Mapping Indiscretions

AN: Finally an update! Much apologies for the delay and many thanks to all who’ve offered feedback and stuck with me. As this was started pre-HBP, all is now hopelessly AU. I won’t really attempt to reconcile events to canon, but might borrow bits and pieces. As always, reviews are greatly appreciated!

Disclaimer: Nothing recognizable is mine. Including the disclaimer.

The journey to the Transfiguration classroom was short but not terribly productive. Ron still refused to talk much (not even an inquiry into the current state of his beloved Chudley Cannons could draw forth any enthusiasm) so Hermione occupied herself in catching him up on the various goings on in the castle in his absence. She finished telling him of Seamus and Dean’s nocturnal brewings in one of Sprout’s greenhouses, and the subsequent pandemonium caused by the accidental administration of the illicit liquid to the Herbology professor’s leaping toadstools by unsuspecting second-years, just as they entered the room. Ron failed utterly to appreciate the sublime hilarity of the anecdote, so she gave up on engaging him in anything resembling conversation. She settled herself in between Ron and Draco, with Harry seated on the other side of the blond Slytherin.

“Good morning. Before we begin today’s lesson, I’d like to resolve an issue that was brought up last class. Miss Granger asked some very interesting questions regarding the nature of the relationship between transfigured objects and their properties as defined by Muggle investigative methods. Unfortunately, we do not have time to go over these during class—” an anticipatory groan interrupted her, but she continued undeterred “—and so I have assigned several extra readings on the subject. I expect summaries of each by the end of next week.” She gave a smile and nod toward Hermione, who was busy sinking lower into her chair to dodge the glares and grumbles being hurled in her direction by her classmates. Even Draco muttered, “Damned swot,” under his breath with a mixture of familiar annoyance and grudging affection, and she elbowed him with less force than she would have previous years in retaliation. McGonagall silenced any further protest with a wave of her hand. “Now, today we shall be undertaking a series transfiguration. You have all been given objects and a set of targets into which to transfigure them. You will be graded on the success of each change, and the integrity of the resulting object. For example, Miss Brown, you will begin with rake/snake/cake/lake…”

The students set about their appointed task with varying levels of enthusiasm. Seeing an opportunity to talk to Draco for the first time that day (he and Harry had been rather occupied with one another after breakfast), she leaned over to whisper to him while appearing focused on the pocket watch in front of her, “How are you doing? Did you know he was being let out of Azkaban?”

Draco poked the slug on his desk with disgust before answering in a low tone. “I’m fine. The Ministry informed my mother—without giving her any say—of my father’s release yesterday, and she owled me last night.”

Hermione expertly transfigured the watch into an impeccably boring rock. “Do you know how he did it?”

Draco winced at the lingering mucous in the bottom of his newly made mug. “Gobs of money, I’d expect. He must have Galleons stashed somewhere my mother doesn’t know about.”

Harry used the meanderings of the furred, legged, and tailed hat on his desk as pretence for joining the conversation. “What are we whispering about?”

“Lucius.” Hermione’s rock morphed into a complicated brass padlock.

“Oh.” Harry grabbed his bowler by the tail, pulling its head out of Draco’s slimy cup. “What are we going to do about him?”

“What do you suggest? We all know he’ll be up to no good. He’s had more than enough time to plan something.” Draco transfigured the drinking vessel into a small, ornate but equally gooey Persian rug.

“It’s been what, nearly half an hour since they showed up?” Harry added leathery wings and pointed ears to his object, but didn’t manage to reduce its hatty-ness.

“As I said, more than enough time,” Draco sneered at his damp miniature floor furnishing, equally disgusted with it and his bastard of a father.

“Do you trust Moody to keep him in line?” Hermione asked, her rock shifting into a lovely fluffy blue sock with yellow ducks in a wandstroke.

“Not a chance, especially if his real mission is catching Snape.”

“We need to do something.” Harry corralled his creature, which now might have passed for a usable (if furry) doormat if it hadn’t still been sporting wings. The only sound from Ron’s direction thus far was a plaintive rib-bet from the green, pebbly, wooden shoe hopping pathetically toward the edge of the desk. Ron absently pushed it back in front of himself, and with a wave of his wand, added a pink, curly tail. Hermione winced in sympathy for the poor thing and considered their options. The only good one she could come up with risked exposure of Snape and their son, but they hadn’t much choice. She sighed, “At the very least, we can keep track of him. Where’s your map, Harry?”

