Chapter Text
She was on her knees in the garden, again. It was the only place she cared to be. On her first day at the Burrow she’d tried to sit alone in the house whilst Weasley Sr was at work, and couldn’t keep still. The house was everything her childhood should have been but never was. Pictures of the Weasley children on the walls. Colourful ottomans and blankets knitted by a mother’s hands. The haphazard comfort of the well stocked kitchen. Penelope couldn’t bear it. Wherever she turned, her mind overlaid warm sights with the bleak dark tones of Spinner’s End. The grime on the windows that never seemed to go. The scarce furniture. Cobwebs clinging in corners that her father never dusted… The house he’d cared for as poorly as his heart.
No. She had much rather be out here in the garden. Even with the miserable heat. Even with the sun beating down through the thin smattering of clouds making her squint and grimace, burning her skin, sending bead after bead of sweat rolling down her spine.
Wind caught the twine pea trellis, billowing it away from the wooden posts like a sail. A fragile stalk curled around Penelope’s hand, its leaves fluttering against the black of her sleeve, which covered her scarred wrist.
At the plant’s delicate touch the itch flared up again—the fresh irritation of recent blade-marks, and beneath it, the tingle of dark magic yet to fully fade from the scar on her left forearm.
Penelope had been fifteen years old when the Dark Lord forced her father to bring her to Malfoy Manor. When she had been made one of them, so the Dark Lord could use her as a spy against her own father.
Snape must have known all along that this would be inevitable, if the Dark Lord returned; for he had trained her in the art of Occlumency from an early age. She’d become skilled at it, then brilliant. A match for Snape himself.
And yet she feared it was her own mind that had betrayed her father in the end. That there had been some thought or memory she’d failed to guard closely enough, which had led to his demise.
Wind buffeted her, pulling her black shirt taut against her flat chest as she stared down at her sleeve. The pea-vine curled around her wounded arm without judgment, in a gentle green hug that eased the tingling and kept back the memories.
Plants liked her, even if people didn’t.
Weasley Sr pretended to like her. She sniffed. That facade wouldn’t stand long. Soon he would give up on being nice, and avoid her along with everyone else. It would be more comfortable that way.
The only useful thing that had come of his nice behaviour was the permission to meddle in his garden. ‘Tend it, if you like,’ Weasley Sr had said. So she did.
Patiently, Penelope cajoled the pea plant away from the twine it was hugging, snapping off the pods to collect in a basket at her knees.
Gardens came naturally to her. So did Herbology. Unlike Potions, which she’d been rubbish at in school. Not that she hadn’t tried. She’d tried harder in Potions than in any other class. And her father had upbraided her as harshly as the other incompetents.
Such as Longbottom.
It was amusing to Penelope (a sharp, biting amusement) that she had those two things in common with Longbottom. Gifted in Herbology. Bollocks at Potions.
What she wouldn’t have given for a drop of the attention her father had showered on Longbottom like so many storms of acid rain… Penelope didn’t know. Perhaps she, with her thicker skin, might have withstood it. Might have been nourished by it, even. Grown a little taller, bloomed a little fuller.
Alas. The Potion Master’s efforts had been directed elsewhere.
Longbottom had been her father’s nemesis from the moment he set foot in Hogwarts. Because Longbottom had not been the Chosen One.
Had the Dark Lord killed Longbottom’s parents, not Potter’s… Had Lily Potter lived… Penelope’s father might have turned out differently. Penelope would have turned out differently.
So much for a lost, enduring love.
Severus Snape had left her anger. Black and curdling, decay in her bones.
She loathed Longbottom.
But she hated Potter more.
It was Potter who had surely leaked her father’s memories to Rita Skeeter, or left them unprotected enough for the cunt to steal them. Now his past was available for the reading on every shelf in every bookstore in the Wizarding world. Bound between two covers, indelicately intimated in two hundred fifty-nine pages. And Penelope had had no choice but to read every word. Desperate for some shred of understanding.
