Chapter 25

Flashes of Black

Severus Snape had never made Professor Sinistra feel nervous. He annoyed her more than anything else, was occasionally unwittingly hilarious, fascinating like no other, and she loved nothing more than to push his limitless buttons – but unlike most of the school population, not once had she allowed him the privilege of intimidating her. He should be so lucky.

But as the exams drew to an end, and their Occlumency sessions drew nearer, she found that her mouth was frequently dry, her mind packed and full of apprehension (which Aurora was positive would make everything even harder, which increased her stress, which increased her packed mind and, oh, it was vicious and endless…) and she couldn't look Severus in the eyes without regretting her decision to allow herself to sit in front of him and have him break into memories she had no luxury to cherry-pick.

The N.E.W.T.'s had ended; seeing as there was only an extremely small handful of students willing to take the Astronomy N.E.W.T. one would have thought that it shouldn't have been all that tiresome for Aurora… but seeing as those students usually needed three times as much intensive time as everyone else, she had found it an immense relief on her mind when their exams had been done. Two of them were in the process of applying to the Academy of Magical Astrophysics – a process Sinistra knew like the back of hand at this stage – which required even more proof of their academic competence in the form of several assignments and a ridiculous amount of unnecessary paperwork and reference from their Astronomy professor, so she still had that whole ordeal looming over her which rendered her rather sleepless and stressed up to the eyeballs. She wagered she was possibly not optimal Occlumency-student material at the present time… then again, if she succeeded at it now (and Sinistra was sure that she would – she tended to succeed at anything at which she was determined, and by Merlin was she determined to fool the old Headmaster and anyone with the cheek to presume to know what she was thinking and feeling), at least she knew that she could do it anywhere.

It was a Thursday evening, the air warm and breezy as they turned their way into summertime, and she was currently escorting two representatives from the AoMA down the grand staircase and out of the grounds.

"Well, from what I've seen so far of these projects it all looks very positive…" the eldest of the two wizards croaked cheerfully, waving her two protégés vast amount of paperwork around his face, making Sinistra cringe as the doors to the castle were flung open. There was a whole year's worth of her very best students' first attempts at astronomical research in his hand and he was just about ready to allow it all to be swallowed into the abyss.

"It's a tad windy out, Theo…" she mused loudly and deliberately as they clapped their way down onto the grounds. "You might want to put those in your suitcase there."

"Ah, it is, it is, quite right!"

Thank heavens he did. Theodore Corkery had been Vice Chancellor of the AoMA for nigh on sixty years now, he had considered and accepted Aurora's own application as a naïve and credulous Hogwarts graduate, they had met every year a new student raised their hand in anticipation to join the professional wizarding astronomy ranks and as every year passed Aurora was sure that his mind was slowly failing him. She spent a lot of time worrying that her student's applications had been lost or erroneously destroyed, and her mind was only relieved when she received confirmation from the AoMA that positions had either been offered or denied to them. Her suspicions and worries were not helped when Corkery haphazardly shoved all of the paperwork into his suitcase as if he were filling up a hole in the ground.

She inwardly cringed and bit down on her tongue as the second, only very slightly younger wizard shook her hand.

"Pleasure to see you as always, Aurora." He said with a courteous bow. "We'll be in touch shortly; the owl will arrive in about a week as usual…"

"Yes, no need to venture further out to the gate my dear, you head back inside!" Corkery said jauntily as he reached out and not only shook her hand, but kissed it, making her instantly pull it back toward her chest protectively.

He's gone… she thought. She noticed that the AoMA professor was eyeing him with concern also.

"Well, if you're sure," she said, knowing that she never had any intention to walk them further than the castle, her time was far too valuable. "I assume you both know your way by now."

Corkery gave a highly inappropriate level of laughter.

"Sharp as a tack, this one!" he chuckled. "Yes, we'll get out of your hair. It is a LOT of hair to get out of! A haircut wouldn't go astray!"

Aurora glowered at him. Suddenly her mop of black dreadlocks felt ten times heavier.

"Goodnight, then" she said forcefully as the wizards turned and made their way across the grass. She watched him pass Hagrid, who gave her a nice big wave in the sunset to which she returned before closing the oak doors shut on them all.

The door to Severus's quarters opened with a bang. She saw him jump in the distance, where he was sitting on his tattered leather couch.

"If you could possibly enter my private rooms without tearing down the supporting walls, I would appreciate it…" he drawled.

"Why does every school of knowledge and progress have to eventually be overtaken by senile old men?" she snapped irritably as she shoved the door closed with her shoulder.

Without looking up, his focus instead remaining on an exam paper he was evaluating, Severus replied: "what has Dumbledore done now?"

