The Knick-Knack
The neighbours were Muggles, very nice Muggles, and so in keeping with the International Statute of Secrecy, the young couple had moved their furniture into the house the conventional way, with blood, sweat and tears, resorting to Hovering charms only when safely inside the front door. During the weeks, they both worked all day, but on weekends they browsed antique and second-hand furniture shops befitting their low budget until the empty rooms were sufficiently filled, gradually turning the little house into a home suitable for both of them.
That last part had been less of a challenge than she had anticipated, Lily thought, looking around at the front room that constituted their main living quarters. She had expected Severus to want to bedeck the entire house in black, with heavy furniture, pompous draperies, and velvety wallpaper straight out of a Victorian bordello. Somehow this had been her vision of Slytherin domesticity. Instead, he had shocked her by acquiescing to a worn but comfortably squishy chintz sofa -- a great bargain and utterly Muggle -- after only what seemed like an eternity staring at her find, one eyebrow raised, hands behind his angular form in a pose of contemplation. The sofa amused him, but apparently reminded him of “a real home,” whatever that meant to him; his own home clearly hadn’t been one, and his own home, if she remembered rightly, had not contained a floral chintz sofa. The antique velvet wing chairs were his idea, and with their formal height and upright backs and worn moss-green velvet coverings, they did look the way she pictured the home of a Slytherin bookworm -- but they matched the sofa in their own odd manner, and it was his house too, after all. The chairs made their way over to the nook by the fireplace, where Severus could often be found reading in one of them.
They had both admired the Persian rug, which was somewhat threadbare but lovely, with intricate detail cast over a background of what she inwardly, but never out loud, called “Gryffindor red,” and the old bookcases were battered yet still beautiful. In fact, either her new husband was showing amazing forbearance, or their tastes in decoration matched surprisingly well. It was only when they were finally unpacking all their books and knick-knacks to fill those bookcases that something came up that Lily really didn’t want to have in her home.
There she was, placing a wedding present, a figurine of a pale and serene young couple, onto the nicest and sturdiest of the bookcases, when she heard Severus saying, “And I think this would look nice right -- about -- HERE.” She turned to see him placing something on the table that sat in their front window, the one with some prized books stored flat on its lower level. She blinked. Her husband had delicately arranged a doily in the center of the table, and on it he had placed… a shrunken head. He stood back with his hands on his hips, gave it an appraising look, and said, “Perfect. Mind if I get some writing done?”
“No, no… not at all,” Lily replied with a forced smile.
“Great,” he answered, pausing hesitantly as he always did before giving her an awkward kiss on the top of the head and then sprinting up the stairs to an extra bedroom that contained his desk, a makeshift lab, and the potions research that he was working on when not involved in the war, which seemed to take up so much of everyone’s time these days.
When he had safely disappeared up the stairs, Lily walked over to the table and looked at the knick-knack. Yes, it was definitely a shrunken head. It sat there in the front window, in full view of the Muggle neighbours -- in full view of her friends and their compatriots from the Order of the Phoenix, whom she suddenly was no longer so eager to invite over for a meeting. (“Hello, welcome to our home, thank you for ignoring my husband’s misbegotten reputation as a Dark wizard, and oh yes, how do you like our lovely shrunken head?”) No, that wasn’t going to do. They would just have to keep meeting at the Longbottoms’ or the McKinnons’, she thought darkly. So much for becoming the hostess with the mostest.
She too stood with her hands on her hips a few steps away from the table, but unlike Severus, she did not think that the thing she contemplated was “perfect.” In fact, it was utterly creepy. The person whose head had been shrunk did not look a bit happy about it, and his or her hair -- she couldn’t tell which -- was even wilder than Severus’s was when he woke up in the mornings. She turned away and went back to her box of decorations: wedding gifts both wizarding and Muggle, things from her childhood bedroom, a couple of interesting items they had picked up on their brief trip to Greece, a wonderful whirligig from Albus Dumbledore that apparently did something useful -- it was their job to figure out what that “something useful” consisted of. Why couldn’t Severus have put one of those front and center? Why did it have to be a shrunken head? Why did he have a shrunken head at all?
