Chapter Text
Keen on not dying of aconite poisoning in the potions lab in the cellar of Severus Snape’s house at Spinner’s End, Remus let Narcissa brew his Wolfsbane without him. While she worked, he tried to settle into this very inhospitable little house. It lacked the soft coziness of the Muggle house he was raised in. Here, all the angles were sharp and irregular, as if it was trying to catch on his clothes or trip up his steps.
Climbing the narrow staircase to the topmost level, he found only two rooms. There was a loo with an immense, rusty looking bathtub that couldn’t possibly have been moved up the stairs by brute strength alone. The bed was likewise oversized, and crafted in an ornate wizarding style with high corner posts hung with bed curtains. It would have to do for Narcissa. The bathtub, however, called for wand work to de-rust it and Remus gave it his best. Dumbledore might not know of them, but there were ways Muggle-born and Mixed-born wizards knew to do a little household magic without being detected by the neighbours.
Judging by the size of the main floor, there ought to have been at least one more bedroom upstairs, but no other doors were visible. If Severus had hidden his own room away, Remus was just as happy not to have to see it. The missing room did mean, however, that Remus would need to improvise his own sleeping quarters.
Off the kitchen, was a nearly empty larder. If he cleared away the disused cooking utensils on the sideboard there, he might be able to transform the chipped butcher block slab into a bed. It was a musty room with one tiny, high window curtained in cobwebs. If he hadn’t spent so many of his schooldays crashing in a place called the Shrieking Shack, he might have despaired at it. What would Narcissa think of what he’d managed to do to make a comfortable bedroom out of it? Oh, that hardly mattered. Whatever the coming year held for them, there would be no more need for them to be in one another’s bedrooms.
In the kitchen itself, he found a few canisters of dry goods: sugar, tea bags, rolled oats, rice, and long, straight noodles like linguini that swelled into yellow pasta snakes’ heads on one end. There was also a tin of biscuits of uncertain age and a sticky bottle of extremely crystallized honey. They would need to go to the shops for real food. Either that or he’d be fixing porridge for his fancy new wife’s first supper in their dreadful little home.
He leaned forward, his elbows on the kitchen sideboard, his head in his hands, laughing quietly, morosely to himself at the ridiculousness of it all. What else could he do?
It was about time Narcissa reappeared upstairs, wasn't it? He’d cleaned and organized the house, made a pot of tea, deemed the biscuits safe to eat. How could she still be working? For all Remus knew, she hadn’t slept at all the night before. He'd only slept for a few hours on the Tonks’ kitchen table himself. Now he'd remembered how nice sleep was, he was yawning, fluffing up the cushions he’d taken from the lounge for his sideboard bed and lying down on them, just for a moment. Even though the bed wasn’t quite long enough for him to straighten his legs, he was soon asleep.
When he awakened, it was with a start. The light through the larder’s window was far more oblique than it had been when he lay down in the middle of the afternoon. As he sat up, the hair on the back of his neck prickled, raised as if in alarm, though the house was quiet. It was a reaction he knew well, almost like an animal sense, and it only stirred when dark magic was about. The lads – James, Sirius, and even Peter – they had the same kind of sense, thanks to their animagus status. In them, it was wild in a neutral way, like the turning of a compass. For Remus, it was a sign that darkness was near enough to resonate with his own wolfish curse.
It was time to find Narcissa.
In the lounge, the passage through the plaster wall into the cellar had been closed, the thick red book slid back into its place on the shelf. Narcissa’s brown wool jacket lay elegantly draped over the back of a shabby armchair. He held the cuff between his thumb and forefinger. The outside was a rough weave. The inside was lined with something smooth.
“It isn’t silk,” Narcissa had frowned as Tonks had handed it to her from Dumbledore’s trunk of Muggle clothes. “It’s not made of anything grown out of this earth. It’s…”
“Chemical,” Remus had supplied. “Probably nylon.”
“Nylon? Is it safe?” Narcissa had asked.
He’d laughed at her. “Yes, perfectly safe. Common as anything. Take it from me, sworn as I am to protect you.”
He dropped the cuff, his prickling skin on his neck grown clammy and cold. She must be upstairs. The wood creaked like a decrepit, untuned xylophone as he climbed the stairs. The door to the bedroom was open and a flash of long platinum hair reassured him that Narcissa was indeed safely asleep. She was as she should be after a long, heartbreaking, exhausting day.
To be sure of it, he stepped over the threshold, into her bedroom again. She lay on her side, her face turned to the pillow, her body on top of the covers, one stockinged foot jutting over the edge of the bed. The cold sweat on Remus’s neck flared hot. Her posture was more like that of someone who had collapsed in a faint than of someone who’d put herself to bed right after taking such care not to rumple her cheap, borrowed jacket.
