Sprung

All intention split and fell into ruin. Afterwards, Snape had no idea if even half of what he recalled did actually happen. His mind had been extraordinarily unfocused, not unlike being trapped in a dream where the surrounds shifted and bled into each other, transforming into colours and concepts and ephemera that he could not even attach a label to.

His desperation to be away from the abandoned den gave him enough concentration to successfully Apparate to where he needed to go: a two-storey brick building just east of Diagon Alley. It was a venue he had used in the past when the need arose...merely a waiting place. He had claimed one of the rooms as his, though he had no idea who actually owned the building; nor did he care. It had been uninhabited for as long as he could remember, which suited him just fine. Snape suspected itinerants used the place from time to time. Vacant buildings rarely escaped the eyes of squatters, and he was content to allow this building to be treated as a stopping point for those who had no home, but only briefly. He had set a subtle charm deep into its brickwork and wooden frames that encouraged others to move on after a day or so. It had been a spell of his own creation, a variant on other, more well-known ones. Charms had never been his strength, but occasionally he was able to bend one into an elegant simplicity that served him. This one had been untested until he used it on the building and it had taken remarkably well. Each time he paused there, usually only for a few hours at most and sometimes not for months on end, he couldn't shake the impression that the charm he'd set had an unexpected side-effect. Not only did it seem to discourage lingerers, it felt as if the building actually welcomed him. To go into the room he'd barred against all others was the closest he'd ever felt to the adage of "coming home". He had no clear idea why this would be so. The room itself was unremarkable in every sense of the word. It held no furniture except for a high-backed armchair upholstered in a threadbare, faded cloth, and a three-legged wooden stool that he would sometimes prop his feet up on. The carpet was frail and worn, scarcely thicker than a piece of cardboard, its pattern and colour long trodden into oblivion.

A dusty fireplace held three logs, the wood so old that Snape wondered if they had actually petrified. He'd never felt the need to light them. Cold was a condition he was used to, even if he didn't particularly like it. It had the benefit of keeping him alert while he was waiting. To risk a lit fire and warmth could potentially lull him into staying longer that he should, so he left the logs to collect increasingly thick layers of dust. No, this was not a place to stay, however much the room seemed to whisper at him that he should.

It was the first place that Snape thought of to leave the spy. Here she would be safe until she regained consciousness. The door to the room was responsive only to him on entrance. She would be able to leave freely but not return into that room. Not that she would. What the grey-haired woman would make of this place he had no desire to discover; he hoped to be long gone before then.

Snape fancied that he felt the walls of the corridor that led to the room flex in a near peristaltic wave, sucking him towards that small, square space that he had sheltered him many times before, but likely it was mirage born of his scrambled mental state and nothing more.

He dropped the spy's rag-doll form rather clumsily into the chair. She didn't even stir. He would have to trust Beta's word that, beyond the Obliviation, no lasting damage had been dealt to the woman. Snape ran his fingers up tck of the spy's skull and found a lump that yielded slightly to pressure: from the blow to knock her out. Amateurish. There were better ways to render someone unconscious rather than by brute force.

The reason for the blow seeped its way through the hissing static in his head: there was no way now to avoid having the spy know that something had happened to her. True, she'd be unable to determine what precisely, but Snape wanted to ensure that she asked herself as few questions as possible lest her curiosity lead her back into danger. The lump on the back of her head provided a decent enough excuse: mugging.

His fingers slid away from her head and delved into her pockets. Snape winced at the soreness that had sprung up in his shaking hands...most likely from the effort of hauling the spy's limp body.  A key. Two crumpled receipts. A slender wallet that contained a single twenty pound note. He removed it and cast the wallet carelessly on the floor. A quick frisk found no evidence of jewellery on her body. Slim pickings for a mugger, but it didn't matter.

He left the room without looking back, squashing down a surge of regret that this spy was now lost to him as a resource. Beta was right: she was good, but Snape wasn't desperate enough to use her abilities to ignore the threat the female lycs had imparted should they find the spy snooping around again.

A light drizzle had begun while he'd been in the building, and the biting air promised that drizzle would shortly turn into sleet. The weather barely registered to him as he made his way to Knockturn Alley through shadow, behind wall and under stricture. An indefinite abstraction of voices that slipped and slid into meaningless white noise surged and faded in his ears, as if carried by the wind. He rolled his shoulders to shake the creeping sensation of dread that skittered down his spine.

