Thank you for your reviews on the prologue - here's something with a bit more meat to it. And to everyone who celebrates it, happy Thanksgiving! Chapter Two is about halfway written, but I probably won't be able to finish it until the end of the next week,
One: Ill Met
As fate would have it, Professor Snape was the first of my new colleagues I encountered when I arrived at Hogwarts. The thestral-drawn carriage (for I, having seen my own brother die of his injuries, was a member of that grim club which could see the unearthly beasts) had just deposited me and my trunks in the courtyard when the Potions master swept past, black robes swirling behind him in a cloud almost as thunderous as the one that weighed his brow.
Normally I would have said nothing and let him go on his way. But I was tired and out of sorts and feeling just a bit trepidatious at the thought of the students I would have to face the day after next. Surely a simple greeting wouldn't be too much of a presumption.
"Professor!" I called out.
He did stop. However, he turned his head the barest amount necessary to get me in his line of sight. "What?"
I summoned what I privately thought of as my "company" smile, the one I put on when I had to entertain my mother's friends or the parade of young men she thought suitable but whom I found to be hopelessly dull. I extended a hand. "Good day, Professor. I am Aurora Sinistra, the new Astronomy professor."
The cold black eyes surveyed me for the briefest possible second. "And what of it?"
Well, I'd heard he was brusque and ill-tempered and lacking in most, if not all, of the social graces. Still, his response to my greeting took me aback for a second. Then I lifted my chin and replied, "Perhaps nothing. At least now you have a face to put to the name, should we pass in the corridors or encounter one another in the dining hall. Good day."
Without bothering to wait for a response, I pulled out my wand, murmured, "Wingardium leviosa!" under my breath, and headed off toward the Astronomy Tower as my two trunks followed in my wake like a pair of obedient krups. I knew better than to look over my shoulder, but somehow I got the impression that Severus Snape remained where he was for a long moment and watched until I had disappeared inside the building.
It was not, perhaps, the most auspicious of meetings.
As it turned out, our paths crossed seldom enough. An Astronomy professor, for reasons both obvious and practical, cannot keep quite the same hours as the rest of the Hogwarts faculty. My classes were held at night, and sometimes far along into the early-morning hours should the particular movements of the stars require observation at those times. I was rarely in bed before dawn, so of course I did not have breakfast with everyone else. No, the house-elves brought me a light meal early in the afternoon to break my fast. I did usually take my supper along with everyone else in the Great Hall, but whether by accident or design, Severus Snape always managed to be seated on the side of the table opposite from me.
Despite his aloofness (or perhaps because of it), I did manage to make friends with the other members of the faculty. Professor McGonagall was always there to offer a ready word of advice and support. Pomona Sprout and I struck up a rather incongruous friendship, but there is more correlation between the phases of the moon and the movements of the stars and the growing cycles of the plant world than one might imagine, and we had some lively discussions on the subject. The Muggle Studies professor, Charity Burbage, quite latched on to me after she discovered I had taken my degree at Oxford.
"It's quite unusual, isn't it?" she asked one evening, not long after the term had begun. "For a witch to also attend a Muggle university?"
"Unusual, but not unprecedented," I replied.
It being a Friday night, I had no classes to teach. We sat at the top of my tower (I already thought of it as such, even though I had only been in residence at Hogwarts for a scant month). Already the air was sharp with the promise of winter's chill. Charity and I, however, were well-braced against the October air by our heavy cloaks and a flask of firewhisky.
She poured another measure from the flask into a shot glass. "What made you decide to attend university?"
Although Charity and I had become quite close in a short period of time, I wasn't sure I wanted to tell her the absolute truth, that a good measure of my decision to attend Oxford had been born from a desire to irritate my mother. That sort of thing simply wasn't done, after all - to spend day after day rubbing elbows with Muggles, to waste one's time for a piece of paper which had absolutely no value in the wizarding world!
Another, deeper reason was the love I'd always had for the stars, for the intricate movements of the night sky. Although it was heresy to even think it, this was an area where Muggles dominated. No wizard had ever walked on the moon, or flown a broom so high he broke free of our world's orbit. Magic could do so many amazing things, but it could not do everything.
I had known better than to utter such sentiments aloud. I'd simply stated that I would attend Oxford, mother's blessing or no, and since I had inherited my portion of my father's fortune upon graduation from Hogwarts, there was very little she could do to stop me. Save grumble about how I was wasting my time, and how no one in the wizarding world gave two figs about how many Muggle degrees I might earn.
To be sure, once I had that degree, I found she was right. Although I could have lived idly enough on my inheritance, it was not in my nature to do nothing. I found little that was suitable to my talents, however, so a few months after graduation I took on the thankless job of writing the astrology column for the Daily Prophet. This would have horrified her even further, save that at least it was a position on a wizarding paper. It could have been worse, she supposed. I could have been stuck up on a Scottish crag with a telescope and a Muggle graduate student with roving hands.
