Lamentations of a Starry-Eyed Twit
The Confessions of Auriga Sinistra
Author's Note: Okay, it's not exactly three updates in a week, but still. I will get better at this updating thing!
Also, I've got a question for you guys.
I'm getting kind of tempted to let more time elapse between Auriga's entries, rather than chronicling, oh, every single day. After Christmas, the plot of Sorcerer's Stone doesn't really get rolling again until February, and I'm not really sure how I'm going to fill all that time, and honestly, it'd probably make for an extra fifteen chapters. And I really, really want to get to Chamber of Secrets someday before I die. For therein lies Gilderoy.
So, would this upset anyone terribly or anything? Let me know!
-Part 23-
Tuesday, December 24, 1991
Teacher's Lounge
11:40 A.M.
This is unnatural.
Let's take a moment to review, shall we?
Yesterday was altogether enormously surreal in its strangeness. You know, what with the random chivalrous acts of ex-boyfriends and my mother's bizarrely low degree of unadulterated evil and that hardly important but admittedly faintly strange part with the kissing of Snape. Even my life, which tends to love showing off how enormously-surreal-in-strangeness it can occasionally be, doesn't usually go that far. Not to mention that the majority of my colleagues witnessed the last part. One would think they'd all be tempted to comment upon it, or at least to stop chattering at once and look appropriately guilty when I enter a room.
Instead – nothing.
And I mean nothing to the nothingest degree. My mother hasn't said anything about it. And that's not just because I've been avoiding her like mad, either! Avoiding my mother is impossible if she wants to talk to you. After approximately twelve frenzied minutes contemplating how difficult it would be to change my name and flee to Albania, I resigned myself to this fact. I was well on my way to embracing my doom when she ambled on in here, peaceful as you please, and went, "My goodness, Auriga, did you even bother to brush your hair this morning?"
(Which I did, thank you very much.)
I just sort of stared back, dumbfounded, until she apparently got tired of waiting for some sort of coherent response. "All right, then: it appears you really are useless without a grotesque amount of caffeine in your system."
She then poured me another cup of coffee, inspected a lock of my hair for a few seconds before sighing in defeat, and ambled right back on out.
Let me tell you, Notebook, I was almost tempted to yell after her, "Remember yesterday's rather indecent snogging session with our resident overgrown vampire bat?"
I managed to refrain.
Mostly because I hadn't yet quite gained back the power of speech.
But whether I yelled after her or not isn't the point, Notebook. Not in the slightest. The point is that she's plotting something here – she must be – and what's more, it's something bigger than I could've ever imagined. She's going to lull me into a false sense of security and strike when I expect it least! She's going to wait until the second I'm off my guard, and then, oh, then . . . then she's going to destroy me.
That is, if Quirrell doesn't beat her to it.
The gift exchange is set to take place in twenty minutes. I've got the collar wrapped up in some rather jolly wrapping paper with little reindeer all over it. There's even matching ribbon, and a few tiny jingle bells, just in case. I happen to think it's perfectly light-hearted and festive, and not the sort of thing you'd give to someone who could potentially kill you.
Hopefully, he'll also happen to think this.
Jingle bells don't give off any sort of "I know you're evil and I'm onto you, mister!" air, do they?
They do sound sort of sinister. You know, in the same way that little girls singing together can sometimes. Their innocence is so merry and unquestionable that when you stop to consider it, you realize precisely how suspect it is! How could anything be as merrily and unquestionably innocent as jingle bells? It's just not possible! And Quirrell, being as familiar with all things dark and deadly as he is, is sure to figure it out in approximately half a second! And if there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that that's not even close to a sufficient head start, assuming I need to run for my life.
All right. Perhaps I'll get rid of the jingle bells.
Just in case.
Bedroom Quarters
1:09 P.M.
Well. That wasn't exactly as traumatic as I'd anticipated. I am, indeed, still alive, and uninjured as well, save for a rather sore shoulder (courtesy of Snape brushing past me so brutally on the way out that I slammed into the doorframe).
I was right in the middle of confiscating the jingle bells when Trelawney sort of drifted in. She was quite abnormally smiley, and the first thing she said was a rather contentedly vague, "Auriga! Do you hear that?"
(Ah, the Christmas sherry. Which, from what I've observed, has very much the same effect as the regular sherry.)
Because the pressure was rather on and I'm pretty sure we've established that I don't work so well under it, I dropped the bells into my coffee mug. "Hear what?"
"That little jingling noise!" Trelawney persisted.
"Nope, 'fraid not." And then, thanks to a stroke of brilliance – "Perhaps it was your bracelets."
Which I happen to think should have been enough to shut her up. After all, when one wears forty-two bangle bracelets on a daily basis, they hardly have the right to remark upon any slightly suspicious jingling noises!
Trelawney, of course, spends far too much time around incense to be able to draw such a basic conclusion.
"I don't think so, my dear," she said, in this rather infuriatingly all-knowing way that reminded me a bit of how my mother might be were she to get drunk (which she never, ever would). "In fact, I suspect I've found an explanation to this baffling little matter!"
I made sure to hold my mug very still. "And what might that be?"
(To maintain this degree of secrecy with Trelawney was, of course, a little unnecessary. Honestly, I just didn't want to have to suffer through explaining precisely why I had taken the jingle bells off of Quirrell's Christmas gift and put them into my coffee. Batty as she is, I don't think she'd have bought that they added flavour.)
"Clearly," Trelawney said, her eyes widening to the point where, through her glasses, they looked at least three times the size one would expect eyes to be, "it is the work of the Inner Eye! It's quite busy, you know," she added rather confidentially. "Refuses to even take a rest on Christmas, the poor dear!"
Stupid sherry.
