Severus remained perfectly composed as he engaged in a rapid internal battle. He was fighting to select the set of words that could best rectify the situation, though the look on Asha's face did not make him hopeful. She was standing ridged, her jaw locked in place and her eyes blazing like an untameable Fiendfyre.
"Asha... it was just a precaution," he said, his voice steady but sharp, "only to be used in an emergency". He hesitantly raised a hand, looking like he was deciding whether to reach for his wand or grasp hold of her arm. He was treating her with the extreme caution that one would a wild animal; dancing the fine line between scaring and provoking. "It was only with your safety in mind," he implored.
For several agonising moments, the pair were suspended in a venomous, brittle tension. Asha gnawed on her lip as she struggled to breathe through her intense anger. Next second, she hurled the wristwatch at the fireplace. As it whistled past Snape's shoulder, she concentrated the full force of her rage into the small enchanted object. Before the watch even came close to smashing into the flaming coals, it combusted from the inside out. Asha relished in the dissolution of the thick layers of magic Snape had cast on the wretched object.
Severus leapt back and whipped his head around in time to see the watch implode into nothing. A wave of pressure immediately followed, radiating through the dungeon and causing his ears to pop. He grimaced at Asha's fearsome display of magical power. Severus had witnessed it once before at the lake and since then he had conceptually understood the scale of her capabilities. But nothing could have prepared him for experiencing the force of her power up close. He hastily looked back at Asha. She had backed away from him, still glaring at the spot where the watch had vanished.
Asha quickly dropped her outstretched palm and clenched her hands at her sides. Magic was coursing through her veins. Her palms itched with the temptation to disintegrate anything and everything in her vicinity. She fought to control her breathing and cool her head, but bitter, hostile thoughts flooded her mind. Usually the awareness of Snape's hard, stoic demeanour helped her to ground herself. But right now, any thoughts of the man were utterly resentful and sent her into even more of a rampant fury. She could feel her control slipping away. She needed to get out of this airless, cluttered, claustrophobic classroom. Most of all she needed to get away from him.
Using her last ounce of self-restraint, she said icily, "I'm going outside to clear my head". Then she strode for the door. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Snape make a sort of involuntary twitch... like he was considering chasing after her. "And no, I don't need supervision!" she snapped viciously before ripping her coat from its hook.
The air outside was bitter cold, but Asha was too furious to notice. She demolished a path through the knee-deep snow, taking wicked pleasure in kicking through the thick powder instead of lifting her feet up and over the surface.
With every step she took, the energy within her demanded an exit. Whether she knew it or not, Asha had always used magic as a way to vent her emotions. Using both hands, she wandlessly gathered a shovelful of snow and compacted it into a dense sphere. Then, with an aggressive thrust of her arms, she sent it hurtling hundreds of feet across the grounds. One after another her amplified snowballs collided into hills, rocks and trees with satisfying force. She even took extra care to hit the whomping willow, sending it into a swiping frenzy (an act that Asha would later add to her cupboard of regrets; the cupboard that always seemed to spill open just as she was trying to fall sleep). Behind her, the hands on the Clock Tower struck midnight.
It wasn't difficult for Severus to keep his distance as he followed Asha. She was already several hundred feet ahead and ploughing through the snow at a speed that was quite frankly impressive. Even so, he walked very slowly. He was determined to resolve this debacle before night's end, but he needed the hot-headed Hufflepuff to calm down first. He was still struggling to come to terms with the fact that she had somehow sensed magic that was virtually undetectable through the use of a wand.
Before long, Severus realised that instead of tracing her usual path to the lake, Asha was heading towards the Forbidden Forest. He experienced a strong urge to power ahead and catch up with her; to ask what the hell she was doing; to immobilise her so that her safety was certain. But in the end, he resisted, listening to the part of himself that assured him that he could trust her.
As if her feet had a mind of their own, Asha only now realised that she had arrived in the forest clearing where she and Snape had been two nights ago. Despite having arrived at her destination, she couldn't bring herself to stand still. For how long she spent pacing up and down, hands clasped on top of her head, staring unseeingly into the webs of bare branches, she did not know.