Aurora scoffed as she threw off her cloak onto the back of a chair. "Nothing, for a rare change. You know, when I was innocent little wreck at AoMA, Professor Corkery was this all-knowing, foreboding figure in the field of astrophysics – Muggle and magical studies combined – and he was. Now he's just some deteriorating, slightly racist, old fool the academy can't bear to get rid of."

"Maybe he always was, and you were too ambitious and eager to please to see it." Severus answered, still feeling no need to look up.

"Maybe. But he's definitely losing his mind," Aurora said sadly, surreptitiously running a hand through her course forest of locks, one of the only links to her birthplace. "Can Occlumency stop the mind from disintegrating into foolish old fart territory?"

He rolled up the parchment he had been frowning over and threw it onto the larger of two piles in front of him, he finally looked at her.

"Oddly enough, I have not done much research in the field. You're the academic. You should publish something to enlighten us all."

There was a slight bitterness in his voice as he said this that she did not like. It was not chastising, but it reeked of inner resentment. She sat herself down on the coffee table opposite him, making quite sure that she didn't flatten the Potions theory O.W.L. examination papers as she did do.

"Why do you do this?" Aurora asked so forcefully that she might as well have shoved him. "You're a…" genius had been teetering right on the tip of her tongue before she instantaneously swallowed it whole. She couldn't inflate his head that much. "… you are far too talented to remain just a Hogwarts professor. At least I have my research to prove that fact to me when I need something more. At least I have plans. What do you have?"

Severus opened his mouth to answer, where it hung for a few moments… she was sure that if she was able to break into his mind then her own would implode in on itself – there was an entire universe inside that head. Forever exploding and expanding.

"I believe you are the reason we are both here tonight, not me" he finally answered, effortlessly sidestepping having to directly answer her, as always.

Though, as they both dusted themselves off and rose to find a more open space, there was a lightness in him that had not been present when she had entered the room. It seemed that what he wanted in response to his biting comments about her having the privilege to follow her ambitions was her meagre reassurance…

"Alright…" Severus said as he waved his wand and sent the table in the centre of his room flying toward the wall. "I presume I don't have to go into the theory and history behind Occlumency and Legilimency with you?"

"'course not. Done my homework and everything," Aurora answered with a mock salute.

Her forced jovial mood seemed to hide the fact that she was nervous as all hell quite well. Severus, too, had smirked slightly.

"Very well, then. First thing's first – I am going to use a simpler form of Legilimency on you, so you know when it's coming, when it's happening. Usually I will be wandless, and obviously no one is going to verbalise the Legilimency spell upon you…"

"So I am going to have to keep up these mental barriers the entire time?" she asked, a slither of panic escaping her this time.

Severus shook his head and began pacing in front of her, toying with his wand. "Of course not. But eventually you will know the subtle signs. You will feel it. Besides, there are two things we want to accomplish in these lessons. One: developing your skills in Occlumency to such an expert level that you will be able to counteract any emotion that contradicts what you tell someone, and two: the ability to empty your mind of emotion at will, so the memories of…" he paused and bit his lip, "… so memories won't get in the way."

She took a deep breath and tried to forget that she had an entire life's worth of memories and emotions to block. Aurora was usually very confident in her abilities to the point of near arrogance, but suddenly she felt rather inept and intimidated by what was about to face her. She didn't like it.

"Ok," she said finally when she noticed that Severus had watching her with concern for quite some time. She shook out her limbs and concentrated with all her might on making her mind still and calm… empty, numb…

"Ok…" she said again. "Let's do it. Come on."

But Severus was hesitating and it was making her nerves stand on end.

"I agreed! I agreed to this!" Aurora snapped. "I told you it was fine. Come on. What're you waiting for? A formal invitation from my owl?"

She closed her eyes and awaited the blow – though she had absolutely no idea if she was feel anything, it was all the better that she didn't know. She wanted to have an inkling of what it felt like to be taken by surprise first, so she could build up an immunity to it. She heard a brief intake of breath from across the room before the words "Legilimens!" rang out and she was suddenly hit with a tonne of memories that she had no control over.

At first the flashes started out as flickers, tiny little milliseconds of indistinguishable visions, like slides on a projector that had been cut out of order… but slowly the visions began to manifest themselves into tangible images… Sinistra began to recognise them one-by-one… she was back in her old school, in Uagadou, a vast stone fortress carved so high within the mountainside that clouds and mist flitted by right next to them. She was a young girl again, about twelve, sitting high on top of her mountain school, fiddling with the knobs on her telescope as the endless night glistened overhead and the clouds floated along below – one would almost think that they could fall and be caught by them…

Now she was older, certainly no longer in Uagadou nor Africa itself, she was at Hogwarts in her old Slytherin uniform… she was shivering (the Scottish climate never agreed with her), cold, alone… sitting in the common room in the corner, she was trying to concentrate on the Charms textbook she had in front of her and not on the bunch of Slytherins congregating by the fire – laughing and giggling and talking and relishing in their bonds. She felt desperately lonely. Her heart ached.

