"It's been what, four years?"
Just as Snape took the first sip from his cup, he heard Maverick's voice, and knew at once the words were meant for him.
"I remember there being some disagreement between us." He saw Maverick glance briefly toward Dumbledore. "That was after the troll attack, wasn't it?"
"One ogre and two trolls, if memory serves."
Dumbledore played his part perfectly. Snape had no doubt the two of them were just putting on a show infront of him.
Two dignified Arch-Mages acting as though they couldn't remember something from four years ago… this was clearly emotional harassment aimed at him. The old bat really wished there were an HR department in this godforsaken castle.
Maverick's gaze returned to him, and Snape's fingers tightened further around the porcelain cup.
"We've hardly spoken properly since then, haven't we, Severus?"
Snape: "…"
Snape very much would like to point out that he rarely spoke to any of the Hogwarts staff unless it was necessary, but he feared the other party would not believe him.
In truth, if the conversation had started with him instead of Karkaroff, he probably would have answered without making things complicated. But after watching Karkaroff reduce himself to such a miserable state simply because he could not control his tongue, Snape now found himself under considerably more pressure than the conversation warranted.
He definitely did not want to find out what Karkaroff had just experienced. And on that note, what kind of wizard threatens someone like that? Did this kid not know the Cruciatus Curse existed?
"Severus?"
To Snape's credit, he was remarkably good, far better than Karkaroff, a Great Mage, at controlling his emotions where it counted. He was distracted for a moment, and when Dumbledore called his name he didn't even flinch, giving the old wizard a single nod and setting the porcelain cup down first.
His Occlumency kicked into overdrive, and he turned to face Maverick, who was still watching him, waiting for a response.
"I... prefer to keep my acquaintance with my colleagues purely professional, Master Caesar."
"I see." A small smile touched Maverick's lips.
"Severus has always been like that, Maverick." Dumbledore chimed in. "Even before you joined the school." He looked toward Snape and gave him a small, Dumbledorly nod.
Snape's face didn't so much as change.
Maverick took another drink from his tea and carefully placed the cup back on its saucer before saying to Snape again, "I'd like you to show us the mark Tom placed on you… Death Eaters."
A reaction finally crossed the old bat's face at last, the faintest flicker behind his eyes. This kid clearly had no patience for mincing words.
"Ah, I believe you may be mistaken there, Maverick," Dumbledore added the moment Maverick finished, like a good cop balancing out a bad cop, though Snape may have no idea what that meant. "Severus served as my spy within Tom's inner circle. Calling him a Death Eater would be inaccurate."
Maverick did not bother correcting himself. Instead, he looked at Snape, silently waiting for him to respond.
Snape sighed, laid his left arm flat against the oak table, and pushed back his sleeve. Was he expected to argue? Please. Unlike Karkaroff, he wasn't quite so tired of living.
Maverick rose slowly from his chair, and under Snape's watchful eye, walked unhurried around the table before coming to a stop beside him. A single bead of sweat gathered at the side of his forehead feeling himself watched from above, but he didn't dare move.
Maverick furrowed his brow and leaned down slightly, studying the bared arm. This old bat, he thought, was paler than half the witches in the school.
Anyways, the Dark Mark, it was still there, faint as it was. The skull and serpent seemed to writhe beneath the surface, the tiny snake curling through the skull's open mouth as though it were alive.
Dumbledore soon joined Maverick, and Snape found himself flanked on both sides, the sensation stirring up old, unpleasant memories from his school days, back when being surrounded rarely ended well for him.
"Well?"
He glanced toward Dumbledore, who stood rubbing his short beard thoughtfully.
"A bit interesting. But nothing complicated." Maverick said it without looking, then straightened.
His eyes then met Snape's, "I'm about to work some magic on the mark. Please don't move."
Snape: "…"
With little choice but to comply, Snape followed the instruction, keeping his eyes on Maverick as a finger was pointed toward his open sleeve.
However, contrary to what he was expecting, Snape felt nothing after that. One second passed. Two seconds, five seconds, for nearly half a minute, all he could do was watch Maverick standing there, the tip of his finger glowing faintly orange, the only visible change the Dark Mark itself, stirring, animating just slightly beneath the skin, and beyond that, nothing.
When Maverick eventually lowered his arm, there was a thoughtful expression crossing his face. Something, evidently, must have happened to warrant that look.
"Detect anyone else?"
Snape then turned his head to the other side, where he saw Dumbledore wearing that same thoughtful expression as well.
"No. It appears Severus here is the last one."
What in the depths of Morgana's cauldron are you two monsters talking about?
He was this close to simply asking outright when he saw Maverick point his index finger at his arm once more.