Still, the Prophet position bored me within a month. When I heard of the opening at Hogwarts, I jumped at it. I knew it was a long shot - after all, at that point I was barely twenty-three, with no teaching experience. All I did have was very high scores on my NEWTs, along with a useless (until then, at any rate) degree in astronomy. But Dumbledore saw something in me apparently no one else had, and here I was.
I told Charity as much, and added, "One often hears of Muggles who wish they could practice magic. I suppose it's not as often one encounters a witch who wishes she could be a scientist."
To her credit, she didn't laugh at me. Instead, she took a contemplative sip of her firewhisky, then said, "I'd never really thought of it that way. Merlin knows I have a difficult time convincing some elements among my students that Muggle Studies is a valid subject. They think it quite beneath them."
"Silly," I murmured. I knew to whom she referred - those students who prided themselves on the purity of their blood, of lineages that could be traced back to the days of the Founders. Of course one should take pride in one's family, but to think that pure blood equaled superior magical ability was foolish. Many of my former classmates who had possessed the strongest magical ability were the product of mixed marriages.
Even my own family was not free of Muggle blood, however much my mother liked to tout the nobility of the Sinistra line. That was even sillier in a way, since of course she had married into the family. She was from a long line of purebloods herself, but the Sinistra family owed the majority of its fortune and not a little of its standing in society to the fact that my great-great-grandmother had been the daughter of a Count.
"And a Beauty," my mother had always added.
Capital letters or no, there had been no denying that fact. Great-great-grandmamma's portrait still hung in our town house in London, and as a child I used to spend a great deal of time staring up into her painted features and attempting to see something of my own face there. The cloud of dark hair, yes, and the straight nose and full mouth. But my eyes were an odd amberish hazel instead of deep blue, and I lacked something of her height. Still, the resemblance was strong, even several generations later.
"I think it would serve them well to spend some time in the Muggle world," I said, and sipped at my own glass of firewhisky. It left a trail of scorching heat right through my midsection, but the warmth was welcome, necessary. I cleared my throat. "Rather like some of the exchange students I met at Oxford. I sometimes get the feeling that we are too closed in on ourselves, too bound by tradition."
The traitorous thought had sometimes come to me, back in the days before He Who Must Not Be Named was vanquished, that perhaps the best solution to the wizarding world's problem would be a few carefully placed mortar rounds in the Dark Lord's vicinity. Or, failing that, a few shots of nerve gas. I'd known better than to suggest such things aloud, but the thoughts had nagged at me over the years. Would my brother still be alive if the wizards who fought the Dark Lord had scrupled to use a few Muggle weapons in their war?
"Quite the revolutionary, aren't you?" These was no malice in Charity's words, and I saw a flash of her teeth in the darkness as she grinned. "Ah, well, after a few years here you'll be quite worn down. No crusading, just marking papers and administering tests. And the Christmas and summer holidays to look forward to, of course."
"So jaded?" I asked. "I thought you'd only been here three years."
"As I said, after a few years you'll know which traditions can't be meddled with. And while I might privately agree that some of these spoiled brats would do well to spend a month or so with no magic and no brooms and no house-elves to bring their meals, I certainly know better than to say such a thing aloud - especially if there's any chance it might get back to the Regents!"
Although there was an undercurrent of rueful amusement under her words, I could tell Charity was less than thrilled with the situation.
"No wonder Professor Snape is so bitter," I remarked.
That comment elicited a sharp laugh. "No doubt he'd tell you there would be no point in sending any of these 'dunderheads' off to live with Muggles, since he seems to be of the belief that each batch of students is worse than the last. And I can't say as he has any great opinion of Muggles, either, even if he is half-blood himself."
"Really?" I would never admit it to Charity, but over the last month I'd begun to develop an unhealthy fascination with the Potions master. Nothing romantic, of course - my taste did not run to sallow, hook-nosed men without a polite word for anyone - but rather a sort of morbid curiosity as to why he seemed to be in such a black mood all the time, and why on earth Albus Dumbledore would have ever hired someone so unsuited to working with children for a position that required he be surrounded by them at all times.
"That's what I heard." Charity had her hood pulled up, covering her graying curls. All I could really see in the darkness was the tip of her nose. She stared up at the night sky. No stars for us tonight; a heavy blanket of clouds hid the constellations, although a faint gibbous moon wavered in and out of existence whenever the cloud cover momentarily thinned. "Not the sort of thing he'd wish to advertise, I would imagine." Then she shifted so she faced me. "I would think you'd know something about it - weren't you here about the same time he was?"
