Chapter Fifty-Three—The Necessity of Complicity

It was a stark contrast to the last safe house. Well-kept and solidly constructed. Tastefully, if a little austerely, decorated. Located in an upper-middle class neighbourhood. There were no fleas, threadbare carpets, leaking taps or clanking pipes. No dilapidated furniture, peeling paint or pictures of ducks. Or dogs. It smelled of tea and faded perfume that was spicy and warm. Snape quite liked it; as much as he could like a house, which wasn't a great deal. At least it didn't make him itch like the last one had.

He wondered how Dumbledore had secured it. There was no indication that it was owned by a witch or wizard. There were too many Muggle inventions and gadgets for it to be so, and apart from the rather thorny wards and charms around the outside of the building, it didn't have the typical indicators of a dwelling tailored to suit a magic-wielding inhabitant. Perhaps the Headmaster had bought it. Whilst Snape didn't know for certain what the man's financial status was, he guessed it was more than sufficient. There were many things he could say about Dumbledore, but privation and miserliness were not among them.

A grandfather clock in the hallway outside the study ticked softly, muted light from a lamp set in an alcove in the wall opposite catching the brass time-face. A plate-size bob swung back and forth smoothly, almost hypnotically if one looked at it for too long. The clock had already chimed out a quarter-hour since he'd sat down opposite Parr. And still she hadn't acknowledged him.

She knew he was there. It was hardly avoidable, but she had decided that whatever she was doing took precedence. The surface of the table was covered in the usual disorganisation of books, pencils and bits of parchment. That alone irritated him. How could anyone work in such a mess?

He watched the nib of the quill as it scratched across the parchment in loops and angles, as it paused from time to time as Parr thought out a phrase in her head, as it occasionally dipped into the small glass bottle of ink near the Striker's hand. He thought he could almost hear it, this mental shuffling and recombination of words, like a murmur from another room. Indistinct. Indecipherable.

It was a strange sight. Parr sat hunched over in her chair, the twin side-locks of hair draping forward, eyes downcast and resolutely ignoring him as she concentrated on keeping the quill held securely between her elongated fingers. But for the absence of her overcoat, now draped across the back of a reading chair in one corner of the modest-sized room, she was still dressed in her Striker black. No cuffs in the sleeves, the material needed at its fullest length to cover her stretched limbs. A peculiar, almost pattern-like stitching down the front flap of her jacket that one could only see if the light were just right. Black on black. Her unnatural height made the table look smaller than it really was, as if she were an adult playing at being a child student. In many ways, this was the truth.

The splayed fingers of her left hand kept the parchment still as she wrote, a puffy redness evident around the cuticles of the nails. The slightly grubby bandages around her hands darkened in places where old wounds had opened...another source of irritation that made Snape scowl. The physical shifting was preventing the Striker's injuries from healing properly, thus extending her convalescence far past the point it should have ended. Circumstances had dictated that she be pressed into service too early. Snape had voiced this opinion many times, both to her and to whomever he felt should know it, with little success. He'd given up harping on about it; it just made him sound like a snotty old matron that no one listened to and just rolled their eyes at.

Parr sniffed lightly and sighed. It made him wonder if she knew what he was thinking.

You said "later". This is later.

The Striker continued to write, her face expressionless. No indication she'd heard his thought. He'd tried to push it forward, as if it were a solid thing that could be brought to her attention if he moved it in her direction, but there had been no pause, no flicker of hesitation in her that betrayed a successful attempt.

Snape opened his mouth.

"Silence, if you please, Dual," Parr murmured, beginning another line of her writing, leaning just a fraction closer to the parchment so the tip of her bowed nose hovered less than a foot above the page.

She'd keep him sitting there all night through to dawn if it suited her, and most likely it would. Make a statement to delay his questions and then studiously avoid the opportunity to answer them. Snape was getting rather tired of this technique. It wasn't even a graceful one, and she made no attempt at hiding the obfuscation with any delicate sidestepping.

What he tried next he had never done before, wasn't sure precisely how it should be done, or if it should be done at all, but he'd had enough of waiting. He pushed his mind forward until there was that telltale tingle of repulsion, two like forces coming too close to one another. By rights he should not have been able to find it...it had always necessitated that the subject be looking directly at him. Instead of breaching that barrier with Legilimency, he let his mind slip down, like a fingertip brushing along bare skin. The effect was instantaneous.

