The Moon Has Spoken

“An bhfuil tú ar meisce fós?”

Fiddler heard either Fred or George ask to the other in a very inebriated voice.

“No… need two more pints, I wager. This Muggle stuff is great, though. Hang on…”, the redhead’s brow knitted. “Did you just talk to me in Irish?”

“Yes, you dunce, and you answered”.

“How come?”

Fred (yeah, it was definitely Fred), raised his shoulders.

“I’ve been reading Fiddler’s Gaelic books. They’re interesting”.

“But I haven’t”, George said. “So how come I understood what you said?”

“Dunno. Maybe our twin connection gets enhanced by alcohol”.

They laughed like hyennas at the thought and Fiddler smiled. She shook her head and walked around the table, trying to find herself something sour tasting, but apparently Molly liked to cook sweet stuff. She raised her shoulders and grabbed a sliced lemon. That would do. She leaned her hip on the edge of the table, as she sucked at the lemon distractedly, looking around at her houseguests having the time of their lifes in their Halloween celebration.
They had spent the last few days going up and down Kerry’s Mall in search for suiting costumes and they had succeeded. Even Moody had stepped in and he was dressed like a Caribbean pirate, limping away with a patch over his non-magical eye; Molly had gotten herself a Hen costume, and Fiddler thought it was oddly fitting. Arthur was dressed like a jester, with his pointy hat and everything, and had Harry and Ginny bent over with laughter at his very unsuccessful attempts to do some card tricks. The two of them were dressed in similar attires, oddly resembling Hansel and Gretel, and they hadn’t still hear the end of it because Fred and George seemed to believe Grimm hadn’t meant the tale to be so incestuous.
Tonks was by the CD player, messing around with the CDs, wearing a gypsy suit that paid her too much resemblance to Trelawney. Harry looked at her every once in a while, and he didn’t seem happy. Hermione was wearing one of Fiddler’s scrubs and stethoscope and she was saying anyone who’d listen she might pursue a Healer career later on. Ron was dressed as an overgrown raddish and his siblings had howled with laughter as they informed him he was actually supposed to be dressed up for the stupid party. Lupin had gotten himself a pair of earmuffs resembling a wolf’s with a matching suit and Snape had sneered at the sight of him.

“Original”, he’d said.

He, of course, wasn’t dressed for the occasion, but Ron had said he didn’t need to.

“He’s the Reaper undercover, who needs a costume?”

And they had laughed for fifteen minutes in a row.

Fiddler was also dressed in black, with her long jet-black hair loose down her back and waist, when asked, she’d replied she was dressed like Morticia Addams, but no one knew who she was so it wasn’t as funny as she had expected it to be.

She felt someone’s gaze fixed on her, and she was startled talisalise it belonged to Severus. He was sitting on what had became his favorite chair, with an everpresent book, away from the others, with his trademark sneer firmly on place as if he couldn’t stand the sight of such preposterousness, but there was a dull glint in those black eyes when he looked at her that Fiddler found unnerving. She watched his eyes travel from her lips to the lemon in her left hand and she raised an eyebrow, inquiringly. He quickly blinked and looked away, pretending to be really interested in his reading. Fiddler shook her head and returned her attention to the party.
Fred and George, dressed with Muggle pijamas, one in bright yellow with little suns imprinted, and the other in deep blue with moons, were fencing around with their forks, as the kids cheered and Tonks wrote down the wagers in the wall with whipped cream.

“You know the only thing that’s missing?”, said Ginny thoughtfully. “Mrs. Black’s portrait howling at us”.

“Yeah, what d’you reckon happened to it?”, Fred asked.

“Probably got burned along with blasted Kreacher”, Ron said.

Harry’s expression closed sadly and everyone changed the subject quickly. Sirius’ death was still an issue, apparently.

“Fiddler, why are you eating that, sweetie, I made plenty of stuff…”, Molly said, walking towards her.

“That’s fine, Molly, I like lemons”, Fiddler smiled gently.

“Yeah, acid stuff she likes… Heard that, Sev!?!?”, George yelled, gleefully drunk. “You still have a chance!”

The room roared with laughter, and Severus fumed from behind his book. This was getting out of hand. He didn’t think he could stomach more teasing from that bunch of dunderheads…
But the truth was the lemon had caught his attention, though, and what unnerved him the most was he had been thinking the exact same thing George had said out loud. That, and other interesting things he could have done with the lemon… or the lady in black sucking on it.

Stop it, Snape, I mean it.

“Yeah, Snape”, Fred drawled. “In fact, you might want to repeat after me… Tá mo bhríste trí thine. Go on, say it, no chick can resist that”.

Fiddler laughed helplessly and Snape stared at her against his will.

“Do you know what you just said?”, she asked Fred.

