Folly, Part Six, A Harry Potter Fanfic
Summary: Snape’s life has been a series of spectacular errors of judgment, to put it kindly.
This has to have been his worst.
*
“Prettier musings of high-wrought love and eternal constancy, could never have passed along the streets of Bath, than Anne was sporting with…. It was almost enough to spread purification and perfume all the way.” Jane Austen, Persuasion
“Neville,” Severus finally whispered into the child’s hair. “We need to talk more about this.” He stood up, the child clinging to him like a limpet, and checked that both conflagrations were dead. “But breakfast first.”
The plan was there, in full bloom in his head, as though he’d been thinking about it all along. It was simple enough in eoncept, though the details might-would-prove tricky.
If Neville really were determined in this matter.
The boy should first be given a decent chance to understand what he’d be choosing. Insofar as that was possible with the child so young.
But Severus wasn’t going to try thinking this through without both caffeine and food in his system. And the boy needed to be fed. He carried him indoors to breakfast, and eventually, out again to the bench, where he settled Neville on his lap and tried to make him understand.
“All your family would value you now, now that I can tell them that you’re a Phytomagus. And they’d give you things I can’t. Material things, but also, well, more important things. Tutoring in magic, and help getting started in your career, and being respected by everyone because of your family I can’t give you any of that, Neville, and you deserve to have it.
“Realistically, you’d be better off back home.”
Severus shifted the boy a little, trying to see his face. Neville, stubborn, instead buried his face in Snape’s chest and said nothing.
“You really would be, Neville. That’s why I was planning to give you back, not because I didn’t want you. I do want to keep you, and I will, if you want me to. But I also think you’d be better off back with your family. And they’d want you now, now that you’ve proved you’re really magical. They’d treat you differently. ”
The boy still said nothing.
“If-for me to keep you.” Snape said. He stopped and cleared his throat. “There would be things I’d have to do. Not nice things. Like that potion. Your family-well, they wouldn’t have let me take you, Neville, except that they thought you were a Squib.”
That much, Merlin help him, was actually true. The last scion of the Longbottoms, had he been known to be a wizard, would, if anything, have been torn apart by the conflicting Accio’s trying to snatch him from the water.
“I changed your appearance, Neville, with that potion. To make you look like my son to Muggles. But if I am going to keep you, now that I know you’re not a Squib, I’d also have to change your mind. Your memories. See, some wizards can look at you and see, not just your body, but your thoughts. So I’d have to change those too. To make it look like the fake past I made up for you, to explain you to our neighbors, was real. Like you really are my boy by birth, only I just found you a few weeks ago. I’d have to make you forget it happened differently. Only, see, that means I’d have to make you forget, not just Algernon and how you really came to me, but also your Gran, and whatever you remember of your real mum and dad.
“That’s a lot to forget, Neville. And some things that you probably don’t want to forget. But I’d have to do that, if you’re to stay with me.”
The boy had tensed at his words. Severus waited.
After a bit Neville mumbled, “So then that means, you’ll have to forget too? That I’m not really your boy? For when those wizards look at your thoughts…?”
Severus shook his head against the boy’s hair. “No. I-I have learned a mental discipline that enables me to, to shield the truth.” To lie. To anyone. “So I’ll always remember the truth, and if a situation ever came up where you were endangered by being thought my boy, I could always reveal the truth and let your real family shelter you. Which they would.”
The small body was stiff against his. Severus tried again, “But like I said, it’s a lot to forget. And it’s entirely understandable if you don’t want to. Only that’s what I’d have to do, Neville, to keep you here.”
Safely, he swallowed. For me.
“So if you’d rather just go back to your Gran’s, with me telling everyone you’re a Phytomagus and they should treat you with more respect, I could make that happen I still could. And your whole family would be happy to have you back.
“Or I could keep you. Only then I’d have to change your memories, like I’ve already changed your appearance. Neville, I could. I can. I will, if you tell me that’s what you really want. But if I’m to do that-you have to tell me why you would choose such a thing.”
The boy burrowed against Snape’s chest. He didn’t look up, so his words were had to distinguish. Severus managed, however. Or at least he thought he did.
“Gran doesn’t read me stories,” was what he thought he made out.
As fucking inadequate a reason as any Severus himself could come up with, and so he bought it.
“All right,” he whispered, his throat unaccountably tightening. “All right. As long as you’re sure. But this next bit is going to be unpleasant.”