When finally her boiling anger cooled to a light simmer, she came to a stop. The absence of her stomping feet left a gaping hole in the orchestra of forest noise and for a moment a stark emptiness fell around her.
Next minute, Asha not so much heard as sensed someone approaching from behind. She spun around, lashing her outstretched arm through the air as she did so. In an instant, the snow between Asha and her disrupter shot up. With a loud crunch, it solidified into a wall of meter-tall spikes. Snape came to an abrupt halt but appeared unbothered by the spears of ice now angled at him threateningly.
As soon as Asha's eyes fell on the man on the other side of her barrier, her desire for isolation and hostility died in her veins.
As her eyes met with his, Severus saw Asha's glare falter. Her irate expression softened with a subtly that only he could pick up on. And with it, the icy stalagmites melted to the ground.
Asha's palm was still raised as her eyes flickered down, only now realising that she had melted the ice. She dropped her hand, holding both arms stiffly at her side and turned her back on Snape.
Severus stepped over the rill of slushy snow Asha had created and approached her, stopping several meters from where she was standing. As she continued to say nothing, he discretely cast a sound barrier around the clearing.
"Your anger is completely justified," Snape said carefully, his deep voice filling the forest's silence to the brim. "I will not tell you that what we did was objectively right, but-"
"We?" Asha interrupted acidly. Of course, she had already figured Dumbledore was involved in this, but the confirmation was still equivalent to a stinging jinx to the face.
"Yes. We," said Snape tersely. "We would have discussed it with you, had we thought you might have agreed."
Asha spun around.
"Oh, you are just asking to be hexed," she growled, fingering her wand in her pocket, though it was an empty threat.
"Everything is a compromise, Asha," he said enunciating each word slowly as if he wanted her to absorb every syllable. "This was a decision made between betraying your trust and increasing our ability to protect you - if and only if an emergency were to occur."
"I made it clear to Dumbledore that I don't want or need protection anymore!" Asha seethed. Her rapid, expressive tone was a jarring contrast to Snape's steady, monotonous one. "And protection from what exactly? What kind of emergency are you thinking is going to occur?"
Once again, Severus found himself in the position of being unable to tell Asha the full truth. Part of him yearned to answer her questions; to gift her the words that would help her to understand; to lessen her pain... but they wouldn't. He couldn't help her.
"I thought we had established that I wasn't about to lose my mind!" Asha continued, her voice rising. "And even if I did... I mean, why are you and Dumbledore so anxious to keep me alive and accounted for? Worst case scenario, I get myself found out and killed and no one cares!" She spread her arm and spun around in emphasis. "This makes my survival my business and my business alone!" She sighed and muttered, "I knew Dumbledore agreeing to leave me alone was too good to be true."
"Is that what he told you last night then? That he would leave you alone?"
"I don't even know why part of me believed him. Why is it so hard for him to just let things be?"
If the situation hadn't been so grim, Severus might have deemed that statement worthy of a wry laugh. "Dumbledore doesn't do 'letting things be'," he said shortly. "Meddling is that man's way of life. He thinks it his duty".
Severus toyed with the idea of telling Asha that the fact Dumbledore wanted to track her did not make her in any way special. There was a reason Albus always knew what was going on within his school. He utilised subtle, complex magic to stay informed with all the goings-on both within Hogwarts and outside it. In fact, Severus was quite sure the headmaster used a very similar charm to keep tabs on Sybill Trelawney.
Asha scuffed the toe of her boot on an iced-over root. Snape was speaking of things that should logically be making her more riled up but instead, she was cooling down. Something about his rich, sliding baritone resonated in the cavity of her chest. It hummed to the frequency of the calm within her. Yet at the same time, she was still deeply angry with him.
Despite the hot rage that coursed through her body, she shivered and let out a frosty breath as she finally noticed the freezing midnight temperature. Snape began to approach her but she turned her back on him and he stopped. His presence was inducing a storm of conflicting emotions within her, like the meeting of two seas. Asha didn't like it.
"I hate that I get so angry," she admitted to him quietly. "Most of it isn't even to do with anyone or anything in particular. I don't know where it comes from or what to do with it."
