Not just frightened
-Professor Snape, you have to know something…
The called out deigns to glace with lack of interest at Muggles' studies teacher, sat farther at the staff table.
- Oh, I know. As a student Quirrel couldn't stand me. Now we're colleagues but it doesn't change anything.
Aurora doesn't give a look to her old schoolmate. The confession is awkward. She tries to look confortable and self confident.
-Severus. Quirinus wasn't just frightened by you. He was jealous of my crush on the young Potion's master who had just been hired.
Because the night
He buries his face in her thick hair and starts playing with her curls. She laughs, and coils up more in the darkness of his heavy dresses. Her laught drive out all questions which always came at nightfall. Their embrace erases the promise of a new sleppless night. They exorcise their ghosts and take care of each other.
When the darkness threatens to gobble up them, she attracts him in her light and slowly, made fall one by one his black clothes until reach his translucent, almost bright skin.
That damn memory
- How did he die?
The boy who lived look away from Snape's corpse to answer her tonelessly. Voldemort. The elder wand. Nagini. She already knows.
- Before dying, he asked me to look at him.
The young man hesitates. Aurora stares at his green eyes with a kind of resigned sadness. She stifles a bitter laught which isn't like her. She thinks that she will have been the one who matters, but not that much.
- Her eyes. Lily Evans. Your mother. That damn memory which slipped between us under sheets.
Dressed up to the nines
Snape's corpse had been moved in a disinfected laboratory of the dungeons.
- Ministry of magic pays well my skills if I make a corpse into a sleeper. It looks better for funeral.
Aurora was as white as a sheet and standing beside a young woman. Her attitude was professional and detached.
-Don't think my job makes me indifferent. He was my teacher at Hogwarts. That's the least I can do for him.
She tooks from Aurora's hands the evening black dress which Severus had seldom worn. Potion's steam shows the dirt.
-Don't worry professor Snape, I'll care for you. You'll be as handsome as you used to be.
The artist stepped back to look at her work : dreadful corpse showing he died a violent death changed into a figure full of dignity, well-settled in his coffin.
Severus Snape ready to be decorated for bravery.
It had nedded to massage limbs to break rigor mortis, to wash the corpse to remove any bloodstain, to make several injections and drainings to remove the lividness and guarantee the preservation of the corpse, to apply some treatments and to close eyes and mouth to avoid an inappropriate expression. Then she dresses him up, puts make-up on him and brush him. She didn't forget to cross his hands and to put his wand between.
-You made a good job, Aurora utters touching lightly a pale hand.
- The upper crush will say that he's as pale as death but he was used to be when he was alive, wasn't he ?
She laughs slowly.
-Order of Merlin, First class. He's finally going to get it. Post mortem. I believe that he just wanted the medal for what it represented. Fools are going to speak about him as about the most wonderful person while having look down on him on his lifetime.
She laughs too.
-Don't get me wrong. Severus was used to despise everyone. Except her. Maybe except Albus and I.
«La mort lui va bien.»
"Death becomes him. "
This is Aurora's thoughts while she's stroking the hand, daring even to kiss gently the ice-cold lips of Snape's embalmed corpse. She's getting rid of the terrible image witch is dawning on her: pale skin with bloodstains, soiled black dresses and thinks of the beauty and the strength of colors in the light of a kerosene lamp.
When she regrets having seen the body like that, she hang on to the moonbeam dispensed by the only non-blocked window of the Shack.
It reminds her of some other nights.