*
The next train got them to London by eleven a.m. Snape established Neville in an inexpensive hotel room with a telly, books, food, and as many monitoring charms as the Wizard parenting book and his own ingenuity could provide while he went on his double hunt.
An application to the department of vital statistics might eventually give him half of the information that he needed. But not the rest, and applying there would leave a trail, and moreover he was pressed for time.
So he consulted several coppers (involuntarily) and then a series of maps and directories, and eventually, after a series of false starts (instantly forgotten by them), netted a minor official returning from her lunch who had all the necessary access and authorizations.
The Imperius curse was illegal to use even on Muggles. The Verum Dicere might have been declared so, had it been known to anyone but a few selected Aurors. The Confundus Charm, however, was a Ministry workhorse, second in their arsenal only to the memory charm itself. If anyone cast Priori Incantatum on Snape’s wand, there were a hundred reasons he could adduce for having cast it upon Muggles.
Hell, the right story, and he could put in for an Order of Merlin.
He needed such a simple thing: just one true death with the proper outlines whose details could be blurred to his purposes. .
An addict. A woman, a white one. Dead after a short but documented stay in hospital.
The clerk contentedly pulled up every death in the last several weeks that came close to meeting any of his parameters. Nor did she question her eventual impulse to change the dates of one woman’s hospital admission and death.
She’d forgotten that she’d ever searched for, much less altered, any such records by the time he’d slid out of her office.
And Snape now had a name, and a picture, and the name of a hospital. And, most important of all, a home address.
The hospital records were easier to fudge, since the hospital was, by definition, open to the general public. Though the administrative offices were off-limits to any but staff, they were hardly secured, nor their location any secret. A single menial gave him the information required, and a little lurking gave him access to the necessary clerk.
Easiest of all was extracting authentic memories of the target woman; once he’d found the right floor. It was ludicrously easy to harvest a few images of a dying and dead junkie from an orderly; he didn’t even have to Obliviate this one.
Less easy was working on the people who’d been the dead woman’s neighbors, if such a term might be rightly used. Spinner’s End was a model of community feeling, compared to this slum.
Still, people noticed other people. Involuntarily, as often as not.
Only, here, Snape needed not only to harvest their memories of a living woman, to feed to Neville.
He also needed to leave some.
Of a dark-haired child, more known-about than seen. There only occasionally, until recently. Rarely seen in public, but sometimes heard.
And in a very few minds, a blurred and incurious memory of a black-haired, hook-nosed man a few weeks back, an argument, a child being taken away from there.
It wasn’t as though any of those neighbors cared particularly about the dead Marianne Waters (if that was her true name) or the child they vaguely remembered.
*
The other neighborhood given him by the copper this morning was clearly correct. He was approached almost immediately.
“I want a woman who’s been a mother. Never mind what game I want to play. You can’t assist me.” Snape stared down his nose, and the woman backed away quickly..
Word of his requirement got out fairly quickly, and he had an applicant who seemed suitable.
“Kinky shit costs more, you know,” she said when she presented herself..
She might have been pretty once, when her brown skin had been smooth and her black hair shiny. The makeup she wore couldn’t hide her deterioration. Not that Snape gave a rat’s arse what she looked like.
He said, “So tell me a little about how you raised your own child.”
She huffed offendedly, “No one said you wanted private shit. Just said you were some sort of perv wanted a mother.” She started to turn away; Snape caught her wrist. He said softly, holding her eyes, “I haven’t told you yet what sort of pervert I am, or what I’ll pay for your services, or what I want. First, I want to know how you raised your own child.”
She flushed a little under her makeup. Snape held her eyes and answered his own question. “Used the telly as your child minder, or nothing. Locked her up alone. Raised her in filth, because you were too stoned or too tired to clean. Fed her trash, or left her hungry, because you were in no shape to go out to buy food. Or because you’d already used your food money on… your other priorities. That about sums it up, doesn’t it?”
They took her away. My Rashida.
She wrenched her wrist out of his hands, and he let her. But his voice stopped her when she turned to flee.
“I think you might actually be willing to oblige me, once you hear my proposition. You see, I have a child too. That’s why I’m here.”
She turned and stared at him incredulously.
”You know, don’t you, that syphilis can be fatal? It’s been fully curable for years, easily by the time you and I were children, mind you. If diagnosed in time. Only, see, back then only doctors treating prostitutes and their clients would look for such a disease. Not those treating respectable married women. Respectable pregnant women. Not in time. And the symptoms, you must know this, are often hard to spot in a woman if you’re not looking for them. And the disease can be transmitted to the unborn baby.