Parr flinched to such a degree that her left hand lurched to the right while the right went left. The parchment tore as the quill's nib ripped through it, and the ink bottle tipped on its side and disgorged its contents in a splatter.

"Fuck!"

She dropped the quill and fumbled clumsily with the ink bottle, making it spew more of its black liquid across the parchment and table.

"Damn it all to pus-filled hell!"

Tiny droplets of ink sprayed everywhere as she juggled the bottle upright and clamped her hands over it securely. A rivulet of black leaked from between her fingers as she swivelled her head up to fix him with a very green and very angry glare.

"You've spilt a bit of ink," Snape understated, keeping his face as neutral as possible.

"Why can't you people use pens?" Parr roared at him.

"Palsy is rarely a problem for us. Perhaps I can find you a crayon if handling a bird feather is too much for you."

"You can shove your crayon right up your gargantuan nostril," she snapped at him. "It took me ages to write this!" She jabbed a finger at the ruined parchment. "I'm going to blame you for this."

"Teachers have all heard those excuses before, Miss Parr. I doubt you'll find a sympathetic ear."

"I think Remus will be fairly forgiving when I explain the circumstances to him."

Snape hissed out a sigh between his teeth and pulled the parchment towards him. In his student days, he'd been forced to come up with a charm for just such a situation. Ink had all sorts of ways of tarnishing his written work, and none of them originated with him. Lupin's bigoted, moronic friends had been the worst transgressors. Black would just upend an inkbottle right over Snape's work without any pretence at slyness, knowing full well that everyone around him would either back him up or deny they saw anything occur at all.

The ugly blot of ink halted its blighting spread across the parchment and began to regress back into a glistening blotch that lifted off the page, leaving the words it had obscured behind it as it formed an undulating sphere of darkness that followed the tip of his wand. The ink slithered back into the bottle in a sinuous ribbon.

Parr grunted. "Show-off."

He gave her a tight smile and slid his wand back into his pocket. She reached out to take the parchment back off him but he moved it out of her ink-stained grasp, his eyes scanning the words.

"The assignment is not for your subject, Dual, therefore it is none of your business," Parr pointed out frostily, stretching farther across the table to take it from him.

"I think you'll find it is very much my business, Miss Parr," Snape replied evenly, leaning back and out of her reach once more. "Your theories on second-grade curses are... fascinating and, unsurprisingly, erratically spelled."

Her hand narrowly missed snatching the parchment from him as the fabric of her jacket was pulled by an unseen force, dragging her back into her chair.

"Ah, so you can be an arse without the aid of your stick, can you?"

He felt rather than saw the dangerous glint in her eye, keeping his attention fixed on the parchment in his hand.

"Your snide, denigrating tone is wasted on me, Miss Parr," he mentioned, secretly pleased at her irritation. He graded her work with a snort and dropped the parchment on the table. "Pedestrian. Lupin will love it."

Parr narrowed her eyes at him. "Worried I'd let advanced reference sources slip in there?"

"A prudent concern."

"Your reputation as a hoarder of information remains secure."

"As a matter of fact, it's not your access to material that I have graciously loaned you that is the issue. Once again, I am moved to the conclusion that your knowledge of us is far greater than ours of you."

Parr studied him for a moment, her eyes still slitted, mouth pursed.

"Us. You. There is no 'us' and 'you', Dual."

"You have made it clear on several occasions that there is. At times you don't even try to keep the disdain from your voice, yet here you are, sheltering behind our protection, gleaning knowledge from us to what purpose I can only guess since some of it you surely already have. A spy, if you like. And not a very good one."

She found that statement amusing, throwing her head back and laughing aloud, the lowered timbre of her voice making it richer and heartier than it usually was.

"You are a curious one, Dual. You hide when I already know you're there, and draw attention to yourself when you should be silent. Don't you find the dichotomy exhausting?"

"I find your prevarication and avoidance exhausting."

"Perhaps I should tell you to suck it up," Parr replied, a half smile on her face. One long finger tapped on the surface of the table a few times. "But then, that would just make you waspish and even more troublesome. I meant that there is no 'you' and 'us' for you, Dual."

"Is that just more evidence of your scorn, Miss Parr, to label me with a term I have no understanding of?"

That question seemed to genuinely surprise her, which in turn surprised him. Her eyes flicked from one side to the other as she thought on his question.