She was still in her Hogwarts uniform, about seventeen. She was walking along the corridor with her hands shoved into the pockets of her robes because she still hadn't managed to suppress her wandless magic, and she was getting in continuous trouble for it from the teachers…

She was a little girl standing next to her mother, giggling with her feet levitating off the ground, before Eshe promptly but gently pushed her back onto the floor… her mother's eyes were darting too and fro out of the window, she looked panicked… that's enough…

The visions started getting dimmer, blacker, until Aurora could not recognise them anymore. Yet she knew they were still there somewhere. She concentrated with all her might on pulling a great big black curtain over the whole lot of them, but it was hard work, and soon enough the visions kept breaking through every crack, until once again she was overwhelmed with them.

She heard a distant, muffled voice call something in the distance and suddenly the memories had all disappeared. The scene manifested itself back into Severus's quarters. Aurora's legs were feeling oddly cold, she looked down and realised that she was kneeling on the floor.

"Come here," Severus wrapped his hands around her elbows and pulled her back into standing position.

"That was a good first attempt," he said, his eyes carefully trained on her face. "Not many people manage to block anything until at least the second or third time."

"I barely remember those things happening," Aurora said, panting and shaking. She had been alright up until she had been forced to see her mother's face.

Severus nodded. "That is, more or less, the point. You have no control over what I see for now, most of it is locked away in the subconscious, but the use of Legilimency can counteract that – it brings about memories that may prove that what you're saying may not necessarily be the truth. A talented Legilimens can search for specific visions and memories in order to do so. What you need to learn is how to block those specific compartments."

"Sounds like a walk in the park…" she bit sardonically, rubbing her temples. She was trying with all her might not to let emotion get the better of her. But when one had absolutely no control over what the Legilimens was picking out of their brain, it was rather difficult not to be overcome when faced with a tangible form of a loved one you could no longer speak to. Facing that last forgotten memory had brought new knowledge to light... her mother had always been frightened, always on edge and waiting for the disaster that finally killed her but not her daughter.

Severus was watching her with the air of someone handling particularly volatile chemicals.

"Shall we cease the practicals?" he asked.

"No," Sinistra replied vehemently, rolling her head around until she she felt a satisfying crack. "Do it once more. I'm going to at least come away from this tonight feeling like I've done something."

"Very well," Severus conceded, drawing up his wand once more. "Remember now – the feeling you had when I saw that last memory, the one you eventually closed on me: harness that. Pull everything shut and empty it."

His wand was pointing straight at her. She heard him cry: "Legilimens!" once more, and the room again dissolved into her own mind.

Her older brother was standing just outside the fireplace she tumbled out of, she was thirteen and it had been the very first time she had set foot in the country. She fell into his arms, weeping…

But this time the blackness overcame them much sooner. The memory barely had time to form before her mind had become an empty slate, cold and dark. There were far less rips amongst the black curtain now… not as much light was escaping… but still a few managed to seep through.

She was leaning back in her chair in one of the Academy's colossal observatories, letting a dribble of cold coffee drip delicately into her mouth… another rip appeared and she was no longer drinking coffee but a bottle of Firewhisky in a very messy bed, she was sniggering into the bottle next to a rather dishevelled looking wizard…

Whether she was able to swipe that memory black, she was not sure, because the room once again materialised into view the way it had done on the first attempt. It was apparent that Severus had lifted the spell.

"Who was that?" he demanded.

"What?" Sinistra blinked, rubbing her head furiously once more as the room spun around them.

"That… that man in the last memory! The man you were… in bed with!"

Aurora blinked, feeling so dumbfounded that he was even asking such a question that she couldn't speak for a good ten seconds.

"I don't think that's any of your business!" she shot back viciously.

"That was Black. You and… Black…"

She had never heard him speak a name with such venom and hatred as he had done just then. Severus's face was stark white, and he shook with the purest loathing. He began pacing the room furiously.

"When did this all happen, then?" he finally snapped. "I dearly hope this was before you discovered he was a mass-murdering servant of the Dark Lord!"