“And so I’m an only child. More accurately, the only surviving child.”
She was listening, eyes wide under what looked like an inch of mascara
He let his voice roughen and slip into his Northern accent. “And so my mum… well, she wanted to make sure I’d never repeat my dad’s mistake. She wanted to make sure. Aversion therapy, the docs call it. Worked with me. My boy’s the same age I was then. So here’s the deal. Keep him for a day, as though he were your own. Let him see what a tart’s really like, what a tart’s life is like. Just don’t lift your hand to him; you won’t like what I’d do to you if you did that. One day. Less, actually. You’d take us to your flat now, and I’d fetch him tomorrow, before you-ah-start your normal shift. What would you charge to do that?”
“You’re crazy,” she said. “You’re a loonie, you are.” But she hadn’t run away.
“Logical,” he answered, smiling and straightening. “Worked with me, like I said. Does it seem like your … type… holds any appeal at all for me now?”
He let his eyes move dismissively from her cleavage to her high heels, and back up to her face. She flushed again and repeated, “You’re a loonie, and your mum too!”
“But a harmless one, at least to you. As long as you don’t harm him. What would you charge?”
Not that she would finally have agreed at all without… persuasion.
*
She did not, apparently, bring her work home with her. That, he could say in her favor. She met him on a corner and accepted custody of the boy, and he turned and left them.
Her squalid flat was everything he’d expected. He surreptitiously added a half carton of sour milk to her fridge to add its distinctive stench the next time she opened it.
When she returned, she accepted the child sleeping in a sort of nest behind her sleeper sofa with equanimity. He’d warned the boy to expect that she’d confuse him with her own child, and to play along.
And that he would fetch Neville at four.
When afternoon came, Neville went to the dirty window and started watching the street. When four o’clock finally approached, Neville alternated staring at the door and out the window.
When four o’clock passed, the boy went white.
It took until four-thirty before Neville finally huddled in the corner and started to cry.
“Wotcher snivellin’ for?” the woman said. She turned up the volume on the telly. “Shut up, I’m doing my nails. I need to concentrate, like.”
Snape raised his wand. “Petrificus totalis. Obliviate.”
He tapped himself. “Finite incantatum.”
He knelt by the boy and gathered him in. “I was here all along, Neville. I never would have left you alone with her. But you had to feel alone, and helpless, and abandoned, because those real feelings are what I’m going to weave into the fake memories I’ll create for you. I needed real feelings to make your memories feel real. But I would never leave you with someone like her, Neville. Never.”
*
A bed-and-breakfast near Coniston was, Snape thought, sufficiently removed from both Spinner’s End and Preston to be safe, but the accent was still right. He had toyed with the idea of using Somersetshire and Lyme, but if anyone ever looked closely enough at the boy’s memories, the discrepancy between the accent and the boy’s supposed provenance would be too great. And the boy wasn’t familiar enough with a southern accent to be able to translate remembered conversations into it automatically.
The first step was to pick an elderly couple to play the chief parts: He chose a couple that ran a tourist shop. Snape brought Neville in several times, to accustom the boy to the couples’ scents, and movements, and sharp but short squabbles with each other. The woman who ran the B&B could become Aunt Enid, and the one at the bakery counter Aunt Louisa. The important thing was that they all be Muggles whom Neville was wildly unlikely ever to encounter again, nor any wizard to recognize.
It had been an expensive pair of days, even with stiffing the tart. But worth it.
*
“Before I start working on your memories, Neville, we need to save some of your original memories for if you ever need them back. Either if there’s some reason you need to return to your family-like, if I died in an accident I wouldn’t want you to become a ward of the Ministry-or, when you’re an adult, if you’ve learned to Occlude I can give you your real memories back. So think of something you would want to be able to remember accurately.” His wand drew a silver strand from Neville’s head, and he tipped it into the phial. “Good, Neville, another.”
The boy’s face was set in a scowl that seemed to hold as much distress as concentration. It seemed to be more than just the pointing wand that bothered him. Severus stopped. He knelt and sought to reassure him. “Neville, you’re not going to lose all your favorite memories. I’m just going to alter them so no one can trace your connection to the Longbottoms. And then add some, of living in London. You’ll still have most of your memories, just the people in them will look different. And you’ll think you only lived part-time with your Gran, and the rest of the time with the woman you’ll remember as your mum.”