“Not quite. I just thought it sounded sssssssssexy!”

“It means ‘my trousers are on fire’ chap!”

Fred blinked, momentarily taken aback, but he recovered quickly enough.

“Well, I bet they are. Aren’t they, Sev?”

Severus glared at Fred witheringly but didn’t dignify his taunting with an answer. He tried to ignore the howls of laughter in the room.

The party went on without Severus, as his memory went back to that night at the library and he shivered inwardly. No matter how hard he tried he still could feel her underneath him, soft and warm… he could still revel in the taste of her skin, of her lips…

Wynn.

NO! Not Wynn, but Fiddler, although he’d cried his dead wife’s name out loud. And he was sure he’d live long enough to regret it. He had seen the hurt in Fiddler’s eyes, the brightness of her tears, the way her responsiveness died at that single word… As if he had physically stabbed her.

He looked at her, dancing and singing with the others, as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn’t taken her so heartlessly in her own library, as if he wasn’t in the same room.
Fiddler, the same woman who had cried so painfully in his arms at the sight of his memories, the same woman who could embrace sourness (no matter what kind), and actually like it…

Snape shook his head. He was getting aroused again and he couldn’t let that happen.
He closed his book with a loud thud and left the room without looking back.

But he still could hear them laugh behind his back.

~*~*~*~


Fiddler entered the autopsy’s room number 101 dressed with her everpresent surgery scrub. She wore a large blue coat tied on her back as well, and her face was protected by a plastic screen and a green mouthcoverer. She had put on a blue surgery cap and she was now rummaging through the jars in search for gloves.
Severus came in then, wearing a similar attire. He scowled at his reflection on the windowpane. Fiddler had had to talk to her superiors into accepting his presence in the room, finally getting her way by telling them he was a well respected Scottish Toxicologist who could enligthen them in those mysterious deaths. But this was preposterous. He felt like a jester dressed like that.
With a sigh, Severus grabbed the gloves Fiddler gave him.

“They’re sterile, so try not to contaminate them”, she warned him.

“How do I do that?”, he inquired, for once not snapping at her.

“Watch me”.

And so he did, following every movement of the ritual she went through to put on the gloves. He mimicked her actions at his best and finally managed to be done with it.

“Not bad for the first time”, she approved. “You should have been a surgeon. You have the hands for it”.

Still not sure if he should take it as a compliment or as an insult, Severus followed Fiddler to the table in which the corpse lay, covered by a sheet, and watched her as she disposed the instruments she’d need. She held in her hand a black, square artifact and she pressed a button in it, brought it to her face and spoke:

“November the third, sixteen hours. Patient: fourty-three years old caucasic male. Date and time of death, October thirty, midnight. Death dyagnosis: acute respiratory failure, cardiac arrest, distributive shock and pressumed intoxication by substances unknown”. She paused for a while and then she added. “As out of the record comment I might add that said substance could be an inhibitor of oxidative phosforilation: Potassium cyanide”.

She sighed deeply and put the tape recorder in the kidney table, leaving it on. She stepped back to the examining table and said:

“All right… Here we go”.

Severus watched intently as she drew back the sheet and examined the corpse. She spoke again and although he knew she was saying it for the record, he had the feeling that, somehow, she was speaking for him as well.

“The skin presents generalized cyanosis, which could confirm my previous theory. Sialorrhea can also be observed, and”, she opened the corpse’s eyelids, “the pupils are mydriatic, but that could be of no significance as it possibly translates a response to advanced life support maneuvers or it is merely the ocular manifestation of anoxic-ischaemic encephalopaty due to cardiac arrest. There isn’t really much else to comment on the subject’s external appearance except for a tattoo in the internal side of his left forearm”, Fiddler lift the limb in question to peer at it closely. “It consists of a black skull with a snake as a tongue protruding from it’s mouth”.

She heard Severus’ intake of breath and turned to see him, his eyes wide above his mouth coverer. She walked to turn off the tape recorder.

“What’s wrong?”

“That is the Dark Mark… This man was a wizard. A Death Eater”. Severus approached to the table and bent over to examin the dead man’s face. “Only he does not seem familiar… He must not have been too high in rank, and that should explain why they found it easy to dispose of him.” He was silent for a while and then concluded: “Either that or… He was a traitor”.

Fiddler saw his sallow skin grow paler and her own heart clenched. Plenty of stupid reassuring phrases came to her mind, but she couldn’t bring herself to say not even half of one to him. Instead, she turned on the tape recorder, grabbed a large scalpel in her left hand and said out loud:

“Let’s continue”, but her voice was thick from the lump on her throat.

She felt Severus’ gaze follow her movements fixedly as she performed a firm incision along the corpse’s breastbone, and, out of the corner of her eyes, she saw him flinch slightly at the sound of breaking bones when she used the clamps to crack the ribcage open.
She smiled to herself and shook her head. Funny, I would have thought he’d done worst things than this when he followed the Dark Lord.

