A/N: This one was hard to finish. I'm still very much heartbroken over Alan Rickman's death, even if I don't particularly connect him and Severus. He was my inspiration and I loved him so much. I miss you and love you, Alan.
Now - a long chapter for you all...
Love and Symbiosis
Chapter 21
Visiting Hours
The world was black, cold…
She couldn't remember if she'd lived in this blind cosmic vastness her entire life or not. Because she couldn't remember a time before this.
" – found – no-one – took - "
A babble of noise surrounded the black universe in which she found herself in, there were words she could recall, but how and why she could recall them was beyond her. Slowly, after what seemed like an eternity, the words strung themselves tighter together… though, when she finally would awake fully, she would not remember them. Just as she would not remember anything from what had happened to her prior to falling into this hole.
"I've done all I can, Dumbledore. She needs to go to the hospital. The St. Mungo's staff - "
"Yes, of course Poppy…"
The words were mere noise - utterly indistinguishable and incomprehensible. Someone might as well have been babbling nonsense into her ears, which is what she assumed was happening. Why couldn't she move? Why weren't they trying to wake her?!
"Who found her?"
"Septima and Charity. Albus, do you think it's safe to move her?"
"It doesn't appear as if she's been cursed... though I won't be completely convinced until… ah, Severus…"
And it was as if the person speaking had suddenly changed languages midsentence, just that one single word - Severus.
Severus was the only word that infiltrated her devastated synapses. Aurora's eyes momentarily flickered, but this was apparently so unnoticeable that no-one made a sound; she needed Severus… it was the only thing that made sense – it had to be important.
Hurried footsteps echoed around her brain.
"What happened?"
"She was found like this," came a woman's voice. "Collapsed, outside a disused classroom. Albus is of the impression she has been badly Obliviated…"
"However, I deemed it best if you made a thorough assessment before we move Aurora to St. Mungo's for hopeful recovery," a voice of the same older man Aurora had heard prior.
She was screaming at him in her head, willing Severus into her mind for once, if only because he was the only thing she was recognising. She may as well have been a blob in the void of space were it not for Severus being the only thing that was connecting her to reality… but Aurora was nothing more than a prisoner of her self, in her shell of a body. More and more the reality that she may never again be able to wrench open her eyes, or move her muscles or even know where she lived and what she did with her life, began to sink into her veins.
The last thing she remembered because losing all consciousness altogether was the feeling of an ice-cold hand on her forehead and her eyelids, and as if that very same hand had switched off a blaring, blinding light - all was calm and still…
He had been dreading the moment ever since he had been called to the hospital wing. He had walked in with something teetering on the end of chest… and when he saw who it was, that something had plummeted straight into his belly. But Dumbledore was there, not to mention a few of the others – Severus willed himself with all his might to remain calm, to plaster an expressionless face over his features.
"What happened?" he asked as evenly as he could.
"She was found like this," Minerva explained, seated next to the unconscious Sinistra, who, were it not for the various bruises over her body, could have very well been in a deep sleep. "Collapsed, outside a disused classroom. Albus is of the impression she has been badly Obliviated…"
"However, I deemed it best if you made a thorough assessment before we move Aurora to St. Mungo's for hopeful recovery," said Dumbledore from the end of her bed.
Severus swallowed hard, trying not to look at her face. Her reached out with one hand and placed his fingers on her temples, with the other hand he took out his wand.
The other teachers present watched on in respectful silence as his wand traced her body, his eyes closed tight, letting the lights behind his eyelids alert him to the cause…
And he felt his wand being drawn up toward Aurora's forehead, where both it and the lights came to rest.
Her brain. It certainly been addled with, and he was certain Albus was correct in his assertion.
"Almost certainly Obliviated…" Severus finally answered, trying desperately not to let his throat catch.
His only hope was that whoever did it had done a clean job. That she wouldn't be left with permanent, long-term and short-term memory loss… all her work, all her research would be long forgotten… her whole life…
Severus bit his lip hard and pocketed his wand, anger bubbling up inside him, overflowing from his belly into his bloodstream.
"Severus?" – of course the blasted old man would have been onto him…
"It will be safe to move her to St. Mungo's. The bruises and cuts are merely superficial – looks like she put up a struggle. I suggest you do it quickly to salvage whatever we have left of Aurora's memories." said Severus, turning to make his exit.
"And where are you going?" Minerva queried behind his back.
Severus didn't turn back, but merely glared at the door.
