Vanilla-Scented Smoke

Vanilla-Scented Smoke

Chapter One: Suckers and Biters

In which a stupid person makes an uninformed decision, the news spreads, and any fellatio-based references you may make in regards to the chapter title turn out to be gratuitous.

Eddie the Evil cackled insanely as he walked through the dungeons and stopped outside the cell of Gordon the Golden. "Are you ready to meet your doom?" he asked in a menacing voice.

"You will never defeat goodness," Gordon insisted as he struggled against his bonds.

"I can try," said the evil werewolf. He snapped his fingers and a large battle axe appeared in his hands. Its sharp blade glinted wickedly in the torch light. Gordon gasped. Eddie rubbed his hands together and twirled his moustache. He wanted to draw out the torturous agony of imprisonment, but he also wanted to go outside and eat schoolchildren. His two favorite sounds in the world were the screaming of prisoners and the wailing of babies. The full moon was nearly up, and he had lots of evil work to do before the dawn ended his reign of terror over the countryside.

---

Cornelius put down his book and shivered. A fire was burning warmly in the fireplace, and a lit-up wand cast a warm glow across his desk, but the juvenile novel he was reading was making him not a little apprehensive of the night outside.

He was staying late at the Ministry building to finish some work - well, that's what he was supposed to be doing, anyway. Dolores had sent him a proposition that the Ministry rid society of all werewolves and vampires, or suckers and biters, as he secretly called them. He didn't doubt for an instant that they were a threat - the book he was reading proved it, obviously - but euthanasia? It seemed too inhuman.

Then again, they're not human, he reminded himself. They're savage animals and it's my job as Minister of Magic to keep the magical community safe.

The pile on the left side of his desk - unread mail from Dolores - was close to five times the height of the papers he had finished with, and those were no few in number, either.

She may look like an amphibian, but she is thorough, he mused. Dolores had left no stone unturned; she had sent in years' worth of newspaper clippings, Defense Against the Dark Arts journal articles by experts in the field, and a six page letter full of reasoning and pleading. She had even included pieces her students had written, keeping with the traditions of the &What Do You Think of Werewolves? essay assigned every year.

Warewolves are evil and if they bite you your in truble. their scary they should go to azkaban. Eddie the evil is a warewolf. warewolves are evil and scary.

Had he really been that illiterate at age eleven? Fudge doubted it. At the very least, he knew the difference between factual information and fictional characters. Eddie the Evil, indeed. He glanced at the book on his desk guiltily.

Fudge was a superstitious man - well, most wizards were. He didn't like vampires, or werewolves, or walking under ladders or announcing that it was Friday the thirteenth (which it, coincidentally, happened to be). He was especially unhappy with the fact that he had chosen to pull a late-nighter on a full moon, of all evenings.

His hand wavered between the leftmost pile and the suspenseful book he was in the middle of. Why, he had put it down right in the middle of a chapter. He could read till the end, surely. Yet before he could decide between work and play, he was shocked into stillness by a dog's quavering howl outside - It must be a werewolf, he told himself unreasonably. This was somewhat too creepy for him: reading about werewolves on a full moon on the night of Friday the thirteenth, and then hearing one outside.

Shaken, he set his lime-green bowler hat firmly on his head, crammed the left-hand pile into his briefcase, noxed his wand, and quickly made his way to the lobby to Apparate home.

His mind was made up. They had to go.

"'S good to see you, Severus!" Ludo said to Snape a few weeks later when they bumped into each other at the Floo chamber of the Ministry. "Did you hear about that new werewolf ruling?"

"No, I did not. Every single law passed here does not immediately grab my attention. Neither does every passing idiot I have the misfortune to meet, Bagman," Snape replied icily.

Ludo laughed, not offended in the least. "Fudge got 'em good. He's going to get rid of those suckers and biters once and for all."

"Oh, really?"

Ludo nodded vigorously. "Can't have werewolves on the loose and eating people every month, now can we?"

"I suppose not."

The man leaned closer to Severus. "You know, they're keeping it top secret, so those bloody freaks don't suspect a thing. Say, you don't know any werewolves, do you?"

"No," Severus lied immediately.

"That's good. If you ask me, they can't do it soon enough." His voice suddenly grew harsh. "A werewolf tore up Gloria's flower bed last year. She cried for weeks." Ludo looked as if he was ready and willing to take vengeance personally on the perpetrator armed with a sharp stick and a few rocks.

"Are you sure it wasn't a dog?" Snape asked impatiently as the queue past the security desk inched slowly forward.

The look on Ludo's face suggested that the notion had never occurred to him before. "I doubt it. Besides, that's just the kind of thing a werewolf would do, don't you think?"

"Maybe," said Snape. "How do they know who the werewolves are?"

"They have it all on file at St. Mungo's, you see. You don't sound very glad of it. I heard you had a run-in with a werewolf a few years back."

Snape's already pale face blanched into a sickly looking grimace. "You are quite mistaken, Bagman. Where ever did you hear it?"