“Up in my room. Shouldn’t take long to get it.” In a louder tone, addressing their teacher, he asked, “Professor, may I be excused?”

McGonagall was too busy restraining Neville’s growling, snapping chaise lounge while he attempted to placate it with honey to do more than motion Harry to the exit. Hermione and Draco exchanged amused eye-rolls as Harry left. She noticed that Draco’s mood and focus seemed to be improving; he’d managed a perfectly dry three-pronged plug with accompanying wire. He saw her look of mild surprise and answered with a condescending huff: “What? I can pay attention in Muggle Studies if I want to.”

Her equally tart reply was interrupted when her lap suddenly became full of half-transfigured monstrosity. The clog’s bleary, bugged eyes pleaded for mercy, its tongue hanging limply beneath its pig snout, a flowing, furry Alsatian tail curled dejectedly around the wooden heel. As Ron poked at it with his wand, it cowered pathetically, trying to bury itself in her robes for safety.

“Ronald! You can’t just lop the bits off that don’t belong on it! Here, let me…”

“Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go;

And Conrad cries out - Oh! Oh! Oh!

Snip! Snap! Snip! They go so fast;

That both his thumbs are off at last.

Mamma comes home; there Conrad stands,

And looks quite sad, and shows his hands;

‘Ah!’ said Mamma ‘I knew he'd come

To naughty little Suck-a-Thumb.’"

Snape finished his performance of the sadistic children’s poem with a theatrical flourish worthy of any pantomime hack, and little Caligula giggled happily, making an absent grab at the half-Kneazle who’d been observing the reading with equal attention. The elderly cat leaped aside disdainfully, and the child contented himself with chewing on the nearby table leg instead. Reading to the boy seemed to be one of the few ways of calming him, particularly when Snape did it. Happily, he was a man no little enamored of his own voice and so could occupy himself quite well in lecturing and engaging in one-sided conversations with his young son. When he tired of the drivel passing itself off as children’s literature, he often moved on to his research and marking with little protest from his audience; in fact, his best reviews seem to come from vitriolic interjected criticism of rubbish journal articles and devastatingly accurate impressions of the dimmest of his students. Besides, the boy’s typical response of drooling and falling asleep really wasn’t much different to what he faced in the classroom daily, except perhaps with a bit more attention from the infant.

Snape had never imagined himself in the role of ‘house wizard,’ but had settled into a routine resembling such with surprising aplomb. He’d taken up the new hobbies of reading all the places where he'd been 'sighted' by watchful members of the general public in the previous day and listening to the Wizarding Wireless. He enjoyed eviscerating the misguided advice dispensed during Toots, Shoots ‘n Roots and had developed a rather embarrassing addiction to The Bowmans, whose derivative soap plotlines brought back fond memories of his mother listening to Radio 4 in the kitchen when he was very young.

Snape would read to the boy, and the child would attempt to set the books on fire. Together, they played with animated wizard dolls and mini-brooms, which the boy would set on fire. He set the child to play with Crookshanks, which Caligula would first attempt to bite, then set on fire. Both parents had by now become experts at the Flame-off Charm Hermione had gotten from Ginny Weasley (Molly Weasley having been far too occupied running the manhunt for Snape to spare the time) and could apply it broadly and without looking. Currently, Caligula appeared to tire of further mangling the unfortunate piece of furniture and turned his attention back to a wary Crookshanks. Snape was not overly fond of the animal, but intervened nonetheless, spelling an indestructible stuffed bear to provide a more suitable challenge. He smiled softly as he watched his son tenaciously hunt the toy throughout the room, but then he noticed an insistent buzzing sound coming from his discarded robes on the armchair. He summoned the small book with apprehension—Hermione wouldn’t employ the alert charm without good reason. The hastily scrawled note did nothing allay concern.

Moody and... Lucius? Bugger.

He would need to build on the already impressive set of wards currently guarding the room to keep the mad Auror at bay. The elder Malfoy’s presence was a mystery and an unwanted complication, but a lower priority. Washing down the last bit of his toast with bitter black coffee, he made sure the baby was sequestered away from the door before focusing his attention on foiling the Ministry’s latest scheme.