Ahe whe was right, he had, and in fact he was thinking about it as he watched her sink her hands into the man’s chest to take out the heart, comment on it, weigh it and cut it open in search of Merlin knew what.
He had indeed had his fair share of murders during his days as a Death Eater. He had never been an active torturer, considering himself well above such bruteness, but he had killed. And more than once.
Was he remorseful?
He couldn’t really say that. He had been the King’s poisoner, he had killed by skills, with stealth, with delicate precission and satisfying subtlety. Severus Snape was a man of intellect and method, not a bloodthirsty dunce. He was cruel, cold and detached and he despised the raw emotions evoked in his sidekicks when they tortured people to death. Severus had seen Lucius Malfoy’s wild eyes shine with ecstasy at the sight of blood in his hands, and he had felt nothing but scornful aversion. He’d watched Muggles writhe in pain and scream in agony under Bellatrix Lestrange’s wand, and he had never felt the need to stop her, he had tutored and witnessed many Death Eater women as they performed unforgivable curses, as they were initiated on the Black Revels and accomplished their first ritual murder with no so much as the blink of an eye.
Except for the time when Wynn had murdered their son.

But he had never seen a woman cutting open a corpse or a living man with Fiddler’s precise movements and matter-of-fact remarks, never had he been faced with someone who could turn the most horrid procedure into a mindful process, someone who was able to embrace a task no matter how distasteful and dissect it with pretty much his own analitic curiosity, setting aside the morality of it. Wynn had been brilliant, but her brutality nauseated him. She had killed her own blood for the sake of foolish beliefs. And the more he knew Fiddler, the more he was certain she wouldn’t put anything or anyone above her flesh and blood.
Fiddler had something the women he’d met before lacked, something indefinable, intangible, like an aura surrounding her, perhaps due to her half humanity, to the innate ruthlessness of her Banshee nature; this woman was a living contradiction, cynical yet sensible, cruel but not unkind, brilliant but not presumptuous, ironic and bitter, but yet with carefully hidden tenderness in her sphinxian face.

Severus had spent the day with her, watching all of her possible faces; educational in a way he’d never been, encouraging her younger students if they did something right, and correcting them as a very sarcastic but utterly kind mother would do when they didn’t; snapping at nurses’ clumsiness, but thanking them politely if they managed to do things the way she liked them. He had seen her deftness at performing horrid procedures, running up and down the ER taking tubes, syringes, paddles, bags and various items as she addressed her patients by name, talking merrily to them to take away their pain as she worked.
But what had impressed him the most was one particular patient, a newborn baby suffering from extensive skin burns, his negligent mother seeming to believe boiling the child would be a nice way to cleanse him. He had seen rage in Fiddler’s face, as she tensely asked the mother to wait outside, and he knew she was ushering her away for she didn’t trust herself not to slap the woman if she stayed. Once the mother was out, Fiddler’s eyes softened as she held the baby carefully, and he had finally managed to separate her from Wynn, when he saw that, no matter how tough Fiddler pretended to be, she was a tender woman capable of such love as Wynn never knew.
She had carefully cleaned and healed the child’s wounds, whilst talking to him with the same sweet half voice she used to address her dog, calling the baby sweet nicknames, tickling his feet and dancing around with him until he fell asleep.
He didn’t remember ever seeing Wynn do that with Lucas. With her son. And Fiddler was doing it with a total stranger.
Severus Snape seldom admired someone, besides Dumbledore, but after beholding such scene, he had to admit to himself that Doctor Fiddler Greene had utterly astounded him. She had the perfect amount of cruelty and kindness to make her intoxicating to him.
He looked at her, bent over the trolley next to the corpse, examining some sort of tissue closely, brow frown in concentration, totally oblivious to his presence, hummintunetune to herself, and he sighed resignedly.
He could deny it no longer.
He, Severus Snape, was shamefully besotted with Fiddler Greene.

The biggest surprise was, however, that he found the thought soothing instead of alarming; still, the blush on his face spoke of the awkwardness he felt by being trapped on a feeling he had no familiarity with. He had thought it was just lust at first, the obvious result of being in close convivence with a fertile female, and the responses the scent of her and her proximity stirred in his body. He was a man after all, and with a very high libido at that. And even though Fiddler wasn’t good-looking in the conventional way, she was still a woman, and he had never been queasy about the women he slept with. Not that he had slept with many anyway.
Not even with his wife. Wynn, the beautiful swan, cold as ice and cruel as hell.

