SB: Chapter 1 - The Place of Snakes (Part II of II)

[strngbedfellows]

CHAPTER 1 - THE PLACE OF SNAKES

PART II

Shade or no shade, it was always hotter here in the afternoons. Dammit. It added the smell of baking sweat to his natural charms as yet another customer repellent, Snape thought sourly, and on principle glared at the little girl behind the cart full of flowers who sat a few yards away.

Well-at least his smell didn’t deter Hernandez. The man was ostensibly some sort of law enforcement, but Snape was well aware he was in the pocket of the local drug lords. Hernandez claimed that he’d picked up the slug in his leg and the accompanying painful limp in the line of duty. Snape supposed that was true enough, as he was well-paid to do various, clandestine “odd-jobs” with some of the more violent affiliates of the cartel, jobs that often carried with them a high rate of employee attrition.

And ultimately, what did Snape care if the money that found its way into his hands for a salve for Hernandez’s leg came from a corrupt government or the cartel that ran it behind the scenes?

Snape had spent the better part of a month in the capital, learning his way around this pathetic excuse for a country, adopting the name Samuel Greene (there was no way that he would pass for a Mexican, so he didn’t even try to take a more local-sounding name). There was something of a centralized magical network here, but that was only the case in the largest of cities on this side of the pond, apparently. Everywhere else he would simply have to learn to recognize the signs of the local magical establishments that were sprinkled in among the Muggle businesses.

Savages.

There was, fortunately, a little shop on Calle del Magos in Mexico City where he had been able to buy a book on local wizarding culture to help him get around, should he want to join civilized society for a change. But honestly, his desire to do so was quite low since his scare in Belgium, and the few times he frequented the magical part of town, it was in disguise and only for quick forays in order to stock up on magical necessities (for his Potions kit in particular).

Eventually, he came to the unwelcome conclusion that despite his desire to stay in the larger cities with real magical enclaves and larger English-speaking populations, doing so was probably counter to his desire not to be found, so he decided to find a relatively out-of-the way place where he could settle down again, at least for the time being. He was tired of running.

He’d always rather fancied the sea, ever since his one and only trip there with-as a child. And the Pacific was supposed to be warm and beautiful-and peace was something he’d been denied in his life. And so he looked to the west-not too close to the sea, mind you, as beaches were attractive prospects to tourists, but somewhere where it wasn’t too far. And not too far south-the closer he was to the US, the better were his chances of finding English speakers.

He started migrating west and north, hopping from town to town to find a place that was quiet where he could hide in peace. He visited Aztec temples and Spanish fortresses, and churches and plazas and museums, trying (and failing) to find a place that made him feel at home. There was little rhyme or reason to his movements, and looking back he couldn’t really say how or why he’d ended up in Sinaloa. If nothing else, it did fit his bill: smallish, quiet, not overwhelmed by tourists, enough English speakers that he could find someone to direct him around town, and the biggest city wasn’t too big. And so one day when he found himself in Culiacán and realized that what’d he’d planned to be a short overnight stay in the town had turned into a two-week stretch, he simply decided not to run any more.

Culiacán. The Place of Snakes.

The name of the town could mean many different things-The Place of Turning Roads, or The Place of the God Coltzin-but that one lodged firmly in his mind. Snape still wasn’t quite sure if it was an omen for good or ill. He’d not believed in omens as a younger man, but after having his life destroyed by half a prophecy, he’d come to lend them a bit more credence. But honestly, what better place for a Slytherin on the run to hide then in a nest of snakes run by a drug cartel?

Due to his judicious spending on his little jaunt around the continent, he still had plenty of money to settle in somewhere and to support himself. First things first-he’d needed to establish a base for himself, somewhere he could skulk in the background and not be found. Once again, he’d deliberately sought out one of the worst, most run-down neighbourhoods that he could manage. One, Calle el Sombras, was almost entirely deserted, the street empty and dusty, and most of the tightly-packed little houses boarded up and abandoned.

Perfect.