"This was a bad idea…" Aurora replied furiously, "I knew you wouldn't be able to remain impartial to this. I believe it was stipulated that no questions would be asked regarding my own personal memories? Memories I don't even remember having, by the way. Do you think I like to remember the fact that I had a brief fling with Sirius Black?"

"I don't know - do you?" Severus muttered under his breath incredulously. She could have reached out and wrung his neck for it.

"Well, if you're suggesting that I have some kind of supressed, torrid fetish for Death Eaters…" she gestured, almost comically, toward the man standing and shaking with rage in front of her, "... clearly I'm not in a rush to break the habit of a lifetime."

Her jokes had always been morbid and her taunts fatal; she was not quite what angle Severus was going to plump for. The pair merely stood blocking each other's path, their eyes boring into each other and their chests heaving in exactly the same rhythm. It seemed almost a scientific certainty that one of them was about to ignite in flames… it was only a matter of time.

After what seemed like eons, he spoke.

"That's not fair" he said, though it was barely more than a whisper.

Aurora sniffed incredulously. She took a few slow, painstaking steps towards him, the soles of her leather boots snapping against the cold stone of the floor, until she could feel his rising breath wash her skin.

"Neither is interrogating me about past relationships that I didn't give a single fuck about at the time, and which make me feel unbearably guilty over in the present. You think I like remembering that I had a meagre sexual association with a man who murdered twelve people? If you take issue with having your past rubbed in your face like that, I can tell you that the feeling is certainly mutual."

When he did not answer, she raised her hands in mock surrender. "You haven't turned me into an Occlumens, yet. Why don't you find out just how insignificant the little maggot was to me at the time? Might be your last chance."

Her dark and heavy eyes flashed a heavy warning, daring him to do it. But his breathing had suddenly become steadier. The maggot comment clearly has had its designed effect… Sinistra thought.

Severus shook his head ever so slightly that one could barely notice him moving.

"No," he murmured, "it doesn't matter which maximum security felon currently finds himself as your flavour of the month – I said I would never do that, and I amnever going to do that. You could at least attempt to trust me."

It was as amicable a resolution as she could have hoped for, though Aurora knew, deep inside, that this new founded knowledge would taint something between them for years to come… if years were what they had, anyway… she was not sure as yet how this would end up manifesting itself, but it was certainly going to. Severus Snape's insecurity-riddled mind would see to it and would see to it regularly, even if he would never outwardly show it.

"I wouldn't be here if I didn't trust you" she said. "And I wouldn't be in this position at all if I didn't love you, like the insane idiot that I am..."

Though he still looked like he was going to be sick at any moment, Severus was now at least struggling to settle himself. He swept away from her and around the couch, where she saw his silhouette sink down upon it, the moon casting a pearly white outline around it.

She knew what Sirius had done to him in school. All of the alumni from those years knew what Sirius and his friends did. They were infamous, the four of them, but Sirius Black and James Potter had been especially notorious and admired… Aurora remembered (it must have been sometime in her fifth year because they were studying for their O.W.L.'s) being curled up in a library chair just after her Defence Against the Dark Arts exam, reading over her Transfiguration notes for the examination the next day, when several girls came giggling around one of the book shelves just opposite her - giggling just quietly enough that Madam Pince would not be alerted…

"Oh, but you should have been there Elizabeth. There were soap bubbles pouring out of his mouth… and you should have seen his underpants!"

"I don't want to see anything like that from Snape; I think I'd vomit on the spot!" the other young Gryffindor girl chimed in. Aurora's brow furrowed as she attempted to read her chapter on Animagi, her annoyance rising with every giggle coming from their direction.

"It gets worse! He ended up butt-naked from the waist down -"

A gaggle of giggles erupted now.

"Gross!"

"Yeah, I'm surprised James and Sirius weren't instantly blinded."

One of them snorted so loudly that it made Aurora slam down her book.

"Could you lot shut the hell up? Some people have exams!" she barked across the benches at them and was met by three very bemused faces. There was no change for any rebuttal, however, because Aurora's very loud protest had now altered Madam Pince, who came charging over to her and ordered her to leave, every muscle in her gaunt face twitching with fury.

She had spent the rest of the night locked up in the Slytherin common room, cursing her wand for not doing what she wanted it to do and feeling stressed up to her eyeballs that she would fail every single subject in which wandwork was a requirement, and it was only the following day, after their Transfiguration examination, that she crossed paths with Severus who had obviously spent every waking moment hidden up in his dormitory. He was avoiding everyone's eye and she had only caught the vaguest of glimpses of him for weeks on end afterward. He was the last to arrive for dinners and the first to leave, he was never in the main common room… of course they had not been close enough friends for Aurora to feel up to saying something to him about it. Cowardly of her, really…

But truth be told, she had forgotten about it; she had forgotten while he would always remember. She had been accepted into the Academy of Magical Astrophysics and was a year into studies when she had run into Sirius Black in the Leaky Cauldron one weekend. It had been nothing, really, their entire relationship had been a laugh more than anything… and during the war they had needed it. Or she had needed it. She had no idea that she had been rolling around with one of He Who Must Not Be Named's most trusted Death Eaters.