He held Neville’s shoulders. “Neville, you’re even going to remember that your Gran is a witch, and that side of your family. Your mother will seem to have been a cast-off Squib, or maybe the daughter of one, but still enough in touch with her family to ask for their help with her baby. But they wouldn’t have been very interested in keeping the baby permanently once they thought you were a Squib like your mum. They’d have sent you back to your mum to raise. And if they keep a family tree, if your mum had been burned off you wouldn’t even appear. Or her death, so they wouldn’t have had reason to worry and go looking for you.
“So see, you really won’t need to lose very many memories at all. I’m mostly going to change how the people and places look. Everyone will act like they really did. The only thing that I see now that I’ll have to remove entirely will be… your visits to St. Mungo’s. That would be too much of a giveaway, your Gran taking you there on visits. So those, those, are some of the memories you should give me now, to keep intact.”
Severus swallowed. The boy looked down and whispered, “Will I remember… going to Blackpool?”
“Roughly. I’m going to change a lot of the details, and make it seem to have happened longer ago.”
“What about…. will I remember… you burning my hair?”
“Not at all. You won’t remember anything that indicates that you’re not truly my son by birth, by a non-magical woman who died shortly after she gave you to me to raise.”
“Can I think for a bit, what I want to be sure of remembering right?”
Severus squeezed his shoulders, stood up, and stepped back. “Of course. That’s a good idea. Tell me when you’re ready to give me more memories to keep. And we can do as many as you want, you know.”
Neville thought for a while, still looking down. Then he looked at Severus. “Okay. I’m ready.”
Severus copied memories into the phial for twenty minutes, resisting the impulse to sneak peaks at them in passing. Then he set to serious work.
It would be much easier with a Pensieve. But there was no way to ask for the Hogwarts one, and Snape could make do without.
*
The boy was a bit dazed, but that would pass.
Looking in Neville’s eyes, Snape asked, “What are your Gran and Gramps like?”
Neville’s mind produced an image of a pudgy woman in a pinny and a shortish man who smelled of peppermint and tobacco. Neville said hesitantly, “They… they didn’t think Mum was much good. Or me either, cause of her.”
Severus snorted. “Their loss, then, about the latter. Do you remember ever going to Liverpool?”
The boy tensed and didn’t answer.
Gramps used his wand to swing me out over the water, only I was scared and I … had an accident. And then when he put me down and saw, he pushed me off the dock. To clean me up.
Snape would have preferred to have used a millpond or river, to lessen the resemblance even further, but the boy’s memories of the salt burning in his nose and throat as he struggled in the icy water had been too vivid.
“Where was your Gran’s house?”
“In the country, by a river.” His mind filled with images.
The bed and breakfast had been sufficiently large and old-fashioned that Snape had only had to edit out the modern Muggle conveniences. Some of the rooms--the kitchen, the nursery, the bath-were Neville’s originals, except for the absence of portraits.
And the neglected back corner of the garden where Neville had retreated from his family’s disapproval was no feature of the bed and breakfast’s grounds.
In the unlikely event that Neville Snape should have occasion to visit the Longbottoms’ home, it was wildly improbable that they’d take a visitor to the kitchen or nursery.
“How did you first come to my attention, Neville?”
“You saw my chocolate frog hopping when I dropped it in the train station, and you started yelling at me and Mum-well, not yelling, more like hissing--for being stupid. And then you said bad words.”
The black-haired man stalked over to them, scowling, the chocolate frog in his hand. “You bloody cretins, have you no concept of discretion? Letting loose chocolate frogs in the middle of King’s Cross-what the fuck? Who the fuck is this?”
He stared at Neville’s face, and then over at Mum. He looked harder. “M--Marcia…?”
Mum started laughing, but not like she was happy. She was looking at the man’s wand. “It’s Marianne! You were a bloody wizard all along? Just my luck, to get knocked up by a wizard. But it’s no good to you, he’s a Squib; my grandparents won’t keep him.”
The man didn’t seem to be listening; he was staring at Neville still. “He’s mine then?”
Mum crossed her arms. “How would I bloody know?”
“How did you come into my custody, Neville?”
“You came to see me, and I was really sick, and you yelled at Mum about it. And she said, ‘You take him, then, if you think you can do better.’ And you said, ‘I will.’”