He’d chosen a collection of the most dilapidated and forlorn little houses on the street and set his eye on one right in the middle of the sorry lot. Tracking down the owner had been something of a chore, particularly among the insular, closed-mouthed, and largely non-English speaking locals, but he’d not cultivated Legilimency just to let it lie idle. He’d eventually found out who owned it, tracked him down, and “persuaded” the wretched man to sell it to him at a reasonable price, one that he could easily recoup should he be forced to fly once again. And so he’d moved into the stuccoed little building crammed onto the street between its neighbours like three aged sardines in a rusting can.

Two up, two down. Just like home.

It wasn’t funny.

What it was was a disaster. The place hadn’t been lived in for years, and best he could tell, the previous inhabitants had been a pack of wild dogs. There were no magical pests, thank goodness, but the positively enormous rats more than made up in size and boldness what they lacked in magic. It had been a battlefield in there for two days before he’d achieved victory over the vermin.

Once Snape was finally alone in his new abode, he’d done what he could to fix the place up inside. There was a little kitchen and a sitting room downstairs, as well as a cramped little WC and bath, and upstairs were two bedrooms. It wasn’t difficult to make it habitable inside with a bit of magic, particularly since he was well-used to living in squalor. Furniture and other supplies that he’d scrounged from various refuse heaps had been cleaned and repaired with a few expert spells. Magic scoured the pipes and the fixtures and floors and tile, as well as restoring the plumbing and re-rigging the frayed wiring. A little elbow grease parcelled out with his magic had sped the cleaning along, and in only a few weeks he’d managed to turn the hovel into something resembling a house.

Inside, at least. He’d left the outside as it was, as unappealing and derelict and apparently deserted as possible, and helped it along with a healthy dose of Muggle-repelling charms. He repaired all the glass in the windows, but left the boards across the outsides and covered the insides with dark curtains. The wrought-iron cages for flowerpots that hung on the windows remained empty and rusting, and the broken glass shade on the light outside the door was not replaced. If the very appearance of the place wasn’t enough to put people off, his wards and charms would speed them along, causing any passing Muggles to become distracted or suddenly remember urgent errands that required their attention elsewhere.

He valued his privacy, after all.

He’d been so (relatively) pleased with his handiwork and exhausted by the effort he’d put into it that it had taken him a few days after settling in to realize that he had hidden himself so well that he now had no idea what to do with himself. His Spanish was nonexistent-while there were enough English-speaking Muggles here for him to find a bathroom, there certainly weren’t enough for him to get a decent job among them, and what little Wizarding community there was in this town was limited to the back rooms of some dirty little shops that also serviced Muggles and were on the other side of town.

Quite simply, there was nothing for him to do in this miserable Mexican toilet.

The sun was sinking low behind the nearby buildings, throwing long stripes of shadow across the cobblestones of the plaza, shade that he would have welcomed but a few hours earlier, but now just irritated him. Snape generally stayed all weekend in the plaza, as those were the best times to catch tourists and drinkers with his little cache of remedies. But Sunday was his early day, as once everyone was clean and sobered up for church, his business slowed to a trickle, and he usually headed home before nightfall. He supposed he would wait a little longer, just to see if any among those shuffling in and out of the cantina were still lucid enough to take what he would have to offer, and then he would retreat back to his domicile, taking his goods with him.

Snape had been nearly a month into his stint in Culiacán, brewing a fresh stock of Polyjuice for his forays into the few Wizarding areas, brooding over the fact that he’d been chased here in the first place, and generally going out of his mind with boredom (and no little frustration at his own uselessness), when he’d suddenly realized that he was his own commodity in this shrivelled little prune of a town.

The magical government here was just as decentralized and beset with corruption as the Muggles’, if not worse, and it was obviously much smaller and even less organized. And that was because there were so few wizards here-he was one of a very small group of people here with his particular talents.

So why not exploit them?

On his travels Snape had seen various shops selling “holistic medicines” and herbal cures and other such tripe-it was all the rage among Muggles these days. So why not sell them something that really did work?