She wished she could have read about her father’s life from his own quill, not Rita Skeeter’s. But he had never kept a journal, not even the simplest log of thoughts and events. Would never have dared leave the keys to his head lying out like that where anyone might get their grubby fingers on them. No. His mind was a house darker than the one in Spinner’s End. A fortress—and all the doors were locked. The keys swallowed deep inside where Penelope would never get at them.
Potter had betrayed her father’s final act of trust, in leaving those memories—those keys—unguarded. And now he was supposed to be her bloody in-law, married to Weasley Sr’s only daughter Ginevra.
For six years Penelope had remained in the house in Cokeworth, shrivelling and drying out, becoming old before her time. The house had been left to her, and everything in it, but she didn’t want the small stability it offered. She wanted a written explanation—an apology, ideally. A confession of love… I was keeping you safe, too.
But there was nothing.
She could have moved elsewhere, started a new life. But Penelope’s childhood had been empty of fairy tales. In the world of the Snapes there was no cauldron at the end of the rainbow, and if there was it was filled with coal. So she’d stayed in that dead-end, dirt poor town where she’d been left in a box on her father’s doorstep, the very day she was born. Stayed in that house, retreating into herself like an Obscurial. Worked at the muggle grocery so she could afford her weekly fare of chocolate digestives and peanut butter sandwiches. Read her books and spoke to no one.
Her only contact with the magical world had been a monthly correspondence with Draco Malfoy. He’d been her friend in Slytherin at school, and her first kiss—before his mother had put an end to further exploration on that front, by way of a sharply worded letter to Penelope.
Draco understood her situation better than anyone else could. Her own father dead, his serving life in Azkaban… Both of them roped into the ranks of a psychopathic Dark Wizard, thanks to loyalty their fathers had pledged before Penelope and Draco were even conceived.
Draco, too, had the mottled white scar on his left forearm.
Had Penelope not abandoned the magical world as she had, she’d surely have been shunned and hated as he was. Still struggling to obtain work at the Ministry after six whole years. Charities taking his money begrudgingly.
No. Penelope had been content to be confined in her father’s house. Content with Draco’s letters as her last link to the world she hoped to forget.
But then had come another letter, carried by an owl that was not Draco’s. A letter from the Ministry, heralding the Marriage Law.
Penelope had shattered every breakable thing in the house that night, until the floor was a field of glass and her hands ran with blood.
Knelt in the middle of the wreckage, she had been forced to admit that, no matter how she’d tried to escape it, she still belonged to the magical world. It was not through with her yet. And the rage she’d laboured to bottle away returned in force, telling her she’d never truly escaped it… only been slowly stewing in it until no part of her was left unpoisoned.
What a Hero Harry Potter was, the papers declared even now, six years after the End. What a burden he’d carried. What a debt the world owed him.
Penelope scoffed whenever she saw his picture. Whenever she heard his name.
She would have taken on the burden of being the Chosen One, would have suffered it all in a heartbeat, if it meant her father had cared about her as much as he’d cared about protecting Harry Fucking Potter.
But he had never cared about her.
And that was Penelope’s inglorious burden to carry.
Arthur sighed wearily, stepping from the fireplace onto the ash-greyed rug.
He slipped off his old brown Oxfords, set down his old brown work case, draped his tweed robes over the back of the armchair. It wasn’t much cooler in his waistcoat and shirt. His glasses felt just as muggy and grimy as the rest of him after the Ministry and the Floo, and he stood in his stocking feet in the middle of the rug as he slid them off his nose to clean them.
It had been his habit for six years now, polishing his lenses when he got home. Making those initial moments of return a bit fuzzier around the edges. So he didn’t have to see the moving pictures of the children he and Molly had made. The blankets he’d watched her knit through the winter months, draping down over her knees as they grew longer.
Breathing deeply, he slid his glasses over his ears again, and blinked. It was still painful, these surroundings which he’d known all his life, since boyhood, but were now so fundamentally altered. Drained of their colour. At least the house was no longer his alone to haunt. All that kept him from lying down on the sofa, not to rise again until morning, was the kindness he’d vowed to give the poor wretched soul who had been forced to live with him.
