Author's Note: Dear reader, welcome to my very first fanfiction story, I hope you will enjoy it. As this is my first time uploading anything, please be kind and feel free to review and critique to help me get better. All the characters and places you recognize are property of JK Rowling, I'm just borrowing them. Have fun!
Saturday evening had seen a tall, grey-haired woman resolutely stalking up a hill to a robust looking stone cottage in the North of England. Drawing closer to the cliffs, she had almost reached the gate of a fence made from dark grey stone, when she stopped abruptly as if she had been hit by an electric shock. A fierce look of disdain on her face, she took out a wooden stick and began whispering under her breath while flicking the stick form time to time. Had someone passed by, they would have certainly been alarmed by her strange behaviour; after all you usually don't see people waving a piece of wood through the air while muttering to themselves. It was a lucky thing, then, that the hill seemed completely deserted apart from the little cottage. The pathway crossing it looked barely trodden, leaving the overall impression of isolation and tranquillity behind. After a few minutes, the woman's face showed a quick flash of victory crossing her features as she took the last steps to open the gate and walk across the front yard just to come to a screeching halt in front of the door again. Now looking thoroughly pissed off, she repeated the process until she finally began beating down onto the dark door.
"Severus Snape, I swear that I will bombarda the façade of your blasted cottage if you will not let me in immediately!" she screamed. A few moments later the door swung open to reveal a smirking, dark-haired man standing in the doorway.
"So...what brings you here on this perfectly enjoyable evening, Minerva?" he drawled after they had settled in the small sitting room. As if I didn't know why you dragged yourself all the way up here. He wouldn't make this easy on her if his suspicions proved to be correct.
After taking in the small space crammed with dark, wooden bookshelves, the fireplace with the dusty looking mantelpiece and the unsettling portrait depicting the night sky shortly before a thunderstorm hung above it, her gaze finally focused on his unshaven face looking gaunt in the flickering candlelight.
"As you well know, Severus, I have been trying to contact you for a matter of weeks now. You ignoring my owls and floo-calls has left me no choice but to inconvenience you in person," she answered in a clipped tone, fixing him with a piercing stare.
Damn him and his premature belief that this woman would just leave him alone if he ignored her advances long enough.
"It has certainly come to your notice that Hogwarts will soon open again for the new term", she continued.
"Indeed", he replied. It had been all over the Daily Prophet, and while he normally would not take a single thing that train-wreck of a magazine published at face value, he had been reasonably sure that at least this basic information was to be taken seriously. Not inclined to indulge in a longer answer, he waited for her to resume the conversation.
"While I have been able to secure Bill Weasley as the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, I wasn't successful in convincing Horace to stay on for another term…", she paused, a look of determination forming on her face. Bloody Gryffindors! , he thought to himself.
"So you wish for me to recommend an acceptable replacement, then. Well, this could prove to be a difficult task, though I am sure I would be able come up with a suitable name before term starts", he said in a serious tone. Oh, he knew full well this was not the reason she had taken it upon herself to disturb him personally, but he would be damned if he did not enjoy himself a little before it came to the inevitable.
"Stop winding me up, Severus! I have known you for over twenty years; I recognize your sarcasm when I hear it", she snapped at him. "As you can imagine, I have exhausted every possible option to fill that position during the past months; all candidates either declined the offer or proved to be incapable in all aspects this job requires. Given that term starts in two weeks' time, I am depleted of any choice."
How he loved being someone's last resort. Throwing her a piercing look, he decided to stretch the silence between them, a technique that he had found to be most effective and amusing when wanting to make someone uncomfortable.