He’d thought it a brilliant idea for all of two seconds before abandoning it. Who on earth would buy anything from a grizzled, hook-nosed derelict busking on a street corner?

One who didn’t have a choice, he answered himself. One in whom he’d planted a suggestion to do so. Along with the suggestion that he spread the word.

And that was exactly what he did. He spent nearly a week brewing a vast array medicinal potions-nothing fancy, just mild painkillers, hangover cures, stomach remedies, and the like-some magical but others merely common sense. All would be completely untraceable to even a proper magical government, much less this barbaric farce that managed magic in Mexico, as they were potions and not actual spells. Armed with a basket of his wares, dressed carefully in concealing yet nondescript clothes, he’d made his way down to the plaza, staked out a place to sit, and had lain in wait for his prey.

Snape reasoned that he wasn’t being excessively unethical-he was only “telling” people to buy something that would ultimately help them. Like stopping a group of carousers headed into the bar and leaving them with lighter pockets and vials of potent hangover-prevention draughts. Or persuading a woman with a screaming child that it was in her best interest to buy something for her obvious headache and its obvious colic. Or spotting a tourist with an aching stomach, having been stupid enough to eat the food from La Serpentia Negra, and relieving him of his agonies for a small fee.

He was doing them a favour, when one got right down to it.

Although his customers didn’t always see it that way, not at first. Business was slow those first few months. The people here were quite polite to the tourists, as they were a source of income, but clannish and snobby towards outsiders who moved in on a more long-term basis. Not only that, he was well aware that he intimidated people-it was a skill that he’d spent years perfecting. Unfortunately, it worked against him here, in that few people wanted to approach such an off-putting figure, and subsequently few got near enough for the required probing eye contact. But a few did; mostly tourists in the beginning, which only helped in the short term, but gradually, he began to reel in some of the locals. Not the most stellar specimens of Culiacán society, granted-old Rodriguez had been one of his first-but still, faces familiar to the townsfolk began to be seen buying his merchandise.

Ever so slowly, the people of the area seemed to accept that he wasn’t going to go away-and subsequently to realize that perhaps his wares weren’t the garden-variety quack remedies. They still made fun of him behind his back, he knew, of everything from his clothes to his accent, calling him Viejo Don Greene, the purported honorific uttered in only the most disparaging tones. He’d been called worse by better (and by worse), and he frankly didn’t care. Especially not when being out in public and enduring their pathetic jibes meant a steadily increasing flow of their cash into his hands, and just for doing what he did best. Not to mention that sitting in the plaza day after day had helped him immensely to improve his Spanish. He’d been shocked by how much he enjoyed himself when, after hearing a group of gormless little hooligans nearby making fun of his nose, saying that all he needed to was a hairy wart to look the part of a witch (how original), he’d turned to them and growled in near-perfect Spanish that they’d best run home to their mothers, lest he crack open their empty little skulls and use the pulp for his potions.

They’d paled delightfully and scattered. He hadn’t enjoyed himself that much since his days as Potions Master.

By the time Snape’s 40th birthday had rolled around, he had a steady and regular business, to the point that once or twice he’d even overheard some of the locals recommending him to visitors. And by the time he’d been here for a year, a one or two people had actually approached him with requests, asking him for specific remedies other than those in his usual arsenal, like for acne or cramps. And he always provided.

Don Greene, it seemed, had arrived.

And if all went well, here he would stay.

Snape carefully began to pack away the few potions that he sat out on the bench next to him as advertisements, tucking them away in the magically enlarged and neatly segmented interior of his basket. The plaza was slowly emptying; the jewellery maker had rolled up her blanket, the girl with the flowers had wheeled her cart away, and the café and the cantina had only a few stragglers for customers.

He was looking forward to heading out himself, to being comfortably tucked away in his refuge, in the dark and cool of his workspace, away from prying eyes and glaring sunlight. He generally spent his weeks contentedly alone in his lair, brewing fresh stocks, reverting back to his old habits and experimenting with his existing recipes, or tending to his garden and preparing ingredients.