I shook my head. "Only very approximately. I was a first year when he was a seventh. There wasn't a great deal of overlap. I think I may have a hazy memory of a skinny boy with black hair who even then seemed to go about in a perpetual storm cloud."
"No sweetness and light for dear Severus, that's for certain." Another flash of white teeth as the moon broke from the clouds for a few seconds. Then she shifted, and said, "Ow…this cold stone is getting too much for my bones, even with the firewhisky. Shall we take the convo inside?"
The cold didn't bother me; I was used to long nights spent in chilly observation of the stars. But there was no point in staying out here, especially when we could finish our chat in front of the fire in my sitting room. "Of course," I replied, and stood.
We made our way down to the little parlor that already felt much more like home to me than the cold grandeur of my family's town house in London. The conversation drifted to other matters - who among our current crop of first years showed the most promise, a bit of good-natured quibbling over the prospects of our House Quidditch teams. Charity was a Hufflepuff and I a Ravenclaw, but we tried to not let that get in the way of our friendship. At length she bade me goodnight and departed.
I sat in front of the fire and watched the flames dance back and forth. I knew I should have been feeling mellow and contented. After all, I had just survived my first month of teaching. No one had come forth to denounce me as a fraud with absolutely no pedagogical experience. None of my students had caused me any real problems, although the Weasley twins had created a disturbance a few days earlier by enchanting the little Muggle-made model of the solar system on my desk and making the planets spin overhead. I had quite enjoyed the show as much as the students, but as I was supposed to be the one in charge, I docked them ten House points and tried to give them a stern talking-to about disrupting an important lesson.
It probably didn't do much good; Fred Weasley listened to my little lecture with an expression of exaggerated gravity, while George rested his chin on his hands and regarded me with limpid brown eyes. I believe he had decided to amuse himself by fancying some sort of crush on me.
My mother had warned me about such things - "some of those boys will be barely six years younger than you!" - but in George's case I was fairly certain he didn't really have a crush. He probably just wanted to see if, by pretending to have one, he could throw me off my stride.
At any rate, the incident was only one amusing little interlude in a month that had slipped quietly past with me hardly noticing it. Professor Dumbledore seemed pleased enough with my work. I hadn't been fired yet, and that was something. My fellow staff members, save one, had been most welcoming. So why this sudden feeling of malaise?
I could attribute it to the firewhisky, but my Oxford days had taught me a thing or two about drinking. Not that I would have an opportunity to put it to the test, but I felt fairly confident I could drink most of my fellow Hogwarts faculty under the table if necessary.
Loneliness creeps up at the oddest times. I had known for quite some time how to keep it at bay - the half-read book, the pile of star charts on my desk, the enchanted phonograph and stack of old wax records that accompanied it. But none of that seemed adequate to my current state of mind.
I had always had a great deal of alone time as a child. My older brother Augustus was eight years my senior, and so for a large chunk of my youth he had been off at Hogwarts. But I'd never felt truly alone until he had been killed two days before my eleventh birthday…two days before I was supposed to leave home and come to school. That had been out of the question, of course. I stayed in London for the funeral and came to Hogwarts three weeks later than everyone else. My mother thought it best, even though at the time I was terrified by the prospect of being separated from the only member of my immediate family I had left. But she said the wizarding school seemed the safest place for me, and there I would be surrounded by other children, by new friends and other distractions.
But I never forgot the ringing silence of my home when I returned for the winter holidays that first year, the empty room where Augustus had once slept. My mother, who had always been young and beautiful to me, seemed to have aged ten years in those few months. And the house where I was born had become an alien place.
The silence of my chambers seemed to press against my ears. I set my empty shot glass down on the little carved table beside my favorite armchair, the one made of soft faded brocade and wonderful down-filled cushions. Then I turned and left the room.
Stairs, so many stairs. I knew as soon as I had taken up residence here that I had no need to worry about the rich meals Hogwarts' house-elves provided - I would certainly work off the effects of that food just going to and from my chambers at the top of the Astronomy Tower. The wind had strengthened. I could feel it tugging at my loose hair. Most of the time I pulled it back into a tight bun that I hoped enhanced my professorial appearance, but I had taken it down earlier since I would be teaching no classes tonight.
It was quite late, perhaps half-past midnight. My normal working hours, of course, but Hogwarts slumbered around me. No yawning first years to herd up into the tower for their Astronomy lesson. I might have been the only living being in the place as I made my way through the corridor that led to the dining hall.
Something whooshed overhead with a discordant jangle. Sharp fingers caught in my hair and tugged. Hard.
I let out a little screech. Of course I didn't have my wand with me, but I didn't need it for simple spells. "Lumos!" I cried.