He was a Slytherin, she reminded herself, and even now, he spent many of his days immersed in the world of the Dark Lord as a double agent, ostensibly spying on the Order in return for clemency for his Muggle-born wife when he was actually gathering information for Dumbledore. Most of the time he was upstairs or at Hogwarts working on the updated edition of Libatius Borage, a project that she had put quite a bit of work into herself, but some days, he spent more time at the gloomy-sounding Malfoy Manor than he did at home. This was probably normal where he came from, she thought grimly; he probably thought the shrunken head was a perfectly lovely and elegant addition to Snape Manor. As she put things in their newfound places and dusted off the books she was arranging on the shelves, she pondered whether she should express her distaste for the thing to Severus. She finally decided against it; he was probably tolerating any number of her treasures, considering them too girly or too mundane, and yet he had kept any reservations to himself. This was a marriage, and it was a two-way street. Her part of the deal would involve putting up with the shrunken head. She looked at the thing and shuddered. Perhaps she would eventually move it to a less conspicuous location. Perhaps he wouldn’t even notice. For now, though, he thought it was “perfect” “right -- about -- HERE,” so right about here was where it would stay.
Sitting down in the wing chair that faced away from the table with the shrunken head, Lily pondered the odd twists of fate that had led her to have this thing in her living room. She could have dated James Potter -- chances were, she probably could have married James Potter, in which case her home would undoubtedly have been filled with Quidditch memorabilia and other mementos of their glory days in Gryffindor. While she wasn’t sure that she would have adored that kind of decorating scheme either, why did she have to fall in love with a man whose idea of a household decoration -- no, a centerpiece -- for their living room was a desiccated body part that probably came from one of the creepiest stores in Knockturn Alley? Why did the love of her life have to be someone who decorated with an ornament that had probably involved decapitation as a step in its manufacture? Lily cringed but, thinking it over, concluded that especially in these troubled times, she should probably consider herself lucky that her marriage’s first foray into the “for worse” category was nothing more than bad taste. Really bad taste.
The shrunken head was driving her mad, she decided the next morning over tea, scrambled eggs and the Daily Prophet. Not literally -- she didn’t believe that it had any kind of Dark power to it -- but she was fixated on it whenever she went into the room. She had already had to turn it so that it was looking out of the window, because in its original position, facing in toward them, she had felt like she was constantly being watched. So now it was gazing out the window, staring blankly at their neighbours, the milk man, the post man… at least it was small enough that none of these visitors might even notice it. They would probably think that someone had just left an apple around too long…ugh. She was beginning to loathe being in the house alone with it, and Severus had left at some ungodly hour at Lucius Malfoy’s behest. Usually she regretted leaving the house for work, but on this day, she was happy to go and get away from their new roommate. The one good thing about the object was that her revulsion made leaving the house for their upcoming weekend journey more appealing, even though it was a trip to their hometown for the undoubtedly boring and painful event that would be Petunia’s wedding.
When she returned home in the early evening, the horrid thing was still there. She never knew when Severus would arrive home from these missions; the fact that she never knew whether he would arrive home at all was not one that she let herself contemplate. In any case, she was alone, and she didn’t want to spend the evening upstairs or in the kitchen, not when there was an otherwise perfectly nice living room with a comfortable sofa to stretch out on. But her eyes were drawn to the hideous object, even though she tried to keep them on her book, and eventually she got up and threw a cloth napkin over the shrunken head to keep herself from looking at it. She sat back down and tried to read, but found that now she was constantly looking at the draped napkin instead. It was like having a large and malevolent insect in the room that one was afraid to kill but had to keep an eye on. Some Gryffindor, she thought, spooked by an inanimate object. Giving up, Lily walked over to the table to remove the napkin, which was going to look ridiculous to Severus anyway when he walked through the door. She knew that she probably wouldn’t be able to sneak the covering away in time, that his sharp eyes would notice it, and that she’d wind up having to explain that she abhorred his prized object. She gingerly picked up the edge of the napkin and pulled -- and to her horror, the shrunken head rolled off the table onto the floor.
Now she had to pick it up, she thought with a shiver. How on earth did one pick up a shrunken head? By the hair? She couldn’t imagine touching the actual skin -- she shuddered again at the thought of it. It had partially rolled under the table, making the rescue even more difficult. She covered her hand with the cloth and, wincing, reached slowly over for the head, attempting to pick it up by the hair without actually touching it. At the last second, the sensible idea finally came to her -- you’re a witch, use your wand. After all, she had already used her wand once to turn the thing around so that it wasn’t facing her. She heaved a sigh of relief, pulled out her wand, chanted “Wingardium leviosa!” with a clarity that Professor Flitwick himself would have been proud of, and with a delicate swish and flick, Levitated the shrunken head off the floor. It was in mid-air above the doily on the table when the front door opened with a crack and her concentration broke; Lily had been so absorbed in her work that she hadn’t even noticed Severus coming up the front walkway or opening the door. The head dropped, bounced off the table with a revolting thud, and rolled onto the floor again.
