Summer At Snape's
Here's installment number three!!
Love you guys.
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"So this is Prince Manor?" I ask, looking at the large manor before us.
"Indeed," Snape replies, walking up the pathway to the front door. I follow behind him until he throws his arm back, stopping me from going any further. He takes his wand out and mutters a few anti-jinxes before opening his front door and ushering me in behind him.
"I'll show you where you will be staying, and once you settle your stuff down, I'll give you a quick tour…and guidelines I'll expect you to follow."
I nod my head at him as he leads me up a large staircase, turning right at its landing and opening the second door on the left. He waits for me to enter before stepping in after me.
"This will be your room while you stay here," he states as I place my trunk and case down, and place Onyx over on a window seat. The room was plain with a four-poster bed on the right wall. On the wall facing the door, was a large window and window seat, with a desk and wardrobe on the left wall.
"Thank you, Sir," I state softly, sitting beside Onyx.
Snape walks towards me, sitting on the side of the bed, facing me. "Are you all right, Taylor?' He asks me, slowly.
"I'm not actually sure," I reply, looking up at him with a shrug.
He nods at me and stands back up. "Come on," he says, gesturing to the door. "Let me show you around."
I stand up and unlatch Onyx' cage so if she wanted to get out and stretch her wings, she could, and I follow Snape out into the hallway. To the left of the door we walked out of is a bedroom. He points to the door across from the room that I would be staying in and tells me that it is a bathroom. The door to the right of the bathroom is a closet and the one at the end of the hall is another bedroom. His bedroom is at the other end of the hall, and he informed me that under no circumstance should I ever go in there.
Walking back down the stairs, Snape leads me to the right, showing me the kitchen where his House Elf Bauble is, dining room and a potion room. To the left of where the staircase lets out is the living room, a large sunroom with a variety of potion making plants and a library.
The library at my grandmother's house is much larger than Snape's, but Snape's greatly outnumbers what Remus had had.
I run my hand across the bottom row of books, glancing at their titles. Some of the books on his shelves were hundreds of years old.
"I thought you might enjoy this room," Snape says from the doorway, watching me in curiosity.
I stop where I am and look up on the shelves. "Can you even touch most of these books?" I ask, looking back to him.
He shakes his head at me with a slight smile. "You, however, have free reign. Although, there are a few that I might like your help with ridding of jinxes."
"I'll help if I can," I say looking towards a particularly dilapidated book and pulling it off the shelf to look at the date. Reading it, I frown. "But it looks as if you might be out of luck with that."
"What do you mean?" He asks, sitting down in an armchair a few feet from me.
"Well this book," I state, walking over to him and taking the seat across from him, "was published in the 1250s. Many of the protection spells and curses against anyone who was not a pure blood that were commonplace in the middle ages, no longer exist today, or were even creations of the particular manufacturer, publisher, writer or owner of the book. I know only some of them and would rather not see you burst into flame or die before me if I happen to miss one."
"How incredibly caring of you," he replies. "How do you know all this?"
"My grandmother," I reply, looking around the room. "She always prided herself on the Black library and liked acquiring books that would do particularly ugly things to those who weren't pureblood…she enjoyed testing them out on those who used to come to her door before my grandfather had added all the updated protection spells on their place."
"I was unaware that you had much contact with her."
"Well I didn't have much. She'd take me a few times a year when I was younger and increased it every year, teaching me how a good pureblood should act and believe. My last year at the orphanage, she would have me come over almost every weekend. Remus was tipped off and that's why he had come to get me, not allowing me to see her anymore- she died a few months after Remus took me in, although I didn't find out until more than a year later."
Snape studies me from across the table. "I don't recall you ever mentioning her much."
"Well she was hardly a great lady, but she was the only tie to the wizarding world that I had."
"So you didn't like her?"
I shrug. "I can only assume that she had gone quite mental in her old age, or I can completely understand why my father ran away when he was sixteen."
He frowns at mention of my father and I flip through the book before me, which happens to be an old basic charms book. "What was she like?"
"She valued blood above everything. She used to talk down to Lucius because somewhere along the line his blood was 'tainted'," I sigh and shut the book. "She taught me how to behave like a proper pure blood. How to speak, how to choose those I talked to…how to be adequately punished and to punish others…The typical upbringing that I wouldn't have received from my 'Muggle loving' father."
"Can I ask you something?" Snape states, staring intently into my eyes.
"If you stop trying to penetrate my mind, sure," I retort.
"Were Potter and Granger telling the truth?" he asks me. "About Pettigrew?"
"Planning on cashing in on the bounty on him? Bringing about the downfall of the Dark Lord is a great reason to pretend to be dead for twelve years, don't you think?"
"Is that your way of saying yes?"
"You already know the answer, Severus. Face it. It all adds up," I reply. "Sure, my father was an asshole to you in school…but he disowned his own brother for turning towards the dark arts. You were in Regulus' house at school…you had to have known that. Besides… wouldn't you have seen him at Death Eater meetings?"
Snape doesn't respond, looking down at his hands on the table.
"You believed him and still wanted to put him back in Azkaban…twelve years for an innocent man wasn't enough?"
"I don't have to explain myself to you," Snape coldly replies.
"And I'm not asking you to," I state with a smile. "This is going to be a long few months, isn't it?"
"Only if one of us doesn't kill the other, first."
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Feelings?