"I have something else to attend to," he answered simply.
It was a testament to his usual demeanour that not a single one of the students noticed any specific change in Severus's disposition as he rushed down the corridor, his riled, hurried steps ringing across the stone walls, scattering one or two Ravenclaws as far away from him as they could possibly manage.
He thanked his lucky stars, despite realising that such a term would have infuriated Aurora, that Quirrell was sitting at his desk when he swung open the door – he didn't fancy prolonging his desire to wring his filthy little neck.
He had pinned Quirrell against the wall before the man could utter a single sound of protest.
"I -" Quirrell spluttered and gagged as Severus maintained a vice-like grip upon his collar.
"You did it," Severus spat through his yellowed and clenched teeth. "I know you did it!"
"I- don't-" Quirrell continued to cough, "did… did – what?"
The tip of the black wand that had previously gently traced Aurora's body now shoved itself right into crevice of Quirinus's throat.
"If anything happens to her permanently, you are a dead man – do you hear me?" Severus's senses were now quite beyond his control, he mentally grasped at it… trying to centre himself… but all his unstoppable fury was telling him to kill the other man. Right here and now. "I don't care if there is no proof. I don't care if I get sent down to Azkaban for it! You are a dead man."
Never mind that there would be absolutely no proof, that Quirrell might talk to the others about Severus's own sanity, that if he did completely snap then a life-sentence in Azkaban following his mother would be on his hands – his mind was so far gone that he felt positively free with madness, like the shackles had been unlocked. The only feeling that was even remotely similar and liberating was when he had knelt for Aurora…
Quirrell looked positively terrified for his life, which he really could not be blamed for when faced with a crazed, shaking, unhinged looking man who looked just on the verge of a final breakdown.
"Sev – er – I didn't – unghh"
The wand burrowed further toward his pounding artery. The black eyes burrowed into his eyes.
Apparently Quirrell knew what he was trying to do, for he immediately averted his eye gaze, but as he did so, Severus caught sight of purpled, dark skin near his eye. It looked faded, but in very odd patches… as if he had tried to hastily scrub it off with a potion or charm and had done a piss-poor job in doing so.
"Managed to thump you before you desecrated her memory, did she?" Severus sneered with a triumphant glint in his eye. "That's a start at least."
Quirrell said nothing, not a muscle moved in his features nor his body, but his eyes remained firmly at the door behind them… he did not even register the threatening finger less than an inch from his face.
"If I get a shred of evidence that you had anything to do with this…" he whispered in his most quiet, threatening voice. He viciously shoved the eerily silent Quirrell away form him so forcefully that the younger Professor stumbled and tripped, ending up bracing one of the walls to prevent him from falling completely.
Severus wiped the corner of his mouth with his sleeve to erase the evidence of his spitting fury and straightened up his cloak.
"Do not tempt someone who has nothing to lose," he murmured viciously underneath his breath as he backed away, closing the door gently and quietly behind him.
Muffled sounds and various, greyscale shapes danced in front of her eyes. Aurora must have been staring at the high ceiling forever… she felt as if her head was caught in a vice, unable to move an inch as all around her she heard vague, subdued voices and the hurrying of footsteps…
She might have been there for days, hours, weeks, she had no idea. It was bright and sunny on the day she was finally able to turn her head to look out of the window with great, painful effort, shutting her eyes almost immediately upon feeling the sting of the light on the nerves of her corneas.
Almost immediately as it happened, as if someone had shut off a switch, the light was completely blocked. Aurora breathed an inner sigh of relief as the pain eventually subsided.
"I've told these imbeciles multiple times to keep the curtains shut, but clearly I'm not communicating primitively enough for them…"
The contemptuous muttering was so soothingly familiar that Aurora ventured to open her eyes again, the vague black object next to her slowly began to focus into the form of a very displeased looking wizard.
Severus Snape looked downward and met her rapidly blinking eyes. He sniffed a bemused wisp of air upon seeing her awake.
"Ah, Borealis. Glad you could finally join the world of the living."
Aurora continued to gape at him, comprehension coming back to her word by word. Or at least syllable by syllable. Severus smirked and looked back down at his reading material.
"Not often I am given the gift of silence with you in the same room," he said as his eyes flicked back and forth across the page. "A welcomed change – but I think it's time you rolled out of bed and got on with your job, don't you?"