Ludo frowned and rolled his eyes up in his head. "I dunno. Must've been from Sirius Black, back when he was an Auror. Not," he added quickly, "that we were friends or anything."

Outwardly, Snape scowled, but his head was working, too. Lupin... killed by the Ministry... no... If anyone deserved that fate, it was Black. As unhelpful a little prick as Lupin had been at school, they were older than that now, weren't they? He wasn't so bad. No, he was just normal, really. Smart, like him. That was always good. There was that incident where they had ended up at the same party on New Years' Eve... but that didn't bear thinking about. If Bagman was telling the truth, Snape would lose his--what was Lupin to him, anyway? His former coworker? His acquaintance? His old school chum? Certainly not his boyfriend, probably, really, not at all. The laugh that rose in his face at the penultimate thought died completely at the last one. He was not gay, thank you very much, and neither was Lupin. But that party...

They put up with each other, of course, and could, in fact, have been classified as friends, but how could they not be, working in the Order together and having so much in common? They were both intelligent... both bachelors, and neither young anymore, not that they had acted young when they were. That was all, really. Well, they had kissed once, but Severus was almost sure they had been drinking too much, and besides, it was New Years Eve and they had been counting down the last ten seconds, of all asinine things to do, so everyone had been kissing each other at the stroke of midnight. If Snape remembered correctly, which was unlikely, he had pecked Tonks and Molly Weasley on the cheeks at some point during the evening as well.

And the only reason the one with Lupin involved tongue was because they just happened to be facing that way.

It was an accident, really. It would never happen again.

Besides, there is a big step between accidentally kissing another man and stepping up and saying you and he are gay lovers, of all things. That was not going to happen, not before Merlin's pet pig perfected auto-brewing cauldrons.

But now wasn't the time to think about that. Severus pulled himself out of his musings and changed the subject. "Are they any closer to catching that scum?" he asked.

Ludo's visage brightened visibly. "Oh, yes, he's somewhere in Tibet, Shacklebolt's sure of it. Did you hear? There's talk Shacklebolt might get promoted..."

A few minutes later they had split up, with the last words of "But you didn't hear it from me," and an overexaggerated wink before Ludo disappeared.

Severus rushed through his meeting with the head of the Department of Apothecaries and Magical Ingredients Distribution, which he had previously been looking forward to, and, as soon as he could get away, set off in search of someone to complain to. He knew he had to do something, but had no idea what, which was strange for his normally infuriatingly calm self.

He had only been wandering the labyrinthine halls for a few minutes before he ran into the person he least wanted to see: Lucius Malfoy. To put it politely, the circle of friends they occupied wasn't ideal - and Lucius wasn't exactly a paragon among humanitarians.

"Snape," he was greeted.

"Malfoy," he returned gratingly, belying his polite words. "What a pleasure. You're quite friendly with the Minister; I assume you had some part in the new legislation in regards to werewolves?"

"How do you know about that?"

Snape forced the shadow of a sly smile onto his face. Malfoy let the answer slide. "I did, in fact. The preliminary vote was unanimous."

"Unanimous? Fifty council members who all voted yes? You had something to do with those numbers as well, I suppose."

This time it was Malfoy who allowed a grin. "Unanimous between Fudge, Umbridge, Nott, and myself. The council never even found out about it. They generally don't, when the matter is an important one." He paused for a moment, then continued, "It pays well to go along with the small things so that Fudge will go along with the big ones. Besides, that werewolf that attacked you at Hogwarts is working for Dumbledore. Lupin, was that his name?"

"I believe so," Snape managed before Malfoy finished: "Well, his precious little army will be down one member come July thirteenth, have no doubt."

"What would you do if you knew you were condemned?" Snape asked conversationally that evening when the Order meeting was over, opening his Muggle copy of Dante's The Inferno.

Sirius glared. "Why? Don't tell me tomorrow you're finally going to drop off the face of the earth."

"Oh, shove it, Black. I don't have to be here."

"No one invited you."

"And cut the wisecracks. If you can't think of your own insults, don't say anything at all."

"So I can sit quietly and do what? Listen to you talk about what it would be like if we died tomorrow?"

"If I did. You never do anything more dangerous than throw insults at your bloody house elf's back."

Remus, face buried in A History of Dragon Evolution, Volume 2: Hungarian Horntails, bristled more and more with every snap that flew. He was tired of his two best friends fighting all the time. He stood up to excuse himself to bed and--

--Best friends?--

--jolted by the thought, announced, "Don't you have anything better to do? It's bad enough that you fight, and worse that you do it every single day, but do you always have to say the exact same things? There's no need to go on like children. It's like nothing's changed in the last twenty years!"

"Oh, you mean since Padfoot dearest here tried to-" Snape began.

"You've both killed people and faced Dementors and watched children grow up, but you haven't even grown up yourselves. I'm bloody sick of you acting like nothing's more important than proving you're both testosterone fueled morons who managed to miss the part of their life where they figure out how to let go of childish grudges and just grow up!" Remus stopped talking suddenly, his face red but his breathing surprisingly calm.