"Merlin's dick, where were you?!" the fat apoth hissed at him as Snape slid past the man's corpulent form and into the back of the shop. "You said you would be here an hour ago!"

"Unavoidable," Snape managed to grind out through his clenched teeth, jaw tight against the pain that had spread from his hands up along his arms and into his shoulders. He grabbed hold of the doorjamb with a difficulty he hoped he'd managed to hide, obscuring the vice-like grip behind his back. His legs had become unsteady and the condition showed no signs of improving, so he was forced to use what strength was left in his arms to hold him upright. He noticed the fat man had a hand pressed his cheekbone. "What happened?"

"What happened?!" The apoth's voice rose to a shrillness now that the back door was closed. "I nearly got killed, that's what fucking happened!" He snatched his hand away from his face to reveal a nasty cut. The clean slice gaped apart now that the apoth was no longer holding the edges of the wound together, and an ooze of blood flowed out, almost black in the low light.

"Give me details, not interpretations!" Snape snapped at him, fingers digging into the wood to hold himself up and steady, hands hidden behind his back to hide just how close he was to sinking to the wooden floor.

"Go ahead and take them, then!" Todianus spat back, groping for a handkerchief in the pocket of his robes and glaring out of an ashen face.

"Just tell me, idiot! I can't perform Legilimency on you when you're that agitated!" Snape hoped the lie would pass undetected. The truth was he couldn't focus his mind sufficiently in order to pick through the apoth's thoughts, and the telltale greying at the edges of his vision presaged the distinct likelihood that Snape would pass out if he pushed himself any further than merely standing stock still.

"When you didn't show, I went to the meeting place instead." The apoth misinterpreted the grimace on Snape's face as disapproval. "You think I'd just sit here and let them come and find me for not showing up? The cut would be across my throat, not my cheek!"

Snape winced at the apoth's strident voice, the sound splintering its way deep into his head in a discordant harmony to the bone splitting pain that was creeping down from his shoulders into his spine.

Todianus mopped the blood off his face and waddled past and into the shopfront area of the apothecary, gasping for breath in his barely controlled panic.

"Greyback wasn't at the hiding place, and thank Circe for small mercies!" His pudgy, be-ringed fingers rattled through the glass jars on the shelves behind the counter. "That bastard can smell deception five miles away!"

"Who was there?"

Todianus pulled a dark glass bottle with a fluted neck out from behind a flask of Murtlap essence and yanked the cork stopper out with his teeth.

"That dread-locked Sniffer and his leash-holder," the apoth replied, his words somewhat muffled by the occluding cork. "The stinking vagrant that met me in Trafalgar Square abandoned me the very second he was able to." One unsteady hand shook the glutinous contents of the flask out on to the already blood-soaked and crumpled handkerchief. "Can't say I blame him in the least!" Todianus hissed at the sting imparted by the medicated cloth clamped to his cut flesh, the cork falling from his teeth to bounce across the floorboards.

Snape clamped his lips together in a tight, white line. If Greyback's tame seevy had been there, who knew what deceit they could have picked up from the fat man. The apoth was not in the least adept at any kind of mental trickery, and he certainly wasn't gifted at tamping down any emotional surges. In an already panicked state, he could've inadvertently given all manner of information away. Snape had to know the possible extent of the damage.

"What happened?"

Todianus rolled his eyes up at him, the whites catching the paltry light flickering from the lowered lamps on the shop-front's interior walls. A splatter of darkness down the right side of the apoth's robes rolled in and out of shadow.

"I was checking on the woman, once that bastard Sniffer let me past to actually touch her!" The flask was slammed down on the counter-top in a harsh punctuation. "She was... " The apoth's voice trailed off, and he wiped the edge of his mouth roughly with the back of his free hand.

"She was what?" Snape had to screw his eyes shut as the room started to melt and slide into an incomprehensible sludge. The razor-thin cracks of agony that had begun to erupt along his spine swelled into a ragged, tearing misery that sank in poisoned waves through his muscles. Splinters of wood, peeled up from his grip on the door-frame, wedged themselves cruelly under his fingernails, but the sensation failed to register over the red-swamped clangor that was ratcheting through him. He was having difficulty in picking the apoth's words out from the chorus of slithering voices in his head.

"She was dead," the man wheezed under his breath, studiously avoiding looking at Snape as he said it. The hand on the flask tightened convulsively.

