Double Dog Dare! -- Episode 26
Vulgarweed, 12 July 2002

“Viviane, step back!” Dumbledore said warningly, “Your rage is going to touch off the wards from this distance if you don’t put a sock in it.”

“As if you’d ever spare a sock for my problems,” she sneered. Sirius growled, but Dumbledore merely rolled his eyes and looked down at his robes that were still being tugged by tiny teeth. “Don’t worry, Fidelis,” said Dumbledore. “I trust Severus implicitly.”

***

“If you don’t mind,” Snape said in a near-whisper to his extremely welcome wooden wand. “After all, it’s not the size of the wand but the wizard who wields it…with a little help from my mahogany friend…so please, reducio.”

Bless Ollivander for being so right—it was always best to be polite to one’s most important tool. One “please,” one of the greatest of magic words, could make up for years of that insulting performance to the first-years, who were always a little too enamored of their new toys. His wand agreeably shrunk to just a little over the length of his thumbnail, and with a happy grunt of blissful pain, he jammed it through several layers of skin just below his shirt-cuff, where it rested like a power-humming splinter, as he whispered a sticking spell. Good, only a little blood, and with any luck it would blend nicely into the rest of his petty Janet-scars.

And not a moment too soon, because outside in the muck he thought he could hear the approach of overpriced shoes. Now, would Janet open the door, or—

Of course not. She’d lower the barriers for just a second and just Apparate on in, because that was the kind of pretentious wench she was. He did his best to look terrified – and did a fairly decent job of it, because he certainly had not expected her to come so close.

“I see you’ve awakened, my….handsome…..darling,” she said in a voice meant to convey the precise opposite, placing a claw-nailed hand on his chest in an unpleasantly intimate fashion. “So glad you’ve been able to enjoy at least a little of my hospitality. Alas, we cannot dally long in our lovenest, as someone very important wants to see us both….I’m sure you can imagine who it might be. It is of course a great honour for us both, and so we must toast.” Janet drew from her expensive robes two flasks, one marked with her family crest, the other plain. “For me, wine of course, and for you, a very special treat….”

She pointed her wand at him. “Drink it all down and I’ll let you visit Our Lord with your body intact for a little longer.”

He thought quickly. Alright, which of the two plans would be best? Once the chemical reaction had taken place, there wasn’t much that could be done with Essence of Dementor; any transformations of isolated ingredients would be deeply unpredictable. And yet Janet would know in one mouthful if he simply switched….unless….Yes, indeed: with a quick sniff he recognized a spot on his sleeve as the grease trail of the cheap California wine the fake Viviane had been too eager to drink. If he jumbled the ingredients as he switched….well, it would be a crap shoot. But at least he probably wouldn’t be hallucinating his worst nightmares at the same time he tried to face down one or two or three of them in the flesh.

He hoped he looked suitably cowed. “To your…health, my queen,” he spluttered as under his breath he muttered a mixing formula. Chardonnay, blood, Fidelis drool still embedded in the wood of his wand, mud, taste of Dementor and madness, a bit of Viviane’s metallic nail-spitting rage, an aftertaste of Azkaban and another of Dumbledore’s candy, the venomous spit of a hostile kiss and foul black macaroni; never had Snape been so glad to be filthy. The result of it was that she drank something that tasted like cheap wine and he drank something with a taste and texture like Hagrid’s attempt at a liquor made from milk that he’d claimed was an old family recipe…his mother’s side, of course. Trying not to gag on it was the least of his problems.

He shook his head violently and let his eyes go unfocused and shocked, as he’d imagine someone sinking into the proper influence would be.

He didn’t have to feign horror when Janet started ripping off his clothes.

***

Jason sat glumly in the garden where he’d been banished with Jeremy and the three Weasley boys. Fred and George were absorbed in peering into the window, trying to catch what his parents and Professor McGonagall and Madam Hopkirk who worked with their father, were gesticulating so heatedly about. They must have cast a Muffling Charm, because even Fred and George’s patented Ear-Wigs – hairy devices worn like earplugs that resembled freakishly caterpillars stuffed in – did nothing to make the sound any clearer.

“Well, I’ll tell you this,” Fred said. “It’s clear something really bad is going on. Dumbledore looked very worried, and there was some odd business going on at Hogwarts. I don’t like it at all.”

Jason almost jumped out of his skin when one of the large bugs zooming about in the summer sky turned out not to be a bug at all, but the tiniest owl he had ever even thought of seeing.

“Hey, that’s Pig!” Ron said, jumping up. “Took him long enough to write back to me.”

I’m going to have to get used to this kind of thing, Jason told himself as Ron unwrapped a piece of paper from the owl’s leg. Okay, owls bring letters. I can understand that. I can handle that.

“Shit!” cried Ron. He handed the paper off to the twins, who clustered around it. Jason managed to get his head in between them. What it said didn’t make much sense, but it seemed to make the Weasleys upset: “Sorry took me so long. Not sleeping much – scar hurts like hell and having bad dreams about school and the Ministry and Dementors. Don’t think it’s about me. Keep an eye on your dad and on Dumbledore and Snuffles will you? Go and check if you have to. –H.P.”

“That’s it,” said George. “Dammit, what kind of Gryffindors are we? We have to find out what’s going on.”

Their eyes got very wide as Jason told them in much greater detail everything he had seen and heard in the Pensieve.

***

“A-Azkaban,” Snape groaned in a hollow whisper, trembling all over and his hands scrabbling helplessly in the mud, as Janet straddled him eagerly; like a lusty Dementor herself, eager to lap up every dribble of horror and grief from his trembling lips.

Though he could certainly visualize the place clearly enough and was in fact doing so, it was his own choice as, one by one, while she delighted in his excellent performance of madness and suffering, he turned each of his scattered black buttons on the ground into a Portkey.