He’d discovered, rather to his pleasure, that he was able to purchase a wide variety of non-magical plants and herbs, dried or fresh, that he needed for his work; the grocer’s were surprisingly well-stocked for such a miserable place. However, that windfall was mitigated by the fact that the market for obscure or magical ingredients was woefully lacking.

Anti-tracking charms notwithstanding, Snape was still not about to use any sort of post, magic or Muggle, to order what he needed. He grew rapidly tired of the more and more frequent trips to the magical shops under the guise of Polyjuice. He’d eventually decided that this simply wasn’t an option, if for no other reason than that the constant use of that potion was rapidly eating his disposable funds. It wasn’t long before he came to the conclusion that if he wanted something done right, he had best do it himself. He’d made an arrangement with one of the local shops (in disguise, of course) to order and ship the animal-derived substances that he needed in exchange for his brewing expertise in providing rather complicated and difficult potions for the proprietor to sell, but opted to work with his own plants.

He’d been quite good at Herbology in school, managing both an OWL and a NEWT in the subject. Really, he’d been good with plants even before school, in an odd sort of way, tending to the herbs that his mother grew in their kitchen window, the only bit of green on the sooty streets of his home, or helping to plant the campanulas in the boxes over at-

At any rate, he saw no reason why he couldn’t grow his own plants.

The smaller of the two bedrooms in his house originally held his workbench when he moved in. He shifted things around so that his bed was in that one, leaving the larger one mostly empty, only one corner taken up by his workspace. He spent the rest of the week doing a little remodelling around the grounds: magically expanding the larger room to twice its original dimensions, erecting a wall to delineate his workspace from the rest, and then converting the rest of the room into a modest little greenhouse of sorts. Salvaged (or stolen) clay pots and troughs filled with earth were ample planters. Old scraps of wood were transfigured and cobbled together into stakes or small trellises for the climbers, and well-placed charms helped to keep the more active creepers confined to their own territories.

The difficult part had been working on the roof. Transfiguration and charms only went so far; he’d actually had to blast out part of the roof and fill it in with glass panes that he’d pieced together from bits of broken windows liberated from other houses along the street, and reinforced with a lattice made from strips of iron that had once been those same houses’ window boxes. Charms kept the room warm, moist, and filled with the bright Mexican sunshine.

Eventually, he’d managed to create a small but adequate atrium upstairs. On the converse side of things, the little root cellar under the house had needed very little work to make it suitable for dark adapted plants and fungi; it was little more than a hole in the ground as it was. The dirt floors had been easily excavated and sculpted into something resembling small terraces for planting, and charms and pans of water kept it cool and damp.

He’d risked a long-distance Apparition back to Mexico City the following week and spent three days stocking up on seeds, spores, sprouts, and seedlings. Most were purchased on Calle del Magos, but a few of the more exotic plants he’d acquired on the black market. If those wretched Weasley twins could come by venomous tentacula seeds right under the nose of their dragon of a mother, then he should certainly have no trouble finding the same in secret in an alley in Mexico.

With a month of construction, travel, and honest work with his hands, he’d created for himself quite a useful little garden. It had taken the better part of a year for all of the plants to establish themselves to the point of supporting a regular harvest and being useful for potions, but by then his need for visiting the magical side of the city had dropped drastically, which was precisely what he wanted. Rather than spend his weeks darting in and out of back rooms of shops all across the state, he could now stay at home and work.

The streets were quiet as Snape made his way back to his solitary domain, everyone going home to supper and to begin their weeks at work. That was usually the case here; the town had a lazy, sleepy quality to it that he had grudgingly begun to appreciate in recent months. His appreciation, he wryly reflected, was likely due to the fact that a mere three months ago, the entire city had simply exploded.

He’d been sleeping late that day; it was the second of November. He couldn’t remember a year that had gone by in the past twenty years that he hadn’t drunk himself into oblivion on the night of the thirty-first of October. It had been necessary to drag himself out of bed and go back to work the following morning when he was a teacher, but that time was over, and the last year he had wallowed in bed all the following day, drunk some more, and slept through most of November the second, and he fully intended to do it again.