"I forget," she muttered, as if to herself. "A Dual is one who once had the capacity to become either Striker or Handler but, for whatever reason, was never led into one role over the other."

"Once?"

"Past a certain age, the Dual will forever retain the Dualism, being neither Handler nor Striker, but with some aptitude for both. It is a rare trait, sometimes one that is prevalent along certain genetic lines. A useful trait, too." She paused and gave him a toothy smile. "Be careful. Dualism alone would see you regarded very highly by seevy females. It's strong enough to outweigh even your impeccable discourtesy. If a Striker gets it into her head that you would breed well with her Handler, you'll have little choice in the matter. Maybe it is best that you hide in the shadows."

"Husbandry is another of your roles?" Snape asked with a curl to his mouth.

"It is a function I perform, yes," Parr admitted with a slight shrug.

"And your Handler has no say in the matter? You reduce her to a breeding animal?"

"Now who's the disdainful one?" said Parr, one eyebrow arched. "Of course she has a say, but I have final approval." She shook her head slightly. "You have no understanding of our ways, or of our precarious position. I must think beyond immediate fancy and selfish desire to something far more long-term. It is our way. It has always been our way."

"And you tell me this right here under Lupin's nose? Perhaps this is some trifling piece of information he already has, a scrap that you think you can throw me just to satisfy me long enough for you to slip away."

"Remus has other concerns right now," she mentioned dismissively. "It's hardly right under his nose, even if he is upstairs." Her gaze sharpened on his face. "Don't tell me you're jealous?"

"Of that flea-ridden clod? Hardly," he replied, sneering at her.

"Not of him. Of what I tell him."

"I don't dance to the tune of jealously, Miss Parr, and since you have already told me that you inform him only of what you deem unessential, it seems ridiculous to be covetous of that."

A discontented rumble issued from her. "You're never satisfied, are you? I answer your question and you bitch about its importance to you." She reached for her quill and made to resume her studies.

"Why are you at the school?"

She tutted. "You know the reason why, Dual."

"I know a reason. A reason that fails to answer all my questions."

Parr threw down her quill once more in exasperation. "I don't exist to answer your damned questions!" she snapped at him, her eyes flashing. "Our agreement is that I teach you some semblance of mental technique that doesn't have you club-footing around like a novice!"

"And very little of that you've done, Miss Parr," Snape pointed out. "All I've received so far is a few vague notions and a mental correction that has left me flawed, perhaps more so than I was before."

Parr's brows lowered sharply at the accusation levelled at her.

"Or was that your original intention: to cripple me?" He delivered that with a velveteen smoothness that belied his deep-seated anger at the potential truth of it.

The outrage was on her face as if it had been slapped there. She was up and out of her chair, towering over him, fists clenched and shoulders tight.

"Do you have any..." She cut off her words abruptly, a moderating breath in and out to temper her reaction to something less stentorian. "Do you have any idea how difficult it was to untie that knot?" she hissed at him. "I should never have attempted it if another option was open to me, but there wasn't. I did the best that I could!"

"Then your best was insufficient to the task," he shot back nastily. "I have all manner of sensory glitches now, and who knows what to come later!"

She blinked at him, the colour of her anger still high in her cheeks and the shadows of fatigue ringing her eyes. "What sensory glitches?"

"Visual distortion, proprioception imbalances, no mental defences..."

"I told you you'd be open to others once the knot was untied," she spat back at him. "I will teach you how to block them but now is hardly the time for that. Remember the third rule, Dual. The proprioception imbalances are to be expected. They will fade. I don't know what visual problems you're talking about."

"The vision in my left eye is affected. It... warps," he told her, struggling to give words to the sensation and effect he had experienced.

The expression on Parr's face changed. "Warps?" The fingers of her right hand moved to her mouth, tapping her bottom lip gently, a speculative look in her eyes. "Like this?"

His vision rippled into waves of distortion, making him wince and turn his head aside. The distortion remained, but this time at the far left of his vision. Right where Parr was standing. It made his eyes water, even when he closed them, as if the rippling affected not only what his eyes perceived but of what his brain did also.

"Don't do that," he told her automatically. The rippling stopped. He waited until the water leaking from his eyes drained away. When he turned back to look at her, he almost missed the look of triumph on her face as she covered it with something more neutral.