Not that he particularly disliked Minerva McGonagall; they had been allies of some kind with a genuine dose of house rivalry thrown in, at least until this last disastrous year of him being Headmaster. After his name had been cleared by the Boy-who-lived-to-embarrass-him, he had miraculously woken up in St. Mungos, where they restored him to something approaching health. He had received her letter shortly afterwards: her apologizing for her efforts to undermine him leading the school (which he could not blame her for; it had been an absolute mess by any stretch of the imagination), misjudging him for his motives and so on. The content of these letters seemed fairly similar and to his surprise, he had received several of them, specifically from members of the Order of the Phoenix. For good measure, however, he had also been on the receiving end of some disturbing letters from the general public, calling him a traitor, a coward and whatever came to mind when writing an ill-informed letter of hate. Finding their objections to his person justified to some degree, it had bothered him little to read their attempts at insulting him. Where his association with Minerva was concerned, though, he was inclined to continue their somewhat strange acquaintance, although he would see to having her squirm before giving her what she wanted.
The look of determination appearing back on her face when she realized he would not respond, she continued, "Thus, Severus, I know this is a lot to ask of you but I am desperate to have you reinstalled as Hogwarts' Potions Master and Head of Slytherin House." As if he had not done enough for all of them already. As if he had not been asked – or rather ordered – to do countless deeds by two masters for the better part of his miserable life.
"No," he replied simply.
"This is all I get then? A simple 'no'; no explanation, no conditions, no bargaining," she snapped again.
"My, Minerva, you know full well the reasons strongly speaking against my returning to Hogwarts. Otherwise you would have been knocking on my door months ago, determined to have me resume a career I have neither enjoyed nor been particularly suited to. Not even taking into consideration the disastrous year of my acting as Headmaster, adding to all the stress and trauma of two consecutive wars. I do not think it particularly reasonable to mend my psyche among a castle full of dunderheads," he retorted.
"Your deeds as Headmaster have been exonerated, Severus, you did what you had to at the time, as all of us did."
"You cannot exonerate watching students being tortured by their teachers, Minerva," he spat. This is on my conscience, not yours.
"This was beyond your control, and you know it. There was nothing you could have done to prevent this; he would have replaced you with someone doing more damage than we would have been able to mend, Severus. The students know of this now. As far as I have been able to recover from the ones aiding in restoring the castle, they have come to terms with what happened to them during that year. They have not forgotten, but forgiven, Severus. You are free to teach them again, free to replace their memories with you educating them as you have done before." But who will replace mine, Minerva? He hardly believed the children would be willing to forgive his role in their torment this readily; he was not going to forgive himself.
They fell silent again, the candlelight flickering around them, both seeming lost in their own thoughts for a while. At last, her features took on a stern look once more, her lips tightening before McGonagall continued.
"I am most ardently concerned with Slytherin House, though. Many children have lost any sense of direction, with their friends and families largely imprisoned or dead, they have no one to turn to. Even Horace would not have been able to care for them now, I am sure of it."
"Where, I ask you, was that concern for the 'grand' House of Slytherin all those years, Minerva? Decades of suspiciously eyeing the students, guilty by being sorted into the wrong house, disregarding their needs and feelings by shamelessly favouring your precious Gryffindors and truthfully the other houses as well. Dumbledore had seen to this order when I was a student all these years ago, and you supported him keeping it that way," he hissed, his temper rising though he had not intended it to.
The neglect of Slytherin House had long infuriated him; even during his time as a student, Dumbledore had made it crystal clear where Slytherins' place was, brazenly excusing everything the Marauders had done, while he had to pay for his actions at any given opportunity. He had not been the first student suffering from this injustice and certainly not the last and he wondered how many students had been persuaded to join the dark side because they felt it was the only side wanting them. Though his reasoning for joining the wrong cause had been far more complex than that, it had certainly affected his final choice.
"I know, Severus, we have done too little, too late. I am afraid we failed many of them," she remarked guiltily, holding his dark gaze with a stern brow.
"Indeed," he replied steadily after another pause. This was somewhat of a surprise; he had half expected her to argue his position, as they had done many times before.
"The students need you now. You are the only constant they have known these past years, the only person that truly cared for them. You know their situation, what they have been through, the struggle they are facing right now. There is no one else, Severus. You must return."
Let me know, if you liked it :)