What now—
Hiss.
This time, he felt... something—he felt it immediately.
Pushing aside every other thought, he quickly focused entirely on that sensation.
It felt like an itch, like something had been stuck fast to him and was being peeled away. Not painful, exactly. Not pleasant either. It took him only a moment longer to understand what was happening.
The Dark Lord's curse mark was being removed from him. And it was happening so easily, without ceremony of any kind, as though the curse were nothing more than a spell clinging weakly to the surface of his skin.
Had anyone else been doing this, Snape would have dismissed the entire thing as impossible.
He knew better than anyone just how complicated the Dark Mark truly was. He had studied it extensively himself, particularly after Voldemort's supposed death, and in the years between that death and Dumbledore's revelation that the Dark Lord still lived, he had tried a great many methods to remove it.
All of them had failed.
Just how deep does this kid's magic actually run? He really wanted to know.
It didn't take long this time either. In under a minute, he watched the Dark Mark fade slowly from his skin, the itching sharpening briefly in its final moments, before a thin curl of smoke, or something very like it, rose from the surface of his arm. And then, it was simply over.
Quite anticlimactic, really.
Maverick withdrew his outstretched hand and tucked it back into the pocket of his long coat, while Snape's eyes remained fixed on his own bared arm, seeing nothing there now but pale, unmarked skin, exactly as it should have been all along.
He wasn't sure whether he was imagining it, but he felt inexplicably clear-headed also, something close to the feeling that came after taking Felix Felicis.
"Severus."
"Y-yes. Headmaster."
He had drifted for a moment, and quickly gathered himself again. He looked between Dumbledore and Maverick, both of whom had returned to their seats.
This time, when he looked at them, something close to appreciation crept in alongside the wariness. Whatever their reasons, he owed Maverick a debt for this, whether he liked it or not.
"Congratulations, Severus. You're a free man now."
Well. That smug face still looked like it deserved a few hexes.
"Thank you." Snape said it plainly, without embellishment.
"Any questions?"
Snape's brow arched slightly. He very nearly couldn't resist the urge to answer with something dry.
I'm permitted questions now?
He kept that particular thought to himself, of course. Instead, he asked, "Is the Dark Lord truly dead?"
It was a perfectly reasonable question, one that had lingered in the back of his mind since the night of the Triwizard Tournament's end.
He had watched the Dark Lord toyed with, beaten, humiliated, at last. But killed, that part had never been shown, not on the broadcast that night. Only afterward, at the ICW Assembly, had Maverick claimed as much.
And yet the Dark Mark on his arm had still carried life in it, right up until moments ago. Just as it had thirteen years before, when the Dark Lord had supposedly died the first time, and every Death Eater's mark had lingered on regardless, never quite fading.
Maverick gave him a small, knowing smile. "Not yet. But soon. And it won't be me who kills him, though if you'd like, I could arrange for you to watch him draw his last, thoroughly pathetic breath. Who knows. You might find it rather interesting."
Snape shook his head decisively. He wasn't a masochist.
"So long as he dies, it makes no difference to me who delivers the sentence."
"I see." Maverick leaned back slightly, still smiling, and crossed one leg over the other. "In that case..."
Snape thought he might finally escape this suffocating dungeon Dumbledore called an office, when Maverick's next words caught him somewhat off guard.
"How about we have a little talk about you next..."
"What... about me?"
Dumbledore, meanwhile, simply sat there, watching the exchange with obvious amusement. The only thing missing from the picture, really, was a bag of popcorn in his hand.
"The Headmaster has told me some rather interesting stories about you."
Snape's brow furrowed at once, and he turned sharply toward the old man.
Dumbledore, for his part, either feigned ignorance beautifully, or genuinely failed to register the look Snape was giving him. As for what these "stories" might actually be, Snape hadn't the faintest idea, there were, after all, a great many to choose from. If there was a single soul alive who knew more about him than he knew himself, it was this old thing sitting across from him.
"Oh, and don't misunderstand me. The Headmaster only told me the parts concerning Tom Riddle, and where exactly you fit into that particular picture."
Snape didn't believe that for a single second. He was quite certain Dumbledore must have spilled absolutely everything, down to the smallest, most humiliating details.
"About you going undercover within the Death Eaters' ranks, in exchange for Dumbledore watching over Lily's ch—"
"—I am well aware of my own circumstances, Master Caesar." Snape cut him off before he could finish, steering the conversation firmly back on course. "You were saying you wished to speak about... me?"
Maverick shrugged lightly, smiling still. "Yes. I was thinking... would you be interested in a change of career?"