Aurora opened her mouth, which felt as if someone had sandpapered everything from her lips to her tonsils, and tried to cough a reply. Immediately her grateful lips were met with the rim of a water glass that he had presented to her, which she gulped down like she had been navigating the Sahara for a month.
"What happened?" she finally choked as she handed the bronze goblet back to Severus, who took it back and placed it upon the bedside table.
"We thought that perhaps you would give us some insight to that," he replied. "Though I did think it was a longshot... do you know where you are at this moment?"
Aurora sluggishly observed her current surroundings, the light streaming out of the door caused her to shut her eyes again.
"It hurts to look…" she mumbled, wincing. Footsteps radiated toward the door; she heard it slam and Severus sigh irritably.
"Sometimes I am of the impression that St. Mungo's rounded people up in the middle of a street and slapped them with Healer badges," he bit, moving back to his seating position. "You are experiencing photophobia. It is a common side-effect of -"
"St. Mungo's?" Aurora queried, latching onto the first bit of information he had given her. "As a patient?"
"Oh, of course not. You know how the Healing profession is screaming out for theoretical astrophysicists to join their ranks."
"Ever the comedian, I see."
Severus nodded a mocking thanks.
"So why am I stuck here, then? The catalyst of these side-effects…?" she pressed, giving up on physical exertion completely and collapsed back into the starchy bed sheets.
He paused for a while, as if musing over every possible way he could answer her. Eventually, Severus bit his tongue and said, "what is the last thing you remember? Even vaguely recall?"
Suddenly her brain was thrown into overdrive as she struggled to recall a single memory, a vision, an object she had seen before she woken up here. Everything was black and nothing. The mere feeling of such a void in her life made her entire body shake with distress.
"Try not to focus on any specific," Severus interjected, obviously sensing the uneasiness.
And so Aurora tried again, closing her eyes to block out the alien environment that surrounded her now. This time, the feelings began morphing into shapes, images and situations.
"My tower…" she whispered.
"What?"
"I was sitting in my office," Aurora explained as the images kept on coming. Severus tutted.
"Well that's absolutely something we can narrow down and pinpoint -"
"And you were…"
She trailed off as the rather incongruous vision of him encircled and restrained by thin, black ropes and lying upon her desk, covered in red welts and cuts, suddenly flashed before her.
Snape and Sinistra caught each others' eye and promptly looked away in opposite directions. She shifted in her bed.
"That did happen, didn't it?" she whispered clumsily after a few excruciatingly long awkward moments of silence.
Severus, still staring resolutely at a painting of a mediwizard pouring some kind of disgusting looking substance into the mouth of a wailing amputee, cleared his throat, his lips even thinner than usual and his cheeks with rather more colour…
"I can assure you it did; I couldn't sit down without flinching for days." He mumbled so inaudibly that she barely registered that he was speaking. Aurora couldn't stop one corner of her lip from curling.
It was a very odd sight… more a feeling than anything… but despite Severus's initial unease, from that point onward his demeanour seemed to shift – as if someone had warmed up a bitterly cold chamber (with the exception of him almost blasting one of the wizard Healers through the door with his onslaught of well-chosen words for not shutting out all of the lights in Sinistra's room).
"Are you actually here to help me remember something, or are you just making it your mission to alienate me from the entire St. Mungo's morning shift staff?!" Aurora argued as the Healer stormed out in a huff, she felt extremely incensed at his sudden desire to shower her with an unwarranted protective disposition.
Severus continued to glare at the vacated and closed door for a few more moments, as if making sure that anyone who came back through it would be instantaneously recapped of his threats to report them for incompetence. Eventually he rested back against the chair and irritably flicked a piece of black hair out of his eye line.
"Well, it's obvious now that you've been Obliviated -"
"Really? Wouldn't have caught on to that, what with this gaping black hole in my head that appears to have sucked all my memories into it."
She was met with the most spectacular glare – to which she, of course, returned.
"… astronomy metaphors? Really?" he said with a well-trained raised eyebrow. "You didn't allow me to finish my sentence, though why break the habit of a lifetime? I was going to say you've been Obliviated rather poorly. Instead of taking out a couple of selective memories your attacker appears to have done a slapdash rush job: they've completely erased everything from past week or so. Though, thankfully, there appears to be no permanent damage to your thoughts or memories… time will tell."
Aurora shook her head where she lay, in sheer disbelief.
"But why on earth would anyone want to Obliviate me?" she implored with much waving of hand. "It doesn't make sense… what do I know about anything that needs to be kept secret? That's your sort of business, not mine."
