A Dish Served Cold

Chapter 39 – Threats

Bill flung himself forward desperately and his outstretched hands caught at the stair’s edge. There was a moment of doubt as his fingers sought for a hold and then he was pulling himself up to flop on the crudely cut steps. The asps were below, frustrated by the first riser, and he was staring rather warily at the trapdoor above him.

After the last two rooms, he was wondering what other little welcoming touches Sarit Yidoni had left for any uninvited visitors.

Still, he couldn’t just lay here on the steps for the rest of his life.

With a sigh, he pushed open the trapdoor.

Even as he was running away from it, he still couldn’t believe that Sarit Yidoni kept a djinn in her kitchen.

Severus stared morosely at his worktable. He had gathered everything that he needed for the conjuring. He had double-checked everything five times. He had memorized the words required, the wand gestures, and every detail of the circle he needed to inscribe.
There was no reason not to do it tonight.

Except that he was extremely reluctant, now that it came down to it, to even accidentally murder Remus Lupin.

It was irritating beyond belief. When had he developed scruples, of all useless things? What had happened to the eager young man who had run to Voldemort with the juicy prophecy still ringing in his ears?

Futures spooled out before his eyes and stilled his hands. He saw Remus lying cold and covered in blood, glassy eyed in death in the chalked circle, Ginny screaming and weeping as she tore at her hair and clothes. Then he saw the wolf separated and mad with fury and fear, attacking those that had done this to it. Hermione’s eyes dimming and going blank, Potter shouting in terror as Weasley’s throat was torn out burned itself into his retinas.

Then he saw the other futures, success as Ginny shrieked with happiness, Remus looking calm and healthy, more failures with more dead bodies and himself being hauled off to Azkaban.

He stood there for long moments, wrestling with his visions, trying to make some sense of them.

Then it hit him.

There was no sense to be made.

Each future was as possible as any other. There was no set future. The prophecy about Potter and Voldemort had come true because Voldemort had believed it. He had made it happen. Any of these futures could come to pass, depending on what choices he made.
The future where the wolf attacked could be eliminated, if he made certain to have a strong cage ready for it. He could look at each future, see what he had done wrong and work to correct those errors as best he could. However, doing that would change the array of possibilities, it wouldn’t make the future change. The future hadn’t happened yet.

In that moment of clarity, he suddenly understood why his mother and grandmother had kept their visions secret. They had known that the very act of telling could change everything and they had seen something that they desperately wanted to have happen. The fear that their words could take away that future had kept them silent.

If only he knew what it was they had seen.

Bill was certain that Sarit Yidoni was so far beyond crazy that she had come round the other side and gone past again. The whirlwind of fire and magic that preceded the djinn was almost more terrifying that the sharp teeth and demonic expression. The sheer power of the creature was bowel liquefying and Bill was quite certain that he was going to have to change his trousers when this was all over.
Assuming, of course, that he survived it.

Susan Bones sat quietly beside Ginny with a pensive expression on her face.

“So was it awful?” Ginny asked again with a touch of impatience,

“No, but that was what was so appalling about it,” Susan replied. “I mean I hate him, really truly hate him, but the sex is amazing. Its like we take out our hatred on each other by making each other come so hard we can hardly stand it.” Susan was blushing beet red as she spoke but Ginny merely nodded sagely at her words.

“Ex-sex can be that way, like you are trying to make the other person sorry for leaving you, but you’re also still pissed off.” Susan blinked at Ginny’s matter-of-fact response.

“Ex-sex?” she asked with an expression of bafflement.

“Sex with someone you have broken up with,” Ginny explained.

“Oh,” Susan replied in a very small voice. “You make me feel so unsophisticated sometimes,” she added softly. Ginny heard the bitterness in her own laughter and watched Susan flinch with some alarm. She controlled herself firmly and forced her face back into a bland expression.

“Don’t think that you need to be just like me, Susan. I am nobody’s role model.” She managed to say it with an airy tone and a wave of her hand, but she wasn’t sure that Susan had actually bought it.

It wasn’t until after Susan had left that she allowed herself to break down and cry for the lost innocence that had bled away on the floor of the Chamber of Secrets.