Perhaps deep down - somewhere she ignored and locked away - Asha knew why she was so angry. Or at least part of the reason. Once again she had grown too close; too trusting. And once again, it had burned her. She had been stabbed with the blade of betrayal. And the realisation that people weren't worth the pain was a crushing sensation that pressed down on her chest. It hurt to the extent that it was safer just to tuck it away. To tuck it away and transform any pain she couldn't escape from into rage. Rage kept people distant. Rage was self-sabotaging and reckless and vicious. Rage was a far safer place than the alternative - a terrifyingly dark, cavernous loneliness.
There was a silence. Snape didn't say anything. The full moon hung in the space between two clouds, bathing the forest in a silvery glow. A smattering of snowflakes swirled down through the canopy above. Asha bit her teeth together to stop them from chattering.
The soft crunch of footsteps told her that Snape was approaching again. This time she let him. He came to a stop behind her. She waited for him to open his mouth and start convincing her of the need for her to be tracked... but he didn't speak.
"Nothing in my life right now warrants this much anger," she whispered, not sure whether she wanted Snape to hear it or not. She could feel him standing behind her.
"Some things do," he said softly. The unexpected richness of his voice caught Asha's attention and she turned around to find him standing much closer than she had expected. Not wanting to look at him, she fixed her eyes on the buttons of his coat.
Her mind drifted to what had been done to her mother; to what had been done to Cole; to the struggles she was being forced to face... alone. As she nodded in acknowledgement of Snape's words, a terrible, bitter sadness swelled inside of her, threatening to swallow her whole. It was unbearable. She closed her eyes and bit down hard on her cheek until a metallic tang tickled her taste buds. Her drowning mind snapped to attention, honing in on the sharp sensation of pain and she was pulled out of her bottomless pit of anguish.
For once Severus felt he could tell where Asha's mind lay. Something distant stirred within him. He shut it out and turned his focus to what was in front of him. He wasn't so much looking at Asha's tightly shut eyes, but at the fine snowflakes that clung to the tips of her eyelashes. Even in the silvery light of the moon, her cheeks were pink from the cold. The shiver that reverberated through her reminded Severus why he was standing so close to her in the first place. Slowly, he withdrew his wand from inside his jacket and gently touched its tip to her coat.
Asha's eyes sprung open. A soft golden light flowed from Snape's wand as he recited a heating charm in a soft, velvety murmur. Over the space of a few seconds, her coat became a cocoon of warmth. She lifted her gazed to the eyes of the man before her and despite the flood of heat, a tingle ran the length of her spine. No... said a tiny voice, not alone... not completely.
All within the space of a heartbeat, Asha experienced a sudden, overwhelming urge to close the remaining distance between her and Snape. She wanted to press her head against his chest and hold on to him for dear life. Then, in an instant, the beat had passed and Snape took several steps back, returning to the slightly-further-than-normal distance he liked to maintain between himself and others.
"Thanks," said Asha, her voice almost a whisper.
"I won't apologise to you," he said bluntly, causing Asha to snap back to reality, "because if I were truly sorry, I wouldn't have done it in the first place. However, I am sorry that you found out."
"Nice," she replied dryly. Now it was her turn to be blunt. "I'm not okay with being tracked."
Severus laced his fingers together and ran through his options. A stare-down ensued between the pair until he finally conceded defeat. "Understood."
"Good." Asha was still sceptical but there was nothing more she could do. Snape broke eye contact and scanned the clearing.
"Why did you come back here?" he asked, sounding slightly amused.
"I don't know," Asha admitted, "part of me was probably hoping to run into Bane so I could drop a hefty branch on his head."
"In that case, it's fortunate for everyone involved that he didn't dare show his face this time around," Snape drawled, straightening the hem of his sleave.
A creature rustled in the branches of a nearby tree.
"God, Albus is such a fucking hypocrite!" Asha blurted out, stepping past Snape and starting up her pacing again. "Last night he went on for ages about how important it is for me to 'cultivate my identity' and 'embrace my status as an equally independent adult'. And after all that, he tries to secretly track my every movement!"
Severus frowned. Albus hadn't discussed this particular line of thought with him. "And how does he suggest you embrace your identity while not revealing it?" he asked, doubtful that such a thing was really possible.