By the time Harry returned with the Marauder’s Map, the classroom had descended into a chaos atypical of seventh-year classes. Professor McGonagall was far too busy attending to all the horrors the sequential transfigurations had produced to notice the two Gryffindors plotting with their former nemesis. Hermione panicked briefly as Draco unfurled the map under the desk; would the bargain she’d struck with it hold? She tried to surreptitiously get a glimpse at her rooms in the upper corner of the enchanted parchment, but that section was curled over closest to Harry.

“There’s the Potions classroom.” Draco poked the bottom portion of the map. “He’s still there, at least.”

“Where’s Moody?” Hermione frowned. Malfoy’s name hovered where Snape’s desk could be found, by her calculations, but ‘A. Moody’ was nowhere to be seen.

“Is that him?” Harry pointed to a smudged name moving in a nearby hallway toward the classroom.

Draco squinted. “No, that’s Maughn, Arya. She’s a Slytherin first-year.”

“Keep looking,” Harry said as he unfolded the map further beneath the desk, and Hermione was finally able to peek at the area representing her quarters. Mercifully, it seemed that the map considered Caligula to fall under the category of ‘Hermione’s mischief to be managed’ and her rooms appeared devoid of fugitive Potions master and offspring. She sighed silently in relief and began her own search for Mad-Eye. The nearest corner of the map seemed to wink knowingly at her, and she resisted an oncoming blush. She suspected that the Marauders would be surprised to discover just how sentient their creation had grown. When she’d begun her ill-conceived (so to speak) relationship with Snape months ago, she’d borrowed the map with the intention of spelling it to obscure their activities. The parchment had cheekily shrugged off the charm and asked her what she was hoping to hide. As curious, mischievous, and randy as its teenage creators, it heartily approved of her naughty intentions (though certainly not her choice of paramour) and agreed to cover up any suspect movements in exchange for juicy details of the same (she blamed the map’s unsettling penchant for voyeurism on the influence of Peter Pettigrew). Snape would be furious were he to discover the length and breadth (ahem) of knowledge of his personal life now known to the parchment, but it had seemed necessary at the time. Had she known about the Memory Charms governing Hogwarts student-teacher relations, she of course wouldn’t have bothered.

“Isn’t that your room, Hermione? What would Moody be doing there?” Harry gave her a confused look. He pointed to the dot signifying the paranoid Auror’s location just outside the door of her chambers.

“I’ve no idea.” She hoped her tone leaned more toward puzzlement than panic, though the latter was certainly threatening.

“Didn’t he say something to you this morning?” Draco’s sideways glance was more suspicious than Harry’s. She would have more trouble fooling the perceptive Slytherin.

“N-no, I don’t think so. He and Dumbledore were just checking on Ron—”

“He’s gone!” Harry blinked, peering more closely at the now-vacant area of the map.

“What? Where’d he go?” Draco pulled the corner of the map down between the three of them. They combed the nearby passages and rooms, finding no trace of Mad-Eye Moody.

“He’s not anywhere in the castle. How’d he leave?” Harry spared a glance toward McGonagall, but fortunately she was now occupied in separating the irate creations of Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil, who had managed to transfigure their objects into Acromantulas with political differences. The webbing and biting rhetoric flew about the classroom in equal density and stickiness.

“He must have Portkeyed out.” Despite her optimistic verbal supposition, Hermione winced internally. Snape must have finally done it. She wondered how hard it was going to be to scrape Moody’s crispy remains off her doorstep. The portrait guarding her door was probably a lost cause.

“Wait, there he is. Coming through the gates now.” Draco pointed, having unfolded the bottom half of the map. Indeed, ‘A. Moody’ appeared on the path, moving at a quick pace until, inexplicably, seeming to swing about in a tight circle before continuing toward the entrance to the castle. The odd behavior was repeated several times as the dot approached the entranceway.

“Your dad’s on the move.” Harry pointed toward the dot labelled ‘L. Malfoy,’ which had relocated—rather far away from the Potions classroom—to the second floor. “What’s he up to?”

“Haven’t a clue,” Draco answered, sounding glum and frustrated. They studied the map, exchanging puzzled glances over the dot hovering nearby a room labelled ‘Girls Lav.’ Hermione noticed that Moody had made his way into the castle.