Bill threw himself through the iron door and slammed it behind him. A quick reading of the wards and sigils inscribed on the door and he knew that he was safe from the primal fury of Sarit Yidoni’s magical cook. Why couldn’t she just keep a house elf like everyone else? Panting and gasping for air he stared around him wildly waiting for the next horror to come after him.

Thankfully, the worst thing about this room was the stiff formality of it. He seemed to have ended up in the dining room. A long wooden table with iron legs dominated the room. Perfectly creased linens and stiff backed chairs added to the feeling of a medieval torture chamber rather than a pleasant family gathering place. Iron light fixtures, heavy tallow candles, and a large iron chandelier added to the feeling of oppression.

Yet the floor was a beautiful mosaic of leaping deer picked out with semi-precious stones and local granites, with lapis rivers and malachite trees, all so graceful and delicate that they gave the feeling of suspended movement in every line. It was beautiful and spoke of a very different sensibility to whomever had furnished the room.

He heard voices and steps from the hallway. Looking around frantically, he dove under the table, suddenly grateful for the heavy, obscuring tablecloth.

“It took you ten minutes longer than I expected of you Avram. Next time, do not dawdle in the marketplace, there are all sorts of unsavory types there,” a sharp voice with a core of steel-reinforced misery spoke and Bill heard Avram’s mumbling reply. His garrulous friend of the marketplace was suddenly nearly silent and Bill curled up on himself as chairs were pulled back and feet appeared under the tablecloth.

Bill realized that it was lunchtime and he was very hungry. He very much doubted that he was going to enjoy this meal, however.

Hermione sat patiently as the Mediwitch checked her over. Along with the usual diagnostic wand waving, Maggie actually ran her hands over Hermione’s swollen abdomen and poked and prodded at the child growing within.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” Severus asked with curiosity as Maggie cocked her head and dug around with her fingers.

“Well, the tests are pretty accurate and it looks to be a girl, but to be honest, you won’t really know until the baby comes out and you can check for sure,” she replied with a distracted air.

“A girl,” he answered and Hermione wasn’t certain whether he was pleased or disappointed.

“Did you want a boy?” she asked her husband and he looked at her with surprise.

“I honestly don’t care as long as it’s healthy, relatively intelligent and doesn’t get my nose,” he answered and it took Hermione a moment to realize that he had made a joke.

“Are you feeling all right?” she asked in alarm, he wasn’t really known for his comic turns. His lips twisted and he sighed.

“I am feeling fine, Madame,” he shot back with a dramatically arched eyebrow and an air of pique.

“Well, you don’t make a lot of jokes,” she tried to explain. Maggie was making herself small and unnoticeable as they talked, but her sharp eyes were watching them both carefully, Hermione noted.

“What makes you think that I am making one now?” His expression was bland but his eyes were snapping with irritation. “It just so happens that the Snape nose is not a feature I wish to pass on.”

“Yes, well, not much can be done about that sort of thing,” Maggie intervened and waved him away from her patient. “You look as healthy as can be, though I do wish you could get some more rest; you look rather wilted around the edges.”

“I sleep all the time I just have these dreams that give me no rest,” Hermione retorted with a groan. She would love to sleep deeply and restfully; it wasn’t as though she were trying to make herself ill after all.

“I wish “dreamless sleep” potions weren’t so hard on the baby, that’s all,” Maggie soothed and Hermione allowed her feathers to un-ruffle.

Severus was watching her with his lip caught between his teeth as though he were thinking very hard about something. For a moment he looked as though he were going to say something but then he subsided. The curtain of his hair came down and he hid his face in a way that he hadn’t since they had been married.

She found it quite disturbing, but couldn’t figure out why.

Bill tried to make himself very small. It wasn’t something that he was naturally adept at, but years of practice at the Weasley’s tiny dinner table had taught him how to keep his elbows and knees tucked in tightly.

Looking at the ankles of the Yidoni clan was strangely enlightening. Sarit was at the head of the table, feet firmly planted, with perfectly polished sensible shoes and stockings without a single ladder in them.

The children of the clan had fidgety feet in shoes that were scuffed and with socks falling down or torn stockings. The next generation up all had rather well disciplined feet. They neither fidgeted nor were planted firmly. They were perhaps poised for flight if necessary, but were mostly just waiting feet. It made him wonder.

