( miavi. un: x )

[darkart]

[ If you're feeling fancy and bored tonight (today, this morning..), here's a magic puzzle for you. It looks something like:


The parts can be re-arranged into two dozen different runes, which can then be translated into spells. The simpler ones, of which there are fifteen, simply make everything disappear when 'solved'. The remaining, more difficult nine are:

✧ Shimmery, translucent flowers appear around your head and shoulders, for about five minutes.
✧ BANG. Jumpscare.
✧ An enchanted doodle plays Hangman with you, the winning word changing periodically.
✧ Displays a recipe for zucchini bread. The best zucchini bread you've ever fucking had.
✧ Suggestions for what to try at the curry house in Hogsmeade.
✧ Creates a very cold feeling for about five minutes.
✧ Causes the message What else could you have been doing with your free time? to appear.
✧ Displays directions for a spell to turn nicotine cigarettes into clove cigarettes.
✧ Nothing. Unless you have a Dark Mark, in which case, a small black snake slithers into existence from the base of your wrist, wriggling to the inside of your elbow before vanishing.

Once each rune has been 'solved', the drawing vanishes, making doing more than one very difficult; the witch or wizard (or wizich) will have had to have made a copy or cast a charm to preserve it prior to fussing through everything.

( OP's username, x, is not anonymous, though Severus's general disinclination to socialize might leave even 'friends' in the dark. up2u, my sweet beans. ) ]

Comments

[anguium]

Yet you seem to know what it means, calling me a criminal and no hero.

[darkart]

We're not all inebriated.

[anguium]

What was his name?

[darkart]

None of your business, time deviant. But I could be convinced. What's your name?

[anguium]

Fuck's sake, you're just as impossible as when you were my professor.

[darkart]

[ Aaaahaha fuck somebody who could easily know he's a traitor, at home. But-- ]

What does experience tell you to do? Irritate me?

[anguium]

[ does he trust this timeline's version? maybe? fuck, it's the best chance he has so far. ]

Experience has taught me enough.

Draco Malfoy.

[darkart]

[ A jolt he didn't expect. Lucius's boy - his own godson - grows up and takes the Mark. (A brief fantasy impulse of throwing something against a wall. What are we fucking fighting for. The Potter boy, the rest of these children, all over again. Albus, how could you.) He'll have to know. Won't he? But who is he now, in his time? Someone who's been through enough to be cautious, someone who knows him. Merlin. What a mess. ]

Curious. What poor soul has come between the great triad?

[anguium]

[ it takes him a moment because he thinks about his father and he thinks about his aunt and he thinks about meeting them in a muggle store and how if the last piece of their trio had been there, he would be dead instead of just thinking about how his father and aunt were going to kill him. ]

My mother is Narcissa Black.

[darkart]

[ This response comes after a delay long enough to make someone worry he might just never write one. ]

I'm going to give you an address.

[anguium]

[ he waits that whole time with a knot in his stomach, wondering if he's made a mistake. ]

All right.

[ the "understood" is implied. ]

[darkart]

[ And lo: an address. It's a slightly dilapidated coffee house in London, nothing magical about it. ]

Tell me when you get there.

[anguium]

[ it takes him a minute, but then: ]

There.

[darkart]

Do you know the spell to take a fireplace off the Floo Network?

[anguium]

Yes.

[darkart]

Go to the basement, find the fireplace. There's floo powder in a teacup on the mantle. Use it to travel to Severus Snape's London flat, and when you get there, remove it from the network.

[anguium]

[ oh my wizard god. well at least by following directions he won't be eviscerated by wards or something.

and lo: he does it. ]

Done.

[darkart]

[ Yeah sorry mate he can't add you to his wards without being there in person, but at least he's got a back door.

Which Draco now can't use to escape. Awfully trusting of him. ]

Wait there.

[anguium]

Yeah, he's gunning on Severus not planning on murdering him or turning him in. Which is a gamble but he realized he was walking into a trap box before he entered. It's a better chance than gambling on never getting caught on his own.

Anyway, while he waits he's going to make some tea. There's a nervous energy about him even with his spine rail-straight and his hair tied back perfectly neat and tidy and his robes in perfect order and basically he's the perfect pure-blood wizard that's waiting for the gallows Severus Snape.