Asha stopped pacing and sighed. "He wants me to use your first names," she explained scornfully, "as if that's going to change anything!"
Snape's face went blank. Asha misinterpreted this as the potions master feigning confusion. She rolled her eyes at him.
"He thinks I should call you Severus."
Upon hearing his first name flow from Asha's lips, Severus experienced a twisting discomfort. There was a long pause. Asha folded her arms and rocked back and forth between her heels and the balls of her feet.
"Yup," she said into the uncomfortable silence, emphasising the 'p'. She noted that for the first time that evening, Snape was looking tense. "Obviously only when in private," she added off-handedly.
While it would've been easy for her to back down and say Dumbledore's idea was stupid, the ambitious part of her got a kick out of the idea that she could be one of the few in the castle who could call Snape by his first name. Snape, on the other hand, seemed like he'd never wanted anything less.
"Fine," he said eventually in that classic cold tone of his. Asha stopped rocking, somewhat surprised by his answer. Perhaps he was just Dumbledore's pet, she thought ruthlessly - not all of her anger at him had faded after all.
More than ready to change the subject, Severus brought up something he had been dying to ask Asha all evening.
"What I don't understand, is that the enchantments on that watch should have been extremely hard to detect. I don't understand how you just felt it."
"Yes, that is weird," Asha admitted, brushing the snow out of her hair. "I didn't realise other people couldn't sense magic like that."
For the next half an hour, she and Severus discussed the nature of her strange perception of magic. As they talked, they walked. Both with their hands tucked snuggly into their heated pockets, they found themselves wandering along the lakeshore.
Asha explained that 'the feeling of magic' was how she and her brother first came to understand and use it. Severus found the whole thing infinitely fascinating. What she was saying contradicted a lot of what he previously thought he knew of the nature of magic and he quickly began formulating new theories. He provided an endless stream of questions and for once Asha was happy to answer them.
"I mean, I feel it everywhere, constantly fluctuating," she said, more animated than usual. "My first few weeks at Hogwarts were hazy, but I still remember how insane the shift was from the Muggle world; always passing under powerful protective wards; the pulse of energy as hundreds of dishes transport up to the Great Hall; the paintings; the suits of armour; the brooms! Wow, there's a lot of magic embedded in brooms!"
Severus half smirked, finding Asha's enthusiasm for the fundamentals of magic both entertaining and endearing.
The glassy lake waters gave off a mirror-like reflection of the full moon, bathing his and Asha's moving forms in a low-angled, shimmering light. The clouds finally dispersed to reveal a sky dense with stars. In the distance, moored beside the immense silhouette of the castle, they could see the proud Durmstrang ship, its red flags hanging limp in the still air.
"The fact that potions tend to grow in magic synergetically as you brew them is by far the most interesting part of your class," Asha teased. She glanced sideways to see if she had succeeded in getting some sort of reaction out of Snape. She had... but not the kind she had hoped for.
"Really?" he hummed thoughtfully, more to himself. A deep crease ran between his eyebrows as his mind drifted away to a new set of ruminations. Asha bit back a smile.
When the pair eventually reached the closest they dared get to the Durmstrang ship, they came to a gentle stop. Asha was keen to stay outside a little longer to experiment. Severus was extremely interested to see more of her abilities in action but he knew now was not the time to hover over her. She needed space and to get a taste of the independence that she clearly craved.
They bid each other goodnight and as Severus strode back to the castle, he couldn't quite believe his luck. It seemed that for the most part, Asha had already put the tracking charm issue behind her... though with her he could never be certain. Still, this was surely the best outcome he could have hoped for.
He cut through deep snow until he intercepted the channel Asha had so conveniently carved. All the way back to his chambers, Severus felt an irritating, tugging temptation to turn around.
A/N: More than 5% of my readers are from the Philippines. I can't even begin to wrap my head around the devastation happening over there. My heart goes out to you and the people of your country. The community here on Wattpad is always here to listen, love and support you in any way we can. My DMs are always open ❤️
EDIT: No updates this week cause I've been sick ️ but I'll see you back here Tuesday!
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