‘Penelope?’ he called up the stairs.
No answer. No voice, no creak of wood. Which didn’t mean she wasn’t hiding out in her room—once Percy’s, now as good as a spare since he never came home anymore. She kept the door shut and locked, reminding Arthur of when Charlie had turned fourteen and his childhood sweetness had hardened into a brutal need for independence. He’d got over the phase, of course, as had all the Weasley sons—except, perhaps, Percy.
But Penelope was twenty-three, not fourteen, and most certainly not a Weasley.
Going through to the kitchen, he saw the large wicker basket sat on the worktop, full to the brim with tomatoes of all sizes and colours, purples and oranges and veiny reds, a carpet of courgettes and snap-peas beneath them. A crown of carrots stuck out the top of the arrangement, looking rather like pikes to Arthur’s eye. Chuckling once—fleetingly—he went over to rinse them, then caught sight of a smudge of black in the green landscape outside the window.
She was sat against the trunk of the big oak tree, facing away over the meadow. Her knees were tucked up to her chest and she appeared to be reading, long raven hair tied in an unkempt braid, hiding the vertebrae at the back of her neck. Though in the dappled shade, Arthur didn’t imagine her chosen spot was much cooler than it was in the garden, in full sun. Surely someone so fair-skinned—erring on anaemic—would rather be inside than out on a day like this.
His company must have been just that undesirable.
Unbuttoning and rolling up his sleeves, his own skin tan compared to Penelope’s (an illusion, courtesy of the Weasley freckles), Arthur turned the tap on and washed the veg by hand.
She was the spitting image of her father. So much so that he sometimes had to blink to be sure his glasses weren’t misbehaving. Her looks were forbidding but far from ugly. Statuesque, and ice cold. In that measure she looked not unlike a pureblood lady. Perhaps it was her father’s pureblood half making itself evident in her; Snape had descended from the pureblood line of Princes, before his mother had married a muggle.
Arthur knew all this, from Rita Skeeter’s book.
Which he’d found it difficult to get through, and would never have touched had he not been matched with the daughter of the man. He’d refused to give the… female dog a single sickle, instead borrowing the copy which had found its way into Ron’s hands.
‘Burn it afterwards for all I care,’ his youngest son had told him, when last they’d all gathered for dinner—a week before the marriage. Penelope had not been present. ‘What were they thinking at the Ministry? Honestly, she’s as bad as Snape… was,’ Ron had finished weakly, under Hermione’s withering glare.
As terrible as Skeeter’s book was, it certainly served the purpose of spreading the story far and wide. There wasn’t a Witch or Wizard not wise to the sacrifices Penelope’s father had made, how and why Severus Snape had risked and ultimately given his life in the fight against Voldemort.
What not even Skeeter knew was who Penelope’s mother had been.
Eyebrows drawn together, Arthur crossed the kitchen, taking down a pot and skillet from the hooks over the cupboard.
Penelope had no friends for him to ask what she liked; what would draw her from her prickly shell. Clearly, having Hogwarts’ Least Pleasant Professor for a father hadn’t helped her in the friends department. Nor had her induction to the Death Eaters, at the tender age of fifteen.
She barely spoke a word to him, communicating in complex glares and retreating silences. If she deigned to be around him at all. She seemed to enjoy gardening, but Arthur had come to believe it was more a complex form of self harm than a hobby.
Being at work for the better part of the day left him blind to how she spent her solitary hours. She ate what he cooked in the evenings. But she was still in her room when he ate breakfast and left for work in the morning, and he doubted she ate anything until after he’d arrived home. Except maybe some things she’d picked from the garden.
It had been Molly’s garden, really. Arthur had tended it in the years since her death, but poorly. Penelope had something of a green thumb.
They’d been living together for two tense weeks now, and that was all he knew about her. She seemed far from interested in his own person, and in one more week they would have to—
Arthur set down the pot a little too hard on the range, startling himself out of his thoughts. He took more care with the skillet.
