Coming back to Hogwarts had been good for one thing.
Nights like these.
An Inverness summer had never quite been like the summers in Mali… they were more like the chillier Malian winter days. Aurora had never felt as comfortable in this sun-forsaken country than she did in the summer.
Nights like these, sitting half naked, her robes hitched up so she could cool her legs on the refreshingly biting dungeon floor, pretending to read various textbooks or simulating writing various Astronomy research papers - while she secretly watched him working.
It was an exquisite sight to be behold. A sight she would oft relive in her dreams.
When they were not talking (bickering - more likely)… when they could sit in silence and take turns in silently taking each other in… it reminded her why she loved him above all.
He would work over his bubbling cauldron so quietly and yet every portion of his body, his face, would be telling millions of little stories at once. He was never one for heat, very much unlike her: but not once did he remove the outer layers that cloaked him from the world. She watched the tiny, salty beads of sweat manifest themselves over his forehead - momentarily receding into the epithelial crevices created by his supreme concentration, before trilling their way around his temple and into the greasy black abyss beyond.
She watched his inky, moonless, starless tunnels flit back and forth from metallic rim to licking flame; altering the temperature of the brass with such intricate precision that one could never see the flames changing shape, nor colour. It was a transformation only he was privy to. The shapes and colours morphed so delicately that the whole process of his concocting became an entire colour in itself… indistinguishable from the many separate techniques required for Potionmaking.
His hand would move, almost unconsciously, almost trace-like, toward knives and tweezers and other such ominous looking metal instruments. Aurora had watched him disembowel frogs' guts, spoon viscous newt eyes out from their sockets, pull out the oesophagus' of bats and it had been the most beautiful sight to behold. He was a master of transforming the grotesque into Divinity. Of giving darkness purpose. Like they could sink into the most wretched pit together and entwine themselves around it, completely inviolable and safe.
Extracting Bubotuber pus was no different than picking mistletoe berries.
There was something stupidly poetic in that somewhere. And it made her love him.
Nights like these.
Scattering dead flies over a murky, swamp like stew. With such devotion. Such precision.
His hands, discoloured with the juices and excretions of many an inanimate and living thing alike… haphazardly rubbing them against the ragged cloth he kept next to him whenever he could take a breath between steps. All one hell of a balancing act. Just inches from exploding, unleashing all of its torrid contents upon the world, always mere seconds from a disaster that never came.
He was Potionmaking. He was the very definition of it.
Nights like these, pretending to read, the back of her bare legs icy cold and almost stinging on the dungeon floor, Professor Sinistra would not soon forget.
Oh, and he very well knew that he was catching her undivided attention. For their eyes would occasionally meet from across the vast cold, dark room; his eyes would be illuminated by the flames and the glow of the elixir and his thin lips would be ablaze in red and green streaks, and the corners of them would turn ever so slightly whenever he had caught her looking at him… almost as subtly as he would alter the temperature of the furnace. It had taken Aurora months to notice it.
Nowadays she knew his entire body, face, every carefully planned movement of his muscles just as well, if not better, than her own.
Aurora would often get her own back, though. The dungeons were not their only summer nests. They would frequently spend weekend nights up on her Astronomy tower, catching whatever breeze they could, their roles reversed as he would read and she would work.
Her eyes had just left the eyepiece of her colossal and golden scope in order to make some calculations of the trajectory of Almaak and Mirach upon her notebook when she caught sight of him staring. He had been sitting cross-legged upon the floor of the tower, one book lain upon his right knee, and his elbow teetering upon the other, holding up his chin. He hadn't immediately looked away as he normally would - he merely continued to stare, apparently completely transfixed, at her form in the cloudless starlight.
Eventually self-consciousness got the better of him, though instead of returning to his book he merely gazed upward at the painted constellations inscribed upon the lofty dome above them.
Sinistra smiled to herself as she scribbled the complex patterns that made up Andromeda upon her parchment.
"There are far more fascinating sights out in the cosmos than me, you know…" she casually quipped, gesturing to one of the smaller telescopes.
A howl of wind. A breath. A pause.
His neck slowly released his gaze from ceiling to Astronomy professor, and for once his smile was not subtly, hastily, replaced with a more implacable expression.
The starless tunnels became transfixed upon her once more.
"Hm. I'm afraid to say I would have to disagree with you, Borealis."
And, just like her own in the labyrinthine dungeons, the book remained merely a prop. An excuse in exchange for quiet presence. A way to drink her all in, him all in, while the other flourished as ruler within their element. Just watching. Fascinated. Loving the other so silently.
A feeling she would always have, even when everything had crumbled before them, even when he would ultimately tear her entire world down in front of her very own eyes - and on her very own tower…
At least she had this. At least she had loved like this once.