This time, it wasn't only Snape who was caught off guard. Dumbledore's easy, amused expression vanished also, replaced by something considerably sharper as he turned to look at Maverick.
Maverick pretended not to notice the old man's expression and continued regardless. "Come and work for me. I have a good many alchemists in my employ, you understand, but very few potioneers, and certainly no master potioneer among them."
A sudden fit of coughing seized Dumbledore, violent enough that he might have swallowed a bone whole.
Poaching my staff. This was decidedly not in the script.
"But Severus is a vital member of the Hogwarts staff, Maverick," Dumbledore quickly interjected. "I'm certain a man of your considerable influence could find other potioneers eager to join you."
"I could, hmm." Maverick answered Dumbledore, though his eyes still stayed fixed on Snape. "But not master potioneers. And certainly not Severus Snape."
Snape looked between the two of them as they argued like children, feeling slightly more at ease.
"...But he's my Potions professor."
"...Then find yourself another."
After a brief exchange back and forth between them, both men turned their eyes back to Snape.
"Severus." Dumbledore looked at him the way one might look at a favoured child, while beside him, Maverick simply waited, watching, for whatever answer Snape had to give.
"I." He paused, considering. In truth, he rather liked teaching here at Hogwarts, even if ninety-nine percent of his students loathed the very sight of him. Then again, perhaps that was only because he'd never tried anything else, and had simply grown used to the shape of things as they were.
"In... what capacity, exactly, would I be working for you?"
Maverick's smile widened, while Dumbledore's expression sank rather further. Everyone knew, after all, that Maverick treated his staff exceptionally well, particularly those with any special talent to offer.
"You listened to the UN Assembly, didn't you?"
Snape nodded.
"What did you make of the points I raised, regarding making magical remedies and healers readily available to the non-magical world?"
Snape took a moment to consider the question. "It cannot be done overnight." His expression grew thoughtful as he spoke.
"Muggles cannot simply just consume magical potions, not even ones with simple, general uses, because their bodies react quite differently to magic. The results could be beneficial. They could just as easily be catastrophic..."
"Every potion would need to return to the experimental stage entirely, reworked from the ground up to suit Muggle biology." He paused. "Not to mention the rather larger problem, that they lack magic altogether."
Maverick's expression grew steadily more appreciative as he listened. This old bat, whatever else could be said of him, was clearly something of a genius within his own field.
Maverick found himself all the more determined to poach this super coveted SSR.
"Accurately put." He nodded at Snape approvingly, and pressed on without pausing. "But imagine, once it is done, how many people will want it." He paused again. "The magical world's population sits at what, roughly a hundred million?" He smiled, the expression entirely too knowing.
Snape's eyes widened, just slightly, before he caught himself and reined the reaction back in.
"From a hundred million..." Maverick's voice dropped, almost conspiratorial. "To seven billion."
Snape couldn't help but suck in a sharp breath through his teeth. Supply and demand 101. One doesn't need to be a genius to understand.
But of course, assuming it could actually be done at all. The formulas would need reworking entirely to suit an entirely different kind of subject, and some feasible substitute would need to be found for the magic Muggles simply didn't possess. And whatever the result, it would need to be commercially viable, produced and distributed at scale. But if it could be done...
"Besides, you'll be writing your name into history..." Maverick continued his seduction.
"I can offer you nearly unlimited funding. Research teams. Marketing teams. Whatever you require. A blank cheque, for your salary, name whatever figure you like. My teacher, Sarah, already has research underway on several of the things I mentioned earlier, I'll hand that over to you as well..."
He paused, slowly bringing his hands together and interlocking his fingers. "All I want in return is... within three years, build me a pharmaceutical empire."
---
Half an hour later.
"Just a second, Severus."
The meeting was over, and Snape was halfway to the door when Maverick stopped him. He turned to find the young man walking around the table and coming to a stop in front of him, wearing a smile that gave nothing obviously away.
This kid... what now.
The offered hand, however, was not what Snape was expecting.
"Think about it, alright? I'll need an answer before summer break ends, though. And I really do hope we can be friends from now on..."
Snape raised his head slowly, his gaze moving from the hand to Maverick's face and back again, looking for the catch. He found nothing, at least nothing visible on the surface.
Slowly, he raised his own hand and took it, giving a single unhurried shake before releasing it. He said nothing in response, only nodding, partly because nothing came to mind and partly because whatever did come to mind had a reasonable chance of sounding spectacularly sarcastic, especially in response to that last part.
Then he was gone.
The door clicked shut, and Maverick exhaled quietly, turning back toward the room.
He had some explaining to do now, after all, he had just rather shamelessly poached the school's Potions professor. Well, almost.
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