Forcing air in through his nose, out through his mouth, he set in on making dinner. Drawing out the chopping board, dicing the onions.
Once, he and Molly had made dinners together. Almost every one. They’d liked to do it once he got home from work. To talk, their easy conversation a steady murmur under the bubbling of broth, the rhythms of slicing and stirring.
Now Arthur cooked alone.
Each task seemed detached from itself without Molly there to ground him, to make things real. His hands like muggle holograms, shadows moving over shadows.
Arthur’s stew got underway, meat sizzling in the skillet as stock bubbled in the pot, the chopping board a mosaic of tomatoes and carrots.
He looked out the window again.
Arthur could practically see Penelope’s black shirt absorbing the heat and sunlight. It was old and oversized, and frayed, he’d noticed. Like she’d been wearing it for years and years. He was no stranger to the struggle to make ends meet—all his boys had had to wear their older brothers’ outgrown clothes as they’d grown older. But he and Molly had done their best to keep the hand-me-downs in good condition. Penelope’s shirt… in fact, all of her large black clothes… looked like neglect, to him.
Arthur had taken an interest in her when she’d been in school—a worried father’s interest. Neither he nor Molly had ever seen her—she’d been no friend of their children—but they’d heard plenty about her from Ron. Mostly that she was a git after her father’s shrunken black heart. Any parent would have worried, and they had. Was this girl alright, living alone with a man like Severus Snape as her sole parent? Was it possible that she was alright. Molly, in the infinite goodness of her heart, had gone to Dumbledore. But the old Headmaster had assured her that Penelope Snape was exactly where she needed to be.
Now, too late, Arthur and others had learned that where Dumbledore thought one needed to be, was not always where it was best for one to be.
There was nothing he could do about her past now. Despite his Gryffindor pride, Arthur had reconciled himself to the fact that, had the Ministry not bound her to him as his wife, he’d have probably forgotten about her, and ceased to care. Indeed he had forgotten, before the Ministry Owl had arrived with his Match letter and he’d found her most unlikely name printed there.
Outside, under the oak, Penelope turned the page of her book. Her face shifted to reveal her profile. Along with wearing the same colour as her father’s infamous teaching robes, she had also inherited his aquiline nose—which Arthur had never before thought to find attractive on a woman.
He’d not bothered finding many women attractive besides Molly. Not that, were a Veela to saunter by, his eye wouldn’t be drawn. He was a warm-blooded Wizard, after all. Even if that blood had been significantly cooled by years of heartache.
Penelope, despite her acerbic tongue and hunched shoulders, was not an unattractive woman… And yet she was so… well… wounded… More significantly, so young…
Taking his glasses off wasn’t enough—Arthur had to squeeze his eyes shut and press his fingertips to his eyelids to weather the surge of guilt. He would never have agreed to the match, had there been a choice. It wasn’t right, forcing such a young woman… He was thirty years her senior, for Merlin’s sake.
But the Ministry said their magic was compatible. And that was the priority of the Law.
Tossing the meat and veg into the pot, he stepped out the kitchen door to pick wildflowers. They grew in the shade against the outer wall of the house, and squatting down—though his knees were not so limber as they once had been—he sorted through the delicate buds with his long fingers until he’d plucked an assortment of pleasing shapes and colours. For the table.
Standing up, wind brushing his red hair back from his sweaty forehead, Arthur looked Penelope’s way and considered inviting her inside. Her posture was rigid, shoulders hunched around her book—what was she reading?—and he decided against it. He would wait until the meal was ready, like every other evening. He’d not yet earned the privilege of pushing his luck. Usually she went directly to her room, refusing to eat at the table with him. Despite the gesture of flowers, tonight would likely be no different.
Back inside he trimmed the stems and arranged them in a small vase. He lit a taper too, between the old patchwork placemats Molly had made, hoping against hope Penelope might eat with him tonight. He desperately wanted to know her better before… before… well.
Thunder rumbled outside as the stew simmered to completion, steam beading the lid of the pot. Promptly rain began to fall, the kitchen window running with raindrops.