You said later, “I would never leave you with someone like her, Neville. Never.”
And you didn’t.
This has to have been his worst.
*
“Prettier musings of high-wrought love and eternal constancy, could never have passed along the streets of Bath, than Anne was sporting with…. It was almost enough to spread purification and perfume all the way.” Jane Austen, Persuasion
“Neville,” Severus finally whispered into the child’s hair. “We need to talk more about this.” He stood up, the child clinging to him like a limpet, and checked that both conflagrations were dead. “But breakfast first.”
The plan was there, in full bloom in his head, as though he’d been thinking about it all along. It was simple enough in eoncept, though the details might-would-prove tricky.
If Neville really were determined in this matter.
The boy should first be given a decent chance to understand what he’d be choosing. Insofar as that was possible with the child so young.
But Severus wasn’t going to try thinking this through without both caffeine and food in his system. And the boy needed to be fed. He carried him indoors to breakfast, and eventually, out again to the bench, where he settled Neville on his lap and tried to make him understand.
“All your family would value you now, now that I can tell them that you’re a Phytomagus. And they’d give you things I can’t. Material things, but also, well, more important things. Tutoring in magic, and help getting started in your career, and being respected by everyone because of your family I can’t give you any of that, Neville, and you deserve to have it.
“Realistically, you’d be better off back home.”
Severus shifted the boy a little, trying to see his face. Neville, stubborn, instead buried his face in Snape’s chest and said nothing.
“You really would be, Neville. That’s why I was planning to give you back, not because I didn’t want you. I do want to keep you, and I will, if you want me to. But I also think you’d be better off back with your family. And they’d want you now, now that you’ve proved you’re really magical. They’d treat you differently. ”
The boy still said nothing.
“If-for me to keep you.” Snape said. He stopped and cleared his throat. “There would be things I’d have to do. Not nice things. Like that potion. Your family-well, they wouldn’t have let me take you, Neville, except that they thought you were a Squib.”
That much, Merlin help him, was actually true. The last scion of the Longbottoms, had he been known to be a wizard, would, if anything, have been torn apart by the conflicting Accio’s trying to snatch him from the water.
“I changed your appearance, Neville, with that potion. To make you look like my son to Muggles. But if I am going to keep you, now that I know you’re not a Squib, I’d also have to change your mind. Your memories. See, some wizards can look at you and see, not just your body, but your thoughts. So I’d have to change those too. To make it look like the fake past I made up for you, to explain you to our neighbors, was real. Like you really are my boy by birth, only I just found you a few weeks ago. I’d have to make you forget it happened differently. Only, see, that means I’d have to make you forget, not just Algernon and how you really came to me, but also your Gran, and whatever you remember of your real mum and dad.
“That’s a lot to forget, Neville. And some things that you probably don’t want to forget. But I’d have to do that, if you’re to stay with me.”
The boy had tensed at his words. Severus waited.
After a bit Neville mumbled, “So then that means, you’ll have to forget too? That I’m not really your boy? For when those wizards look at your thoughts…?”
Severus shook his head against the boy’s hair. “No. I-I have learned a mental discipline that enables me to, to shield the truth.” To lie. To anyone. “So I’ll always remember the truth, and if a situation ever came up where you were endangered by being thought my boy, I could always reveal the truth and let your real family shelter you. Which they would.”
The small body was stiff against his. Severus tried again, “But like I said, it’s a lot to forget. And it’s entirely understandable if you don’t want to. Only that’s what I’d have to do, Neville, to keep you here.”
Safely, he swallowed. For me.
“So if you’d rather just go back to your Gran’s, with me telling everyone you’re a Phytomagus and they should treat you with more respect, I could make that happen I still could. And your whole family would be happy to have you back.
“Or I could keep you. Only then I’d have to change your memories, like I’ve already changed your appearance. Neville, I could. I can. I will, if you tell me that’s what you really want. But if I’m to do that-you have to tell me why you would choose such a thing.”
The boy burrowed against Snape’s chest. He didn’t look up, so his words were had to distinguish. Severus managed, however. Or at least he thought he did.
“Gran doesn’t read me stories,” was what he thought he made out.
As fucking inadequate a reason as any Severus himself could come up with, and so he bought it.
“All right,” he whispered, his throat unaccountably tightening. “All right. As long as you’re sure. But this next bit is going to be unpleasant.”
