Severus knew it was too good to be true.
He had always known it – his life was a parade of things that were too good to be true being exactly so. When was the last time he dared to hope? Was it with Lily? Or was it even earlier, with Hogwarts? Or maybe it was even earlier, at home? He had always been an awkward child, a disappointment to his muggle father and his wizard relations both – too strange for his muggle relations, too tainted for his wizarding family, particularly in the changing political climate. He remembered well those changes – at first, just disapproval of his mother, and then, not even a decade later, outright rejection. He remembered moving from a genteel, if somewhat poor family, to an absolutely impoverished one. He remembered coming to Hogwarts and hoping that, for once in his life, he would fit in – there were other half-bloods, then, and even if Lily, his best friend Lily, a muggleborn, couldn't come too… well, at least he would be away from home and at least there was the chance that other children wouldn't have such preconceived notions. Then James Potter happened, and Sirius Black, and his schoolboy years turned like old dairy. And then, of course, the bitterest disappointment of all – when Lily, his best friend, whose letters from America could brighten the worst of his days, turned on him and married James Potter.
They were not good memories, and suffice it to say, Severus was used to disappointment.
So when Rigel Black stepped into his life, he could be forgiven for first thinking it was a trick, an elaborate prank of some kind. The boy was the son of Sirius Black, and who could have known he would fall so far from the tree? And really, if it wasn't for that bizarre, strange form of Legilimency the boy unintentionally employed that first night, he wasn't sure if he would have believed it. Being in the boy's mind and experiencing first-hand his all-encompassing passion for potions (which, truth be told, was slightly unhealthy) was unequivocal evidence – even though he had never heard of anything like it happening before, and further research hadn't revealed any leads either. Discreet inquiries among his Occlumens colleagues, too, had yielded nothing.
But it had taken only a few short months for the illusion of perfection to crack. Not in the sense that Severus had expected, not in the boy's potions ability, not even in the sense that he had been tricked. No, Rigel Black was everything that Severus had dreamed of in an apprentice – but he also had secrets.
At first, Severus didn't care. Severus had worked at Hogwarts for almost a decade, and he was not unfamiliar with children. Children had secrets, and they were inevitably petty ones.
Nothing in that first year made him believe otherwise. The first clues, such as they were, were minor. There was the issue with the boy's wand – while many children would have welcomed the opportunity to see their families, and in spite of the notoriously close relationship Black was rumoured to have with his father, the boy had begged Severus to take him to Diagon Alley for a replacement. But that was easily explained – perhaps Black was embarrassed, and he said himself that he didn't want be seen as getting special treatment. Again, on the night Severus had examined the boy's core, although the boy had inquired perhaps overly much about the information Severus would be able to glean from his core before providing his consent, that, too, was consistent with some petty secret of the childish variety. So Severus simply didn't care.
It was in Black's second year that Severus realized that whatever it was, whatever Black was hiding was serious. It was the morning of that ridiculous Woody prank, when Rigel had been caught red-handed in disguise. They had argued, that morning, about why Rigel had done it, and about other things. But the thing that stood out most in Severus' memory of that morning were Rigel's words:
My father will pull me out of Hogwarts so fast, it will be as if Rigel Black never existed.
It wasn't so much the words themselves – children were prone to drama, and Rigel was, frankly, no exception. It was the way Rigel said it, the look on his normally blank face as he said it, the sheer conviction in his eyes that Severus remembered. Rigel hadn't cried, he hadn't yelled – it was a statement to him, a flat statement of truth, and his normally expressionless face had adopted an expression of sheer certainty. It was truth – or certainly Rigel believed it was truth, and somehow…
Somehow, Severus had believed it, and let Rigel go on. Be he kept watching, this time, and soon realized that Rigel wasn't normal.
Normal children groaned when Severus assigned more homework than usual – not in his hearing, usually, but he knew about it. Normal children complained. Normal children lounged when the professors weren't watching, normal children expressed themselves in loud, often annoying, ways. Normal children didn't express their emotions in the exact same contrived way each time. Normal children relaxed.
Rigel simply never, ever, relaxed. Rigel was always poised, always calm – he always reacted to the same things in essentially the same way. When he had a question, he tilted his head to one side. When he was engaged, or interested, or when he thought he ought to be, he had the same polite smile. He was never unguarded - he did not lounge in class, did not relax even when he believed no one was watching. The explanation that his magic tended to react disproportionately to his emotions only went so far.