Arthur opened the door, but hesitated to call for her. The storm would drive her in on its own. A minute later, when the rain hardened, she stood and hurried into the house, her book shoved under her shirt, her wand gripped in her fist.
She always carried it when he was around. Like she thought he might attack her.
Removing her book from under her shirt, she tucked it under her arm—too fast for Arthur to catch the title. Using the fingers of her right hand, she tugged her left sleeve down over her wrist. Arthur pretended not to look, as he set out the cutlery, bringing two bowls to the table. But he’d noticed her telling habit, and ached for her.
‘Would you like to eat?’ he asked her gently, surprised she’d remained standing there so long.
Penelope didn’t avoid eye contact, but looking into her dark, dark eyes was like looking down two wells of ink. He couldn’t read anything inside them. They held the beginnings of words, of thoughts, but never disclosed the result.
‘I’m not hungry,’ she said, her voice a tangle in her throat.
Arthur knew it was a lie—how could she not be hungry, starving even, thin and bony as she was? But he didn’t protest, letting her leave the kitchen on heavy feet and creak her way upstairs.
Thunder rumbled, rain drilling harder against the bottle-bottom window panes, and Arthur sank into his chair. Elbows digging into the table, he rested his head in his hands and ran his fingers through the hair behind his temples. Finally he took off his glasses and rubbed them on his shirt, indulging again in the blur of his naked vision, the distance of things.
He ate his own food, barely tasting it. Warding off memories of times when the table was full, of boisterous laughter and cheerful voices swelling in his ears, and Molly’s eyes locking with his over the bounty, saying, Oh, my love. Look what we’ve made.
Replacing his glasses, he picked up Penelope’s bowl—and, on second thought, the little vase of flowers—and mounted the stairs.
He left it on the floorboards in front of her door, which was shut as usual (and locked, he knew without needing to check). Stepping down to the landing, Arthur waited to see if she would reach out to take the food. Only when he gave up, the creaking of the stairs betraying his descent, did he hear her door open, then quickly shut again.
Sighing, Arthur went back down to the kitchen.
As he stored the stew and did the washing up, he spotted an owl, pale caramel wings illuminated by a flash of lightning, winging over the meadow and to Penelope’s window. A minute passed, and then it flew away again. Who would Penelope be getting letters from, he wondered? But it was none of his concern, really. She was his wife by Law alone. He wouldn’t meddle.
The rain was hammering now, pouring over the window.
He might have gone to the shed to tinker for a time… but he was too exhausted. Seeking other means of distraction, he meandered into the sitting room, sat in his armchair and put his feet up, staring down his nose at a book. Sense and Sensibility, his favourite of Austen’s. But the troubles of the Dashwood sisters in their need to marry struck him as vastly less humorous than they had when he’d read it before. He found himself staring into the darkness of the fireplace. He was tired. So very tired. He would rest his eyes… just for a minute…
A loud thump woke him from his half-sleep.
At first he blinked, expecting to see Molly there on the sofa across from him, working on another of her blankets (or a jumper… she’d always started in on those around midsummer in order to get them all done in time for Christmas…) He almost swore he did see her sitting there—
But then came a cry from upstairs, low, like a howl, shattering the remnants of his nap.
The book fell from his lap as he stood, remembering his houseguest. Pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, he made for the stairs. An Owl had delivered something to her earlier… had its sender intended harm? There were many who still despised Severus Snape, regardless of his tragic tale of suffering. It seemed unlikely after so much time, but perhaps someone wished to take out their anger on his only living relative.
‘Penelope?’ Arthur called, taking the stairs two at a time.
Adrenalin pumped through his heart when he saw her bedroom door was open, the vase of flowers left on the floor outside. The rain had grown so hard he probably wouldn’t have heard her stepping into the hallway even if he’d been awake.
His eyes darted up the stairs as he heard another whimper—from the attic.
It took him a moment to realise the whimper was a spell, or an attempt at one. It sounded like…
Heart sinking, he took the last flight of stairs at a jog, and found Penelope cowering in the shadows, her wand shaking at the end of her arm as she stared at her dead father on the floor.
