Who are you payin' | Ah what are you sayin' Who: Severus Snape and Eoin McClory What: This is why you carry a donor card. When: April 26th, 1982 Where: The Three Broomsticks, then Hogwarts. Rating: Assume R for gore, possibly language.
The barmaid was staring at him again. Eoin wasn't looking at her, but he could tell. It was funny that she already did that, when he'd come down at this time on this day of the week for a few weeks running now, and always with the same results. He never ordered anything (he never brought money), habitually sat at the same table out of sight of the windows for no reason in particular, and in time went away with one of the Hogwarts professors. Maybe she was thinking of some way of making him pay money to loiter around, but maybe she thought he was a friend of Snape's. Or if nothing else, that Snape would raise a fuss if Eoin was kicked out.
Which probably wasn't true. Or at least, he doubted if it was true, since that was only sensible. From what little he knew of Snape, he doubted the man was the sort to get attached to whatever he was using for his experiments. But Eoin supposed that if the barmaid believed it and didn't feel the need to check with whoever owned The Three Broomsticks again, that was enough.
While he wasn't staring back at the barmaid, Eoin chewed over a question in his head that always managed to pop up somehow or other. Was it demeaning, what he did? After all, as much as he was loathe to admit it, he knew that hiring out himself for vivisection and torture wasn't much better than whoring himself out entirely. Of course, he'd never considered prostitution to be especially demeaning in general, so long as it was the sort of thing one chose to do and if one was paid a reasonable sum. No matter what you were told to do, you could charge for it. But then, he did that as well. To an even greater degree, since he could essentially jack up his prices with impunity.
And that, essentially, made it a little bit easier to swallow. After all, he knew full well that even before the regime change his best chance at success was to become a performer of some sort, and even if he'd had the talent, he'd still have been what essentially amounted to a novelty. But maybe, he though, he and the whores had a bit more honesty about them. After all, he wasn't so much the main attraction in the freak show as he was the ringmaster, manager, and barker.