"Not a glitch, Dual," she told him, resuming her seat, her fingers still ghosting around her mouth.

"Then what is it?" he pressed when she failed to elaborate.

Her hand left her mouth; her inky fingertips traced over her reference books lightly, absently, her eyes avoiding his.

"It is... a way Striker and Handler can locate each other when in close proximity. A beacon, of sorts. Interesting."

"For whom?"

Snape's surly question pulled her eyes back to his. "Interesting for me. Good news for you." She sat back in her chair, a posture of contemplation, her fingers going back to her mouth. "Perhaps the untying went better than I had thought." She rolled her eyes. "Though that might not be saying much."

A stricture of fear struck him at her words. She noticed his change in mood.

"I made a mistake."

The stricture became a strangulation and he couldn't keep his eyes from going wide at the admission.

Parr's hand opened out towards him in a mollifying gesture. "I didn't check that you had removed all metal off you before I untied the knot. A combination of haste and inexperience on my part," she admitted reluctantly yet honestly.

"It makes a difference?"

"Metal has been known to..." She paused, considering the words to use. "... ruck the process. I realised too late how dangerous such a thing was." She stared him straight in the eye. "I almost killed you because of it."

Parr was doing nothing to allay the anxiety in him. Snape wondered if the answers she had for him were really the ones he wanted to hear.

"It was the metal around your neck. It was like trying to hold a fish. You damn near took me with you. You've got a very strong grip. But, in for a penny..." She trailed off with a half-smile. "I had to do something to hold you still and it seems it has... unexpected benefits."

"For you or me?'

"Gah! Stop seeing intrigue where there's none," she told him crossly, tossing her head, the silver strands of her hair catching the light in the room.

"How do you think I've survived so long?" Snape asked her with a frown. "Is an inability to block you from my awareness the only 'benefit' of your ham-fisted actions?"

A shrug. "Perhaps. I have yet to determine to extent of the effects. An answer I know you're not happy with, Dual, but it is a genuine one and all that I have to offer at this time, inadequate to satisfying your demands though it may be."

Truth. He knew that both by how he always knew when the alignment of minds was right, and by some indefinable sensation of congruence. Congruence in her tone, her words, her posture, her scent. The last element caught him off-guard. And she saw that.

"We'll see where it takes you, Dual, though our opportunities are scant." Parr leaned forward, one arm resting on the table. "There is much you need to learn, and fast." There was an unmistakeable urgency to her tone. "My time is limited, as is yours. We must steal more as best we can." There was an unexpected keenness in her face at that statement, as if she welcomed the covertness it implied. It was a keenness that resonated within himself.

"How?"

Again, her fingers tapped on the table as she considered the options.

"I am restricted here for the next few days." The Striker sighed, her tiredness and disappointment finally showing through. Or, perhaps, he was becoming more attuned to its presence. "There are always more of the dead to find." The corners of her mouth turned down in a genuine sadness. "Not what I had thought I'd be asked to do, but there it is...the turncoat that tracks the final resting place of the murdered." She turned her head aside in disgust. "No more than I deserve, some might say."

"Perhaps you can find someone still alive."

Parr head turned back slowly. "Are you requesting my services, Dual?" There was puzzlement, and interest, in her voice.

Snape blinked, turning the question over in his mind.

"It is possible to do so?"

She tipped her head from side to side, consulting her experience in order to answer his question. A fingertip tapped at the table.

"The possibility is there, but the traditional arrangement is not," she sighed, as if it pained her. A snort. "But since tradition is not something I have adhered to assiduously of late, I must consider other options." Again, she looked him straight in the eye in that disturbing way she had that was both an honesty and a challenge. The light caught the faint misting of the blade-slice scar across the left side of her face, turning a milky green where the scar went from skin to iris. "I am not Screen, though. It is still inappropriate of me to act as such."

Snape held her gaze, one that was both an assurance and an unfamiliar intimacy to him.

"There are no others who could act as such?"

It was a question that only one unversed in her society's traditions could ask, but it was also one that offered a genuine alternative, one that she considered carefully. And reluctantly rejected.

"There is one, but I would not jeopardise her position by asking it of her, even though I know she would not refuse it." Parr sat straighter in her chair. "No. If you insist on a service request, I must bargain the terms, and damn the inappropriateness of it."

"I need to find someone, fast."