“Whose turn is it to feed Balthazar?” Sarit enquired from the head of the table. A child’s shoes scuffed the floor near the end of the table. “Very well, do so after dinner.”

Bill listened to the entirely one-sided conversation for the next half hour with utter disbelief. Sarit Yidoni’s tyranny of this family had to end.

At that moment he really missed Fleur.

“Absolutely not!” Hermione shot back at her husband with horror. “Hecate is right out!”

“Well, what do you wish to name the baby – Brittany?” he retorted with a sneer. She rolled her eyes in disdain.

“Of course not, I rather fancied Anne, or Helen,” she answered him, trying not to shout.

“How very Muggle,” he frowned at her with a lowered brow.

“Oh and Hecate is better?”

“That name has been in my family for generations!”

“Which explains so much about your family,” she snapped.

“Well, what about Apathia, Prudence, Hestia or Xenobia, those are all good names,” he ground out, obviously keeping himself in check. Hermione felt her dismay rising with each suggestion.

“You must be joking,” she replied with fading voice. His fierce expression belied that hope. “Do you want this child to be tormented every day of its life?”

He looked rather taken aback.

“They are all perfectly good Wizarding names!” he protested.

“Have you been listening as you call roll, Severus? Have you heard even one of those names being used in the last decade or ten?” She cocked her head and put her hands on what were left of her hips. With her belly doing its best to take over her entire middle section, it wasn’t an easy pose to maintain.

He frowned, but it was a look of concentration rather than of anger. After a long moment where he was quite obviously running the names of his students through his mind he grimaced.

“Not one of them,” he admitted grudgingly.

“Then perhaps we can come to a compromise,” she asked in a gentle voice. She really wanted them to find something they both liked that the poor child could live with.

“Fine, as long as it isn’t Brittany, Stephanie, Porsche or some other Muggle foolishness.”

She closed her mouth on a retort and took a deep breath.

“It’s a deal.”

This was going to be a long night.

When, at last, the dining room door shut behind the last of the Yidoni clan, Bill allowed himself a deep breath of relief. For all the interest value that shoes and ankles can provide to an imaginative mind, he had been all too aware of what could have happened to him had anyone stretched out their legs in the wrong direction.

The little he had heard of Sarit’s abilities had inculcated him with great respect for her power and a healthy amount of dread at the consequences of getting caught.

Albus owed him one for sure.

He peered out from under the table and found himself staring into the cool blue eyes of a House Elf.

Bugger, he thought to himself, as the world faded to black.

Neville sat and contemplated his brother in law with a sense of bemusement. Trajan Snape looked a lot like Professor Snape, though done in woodland browns rather than gray and black. There was something almost elfin in him, like his father, who had that wild, fey quality as well; Trajan seemed to move to his own rhythm.

At the moment, he was bouncing about the room like a toddler on a sugar high telling a rather convoluted joke about a Wizard, a broom, and three hedgehogs. Neville was far less interested in the punch line than he was in watching the dynamics between Trajan and Helena.

“Oh Merlin, do not tell that one again,” she begged him, blushing and hiding her head. Harry was laughing, with his arm around the rather fragile looking Moira, while Ron and Luna sat with heads together oblivious to the world.

Ginny and Susan, who had become dear friends recently, were curled up in chairs by the fire, while Professor Lupin sat very quietly beside his wife. Neville wished the older man didn’t look quite so grateful to be included in the party. After all, they were half his age and it was probably a pretty juvenile gathering for him.

“Oh Lena! Give over, you love that joke!” Trajan laughed at her after the punch line. The room had dissolved into merriment, less because the joke was funny than that they were all rather stressed and unhappy.

“Look, Neville didn’t even crack a smile, it’s not funny!” Helena retorted with a triumphant attitude.

“I was laughing on the inside,” Neville deadpanned and the room broke into guffaws again. He had a feeling that anything short of a eulogy could make the laughter start again. There was a desperate edge to the evening as they all watched their childhoods vanishing and the final confrontation drawing closer.

“Obviously,” Helena chortled and her smile had all the sweetness of spring to him. Even if they all died fighting Voldemort, it was the right thing to do and he knew that he would fight with all his strength. Her love had finally made him the hero he had always dreamt of being. Her hero.

He took his wife’s hand in his and brought it to his lips with a smile. This moment was what mattered now. Tomorrow could take care of itself.