Boggarts were truly the nastiest of magical entities. For people who had survived a war they were nigh impossible to defeat, replicating horrible visions that couldn’t be turned funny if given a lifetime.
When Penelope’s eyes darted to him, Arthur saw her completely open and vulnerable, tears glistening in the same lightning-light that cast eerie grey shadows over Severus Snape’s motionless face. She was holding her wand like the end of a rope she’d been sliding down for a long, long time.
‘It’s alright, sweetheart,’ Arthur whispered, the endearment coming from the depths of his heaving chest. ‘It’s okay. Let me take care of it.’
Making no show of Slytherin stubbornness, she stepped aside, leaving room for Arthur to move in front of her. With his heart in his throat, he did so. Knowing already what he would see next.
With a warping of space and colour, the Boggart shifted, and Arthur beheld his entire family lying dead, covered in canvas blankets as Fred and Molly had been, on the flagstones of the Great Hall, once it was all over.
Horror, deep and piercing, froze him up. Stopped his breath. Made him believe he’d dropped his wand until his fingers tightened around the familiar handle once again.
Sometimes, there was no laughter to be found. Sometimes, there was only one way to overcome such darkness.
Closing his eyes, Arthur allowed the memory of the full table to flood into him fully. The deepest pain of loss, tangled with an echo of deepest joy.
‘Expecto Patronum.’
From the tip of his wand streamed his Patronus, a sparkling blue Retriever, and with a pounce and a hearty whuff! the Boggart disintegrated.
The flickering of the lightning was not the only reason for Arthur’s blurry vision. Penelope had been unable to staunch her own tears in the time his back was turned.
Seeing her that way, a reflection of his own pain, he longed to reach out and comfort her. For the simplicity of an arm around the shoulders. Two bellies expanding with breath. In his time as a father Arthur had learned the true value of physical affection… Often an instant cure for frustration, and certainly for nightmares. Each of his children had fallen into more than one easy sleep under the gentle stroking of their father’s hand through their hair. It often baffled Arthur that some people were repelled by a loving touch. He had his wits enough about him, as he beheld Penelope, to infer that she was one of those. Though he did not comprehend it, he would respect it.
‘I thought it was a shutter, banging…’ Her voice was higher than he’d heard it, constricted by tears. ‘It… fell down.’
Looking up, Arthur saw the trap door to the attic hanging open. He closed it with a flick of his wand.
A knot of tension twisted between his shoulder blades. He really did wish for a hug… for himself, as well…
Despite knowing there was no possibility, it still pained him when Penelope turned tail and hurried down the stairs, the next rumble of thunder doing little to drown the slam of her door.
Sliding his wand into his pocket, Arthur held on to the bannister as he made his way after her.
The door was closed, and locked—he checked, with a gentle twist of the doorknob.
Arthur held his breath a moment, behind pursed lips, then let it out on words. ‘I didn’t know that was up there. I’m so, so sorry you found it.’
He yearned to console her more deeply, to tell her how sorry he was that she had ever known enough loss to inspire the sight the Boggart had shown her. But no response came from the other side of the door. Not even a peep.
He imagined her lying in Percy’s old bed, muffling her sobs with a pillow.
If Skeeter’s story had a moral, it was that even the hardest, bitterest of people had emotions. Sometimes, far deeper emotions than people who didn’t contort themselves into knots to conceal them.
Snape’s daughter was no exception.
‘I’ll be downstairs, if you need anything at all,’ Arthur said to the door, hoping she could hear, that she wasn’t stopping her ears.
But he knew it would take more than a gentle invitation to win her trust.
Drawing in a shaky breath, he rested his forehead on the wood, pressing slightly. Bringing himself back.
In the shadows at his feet, he saw the little vase he’d carried up, tipped over by Penelope’s foot as she’d rushed inside the room.
All the petals had fallen from the flowers he’d picked, their leaves dry and shrivelled. Hanging their heads in grief.