After what had happened in the library, when he had been overridden by his instincts, he had felt confused, ashamed, and above all, angry, because, no matter how badly he wanted her, he had not meant to take her that way. He had expected her to howl at him for days, to expel him from her house, or at least to slap him in front of everybody, but no. Fiddler Greene didn’t lower herself to such manifestations of female anger. She had carried on as usual, her eyes defiantly fixed on his everytime they came across one another, even mocking him in her very own way as she’d done since they had met. She had even been true to her promise and asked him to join her in the autopsy.

“Severus”, she said, bringing him out of his musings. “Look at this”.

He walked over to where she was and raised his eyebrow questioningly. She was holding a stomach in her hands, peering at some ulcerations in the inner mucose closely.

“Look”, she said again, “These are typical gastric erosions caused by cyanide. We would have to run some chemical tests on the tissue, but I am fairly certain that we’re on the right track”.

He saw her smile shine in her eyes and felt the sudden urge to hold her in his arms and kiss her.
Thoroughly.

Where did that come from? He was not keen on kissing, he was a rude, cold, starched man. But yet his mind kept presenting him with images of Fiddler in his embrace, his mouth on hers, moving softly… gently… slowly…
He felt the immediate response of his body and squared his shoulders, breathed in deeply and willed himself to remain composed.

“Well, congratulations”, he said dryly, as if she had stated the obvious. He saw the light die in her eyes and wanted to curse himself.
Why are you like this?

Fiddler stiffened and put the stomach aside.

“I thought that you would like to know”, she said snidely, “especially since he was one of your former playmates. But hey, from now on, I’ll save my comments”.

An eye for an eye. The exquisite irony with which she had spat the word “playmates” was worth of a master.
And he was the master. He bowed mockingly and circled the room examining its contents absent-mindedly. Once or twice he opened his mouth to say something, probably to apologize either for his behavior in the library of for his earlier comment, but he snapped it shut until she finished sewing the man back together.

“We can go now”, Fiddler said with no inflection. “You know the way to the dressing room. “I am going to take these samples to the lab”.

And she walked towards the door without looking at him.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Fiddler was waiting for Severus outside the changing room. It was taking him a while, but then again, she mused, he might not be used to d lik like common mortals did; he probably magicked himself into his clothing. She laughed at the thought, and leaned her back against the wall.

What is wrong with you? Why do you always fall for the wrong kind of man?

Because I am stupid, that’s why. Now leave me alone.

But I mean… Look at him! Did he need to be so rude back there? Come on, lass, he’s got worst mood swings than a fifteen year old teenager, and he’s not precisely what you’d call attractive either…

Shut it, will you? Look who’s talking… As if I had any right to be picky. Besides, his personality--- What am I doing? I am justifying myself… to myself? For crying out loud.

Have you forgotten the library, Fiddler?

Um— No.

She blushed and closed her eyes.
Oh, dear… what is wrong with me…?

But before she could answer that question, the door of the male’s changing room opened and Severus emerged from it.

“Are you ready?”, she said, and immediately cursed inwardly at the stupidity of the question. And sure enough, his sarcastic answer came right away:

“Obviously”.

“Let’s go then”, she said, and strode forward, not waiting to see if he followed or not.

They reached the Denali in silence, and left the hospital’s parking lot hearing nothing but the music coming from the CD player. Severus was barely listening, but then some words caught his attention and he focused his wits on the words:

Romantic scent,
spoiled Lucrece lies warm for you,
There’s no such priest
that can pray me to Heaven.

When done with me,
Forget if you think I feel ashamed;
A wild thing never felt sorry for anything.

Severus looked at her, bewildered. Did she always manage to find a song for the occasion? She held his gaze with darkened eyes, not a single thought visible in them.

“A very… suggestive song”, he said, with a strangled voice.

“If you say so”, Fiddler replied indifferently.

She turned on the volume and focused on the road, passing a restaurant a few moments later.

“Are you hungry?”, she asked.

“Why?”, his voice sounded wary this time, and Fiddler immediately recoiled.

“Oh, nevermind. I just thought that we could pick up some lunch. It’s a long way home. But forget about it”.

And before he could issue a reply she stepped on the gas and sped up, eating a red light in the process, squirming amongst the cars wildly, and blinking suspiciously fast.

Don’t you CRY on me,dlerdler Greene. Don’t you DARE to cry.

So much for bravery.

Screw that song. I am ashamed.

Ashamed to hell.

She didn’t say another word until they got to Elvenpath, as she didn’t trust herself to speak.

But she had a consolation, however small. She hadn’t cried.



A/N.


An bhfuil tú ar meisce fós? = Are you drunk yet?

TBC, please R & R!!!!!

Thanx a lot to my kind beta Ian for his BRILLIANT thoughts!!!


Disclaimer: All characters and HP universe belong to J.K. Rowling, except for the ones you don’t recognize. The plot as well is mine and solely mine!! No profit is being made!!!!