Parr's eyes glittered at him. "And what makes you believe I can find him faster than you can? Dead people are all I have been able to find of late. I may not be able to track him quickly enough."

Snape squinted back at her. "Are you refusing the request?"

She shook her head. "Just alerting you to the limitations. I would not have you enter an agreement under false pretences."

That comment opened an opportunity for all manner of sniping on his part, but he left it alone.

"I'm willing to take the risk."

A nod. "Very well. Who are you looking for?" Business-like. To the point.

"It is too early for me to give sufficient information. There are still facts and details I need to gather."

Parr remained silent, turning his response over in her mind. She sighed. "Give me what you have."

"An Unspeakable went missing some days ago. I have been asked to find out why he disappeared, and to where. You know of them?"

"Yes." Parr did not elaborate, so whether the source of her information was Lupin, through her studies at Hogwarts, or some other origin, was unclear.

"What payment are you asking for such a service?"

"I cannot determine that until I know the specific parameters," she replied with yet another shrug. "So let us proceed as if I have agreed. That way your hand is stronger."

"How so?"

"You get to determine the remuneration. But I warn you of this, Dual: do not underpay me simply because you can. I already allow you to hold much of what is mine in trust." Flinty in both expression and voice. "It's an imbalance I withstand through necessity."

The statement puzzled Snape until he realised what of hers he kept in his possession.

"They can be returned to you if the imbalance is an issue," he replied, his hand moving towards the pocket of his coat that held one of those objects.

Parr's face went as white as snow at his words, her teeth bared in a terrifying presage of violence, freezing every muscle in his body into an adrenaline-drenched knot.

"Return that to me, Dual, and you disgrace everything that I am with such an insult," she hissed at him, body shaking in repressed rage. "A Striker's collar is never returned once it has been given to the Handler. To do so is to denounce them as less than a beast! Unfit, unworthy, unable to perform the only function they can in life."

"I didn't know..."

"Your ignorance saves you this time." Her moral affront fractured, and she slumped forward, her hands supporting her head as her elbows rested on the table. "Bad enough it gets passed around as if I am nothing more than an object to be owned by whomever holds it," she muttered, voice muffled by hands that failed to keep the despair from it. "I cannot teach you what it truly means. To do so would take years, so I must bear your ignorance and trust you do not deliberately dishonour me." She removed her hands from her face, a face that seemed to have aged ten years with cheeks grown hollow, skin stretched thinner and bones grown sharper...eaten away slowly from the inside. Her shoulders rounded inwards as she turned her head aside, her hair shifting aside briefly to reveal the fresh notch cut in her ear. A second nick in the cartilage from precise and deliberate action, the flesh around it flushed and swollen, not yet healed.

He had not seen it earlier. She'd kept it deliberately hidden from him as if it was a mark of shame, but she would have known he'd see it eventually. So why had she hidden it before, and why did she reveal it now?

A sound reached them: a door opening from the rear of the house. Snape turned automatically towards it.

"Too soon our time runs out, Dual, but there is something you must do. For your own sake."

The urgency in her voice brought his head back around to stare at her in query.

"Move to the left."

The strangeness of the request threw him. He shifted his body in the chair in response, which earned him an exasperated exclamation from Parr.

"No! Move to the left here!" Two long fingers of one hand pointed to her forehead.

"I don't..."

"Find me!" Her eyes flicked to one side to look behind him and down the corridor to where voices sounded in calm conversation. "Quickly!"

Snape squinted at her and reached out with his awareness. And found nothing. No barrier. No steel door. Nothing. The emptiness was eerily unsettling. Parr could have been a statue for all he could find of her mind.

"How...?"

"Dodge what you cannot block," she told him, eyes darting back and forth from his face to gauge what seconds she had left before Dumbledore drew too close for her to speak with impunity any further.

Snape heard the characteristic wheezing of Doge as the man responded to some query put to him by the Headmaster just as footsteps sounded down the stairs from the upper levels to the house: Lupin.

"What does the sign mean?"

It was a question Snape was certain she knew he'd ask, and until the very moment he asked it, it was plain from her expression she hadn't known if she would answer it. One last look over his shoulder decided it for her.

"Lycanthropy does not discriminate."

The quill was back in her fingers, head bowed to her work, dismissing him from her attention as she stilled herself into the sham of her study as the final seconds of their collusion ran out.