Another step closer and he could see her ribs moving in the slow rhythm of her breath. She was deeply asleep. Nothing was amiss here – so why was the prickling not abating but moving down his neck, into his arms, along his spine to course through the backs of his legs?
“Narcissa?”
She didn’t move.
Louder. “Narcissa?”
Nothing.
He reached out to prod her arm, to shake her awake. The wave hit him before he could touch her, the force of a hex that would have dropped anyone not already profoundly cursed. A snarl tore from his throat as he threw himself back before whatever it was could take him too. He sat on the floor, panting with the exertion of escaping the hex, fighting to think like a man instead of a creature. The wolf in him wanted to bolt, to flee from the bedroom like a bull avoiding an electric fence on a Muggle farm. But he was not all wolf. He was a person who needed to get this woman out of the hexed space. He rose to his feet and faced the bed.
In the split second of delay his dual werewolf-self gave him before succumbing to the hex, Remus thrust an arm back beneath the shadow of the bed curtain rails, clamped his grip around Narcissa’s waist, and dragged her out. Dazed but unhexed, he sat on the floor with her limp, still-sleeping body folded in his lap. There was no chocolate stashed in the pockets of the borrowed trousers to ease his brush with the darkness. But he had to press on anyway.
He sat Narcissa up in the crook of his arm, tapping the flat of his opposite hand against her cheek. “Narcissa. Madam. Please, you must wake up.”
He coughed past the sound of a growl in his voice, fumbling for his wand, trying to reverse whatever bad spell this was. “Rennervate.”
Nothing.
“Come on, Cissa.”
This was no light spell. She was alive and seemed physically uninjured but he needed help to revive her. On orders from Dumbledore, he couldn’t summon any other wizards here. With Death Eaters infiltrating all their institutions, he couldn’t very well deliver Narcissa over to whoever might now be in charge at St. Mungo’s. But there was still Hogwarts. It was impossible for him to Apparate there but he still knew the password for the Hogwarts Floos.
Gathering her up, Remus got to his feet, turning sideways to carry Narcissa down the stairs to the fireplace in the lounge. Where did Snape keep the bloody Floo powder –
“What – are – you doing?”
Remus jumped, gripping Narcissa tight to his chest. He yelped a swear. “Severus. Quick, help. The bed –”
Snape paced slowly across the rug, moving toward where they stood by the hearth them without looking Remus in the face, regarding Narcissa instead, his eyebrows bent as if trying to inch down the bridge of his nose. “Yes, that bed is charmed to disable intruders and sound an alarm in my office so I may – intercept them.”
Remus’s voice was still loud and frantic. “Why on earth did you leave it armed? You knew we were here. You agreed to it.”
“I knew you were arriving this afternoon and I left my post this morning at great inconvenience to myself and the school to disable all of the house’s deadliest hexes –”
“Only the deadliest?”
“Yes. My time away from school is short. The rest of the hexes I intended to leave until my dinner break, which is now. How was I to know the pair of you would be in such a rush to go to — to retire for the evening?” His wand produced, Snape stepped as close to Remus as he could stand and muttered a spell over the woman sleeping eerily peacefully in his arms.
“Nothing’s happening.”
“Wait. It’s slow-acting. Too abrupt of a waking spell often leads to a punch in the face.”
Remus knew this, and remembered that Sirius would have said that was half the fun. Most of the time, Narcissa bore hardly any family resemblance to Sirius, but Remus saw a flash of one as her face reanimated. Her expression was changing from angelic peace to the faces Sirius would pull when waking up the morning after partying.
All resemblance to him vanished as she opened her eyes. She looked into Remus’s face, returning his puzzled stare, lifting her hand to brush her fingertips along the end of the short, neat mustache over his lip. “Oh,” she said, as if startled to find him real to the touch. Her hand dropped away. “Sorry. What’s happened?”
“Nothing of concern,” came Snape’s reply.
Narcissa gasped. “Draco!”
“No it’s –” Remus could say no more. Narcissa was pushing at him, swinging her legs as if desperate to dismount a horse. He set her down, terribly bewildered to hear her address Snape as Draco.
“What’s happened to Draco?” she said, taking Snape by his lapels. “What have they done to him? Severus, please –”
“Nothing, as of yet. Draco is as well as he can be,” Snape said, letting her back him into the bookcase.
“But why have you left him? He’s not safe.”
“He is,” Snape said, covering her hands with his. “I left him in the dining hall for his evening meal with the entire Hogwarts faculty watching over him. He is quite safe for now, but I have little time and a few more household alarms to disable.”