A little ball of blue-white light danced off my fingertip. In the shadows near the ceiling I saw a quickly flitting shadow that resolved itself into the shape of a small man. He gave me an impudent grin and flipped upside-down, then stuck out his tongue.
"Damn you, Peeves," I snapped. "I nearly had a coronary."
"Aurora Coronary," he agreed, then turned himself right-side up. "What are we up to, Aurora Coronary? Meeting someone?"
"Hardly," I said, with as much affronted dignity as I could muster.
A month wasn't nearly enough time to get used to Peeves all over again. I'd only had a few run-ins with him during my school days, but I'd rather hoped he would treat me with a modicum of respect now that I was a professor. Thank goodness I still wore a set of my good robes, even though my loose hair ruined the image somewhat.
I asked, "And why are you wandering the halls? Run out of beds to short-sheet?"
"That is so 1622," he retorted. "Silly Sinistra. Lost your way? Need a guide?" He performed a midair somersault, then launched himself onto a suit of armor that stood a few feet away. It rattled loudly, and I winced.
"No, thank you," I replied. "It has been only a month, but I do believe I can somehow manage to find my way back."
He jumped from the suit of armor to a display case filled with Quidditch trophies and hit the glass with a loud bang.
At this rate he would have the whole castle around our ears. "Peeves, that is quite enough. I am returning to my tower. I expect you to go to - " I paused. Did the poltergeist even have a permanent base? He had a habit of turning up in the oddest places, although, thankfully, never in my rooms at the top of the Astronomy Tower. I had no way of knowing whether that was because he had been forbidden by Professor Dumbledore to disturb the faculty in their own apartments, or whether Peeves was simply too lazy to go up that many flights of stairs. " - to wherever it is you sleep."
"Sleep?" Peeves screeched. The glass in the case rattled. "Silly, silly Sinistra. No sleep for the weary - or for poltergeists. But maybe I'll let you tuck me in. Just this once."
Oh, for heaven's sake. I knew now that any reply would only make the situation worse. Gathering the remains of my dignity, I turned and began to head back down the corridor, toward the stairs that led up to the Astronomy Tower.
I hadn't taken more than a few steps before a cold voice snapped, "What is going on here? Out of bed, after curfew?"
"Bad, bad Ravenclaw," Peeves taunted me, then leaped off the display case and clung to the ceiling. "Fifty points!"
Muttering a curse, I turned to find myself staring up into Severus Snape's harsh face. "I am not a student," I said, attempting to match the Potions master's chilly tones.
I supposed I could see where he might have mistaken me for a seventh year wandering the halls, perhaps on her way to an assignation in the Room of Requirement. I'd never participated in such activity, but I knew several girls in my year who did. In my simple black robes, with my hair falling down my back, I probably didn't present a very professional appearance.
Professor Snape paused, and continued to glare down into my face. His eyes narrowed ever so slightly. "Professor Sinistra?"
"Precisely. I suppose I presented a tempting target to Peeves here, but I assure you that it is quite legal for me to be out and about at this hour, even if our resident poltergeist has issues with such activities."
In response Peeves stuck out his tongue and blew a raspberry in my direction.
Professor Snape didn't bother to say anything. Instead, he lifted his wand and bit out a quick, "Evanesco!"
Peeves promptly disappeared. Snape secreted his wand somewhere inside his voluminous robes.
"I would suggest, Professor," there was no mistaking the sneer in his voice as he uttered my title, "that you perhaps not wander the hallways alone at night. If you have need of something, ask a house-elf to fetch it for you."
"You don't think I'm afraid of Peeves, do you?" I chuckled and hoped I sounded convincing. "Peeves used to pull the ribbons out of my hair. I assure you, Professor Snape, it would take a great deal more than one poltergeist to keep me from moving freely about the castle. It is my home now, too, you know."
His expression, if possible, became even more sour. "Be that as it may. I believe you have caused enough disruptions for one evening."
That remark was patently unfair, as it had been Peeves who had been doing all the disrupting. However, whatever mood of melancholy had driven me out of the Astronomy Towers and down into the main corridors of Hogwarts Castle had quite disappeared. Now, under Severus Snape's disapproving stare, I felt chastened, even though I knew I had done nothing wrong.
Still, I didn't want him to think he had gained the upper hand. I forced a sweet little smile onto my lips and said, "How lucky was I, Professor, that you happened along! For of course a simple Astronomy professor is quite incapable of handling a poltergeist! No doubt you think I need help tying my boot laces in the morning as well!"
And with that I flounced off, leaving him to stare after me. Perhaps I shouldn't have given my tongue free rein, but really, his disdainful attitude had quite set me off.
I mounted the stairs of the Astronomy Tower, still fuming. In that moment, it seemed quite clear to me that I would never have a civil relationship with Severus Snape.