Unfortunately, that year he’d been quite literally blasted out of bed by screaming and the cracking sound of gunfire-and lots of it. He’d flown to the window in time to see explosions blooming red in the centre of town, and he’d hastily tossed back one of his own hangover cures, thrown on some clothes, and Disillusioned himself before flying out the door to find out what the devil was going on.

It was complete bedlam. Snape wasn’t a stupid man (he often suspected that his generally prevailing cleverness was likely why his relatively few moments of stupidity were truly monumental in scale); he knew from long experience that if one intended to live in a snake pit, one must keep an ear to the ground at all times. He knew a good deal more about the underworkings of this cesspool of a town than many would give him credit for. Sitting quietly on his bench in the square, he’d overheard a great deal from passers-by-rumours on the wind about civil unrest, muttered political manoeuvring conducted in back alleys, whispers about a bold move in the works regarding the crime lords of Culiacán.

He certainly didn’t expect it to be this epic in scope. And somehow, he suspected that the cartel hadn’t either.

Ultimately, he didn’t gather much information that first day-the place was a war zone. And it wasn’t just the cartel and the government doing battle either, oh no-the whole town had risen up. He’d later learned that the current reigning crime syndicate had attempted to stage a coup over the entire country-and shockingly, it had fallen through. The people of Culiacán had revolted against their would-be oppressors and driven them out. All the people-as he’d raced unseen through the streets, he’d seen the local barflies chucking scavenged grenades, old Rodriguez blasting away with some sort of artillery, and-good God, was that the old woman who sold tamales in the square standing out there brandishing a gun? Had the entire city gone mad?

He’d run back to his home, in a veritable froth of fury-dammit, he’d stopped running! He had made a place for himself! He didn’t want to have to pack up and start again!

He’d been so furious that he had already packed up his few meagre belongings and was on the verge of undoing his months of hard work by demolishing the interior of his house before he realized that everything had gone quiet once again. He’d put his hectic packing on hold (he refused to admit that it was any sort of attachment to his domicile that gave him pause) to creep out and survey the situation.

Snape soon discovered, to his own sour amusement, that the locals had won against the more powerful force of the cartel, the lowly townspeople fighting against their oppressors in the name of their beloved leader.

He hated this place.

And yet, he was here. He had a place to live, he had a job (such as it was); it wasn’t that he didn’t want to leave (dammit), but he simply didn’t want to have to run again. Living in a place where revolt and rebellion were the order of the day was simply not conducive to his quest for anonymity-but to his surprise (and sneaking relief) the mayhem had settled down with amazing speed. He’d planned on waiting it out, just long enough to be able to leave without being molested, but just like when he first arrived here, his wait stretched out longer and longer until he was forced to admit that he wasn’t leaving. To admit that he wasn’t just hiding here, but that he lived here.

The streets grew steadily poorer and less inviting as Snape neared his home. Neat and well-kept homes with all the local colour gave way to progressively more run-down neighbourhoods; cheerily lighted windows were replaced by yells and fighting dogs.

His street was still almost entirely deserted (thank God), his house the only one inhabited, although it didn’t look it from the outside.

Snape turned down Calle del Sombras at last, almost home-and was very nearly run down again by that same little wastrel on his bicycle, cheerily ringing that damned bell.

If he did it again, he was going to transfigure his testicles into grapes, the consequences be damned.

Brats, thankless customers, and peddling on the street aside, he thought as he neared his house, things could certainly be worse. He could still be marking homework and maintaining order over empty-headed students day in and day out. The Dark Lord could still be alive. Dumbledore could still be pulling his strings like a puppeteer working a recalcitrant marionette. Potter could still be dogging his every step.

Yes, he grudgingly conceded, there were much worse fates than the one that he had made for himself here, in his little bubble of solitude down Mexico way.

Snape looked down the street towards his house, Number 13, and stopped dead.

He should have known things were too good to last.

There was a light on in the house next door.

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