The words failed to register immediately, sliding in and out from between the half-formed whispers and echoing calls that curled in his ears. Snape squinted at the apoth, the feeble light making his eyes burn as if an acid fume were peeling away the corneas, his vision blurring with moisture that did nothing to soothe the sting. He began to back away from the doorway to the shop-floor, seeking the darker refuge of the back hallway as the three words slammed into place, three sharp stabs into comprehension that froze him part-way between light and shadow.

"No, that isn't-"

"She was dead! the fat man shrieked before he could press his shaking hand to his mouth, stopping the panic from spewing out in a shrill, acidic torrent. His pudgy fingers were white at the ends from muffling his terror, the stones in the gaudy rings he wore winking with a malicious gleam that punctured straight into Snape's head. This was far worse than he had thought possible. If Parr's Handler was dead, then everything he had planned, everything he had wanted was forever closed to him. He felt a suffocating stricture in his chest, as if two giant hands had clamped themselves on his heart and squeezed. An acrid, smarting vapour rolled off of the apoth's shaking form and up into Snape's skull.

"How?" It was the only word he could bring to his lips that made any sense.

The apoth shook his bald head rapidly from side-to-side, eyes screwed tightly shut, hand still clamped to his mouth, a trickle of sweat sliding along his jowls. His nostrils flared wide to allow him to heave air in and out of his lungs.

"How?!" Snape demanded to know through teeth clenched together so tightly it made his jaw creak from the strain.

"I don't know," the apoth cried, snatching his hand away from his mouth, eyes snapped open and wide in their gleaming fright. "I went to look... to see what had happened... but it wasn't her!"

The metallic tang of blood blossomed in Snape's nose. "What are you talking about?"

Two quick steps brought the apoth closer, causing the taller man to shy back farther into shadow as if Todianus had raised a hand to strike him. The blood spattered, sweat-soaked robes swung and clung around the man's bulky form.

"It wasn't the same woman! I'd never seen this one before, but she was dead. When I realised..." The man's mouth gaped open and shut a few times, the spittle on his lips making the flesh glisten. The hand that held the ruined handkerchief to his cut flesh dropped away, the edges of the wound now gummed together. "I panicked! I tried to run, but Sniffer grabbed hold of my arm and nearly tore it out of my shoulder like a chicken wing! He was right in my face! I didn't know he could see like that!" A clenched fist was held towards Snape, not in threat, but in adrenalin-locked disbelief. "The Sniffer is a Legilimens! How is that possible?"

If Todianus realised this, then it meant the Striker had raided into the man's mind, and if he was anywhere near as adept as Parr, then the apoth would not have been able to hold anything back from discovery. Unless-

"He knew about the Imperius! I felt him touch it... he knows everything!

The gravestone chill that pulled his stomach towards the floor between his feet did nothing to alleviate the blistering welter of Snape's nerves as they screamed and frayed. A thick heat slid out his nose and down to the corner of his mouth. Time began to slow, as if mired in syrup that weighed it down to a leaden crawl.

"I thought he was going to kill me," the apoth croaked, his hand now unclenched and clawed around his fleshy throat. "Slammed me against the wall... 'rabbit', he called me. 'We've caught a sly little rabbit in our trap' he said, and struck me across the face." His eyes defocused, looking straight through Snape as he recounted what had happened. "I saw the knife in his hand... he was going to butcher me but I couldn't move! I saw..." A crease of confusion and uncertainty sliced down between his brows. "... something behind him... something monstrous." His eyes shifted from side to side rapidly, seeing within, remembering. "The Sniffer must have heard it.... he turned..." The apoth's eyes snapped back into focus. "The second his hand was off my throat, I Disapparated! I don't know what happened... what it was. Teeth, and claws. And the eyes... I-" He stopped. "Why are you bleeding?"

Snape risked raising his hand to his face and felt his body start to tip off balance, his legs now gripped in shuddering torment. The dark streak across the back of his hand made him realise the blood he'd smelled was his own. He raised his eyes back up the the apoth's bewildered face, and it was right at that moment he caught the flicker of movement. If the apoth hadn't been blocking out most of the light, Snape might have missed it, but the shadows on the other side of the shop window's glass betrayed their intent as a sliver of warning flickered across his awareness a heartbeat before the entire front wall exploded into a brutalised, shearing destruction.