“He’s heading back toward the dormitories,” she said, pointing toward the marker making smaller periodic pirouettes on an upper floor of Gryffindor tower.

“What the fu—”

“Mr. Potter!” Harry’s understandably confused and off-color outburst was disrupted by the arrival of a very harassed and put-upon Transfiguration professor. Luckily, she was distracted by the to-scale miniature IKEA-furnished flying hat claiming an address in a Swansea tower block on the desk in front of them, and they were able to hastily fold the map away before she noticed. As McGonagall began a lengthy and brogue-inflected critique of the specimens in front of her, Hermione cast one last suspicious glance at the wayward dots of the nutty men under surveillance before letting out a resigned sigh. Whatever they were (separately) up to, it couldn’t be good.

It would have taken some convoluted logic on her part to convince the boys that splitting forces for the lunch hour was the most effective way to investigate the mysteries posed by the mad Auror and his wayward charge, but fortunately the problem sorted itself. Ron refused to have anything whatsoever to do with Moody. Draco, who was best equipped to figure out what Lucius could possibly be up to, refused to babysit an increasingly irrational Ron in addition to his father. This left Harry torn between accompanying her to her rooms to see what Moody's fixation with them might be and making sure his best friend didn't walk off of an unconnected stairwell in the clutches of a melancholy fugue. Hermione managed to beg off his assistance by promising to not engage Moody directly, take the invisibility cloak, and give them frequent updates by enchanted Galleon.

“Severus?” The portrait guarding her rooms had stared at her in speechless horror and the wards spelled around it had glowed a sickly puce, but both admitted her nonetheless. As the door swung shut behind her, they seemed to shimmer, re-sealing the entranceway with a low hum. She took stock of the room, half-expecting to see evidence of an epic duel, but aside from some slight burn damage to an end table it appeared just as she’d left it that morning. Though, judging from the height of the marks and coinciding teeth impressions, the fault most probably lay at the feet of her offspring and his penchant for mauling her furniture.

“In here.” His voice travelled to her from the next room, accompanied by the demonic giggles characteristic of a happy Caligula. She made her way to the bedroom, stopping in the doorway at the sight of Snape attempting to change the baby’s nappy, a dangerous undertaking at the best of times. Staying well out of the line of fire, she asked, “How is he?”

“The usual.” Those not familiar with Snape’s many variations of ‘grumpy’ might have missed the subtle note of affection in his voice.

“Absolute terror, then.” Hermione smiled. Snape grunted an affirmative. She set her bag down by the bed. Snape finished cleaning and diapering the child and picked him up. Caligula giggled and reached for his nose, capturing it easily. Hermione hit the makeshift changing table with a cleansing spell as she moved to join them next to it. He turned to her with a raised eyebrow, extricating his nose in the process. The baby shifted his attention to the young woman next to him. Snape handed the eager boy over to his mother and gave her a brief kiss.

“What happened with Moody? Did he find you here? Is everything all right?” Hermione tried to keep her tone light for the child's sake.

“I—” Snape’s reply was interrupted by a horrific bang from the next room. Hermione balanced Caligula on one arm and drew her wand, looking at Snape in alarm. He gave her an incongruous smile as he made his way toward the loud crashes with something like eagerness. Even more wary at his entirely inappropriate reaction to the threat on their lives, she followed him into the sitting room, cradling the baby protectively. The rumbling had now been joined by muffled shouting, and the door shook with all the politeness of a battering ram. Snape waved a hand, and the door became transparent and the ranting more audible. The spitting, outraged visage of Senior Auror Emeritus Alastor Moody at full froth hurled hexes and imprecations toward them, the former bouncing harmlessly off the doorway and the latter washing unpleasantly over the ears of the room’s occupants.

“... felch a Dementor you slimy, rotten, buggering...” the door and jamb shook with each word “... shit-licking, cock-sucking, knob-less, smeg-collecting cunt! Step away from the defenseless children!”

She noticed that, rather than showing concern, Snape seemed to be placing ticks next to a litany of expletives, curses, and generally foul language written on a slip of parchment he’d picked up from her desk. He’d even subdivided alternate spellings and pronunciations. The speed of Moody’s delivery had Snape still marking off profanity a few seconds after Moody's rant was cut short by coughing. He paused, twirling the quill in thought as the Auror’s hacking subsided into pained wheezing.