Sirius stared at him in shock - almost as much shock as Remus was feeling himself. He had never said a word when his friends had tortured Snivellus, ever, but then, he hadn't really cared. Now he did, for some reason. And, Merlin, it had made them stop fighting. If I had known before how well this works, I would have done it more often, he lied to himself.

Sirius opened and closed his mouth a few times, and then left the room abruptly.

Lupin looked at Snape. Snape quietly said, "So? What would you do?"

It took the man a moment to realize he was referring to his original question. Then he said quietly, "Why do you ask?"

Snape looked at the ceiling. "What if we did all die tomorrow? It's possible. After devoting our lives to the proverbial heroism of saving the world, it's quite likely it will kill us. Better yet, we've spent them in misery and without having gathered the proverbial rosebuds to go along with it. So, tell me, how would you spend your last few days on earth?"

Lupin's face took on a sad and sober expression, but he humored Snape anyway. Or maybe that wasn't it; he started to talk as if he was eager to spill out the thoughts in his head. In all fairness, he had been considering the question for a long time - not out of morbid feelings, but because it was something to think about. "I would tell people I loved them. Maybe I'd tell them I knew I was dying, and maybe not. I'd go around to everybody I've ever met and tell them I care about them and I'm sorry if I hurt them." He came out of his trance for a minute and turned to Severus. "But that's to be expected. Everyone knows that's what you're supposed to do before you die. Even Slytherins."

"Actually, Lupin, I had thought you knew enough to realize that the general practice before imminent death is to do something purportedly fun. Wild and crazy, perhaps."

"I don't have fun," Lupin responded, lips quirking.

"Wouldn't you want to change that? Do something wild?" Snape asked, and it was difficult to tell whether it was sarcasm or genuine interest fueling his questions.

Lupin smiled widely now. "You mean get disgustingly drunk and do things involving beautiful women and firecrackers and spray paint and raw eggs that I'll be glad I don't remember in the morning?"

"Exactly." Snape seemed satisfied with that.

"No, I wouldn't," Lupin said candidly. "Why would I want to do something that won't become a good memory? Something I'll regret for being irresponsible and juvenile? No, I'd never want to do something stupid like that." He paused for a minute, then continued as if he'd just gotten an idea. "But maybe I'd like to travel. I've never even left the country, except to study the dietary habits of Kappas in a little nobody town near Prague. I've never been on a real holiday or done any sightseeing..." He took on a dreamy expression and spoke in an excited tone, as if he was saying thoughts as soon as they popped into his head. "I'd like to go to Italy before I die. I don't know why. I guess I've just heard it's such a beautiful place... and Venice is supposed to be spectacular... with the canal and all those people... and you know, Italian wine and garlic bread, I think just having a picnic in the Italian countryside would be the most wonderful thing in the world." The dreamy look left his face and he said with resolve, "That's what I'll do after I retire. I'll move to Italy."

Snape let the corners of his mouth turn up in a sad smile and said to his innocent, condemned friend with just as much conviction - optimistic conviction, uncharacteristic of him, - "Then pack your bags, my friend. We're going to go live in Italy." Then, giving everything one last satisfied look, he turned and left, leaving a stunned Remus standing all alone.

---

Snape's thoughts were reeling again as he walked briskly to the front door. Run away...to Italy. Was it too perfect? Too sudden, at the very least. It had been quite a while since he had let his heart, and not his head, control his tongue. He realized now it was with good reason that he usually forced himself to be circumspect; his id had made quite a mess of things in its newfound power-madness.

But then again, maybe it wouldn't be that bad, even if it did get a little bit messy. Fudge would never be able to find them if they left Britain. And he had to admit, Italy did sound like a nice place. They could run from the law and live out their lives in luxury. But wait--

--He sat down awkwardly on the umbrella stand shaped like a troll's foot - We? If he shipped Lupin off to the Italian countryside, would he really want Severus as a companion? He doubted it. And would Lupin really even want to go? He doubted that more. He had talked as if it was only a dream - not something he planned to do in the near future, or probably ever.

But Severus would see him onto that train, or through the fireplace, or whichever mode of transportation he chose, alone or with a companion. He couldn't very well let Lupin wait around to be killed, could he?

Will they really stop hunting him once we've left England, he mused to himself. Probably; it's not an international law, is it? Will they figure out where I've gone if I just disappear? Will they care? He realized with a start that he would have to resign from teaching at Hogwarts. If, he reminded himself. If I go to Italy with Lupin. But, well, of course I would. I can't resign myself to never seeing Lupin again, can I?

What a ridiculous sentiment. What a ridiculous feeling. What a ridiculous plan. Snape sincerely hoped they would never begin to make sense. If they did, it would be a sure sign he was going crazy.

With a sigh, Severus stood up and stepped through the door of Number 12, Grimmauld Place, into the clear night outside.

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