Narcissa fell back, unhanding Snape’s robes. “Be quick then. But wait!” she said, grabbing at him again. “How did he take the news in the Prophet this morning about the – changes at home? Was he taunted for it? Were the other students cruel?”
The angle of Snape’s shoulders softened. “I tried my best to find him and deliver the news before he reached the dining hall at breakfast. Though I met him at the doors, someone had already told him. The Granger girl. She swore to me she only sought him out to tell him to spare him the added shock of finding out in public, but…”
Remus saw it: the moment Snape decided that allaying Narcissa’s grief was more important than indulging in calling Hermione Granger an insufferable know-it-all once again. He saw Snape swallow the habit down to finish with words of hope instead. “But you may be assured I did my best to explain the nature of your unfortunate and temporary situation.”
“Oh my poor Draco, was he…?” Narcissa could not bring herself to ask if Draco was alright. Of course he wasn’t.
Snape shook his head. “He is grieving, yet resilient. Take heart, Cissa.”
Head bowed, she stepped away from him. “Thank you, Severus.”
Snape cleared his throat as he glanced toward the kitchen. “Indeed. Now. As the house isn’t swarming with snakes, I assume you haven’t tried to cook the serpent-ghetti. I’ll take it away with me, shall I?” He waited for no answer as he strode into the kitchen.
As Snape’s cloak whirled out of sight, Remus crossed the floor to Narcissa in a single step. “It’s you.”
“What is?”
“You,” he whispered to her. “You’re the – how did Dora put it – the selfish lunatic who made an Unbreakable Vow with Severus over the safety of a single student, over your Draco.”
Narcissa lifted her chin. “That’s OUR Draco now, husband. And what of it?”
Remus huffed. “None of this would have happened if Severus hadn't been bound by a vow and was free to make my Wolfsbane potion on time.”
“None of it would have happened to you, that is.”
“Yes, and look at the chaos you’ve caused.”
“You heard Severus. ‘Inconvenience’ was the word he used.” She took up her jacket and put it back on, flipping her hair over its collar. “And I daresay I’m entitled to take something from the Death Eaters after they cost my son the protection of his father, inept as it was. I’ve been thinking of it this way all afternoon as I brewed your potion. For my family’s protection, I take Severus from the Death Eaters, and from Dumbledore I take you.”
Remus turned on the spot, rubbing at his eyes. “Why did Snape agree to the vow?”
Narcissa drifted into a sitting position on the sofa, “He’s a dear old family friend. Severus was brought to my father’s house during his sixth and seventh year summers to learn Occlumency with us. How else do you think he’d know it so well? The House of Black is famous for its skill in Occlumency. Father always said Bella was the strongest Occlumens among us, but mother said he just didn’t appreciate the gentler character of my skills. Bella is more brutish, showy. But Severus – his skills had the best of both of ours. It’s part of what makes him worthy to protect my son.”
“He accepted the vow because your family taught him Occlumency?”
Narcissa wobbled her head. “Well, that and the fact that Bella followed along with me and was all but blackmailing him to agree.”
“Right.” Remus let himself fall into the armchair beside her. “So you trust a man who was manipulated into a vow and who, just now, hexed you into some kind of unwakeable sleep.”
Narcissa clucked her tongue. “The sleep was a mere mishap. Acceptable risk. No harm done. He came with a counter-curse in the end. Don’t these things also happen all the time among your friends?”
“No. Well, yes. But why did it take so long for him to put it right?” Remus asked as Snape twirled back into the room, having found his way upstairs somehow. “There must have been was quite a lag between Narcissa going to bed and your appearance.”
Snape managed to both scowl and roll his eyes at once. “As I said, it was just before dinnertime and as I knew there was hardly any unjinxed food here I waited while the school kitchen prepared a basket for you. I am, after a fashion, your host. In fact, I would have laid it out for you in the larder but someone’s built a blanket fort out of it. You’ll find the basket on the table instead. Now, since I’m sure Cissa is anxious for me to return to my responsibilities at the school, I’ll be off. Do – take – care.”
Neither of them spoke again until the crack of Snape’s Apparation signaled his going. Remus was first to lift his head and sniff at the air. There was indeed food in the kitchen, and he was famished.
He stood. “Come along. Let’s eat.”
She sighed. “I can wait until you’re finished if you’re too angry with me to eat.”
“I am angry with you. But we’ll get along better later if we eat together now.” He extended his hand. “Let’s go. It smells like Hogwarts beef stew and fresh brown bread. You remember how nice it is.”
“I do.” She slid her small white hand into his and rose as he tugged at it. “And what’s all this about a blanket fort?”