And yet there was a part of her that hated Severus for making her ache with guilt on a far more personal level now. How dare he? How dare she? How dare she let him feel that way?

"I thought he'd grown out of it, the tormenting people thing" Aurora said slowly, watching Severus sitting, simply staring at the wall in front of him, his thoughts impenetrable – Occlumency or not. "I was wrong."

"You could say that."

"I was also a bit of an idiot who thought I knew everything back then. And Sev, you and I barely spoke in school…"

"I know. It doesn't matter - it's not your fault" he said, waving an exasperated hand in the air.

Aurora gently settled herself down, not on the couch itself, but the leather arm. She rested her elbows on her legs and surveyed him through her knuckles.

"You ok?" she finally queried as casually as she could, though her heart was thumping in her chest.

Severus slowly turned toward her and opened his mouth a few times before answering.

"I would not trouble yourself with such matters" he said. "Your energy would be better spent concentrating on your own concerns."

Aurora shook her head incredulously and bit down on her tongue. "You'll never get it, will you? You are my concern. Surely you'd know what that feels like… I know you visited me in St. Mungo's every day until I regained consciousness. I know you spent the time reading all of my journal articles."

"How on earth do you know that?" Severus asked, looking rather shocked and as if he'd been discovered in the act of performing something rather Machiavellian.

Aurora snorted and shuffled close enough to him that she was able to rest her chin upon his bony shoulder.

"Had an inking - which you have so kindly now confirmed for me. And you left one of the articles on the bedside table."

She felt his head turn toward her as she buried herself further into his neck.

"You really should cover tracks if you want me to continue believing you're as big of a heartless prick that I usually think you are," Aurora murmured into the fabric of his black robes.

Severus's shoulders contracted as he sniffed amusedly.

"Well, I shall make a conscious effort not to be so discernible next time."

Several long fingers made contact with her forehead, where they swept away several wayward dreadlocks to the back of her head, she closed her eyes instinctively and relished in his touch… her hairline prickled with electric pleasure at every single point of contact with his fingertips.

A cold, thin pair of lips kissed the part of her forehead that had previously been shrouded and hidden, the lips hung there for a moment, the pressure slightly increasing before he took a deep breath and released everything… his lips, his hands, his body.

"Get off," Severus scoffed, but not unkindly. She allowed herself to be gently shoved away from his shoulder. "Do you want to be an Occlumens or not?"

Aurora stood up and straightened her robes, she shook her head so that her hair once again fell into its natural position. That was a bit rich of him, she thought, acting like she'd put a halt to the proceedings when it had been him who had reacted far stronger than she had done to that one memory. She closed her eyes once again and centred herself while Severus watched on…

"Let's try for absolute emptiness this time, shall we?" she heard his voice whisper soothingly to her out of the darkness. Aurora nodded, letting a deep breath escape her lungs and seep out through a partially opened mouth.

Absolute emptiness…

"Relax into it…"

Relax…

"Ready?"

Darkness, blankness, a void began dissolving through her veins and pulsed its way up into every part of her body. She willed it to consume her, allowed and permitted it to take her and shroud her… until there was nothing left but her breathing…

This time Severus did not utter the incantation, the Legilimency spell took her completely off guard as she meditated on it. But even so, there was still darkness, there was a black wall where once he could have glanced in; every memory that was attempting to burst through was failing, the wall was impenetrable.

"Good, good, that's good…" Aurora heard him whisper in what now seemed like a distant, far-off land.

It had been past midnight by the time Aurora and Severus had called it quits for the night. He looked just as terrible and exhausted as she felt (and probably looked, too), and it was the first time she realised that using Legilimency must have been as fatiguing and strenuous as attempting to repel it with Occlumency.

The sleep that followed was empty and blissful, for once. Aurora had no dreams or visions of her mother that night, no deafening visions of screams or boiling water or poisons… nothing that would usually wake her frequently and leave her lying there for hours on end gazing up at the drapes hanging from her bed…

And while she knew it was a lucky one-off, and that much more work needed to be done in order for her to repel exact memories and feelings and keep them at bay: just that one night without being forced against her will to revisit her old home, and the guilt of being the one that lead to her mother's death, was more than enough. It had already been more than worth it.