“Hmmm… I’m forgetting something…”

“Cun'! Cun'!” From his perch on her shoulder, little Caligula punctuated his helpful suggestion by poking his mother in the stomach with his tail.

“Ah, thank you.” Snape rewarded his offspring with a pat on the head, right between the horns, before adding the final tally.

“Severus!” Being the expert in multi-tasking that she was, Hermione, in one swift movement, took a scandalized kick at Snape’s nearest limb and belatedly covered her child’s ears with a conjured set of earmuffs, all the while somehow managing to keep her wand trained on the wheezing menace now propping himself up against the transparent portrait.

“Ma, Da, cun'! Ma, Da, cun'!” Caligula bounced happily to his new favorite chant, which seemed to optimize maximal parental reaction with economy of syllable, and manage to be damn catchy in the process.

“Ouch! He was going to learn it sooner or later anyway,” Snape complained, glaring at her petulantly.

“That doesn’t mean it should be his third word!”

“SNAPE!” Moody pounded on the door with the fist not clenching his wand. He was staring at Hermione and the baby she held in transfixed horror and rage, the physical manifestation of Snape’s iniquity too much to bear. “I’m going to pull your testicles out of your eye sockets—”

“Yes, yes, Alastor, get on with it already,” Snape interrupted with a nonchalance Hermione found astounding. Moody’s head whipped around to glare monocular death at his foe. Magic eye spinning wildly, he roared, “AVADA—”

A flash of mauve and an almighty ‘pop’ exploded from the doorway into the hall, knocking Moody on his back several yards away. As Hermione blinked away the blinding aftereffects of the triggered wards, she noticed something off about the felled Auror’s appearance. When Moody struggled to his feet, lurching against the corridor wall, he was visibly... pinker. Neither of Moody's legs could pull off the blush tights suddenly clothing them (though the wooden one was making a valiant effort) and the bodice failed to flatter his stocky figure despite greying chest hair peeking fetchingly over the top, but the rose ruffles of the tutu might, had they not been singed, have looked quite nice. The disoriented man shook his head, refocused his attention on the abhorrent Snape family, and advanced in a hobbled, lilting prance toward them, pirouetting on the peg leg two steps from the door (which accounted for the mysterious circular motion she and the boys had observed on the map earlier). With an unholy grin and a wave of his hand, Snape banished the Auror in a burst of magenta.

Hermione blinked to clear the spots from her vision. “Well that explains a lot. How many times have you done that to him?”

“Thirteen. Surprisingly, it hasn't gotten old yet.” Snape removed the earmuffs from the baby, who seemed delighted with the proceedings. Caligula made a grab for the earmuffs with a pointy smile, managing to capture Snape’s forefinger in both of his hands. “Your cryptic note this morning was quite helpful. Aside from the obvious,” Snape threw a disdainful eye roll toward the burned and blackened doorway, “do you know what Moody and Lucius are doing here?”

“Well, they showed up at breakfast, along with Ron. Apparently, the Ministry is hoping to tempt you out of hiding.”

“By dangling Weasley in front of me?” Snape's palpable disgust suggested less than favourable odds of success. “What part was Lucius supposed to play in this?”

“We’re not sure. Draco thinks he bought his way out of Azkaban. He’s allegedly here...” she hesitated. He was not going to like this.

Snape raised an eyebrow. “Here to what?”

“To cover Potions. As a sort of parole or something.”

“What?”

“He’s rubbish at it too, apparently. Instead of your review of boil cure preparation, he handed these out to the first-years.” She withdrew a slip of paper from her pocket and gave it to him.

“This looks like the Times crossword.”

“It does.”

“With half the answers scribbled out.”

“Yes.”

“And,” he turned it on its side, “a bootprint.”

They stared at the travesty of an assignment with matching expressions of distaste and affronted scholarship. Caligula didn’t know what the piece of paper had done to deserve such ire, but gamely joined his parents, managing the beginnings of a rather decent Snape Glare. Finally, Snape tossed the offending bit of rubbish into a bin and sighed, “So, Moody's supposed to be watching Lucius.”

“Yes.” Hermione frowned as Caligula started squirming and set him down on the floor.

“But he's been here all morning instead.”

“It would appear so.”