*
The next train got them to London by eleven a.m. Snape established Neville in an inexpensive hotel room with a telly, books, food, and as many monitoring charms as the Wizard parenting book and his own ingenuity could provide while he went on his double hunt.
An application to the department of vital statistics might eventually give him half of the information that he needed. But not the rest, and applying there would leave a trail, and moreover he was pressed for time.
So he consulted several coppers (involuntarily) and then a series of maps and directories, and eventually, after a series of false starts (instantly forgotten by them), netted a minor official returning from her lunch who had all the necessary access and authorizations.
The Imperius curse was illegal to use even on Muggles. The Verum Dicere might have been declared so, had it been known to anyone but a few selected Aurors. The Confundus Charm, however, was a Ministry workhorse, second in their arsenal only to the memory charm itself. If anyone cast Priori Incantatum on Snape’s wand, there were a hundred reasons he could adduce for having cast it upon Muggles.
Hell, the right story, and he could put in for an Order of Merlin.
He needed such a simple thing: just one true death with the proper outlines whose details could be blurred to his purposes. .
An addict. A woman, a white one. Dead after a short but documented stay in hospital.
The clerk contentedly pulled up every death in the last several weeks that came close to meeting any of his parameters. Nor did she question her eventual impulse to change the dates of one woman’s hospital admission and death.
She’d forgotten that she’d ever searched for, much less altered, any such records by the time he’d slid out of her office.
And Snape now had a name, and a picture, and the name of a hospital. And, most important of all, a home address.
The hospital records were easier to fudge, since the hospital was, by definition, open to the general public. Though the administrative offices were off-limits to any but staff, they were hardly secured, nor their location any secret. A single menial gave him the information required, and a little lurking gave him access to the necessary clerk.
Easiest of all was extracting authentic memories of the target woman; once he’d found the right floor. It was ludicrously easy to harvest a few images of a dying and dead junkie from an orderly; he didn’t even have to Obliviate this one.
Less easy was working on the people who’d been the dead woman’s neighbors, if such a term might be rightly used. Spinner’s End was a model of community feeling, compared to this slum.
Still, people noticed other people. Involuntarily, as often as not.
Only, here, Snape needed not only to harvest their memories of a living woman, to feed to Neville.
He also needed to leave some.
Of a dark-haired child, more known-about than seen. There only occasionally, until recently. Rarely seen in public, but sometimes heard.
And in a very few minds, a blurred and incurious memory of a black-haired, hook-nosed man a few weeks back, an argument, a child being taken away from there.
It wasn’t as though any of those neighbors cared particularly about the dead Marianne Waters (if that was her true name) or the child they vaguely remembered.
*
The other neighborhood given him by the copper this morning was clearly correct. He was approached almost immediately.
“I want a woman who’s been a mother. Never mind what game I want to play. You can’t assist me.” Snape stared down his nose, and the woman backed away quickly..
Word of his requirement got out fairly quickly, and he had an applicant who seemed suitable.
“Kinky shit costs more, you know,” she said when she presented herself..
She might have been pretty once, when her brown skin had been smooth and her black hair shiny. The makeup she wore couldn’t hide her deterioration. Not that Snape gave a rat’s arse what she looked like.
He said, “So tell me a little about how you raised your own child.”
She huffed offendedly, “No one said you wanted private shit. Just said you were some sort of perv wanted a mother.” She started to turn away; Snape caught her wrist. He said softly, holding her eyes, “I haven’t told you yet what sort of pervert I am, or what I’ll pay for your services, or what I want. First, I want to know how you raised your own child.”
She flushed a little under her makeup. Snape held her eyes and answered his own question. “Used the telly as your child minder, or nothing. Locked her up alone. Raised her in filth, because you were too stoned or too tired to clean. Fed her trash, or left her hungry, because you were in no shape to go out to buy food. Or because you’d already used your food money on… your other priorities. That about sums it up, doesn’t it?”
They took her away. My Rashida.
She wrenched her wrist out of his hands, and he let her. But his voice stopped her when she turned to flee.
“I think you might actually be willing to oblige me, once you hear my proposition. You see, I have a child too. That’s why I’m here.”
She turned and stared at him incredulously.
”You know, don’t you, that syphilis can be fatal? It’s been fully curable for years, easily by the time you and I were children, mind you. If diagnosed in time. Only, see, back then only doctors treating prostitutes and their clients would look for such a disease. Not those treating respectable married women. Respectable pregnant women. Not in time. And the symptoms, you must know this, are often hard to spot in a woman if you’re not looking for them. And the disease can be transmitted to the unborn baby.
