently hadn't read that part of the script. "The young pyot does naught but skeg at thee, an' tha'rt not..."

"Whisht," Sevanna said sharply, glaring at her brother. He held up his hands in surrender and shot her a smirk that was entirely too reminiscent of her own.

"What's a pyot?" Draco asked, not sure what Richard had called him, and not entirely sure he wanted to know.

"It means 'magpie,'" Sevanna sighed. "Or 'chatterer.'

It was a fair cop, Draco supposed.

She and Richard picked him up off the floor together, and they went home in the company of around two dozen strapping partygoers, heading more or less immediately to bed.

Their separate beds, whatever anyone else might have thought.