Theirs eyes lingered on one another, knowing that the other was thinking the exact same thing but neither wanting to admit it.
"I mean," Aurora continued on after it was clear that Severus was waiting for it. "I can't possibly think of any incident that would have…" she sighed heavily, frustration clawing at her insides yet again, "… but what ground do I have to stand on?" she asked pitifully "a whole week of my life has been taken from me. Who knows what I did or what I saw or who I saw doing what? I certainly don't."
"That's just it, Borealis" Severus said, in a surprising gentle and placating tone. "You don't know. No-one knows. But a memory charm is not the sort of thing that one can accomplish by mere accident… someone knew what they were doing and that someone was in the castle."
"Any hunches?"
"I may have." Severus murmured darkly, folding his arms across his chest.
Sinistra waited patiently, then impatiently, for a name.
"…and?" she prompted. "I would like to do some investigating if it's all the same to you!"
"And nothing," Severus countered. "It won't do to have you storming through the castle doors with murder on your mind - not when we have little to zero evidence of who the perpetrator is. I will monitor the situation myself."
Anger begun bubbling up inside Aurora's belly like one of his infernal potions on the boil.
"Excuse me!" she sat herself back up in the bed and turned her torso in order to face him properly. "Some nutcase is running around the castle trying to kill me and you're not going to tell me who you think it is because I might be a tad miffed? Well, I'm sorry if I don't want to be inviting someone who purposely addled my brains, who could have turned me into the equivalent of a jabbering pile of squashed tomatoes, to tea and biscuits!"
"This is why I can't tell you!" Severus twisted in his chair and leant forward so that she could see every furious feature in his face. "You can't control yourself. You burst into rooms as if you're a battalion of soldiers, wielding axes around and threatening death to all who cross you, it's not helpful!"
"I am a battalion," Sinistra responded with such red hot fury and self-possession that Snape was momentarily stunned; he withdrew, blinking inanely... "And I'll get to the bottom of this, with or without your help, so the only question is how much time are going to let me waste?"
"Do it your bloody self then, because I can't!" Severus's eyes were glittering in a maddening way now, he seemed right on the verge of incomprehension, that very fine line between sanity and and madness. "I can't –you can't get involved in any of – I couldn't bear…"
He viciously scraped the bottom of his chair against the wooden floorboards and stalked away to the closed curtains of the window, vaguely clawing at them as if not knowing what to do with himself.
Aurora watched his back with a concerned frown… but a softer one than what she was used to giving him. Clearly there was something else going on in there, something he would likely never divulge to her. She opened and closed her mouth a few times as she pondered on the right thing to say… she waited until his chest was rising and falling in a steadier fashion than before.
"Is there nothing you can do?" she asked. "To… you know… bring these memories back? So we have something to work with?"
Severus slowly straightened up where he stood, he turned slowly and shook his head – though was seemingly relieved that they had something to talk about.
"Lost memories can sometimes be retrieved, but only through means of extreme physical stress to the individual in question. All evidence points to the Cruciatus Curse being the only means of extracting Obliviated memories, and even then it's not guaranteed."
Upon witnessing Aurora's raised dark eyebrows, he gave her a supremely incredulous look.
"So no. I cannot help you there."
She shrugged.
"I've gotten you furious enough in the past, I'm sure" Aurora added this with a bemused smirk.
Severus gave a quiet snort and paced slowly around her bed.
"Don't tempt me…" he quipped as sat down upon the mattress at her side. Aurora looked him up and down, calculating her next move with supreme delicacy, a slow hand reached out and entwined around the top of his. Severus gave a slight, momentary shudder.
"So this is somewhat painful for me to say, but…" Sinistra coughed, her thumb caressed his knuckles back and forth, "thanks for being here. I'm sure you could have been better spending your time terrorising various students in your classes, but here you are, bringing me back to earth - which probably should have been the jobs of the people employed to do so. I appreciate it."
And that is how you thank someone like a normal person, Severus. The back of her mind was almost smirking in triumph.
Something rather unexpected happened: no retort was made. She felt the shifting of springs and a thin, cold hand sweep across her shoulder blades where it came to rest on the other side. Is Snape, Snape, really, actually holding me? I'm not sure how I feel about this.
He leant into toward her and Aurora looked back at him, ready to slap him, or spit at him, or kiss him, any one of those options would have sufficed – he opened his mouth and said, in the most blasé fashion one could have mustered:
"It's Sunday. Don't flatter yourself, Borealis."