Draco's information, too, was only more suspicious. Rigel slept in his clothes, even though Draco had seen sleeping clothes folded in his trunk. Rigel slept on his covers, and only changed in the bathrooms. He avoided physical affection to an unhealthy degree.
Rigel was too controlled to be normal, and in Severus' experience and knowledge, that meant that whatever secret he was hiding was so consuming, so immense, that Rigel could simply never relax. Really, though; Rigel never did anything normally, so why would his secrets be normal?
Severus had thought, then, that whatever it was, he would discover it soon enough. Seven years was too long, and Hogwarts too small, for secrets of the immense variety to stay secrets for long.
He wondered at what point he simply stopped wanting to know.
Was it in Rigel's third year, when he finally met Rigel's mysterious cousin, Harry Potter? Was it when Rigel told him that Shaped Imbuing was his cousin's invention, and not his own? Was it when Rigel claimed, repeatedly, that his cousin was, if anything, better at potions than he was?
Frankly, Rigel Black was extraordinary at potions. Severus had never seen anyone as interested, as passionate about his field as Rigel, and that was frankly somewhat unnerving considering that he was a member of the Potions Guild. He thought he had seen the extent of obsession at the Guild, but that was before he met Rigel Black. Rigel Black redefined potions obsession. And yet, somehow, Harry Potter was supposedly more skilled, more obsessed, and more interested?
Severus didn't believe it. He had been the youngest Potions Master in the English Guild's history, taking his Mastery at nineteen, and it would not be flattery to say that he was perhaps the most accomplished Potions Master in Britain in the last century. Rigel promised to outshine him. He couldn't believe that the boy's cousin was, if anything, even better than him. It simply defied the odds.
And yet, having met Harry Potter, and then having worked with her, he was shocked to find that Harry was apparently everything Rigel promised she would be. Based on his admittedly limited experience with her, he couldn't tell if she was better than Rigel, but she was certainly his equal, which was improbable enough. It didn't make any sense.
That incident last winter at the annual gala, too, had been demonstrative. Seeing the two of them together, he had realized just how much they looked alike. The resemblance was truly uncanny – they resembled twins, though in truth they were not closely related by blood. Severus had heard a rumour that the boy had passive metamorphic talent that had tied itself to her, and while he had never heard of such a thing, there had be some explanation for their similarity.
It wasn't Polyjuice. He had checked for that, after seeing Rigel's features blurring later that year.
Harder to explain, though, was the use of wands. Aside from Rigel's metamorphic talent tying itself to her physically, could it explain how they could apparently use each other's wands without any problems? Could a wand have dual allegiances, and how did that work with Rigel? Severus well knew Rigel's trouble with others' wands, since he had used an improperly bonded wand for the first month of school, so the fact that he apparently had no problem with the girl's wand… well, that was both improbable and inexplicable.
The whole thing made no sense. Severus felt like there was something wrong about this whole situation, something that if he could only put the pieces together, he would realize. But whatever it was, whatever was so wrong and improbable … Severus was no longer sure he wanted to know. There was something about it, an animal instinct, that told him to look away, to ignore the consistencies and let it all slide.
So he focused, instead, on their differences. Harry Potter was, in comparison to Rigel, rather open. She was frank in her manner and, while she clearly respected him, she responded frankly to his questions and did not appear intimidated by him. Personality-wise, she was different from the boy.
She also apparently had a different set of skills, at least in one area. She could actively manipulate her aura – Rigel did not have an aura, but she did, and it was an innocuous enough one that he had not doubted it until he had noticed that her magical reserves did not appear to change, even after exhausting a fair amount of magic. This was not a skill that Rigel had, as far as Severus knew.
They were different people, Severus reassured himself. They were different. They did have slightly different interests, and they did have different skills. The fact that they were also uncommonly similar, and they were both apparently Potions prodigies, well, that could be explained at least partially by their close friendship.
It was odd – but then, when all the possible explanations had been exhausted, the impossible must be true. So Rigel Black studied Potions at Hogwarts, while his father believed he wanted to be a Healer, and Harry Potter studied Potions at the American Institute of Magic, while she really wanted to study Potions. And both of them were equal prodigies in his field of study, a field notorious for its difficulty.
Severus wondered at what point the inconsistencies would weigh too heavy, and he would not be able to ignore them any longer.
AN: Thanks, everyone, for all the reviews and follows! This chapter was a difficult one to write - there's something about this that is vaguely unsatisfactory, but I can't quite put my finger on it. In short, I think Snape is one of the characters that truly has enough of the pieces to guess, but he doesn't because he just doesn't want to know.