So: drinking tea.

[darkart]

It is very strange that Draco Malfoy has willingly enclosed himself in a trap - an unintentional one, the back door is for paranoia, not luring in serial killer victims - and it does not escape Severus's awareness that among the possibilities is a man looking for vengeance against Dumbledore's spy. He paces in his office, having unconsciously picked the habit up, considering. Weighing out his options. He can't leave right now anyway, it would be suspicious if anyone noticed, and he must be available at certain hours.

Draco is waiting for an awfully long time.

When he does arrive it's not through the fireplace, and there is no ominous fanfare. Just quiet footsteps in the hall and a regular key turning to unlock the front door as wards let him slip by, seamless and soundless.

Severus is as ever, if much younger. Still ugly, pale, black-clad and always, always with that default expression of barely tolerating the world around him. He shuts the door behind him and the look turns on its own.

Hello.

[anguium]

Draco waits. And waits. And waits. He doesn't think that Severus is going to starve him out or anything: that isn't his style. He'd want to get rid of a threat as quickly and quietly as possible. Unless that's his style in this timeline, which would be vastly disappointing. He knows that if Severus does want to murder him there's no way he can win: even at a suitable age for 1980, the other wizard is strong enough to beat two or three of him easily.

So he waits. He picks up a book and he reads and he waits, anxiety gnawing at him. Still, even if he had cold feet, there's no way out. It's an interesting book and it passes the time so he deals with the passage of time that way, drinking tea. Trying to relax. Failing. The sound of footsteps startles him enough that he puts the book aside and straightens almost as though he's in class all over again.

Ah. So he is the appropriate age.

"Hello," he says, sounding calmer than he feels.

[darkart]

The look Severus gives him there just inside the door could mean anything. On someone else, maybe there'd be some tell-- a flinch, a glint in the eyes, of seeing what he remembers as a baby here as a grown man, taking in the way the curve of his chin looks like Lucius, his cheekbones from Narcissa. When you were my professor, he'd said. How did that go? How much did Severus coddle him, given his position? What caused him to fail so miserably as to let him become a Death Eater?

But there's nothing. A blank, unpleasant mask that could be contemplating ways to make students cry as easily as searching Draco's face for signs of genetic familiarity, or threat.

"That was a very foolish thing you did," he says after a while, cognizant that he's telling off a man probably twice his age. It doesn't matter. He tells off Albus Dumbledore when the mood strikes him.

[anguium]

Almost precisely twice his age, to be exact. Draco relaxes only somewhat but it's enough to calm the set of his shoulders, the tension in his spine. An odd expression flits over his face when Severus speaks: he smiles. Whether it's in response to that or to some fleeting thought—whether it be of Severus as his professor, or of something else entirely—is an answer obscured. Draco stands though, momentarily calmed by the current mood of the room.

But only momentarily.

"I've done a great many foolish things in my life," Draco finally says, sounding thoughtful. "Far worse ones." For this, there are a thousand things he could be talking about, small things, large things, life events. But the worst is clear like crystal in his voice even if it's what brought him here in the first place tonight.

[darkart]

"Obviously."

A sudden burst of energy and clear agitation, Severus advances on Draco - helpfully still taller than him - glowering. "Or you wouldn't be here."

Someone not prone to doing foolish things wouldn't have gotten himself in this situation, wouldn't have done something as brutally sloppy as allow such an indignant fuss over a gilded fascist government to be connected to a person poking around about the Dark Mark. If anyone but Severus had been on the other end-- not that anyone but Severus would--

Still.

"You are going to tell me everything about the wars in your world and the state of the Minister there."

[anguium]

Draco doesn't flinch. He's very proud of himself for not flinching actually, even at forty-six and change, which is hilarious considering, but Severus Snape has always cut an imposing figure for him. His eyes do flicker away though, just the once, before he goes back to looking at him. "I know your handwriting. I'm here on a fifty-fifty gamble that's worked out for me. So far, at least."

He could still be murdered.

"I can, it's no secret for me to."

I'm not typing it all up. He's going to tell the whole story.