She could hear her husband hanging up his robes, kicking off his boots, and then turning from the small entryway into the living room where she stood, drooping, having lost the battle against the shrunken head at the exact wrong moment. As always after a day of relentless Occlumency, he looked tired and drawn and was probably on his way over to collapse on the sofa. Lily never underestimated the importance, danger or difficulty of what he had volunteered for, and she always tried to make their home a relaxing refuge for him, but she was afraid she was about to welcome him with an argument, because she just couldn’t stand the awful knick-knack anymore. She gave up and decided to just be gently and tactfully honest.
“I hate the shrunken head, Sev,” she said, immediately cringing at how forcefully the words had come out and wondering what had happened to her gentleness and tact along the conduit from her brain to her mouth.
In response, he looked at the head on the floor, gave her an astonished stare and asked, “You do?” She looked back at him as he stood over by the sofa, appraising the scene before him: doily on the table, shrunken head on the floor, wife standing over the whole tableau, wand in hand.
“I do. I really, REALLY don’t like it. Do you mind if we -- move it elsewhere? To your study, maybe?” There, that was a compromise. This was going to work.
“To my study?” he asked, staring at her in utter bafflement. She nodded. “How about to the bin?” he continued, as a smile crept across his face.
Her mouth dropped open. “You would throw it away?” she said, amazed.
“Of course -- unless you like the hideous thing,” he responded lightly, pulling his pocket-watch out. “Creepy as all hell, isn’t it? Reminds me of the kind of stuff Wilkes used to have around when he was one of my roommates at Hogwarts. I just bought it to see how long it would take you to ask me to get rid of it.” She stared at him, barely comprehending, as he opened the watch and announced with some satisfaction and a wicked smirk, “Twenty… eight hours -- most impressive! Fifty points to Gryffindor!” His long fingers snapped the watch’s case shut again and replaced it in one of his front pockets.
She had a wand. He might have been expecting her to Levitate a pillow over and smack him on the head with it. He probably also would not have been surprised if she had lobbed the shrunken head at him. But clearly he was not expecting a full-body tackle from across the room with sufficient force to knock him over backwards, landing sprawled on the sofa with Lily on top of him. Before he could react, she picked up a pillow and proceeded, without the use of magic, to begin pummeling him over the head with it. With his wand now inaccessible in his pocket, he had to defend himself also without the use of magic, raising his arms to shield his face and laughing at her amused, incoherent outrage: “STUPID (whack) -- BLOODY (whack) -- THING (whack) -- creeping the living DAYLIGHTS out of me (whack) -- trying to be all SENSITIVE to Mr. SLYTHERIN (whack) but oh NO, it was just a JOKE (whack, whack, whack).”
After the last flurry of thumps with the pillow, he managed to fling the pillow across the room and get her arms pinned in rapid succession, and he laughingly asked his wife, who was still struggling to get free, “Didn’t we have this same fight once before? When we were about ten?”
She started laughing herself and stopped struggling, and he let go of his grip. “I don’t know what it was about,” she mused, “but you’re right, it definitely involved a pillow. Several pillows, and my parents’ sofa. I think I won. Of course, I was probably bigger than you back then.”
He shoved himself up to sitting position, pushed back the disaster that the pillow had made of his hair, and replied, “I think you did win. You definitely won this one also: there were at least seven very palpable hits there, Hamlet.”
“This is why you should wait until you’re ancient to get married, Sev,” she mused, catching her breath and resting her head on his shoulder. “Respectable married people are probably not supposed to solve things by having pillow fights like ten-year-olds.”
“Tell me that when we’re ninety, not when we’re nineteen,” he answered mildly. “But for now though, what shall we do with this lovely trinket?” There was a long pause while they both considered it.
Lily finally broke the contemplative silence. “Give it to Petunia and Vernon as part of their wedding present on Saturday?” she asked, turning to him with a wicked twinkle that adulthood and responsibility and even the ongoing war had somehow failed to extinguish.
She had often thought that those who believed they were an odd pair probably just didn’t know him well enough, and once again she was proved right. Severus’s dark eyes glittered and the corners of his mouth twitched upward in a smile as he stood, picked up the shrunken head, and deposited it out of sight in the pocket of his robes for future use. He then headed into the kitchen, presumably for dinner, but not before turning back to Lily to ask, “Don’t let me forget to wrap it, will you?”