She was halfway between a snicker before she began to give a great heave, Aurora only had a split second to react as she promptly vomited over the side of the bed – thankfully in a direction opposite to where Severus was sitting… or was that unfortunately…?
"Of course it would have been far beyond their abilities for them to have pre-emptively given you an anti-emetic potion…" she could hear Severus griping from behind her, though he did appear to have a conjured a bowl for her – which had appeared right in front of her face. "Here…"
He gently dragged her back toward him and ran his fingers through her hair, which he then held in place as Aurora expelled the entire contents of her stomach out into the world for everyone to see. When it felt apparent that she was done, she collapsed back onto the pillows feeling as if she'd been simultaneously hit in the head and the belly with a rather intense bombardment spell.
"Get them to give me a potion – bloody hell…"
"You should discharge yourself and come back to Hogwarts," Severus replied. "I will be far more apt at -"
"Taking care of me? Really?"
"I was going to say ensuring you get the adequate mode of treatment, but if you like."
Aurora shook her head, suddenly feeling like utter death. "I'm sure if you called someone and didn't scare them away with your unbearable arseholary they would give me something."
"What's the point? You're almost completely fine, save a few arbitrary cognition tests. You might as well be in your own room. With far superior potions on your bedside at your beck and call, I can assure you."
"Beck and call! Merlin, I have trained him well and it all it took was one night."
She was met with both a disapproving shake of his head and a very slight, virtually undetected, twitch at the very corner of his lip.
"It might be nice to have a bit of a break from the place for a day or so," Sinistra toyed with the fabric on her sheets as she continued. "I was sort of being driven slowly mad being stuck in that tower for months on end… though maybe if I was in your bedroom with you slaving away, that might be rather more welcomed…"
Severus quickly pushed himself up from the bed and cleared his throat. She absolutely adored this. Toying with him, seeing just how far to go before she could make him start blushing – it was her favourite game in the entire world.
"I'll get someone to make you a substandard potion for the nausea." He informed her, pulling up his collar seemingly for protection. "I'd keep the bowl close..."
"Fine."
She watched him cross the room diagonally to the door and was just about to allow him to leave without another word before a sudden thought came to her.
"Are you substituting my classes?" she called out abruptly. "Do you have the necessary materials? Do you need me to write you lessons plans?"
Severus stopped by the doorway and stiffened up.
"While I would absolutely adore taking on the entire astronomy syllabus for years one to seven as we stargaze aimlessly into the abyss together - I am unfortunately a little busy with other matters," he informed her, not bothering to turn around.
Sinistra surreptitiously sniffed at the air as if she were a wolf that had suddenly wandered into the scent of fresh blood.
"… who's my substitute then?"
Severus gave a rather contrived cough and, finally turning to face her at the door, replied: "You shouldn't concern yourself with school matters in your condition. Perhaps it is best if you rested here for a few -"
The hairs on the back of Aurora's neck were standing in unison. There was a very good reason he was deflecting her questions, and if she was right in her assertion then Hogwarts castle was about to become the ultimate bloodbath. Forget Macbeth.
"Snape…" she bit deadly as she readied herself to pounce, the venom on her teeth almost visible, "tell me who it is. Now."
He turned, slowly, with an expression upon his face reminiscent of someone bracing themselves for a head-on collision.
Severus swallowed hard before opening his mouth slowly.
"Trelawney."
The nerves that were already waiting on the edge of their seats all exploded at once throughout Aurora's entire body.
"WHAT?" her voice blasted him with almost the same amount of fatal force as a Banshee. She began struggling to release herself out of her bedspread prison at once as Severus held up his hands in surrender.
"It wasn't my choice. I swear. I told Minerva you would murder in cold blood if she ever went near your tower, but Sybil was insistent and there was no one -"
"And would you let Neville Longbottom teach Potions for a week if he was insistent and there was no one else?" Aurora scurried around the bed, picking up whatever she could decipher as possibly belonging to her – which, to be fair, consisted only of her wand and her trousers and waistcoat. She gave a startle when she suddenly wondered if she had anything on; a quick feel around her person revealed that she was in fact wearing a hospital gown.
Severus was still looking slightly flabbergasted and panicked by the door.
"That is hardly an appropriate comparison. I mean she is… well, she is sort of a teach -"
He was met with an outstanding glower over the pile of clothes and nodded in surrender.
"Okay, you're right, it is. But look… don't cause yourself any more undue stress, what horror will she be capable of unleashing on a mere day's worth of classes?"