“And they recalled the rest of the Aurors who had been on patrol?”

“Yes. As part of the trap, from what we can tell.”

“Then who's keeping an eye on Lucius?”

“The boys and I have been trying to. Oh, that reminds me...” Hermione retrieved her Galleon from a pocket and sent an ‘all’s well’ message.

“The boys?” Snape looked at her skeptically. “What was that about?”

“Harry and Draco. We’ve been tracking him on the map, and they’re monitoring him over lunch.” The Galleon warmed in her hand with a message. “He’s still there. Oh, no...” Her brow furrowed.

“What now?”

“They noticed Moody was here. What should I say happened?”

Snape shrugged. “You could inform them that he has somehow found out our illicit relationship, discovered me here in your room with our illegitimate offspring, snapped, attempted to kill me, thus engaging the defensive spells I put in place to send him away to any one of several remote, inhospitable places, whereupon he immediately forgets what has occurred, returns to Hogwarts, then rediscovers me here, attempts to kill me, thus repeating the process ad infinitum, or until my wards manage to deposit him somewhere from which he is unable to escape.”

“If I tell them that, Ron will likely vomit, Harry’ll attempt to kill you, and Draco...well, Draco will be smug and pretend to have known all about it.” Hermione frowned, folding her arms pensively.

“Until the memory spell engages...” Snape drawled, raising an eyebrow.

“At which point they’ll forget they asked in the first place. That’s just...” Hermione huffed.

“Bloody convenient?” Snape drew her into an embrace.

“I’m trying to decide between tragic and devious.” She couldn’t hold back a reluctant grin, her hands travelling lightly over his chest, her right stopping to play with the buttons at his collar, the left continuing to the nape of his neck.

Snape chuckled, pressing her closer and letting his hands wander. “I’ve always found the latter perspective more useful,” he rumbled into her ear before kissing his way down her neck. Grinning into the hollow between her neck and shoulder at her shivered response, he was reminded just how much he found the way her obsession with rules conflicted with her delight and skill in breaking them incredibly arousing and not a little adorable. Though he would never admit to the latter, even under torture. When she used the hand on his neck to bring his mouth up to meet hers, her other hand slipping lower to a much more interesting set of buttons, he began calculating the best way to ensure a mutually satisfying conclusion to current activities. They’d barely had time in the last week to attempt a good snog, much less anything more advanced. He started the somewhat complicated process of maneuvering around furniture toward the bedroom while removing layers of clothing, but all progress was immediately halted by an insistent tugging on his trouser leg by tiny, demonic hands. The pair broke apart with a groan and turned their attention to the baby, who was looking up at his parents with a triumphant expression. He pointed to the half-Kneazle familiar occupied with cleaning himself on the couch and exclaimed, in his clearest pronunciation yet, “Cunshits!”

In the pause that followed, the insulted animal managed to convey with narrowed eye and squished face a complete lack of amusement. Snape broke the silence with a loud guffaw, and his offspring joined him with high-pitched giggles. Hermione was torn between disapproval and mirth, finally giving in with a chuckle. Crookshanks decided he’d put up with enough nonsense from his humans for the day, jumped off the couch with a haughty sniff, and exited the apartments to lick his wounded dignity in peace.

“I really am starting to worry about the vocabulary he’s picking up,” Hermione sighed, gazing at said child with some concern. Caligula wandered off to find other objects to label inappropriately.

Snape, realizing that they’d yet again lost all romantic momentum, grumbled, “He’ll be fine. We’ll read some of those swotty baby books after lunch.”

“I suppose.” She checked her watch. “I’ve got to leave for Double Potions soon.”

“There should be sandwiches on the table. I’ve learned to never face Lucius Malfoy on an empty stomach.” Snape grimaced. “Or an overly full one, either.”

“Any advice on how to handle him?” Hermione asked, grabbing an egg-and-cress.

“Always assume he has a wand, don’t believe a single word the comes out of his mouth, never turn your back to him, even for a second, and...” Snape grinned maliciously “... remember his greatest weakness—the hair.”

Hermione looked skeptical. “Somehow, I was hoping for something more helpful.”

“Little Suck-a-Thumb” was taken from Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffman, the rest can be found here:

http://germanstories.vcu.edu/struwwel/daumen_e.html

Recital to actual children not recommended.