“And so I’m an only child. More accurately, the only surviving child.”
She was listening, eyes wide under what looked like an inch of mascara
He let his voice roughen and slip into his Northern accent. “And so my mum… well, she wanted to make sure I’d never repeat my dad’s mistake. She wanted to make sure. Aversion therapy, the docs call it. Worked with me. My boy’s the same age I was then. So here’s the deal. Keep him for a day, as though he were your own. Let him see what a tart’s really like, what a tart’s life is like. Just don’t lift your hand to him; you won’t like what I’d do to you if you did that. One day. Less, actually. You’d take us to your flat now, and I’d fetch him tomorrow, before you-ah-start your normal shift. What would you charge to do that?”
“You’re crazy,” she said. “You’re a loonie, you are.” But she hadn’t run away.
“Logical,” he answered, smiling and straightening. “Worked with me, like I said. Does it seem like your … type… holds any appeal at all for me now?”
He let his eyes move dismissively from her cleavage to her high heels, and back up to her face. She flushed again and repeated, “You’re a loonie, and your mum too!”
“But a harmless one, at least to you. As long as you don’t harm him. What would you charge?”
Not that she would finally have agreed at all without… persuasion.
*
She did not, apparently, bring her work home with her. That, he could say in her favor. She met him on a corner and accepted custody of the boy, and he turned and left them.
Her squalid flat was everything he’d expected. He surreptitiously added a half carton of sour milk to her fridge to add its distinctive stench the next time she opened it.
When she returned, she accepted the child sleeping in a sort of nest behind her sleeper sofa with equanimity. He’d warned the boy to expect that she’d confuse him with her own child, and to play along.
And that he would fetch Neville at four.
When afternoon came, Neville went to the dirty window and started watching the street. When four o’clock finally approached, Neville alternated staring at the door and out the window.
When four o’clock passed, the boy went white.
It took until four-thirty before Neville finally huddled in the corner and started to cry.
“Wotcher snivellin’ for?” the woman said. She turned up the volume on the telly. “Shut up, I’m doing my nails. I need to concentrate, like.”
Snape raised his wand. “Petrificus totalis. Obliviate.”
He tapped himself. “Finite incantatum.”
He knelt by the boy and gathered him in. “I was here all along, Neville. I never would have left you alone with her. But you had to feel alone, and helpless, and abandoned, because those real feelings are what I’m going to weave into the fake memories I’ll create for you. I needed real feelings to make your memories feel real. But I would never leave you with someone like her, Neville. Never.”
*
A bed-and-breakfast near Coniston was, Snape thought, sufficiently removed from both Spinner’s End and Preston to be safe, but the accent was still right. He had toyed with the idea of using Somersetshire and Lyme, but if anyone ever looked closely enough at the boy’s memories, the discrepancy between the accent and the boy’s supposed provenance would be too great. And the boy wasn’t familiar enough with a southern accent to be able to translate remembered conversations into it automatically.
The first step was to pick an elderly couple to play the chief parts: He chose a couple that ran a tourist shop. Snape brought Neville in several times, to accustom the boy to the couples’ scents, and movements, and sharp but short squabbles with each other. The woman who ran the B&B could become Aunt Enid, and the one at the bakery counter Aunt Louisa. The important thing was that they all be Muggles whom Neville was wildly unlikely ever to encounter again, nor any wizard to recognize.
It had been an expensive pair of days, even with stiffing the tart. But worth it.
*
“Before I start working on your memories, Neville, we need to save some of your original memories for if you ever need them back. Either if there’s some reason you need to return to your family-like, if I died in an accident I wouldn’t want you to become a ward of the Ministry-or, when you’re an adult, if you’ve learned to Occlude I can give you your real memories back. So think of something you would want to be able to remember accurately.” His wand drew a silver strand from Neville’s head, and he tipped it into the phial. “Good, Neville, another.”
The boy’s face was set in a scowl that seemed to hold as much distress as concentration. It seemed to be more than just the pointing wand that bothered him. Severus stopped. He knelt and sought to reassure him. “Neville, you’re not going to lose all your favorite memories. I’m just going to alter them so no one can trace your connection to the Longbottoms. And then add some, of living in London. You’ll still have most of your memories, just the people in them will look different. And you’ll think you only lived part-time with your Gran, and the rest of the time with the woman you’ll remember as your mum.”