She could tell he knew immediately that he should not have asked that question, for her drive to run back to the castle and push the old fraud off her tower just became a hundred times stronger. Severus had to physically rush forward and hold her back.
"You are going to make yourself worse!" he reasoned. "Then she'll be taking your classes for months!"
"She bloody well won't! Not if you're there to put a stop to it if I die on the way!"
"Christ, Aurora…"
"Help me with this stupid thing!" Aurora demanded as her shaking hands fiddled with the straps on her gown. Seemingly resigned to accept the inevitable, Severus came up behind her and began picking at the knots with his much steadier, gentler hands.
"I don't know, I think I much rather prefer you in this than your strange Muggle-witch hybrid," he smirked as the knots released themselves, exposing her dark, bare back. Aurora turned to slip her hands into the straps of her bra and had to suppress a bemused grin as she was met with a very set of determinedly averted black eyes.
"We've been sleeping together for how many years, and you still can't look at me… in this state…?" Aurora asked slowly as she pulled on her other garments.
Severus looked down at the ground, his teeth toying with his bottom lip.
"Well… I mean we – we've never slept together. Not in any literal sense."
"Ah, yes, technicalities. And why did they feel to take off all my clothes for a memory loss issue? Urgh…" she had to steady herself on the end of the bedpost as the whole room began swimming around her once more; the nausea was hastily building up inside her belly again.
Severus quickly clasped onto her arm and pulled her down upon the bed.
"Look," he stated plainly and simply. "We need to get yourself discharged properly: otherwise they are going to think I scaled in here and kidnapped you."
On the verge of losing consciousness again, Aurora was no very big physical threat in getting back into bed; she assumed Severus felt safe in this knowledge… given normal circumstances she would have thrown him across the room.
"People usually assume such things about you, Sev?" she spluttered.
"Everyone I've ever met, yes" he replied simply.
Aurora's head gradually stopped spinning so much to induce the need to projectile vomit all over the room. She closed her eyes, shook it off and stood herself up again, to the complete bewilderment of the other wizard in the room.
She met his eye. And she had never seen him look quite like that before… he looked simply astounded, even unnervingly in awe.
"Shall we?" she asked nonchalantly, pulling on her last boot and patting down her maroon jacket. "I need to get to my classroom in quite a hurry, so if you don't mind I'd rather skip the tedious discharging ordeal… let them take it up with Dumbledore" Sinistra motioned for him to get the door.
Severus gave something of a sarcastic bow as he reached for the door, midway toward it, however, his hand returned promptly to his side.
"How up are you for Apparition?" he enquired. "I can get you into a dark place immediately."
Aurora clapped her hands together decisively. "Good thinking - let's do that, let's break the hell out here and get that fraudulent bint out of my tower. After I promptly vomit all over you."
"Fabulous. Although you will spend your first night back washing my clothes."
"Ah, I've always wanted to see you stalk around in pastel salmon-coloured robes..."
Severus smirked and held out his arm.
"Side-along" he explained at her curious expression. "I don't want you getting lost and I have something to attend to before we return to the castle… the Healers may have placed an Anti-Disapparition spell on you anyway due to your confusion. If they were doing their jobs correctly."
"Where are we -"
But he jabbed his arm aggressively in the air toward her, signalling the end of questions. Aurora readied her body for what she knew would be the roller coaster ride from hell and snaked her hand around Severus's forearm; he clasped her tight to him, though she was quite sure that there was absolutely no requirement to do so, and closed his eyes in deep concentration.
Sinistra looked back hastily and gave a quick scan of the room for any intruders, she had also momentarily forgotten where she had placed her wand – but she supposed having recently been Obliviated, momentary lapses in recognition were to be expected. The last thing her eyes came to rest on prior to whirling away from the hospital was Severus's reading material during his, presumably lengthy, time at her bedside. Her insides gave a pleasant heave as she recognised it to be one of her research papers for a Muggle astronomical journal, one of her most recent submissions regarding spectroscopic orbits and quasar properties, something so completely removed from anything magical and so alien from their world… yet he had taken the time to acquire it and had read it in her presence.
There was something far more intimate in that than all the physical contact they had shared. And, though she would never breathe a word of it to him, Aurora allowed herself a final smile in gratitude, and rested her head upon his shoulder under the guise of feeling a tad queasy, before they disappeared away.
Thank you for your reviews and favourites. Much love.