He held Neville’s shoulders. “Neville, you’re even going to remember that your Gran is a witch, and that side of your family. Your mother will seem to have been a cast-off Squib, or maybe the daughter of one, but still enough in touch with her family to ask for their help with her baby. But they wouldn’t have been very interested in keeping the baby permanently once they thought you were a Squib like your mum. They’d have sent you back to your mum to raise. And if they keep a family tree, if your mum had been burned off you wouldn’t even appear. Or her death, so they wouldn’t have had reason to worry and go looking for you.
“So see, you really won’t need to lose very many memories at all. I’m mostly going to change how the people and places look. Everyone will act like they really did. The only thing that I see now that I’ll have to remove entirely will be… your visits to St. Mungo’s. That would be too much of a giveaway, your Gran taking you there on visits. So those, those, are some of the memories you should give me now, to keep intact.”
Severus swallowed. The boy looked down and whispered, “Will I remember… going to Blackpool?”
“Roughly. I’m going to change a lot of the details, and make it seem to have happened longer ago.”
“What about…. will I remember… you burning my hair?”
“Not at all. You won’t remember anything that indicates that you’re not truly my son by birth, by a non-magical woman who died shortly after she gave you to me to raise.”
“Can I think for a bit, what I want to be sure of remembering right?”
Severus squeezed his shoulders, stood up, and stepped back. “Of course. That’s a good idea. Tell me when you’re ready to give me more memories to keep. And we can do as many as you want, you know.”
Neville thought for a while, still looking down. Then he looked at Severus. “Okay. I’m ready.”
Severus copied memories into the phial for twenty minutes, resisting the impulse to sneak peaks at them in passing. Then he set to serious work.
It would be much easier with a Pensieve. But there was no way to ask for the Hogwarts one, and Snape could make do without.
*
The boy was a bit dazed, but that would pass.
Looking in Neville’s eyes, Snape asked, “What are your Gran and Gramps like?”
Neville’s mind produced an image of a pudgy woman in a pinny and a shortish man who smelled of peppermint and tobacco. Neville said hesitantly, “They… they didn’t think Mum was much good. Or me either, cause of her.”
Severus snorted. “Their loss, then, about the latter. Do you remember ever going to Liverpool?”
The boy tensed and didn’t answer.
Gramps used his wand to swing me out over the water, only I was scared and I … had an accident. And then when he put me down and saw, he pushed me off the dock. To clean me up.
Snape would have preferred to have used a millpond or river, to lessen the resemblance even further, but the boy’s memories of the salt burning in his nose and throat as he struggled in the icy water had been too vivid.
“Where was your Gran’s house?”
“In the country, by a river.” His mind filled with images.
The bed and breakfast had been sufficiently large and old-fashioned that Snape had only had to edit out the modern Muggle conveniences. Some of the rooms--the kitchen, the nursery, the bath-were Neville’s originals, except for the absence of portraits.
And the neglected back corner of the garden where Neville had retreated from his family’s disapproval was no feature of the bed and breakfast’s grounds.
In the unlikely event that Neville Snape should have occasion to visit the Longbottoms’ home, it was wildly improbable that they’d take a visitor to the kitchen or nursery.
“How did you first come to my attention, Neville?”
“You saw my chocolate frog hopping when I dropped it in the train station, and you started yelling at me and Mum-well, not yelling, more like hissing--for being stupid. And then you said bad words.”
The black-haired man stalked over to them, scowling, the chocolate frog in his hand. “You bloody cretins, have you no concept of discretion? Letting loose chocolate frogs in the middle of King’s Cross-what the fuck? Who the fuck is this?”
He stared at Neville’s face, and then over at Mum. He looked harder. “M--Marcia…?”
Mum started laughing, but not like she was happy. She was looking at the man’s wand. “It’s Marianne! You were a bloody wizard all along? Just my luck, to get knocked up by a wizard. But it’s no good to you, he’s a Squib; my grandparents won’t keep him.”
The man didn’t seem to be listening; he was staring at Neville still. “He’s mine then?”
Mum crossed her arms. “How would I bloody know?”
“How did you come into my custody, Neville?”
“You came to see me, and I was really sick, and you yelled at Mum about it. And she said, ‘You take him, then, if you think you can do better.’ And you said, ‘I will.’”
You said later, “I would never leave you with someone like her, Neville. Never.”
And you didn’t.