"Isn't the Inner Eye more inclined toward . . . seeing things?" I ventured rather weakly.
"You'd think that, wouldn't you?" Trelawney asked, in this tone of bizarrely jubilant triumph.
"Er," I replied, but was thankfully saved from getting sucked any deeper into the conversation by the very welcome entrances of Flitwick and McGonagall. Trelawney started babbling to McGonagall then, and I couldn't manage feeling anything other than relief. It's the tiniest bit achingly obvious that Trelawney drives McGonagall out of her mind, but honestly – if anyone can handle Inner Eyes with the power of hearing, it's Minerva McGonagall. By the time everyone had arrived, she was in full-on sardonic response mode.
When Snape came in, he immediately made his way toward the darkest corner in the room and stood there, glowering with his arms crossed in front of his chest. Normally, of course, I'd feel obligated to scowl at what an antisocial bastard he was being, but the second I caught sight of him I found myself a bit unfortunately overwhelmed by . . . certain memories. Yesterday-type memories. Not because it had been all that incredible, or any nonsense like that. Just because it's the sort of thing that you can't help but remember. It's not as though it was just because it was Snape and he'd kissed me that I felt a little awkward! If anyone had kissed me in such a spontaneous and savage (er, in a bad way) manner, I probably wouldn't be able to bring myself to make eye contact with them. If Flitwick, for example, randomly pulled me into a fiery and electric embrace in front of the majority of our colleagues, I'm not so sure I'd be on the best of terms with him, either.
(Probably because I would have, more likely than not, managed to crush him to death somehow.)
So, yes.
In conclusion, I did not look at Snape.
Anyhow!
Quirrell was the last to come in, and he was looking a bit pale and under the weather. Being Voldemort's devoted servant must get a bit exhausting, I'd expect. What with all the being evil, and such. Not to mention that Herman seems like he'd certainly be a difficult pet to maintain.
So, unlike Snape, I looked at Quirrell and smiled at him. I heard (yes, heard – Trelawney's not the only one with bizarre abilities in that department) Snape scowling behind me, and that sent me into a bit of a panic. I'd felt like I'd been rather smooth and competent and not at all coming off like someone perfectly aware of every dark and twisted secret nested within Slatero Quirrell's blackening soul, but really, who knows? I'm not the best judge of that sort of thing.
But then Quirrell just smiled back (well, it was more like a spastic mouth twitch) and sank down into a chair.
As could be expected, Dumbledore was absolutely jubilant throughout the whole affair. He didn't seem the slightest bit discouraged by the fact that Kettleburn gave him a few rather hefty books, or the fact that McGonagall's strained smile took on a decidedly homicidal glint when Trelawney presented her with a paperback entitled Actualizing Your Aura – Combating Natural Ineptitude toward the Fine Art of Divination. Having Dumbledore there was actually quite reassuring: I realized about fifteen minutes in that it seemed very unlikely that Quirrell would get wrathful and murderous with the greatest wizard of all time present.
Of course, for all his greatest-wizard-of-all-time-ness, he didn't exactly look like he was planning on doing anything about McGonagall's homicidal glint, but I don't think that's quite the same.
Anyway, I sort of hovered around in the background and waited to give Quirrell his gift. He didn't seem to mind; in fact, he looked like he'd sunk into a bit of an exhausted stupor. This worked in my favour, as it gave me time to actually build up a bit of nerve. What finally drove me to do it was casting a quick, non-kiss-thought-accompanied glance Snape's direction only to find him smirking at me in that timeless 'you ridiculous cowardly woman' way. The smirk disappeared as soon as it registered that I was looking at him, immediately replaced by the most disgusted of scowls. But the fact was that the smirk had been there, and that was enough for me.
Almost in awe of my own daring, I made my way on over to Quirrell, tapped him on the shoulder, and handed him the gift. "Happy Christmas, Slatero."
"H – how nice," he said, and smiled at me. "R – reindeer!"
He set it down on the table and balanced his chin on his hand, continuing to stare rather dazedly into space.
Which was rather rude, if you ask me.
"Slatero?"
He jumped slightly and turned to look at me, eyes wide. "What?"
"Are you going to open it?" I prodded gently.
"Ah! Y—y—yes, of c—course." He made a rather miserable attempt at a smile before reaching for the gift. He performed perhaps the most meticulous unwrapping of anything I've ever witnessed in my whole life (no small feat, considering the number of gift-worthy occasions I have spent in my mother's company). It didn't do much to soothe my nerves, Notebook, I'll tell you that much. Admittedly, the man didn't seem particularly interested in the situation, but that didn't mean that tension didn't build many times over in the seven and a half minutes it took him to remove the wrapping paper. Finally, he made it to the box I'd put the collar in.
He began to look up at me, most likely in a H-how nice, a b-box! kind of way.
"Open it," I suggested, with as warm a smile as I could manage.
"O—of c—course."
He opened the box, and the collar was revealed at last. He sort of stared down at in silence for a few seconds, then looked up and offered me another utterly desolate smile.
"T—thank you."
And something about his reaction just made the entire situation so thoroughly awkward. I'd always thought it was rather self-explanatory, but really! Consider it objectively – a woman gives you a collar for Christmas. And he hadn't been considerate enough to say anything like "Herman w—will love it!" or "It's j-just his colour" – oh, no! And so I couldn't help but suspect, at least a little bit, that perhaps he hadn't even considered that it might have been for Herman.
Which subsequently just rendered it disturbing.
"It's not for you," I informed him quickly.
He blinked up at me in mild surprise. "W—what?"
"It's for Herman," I added, and gave him the jolliest grin I could muster. "To wear."
"Ah," Quirrell said, "How – how n—nice."
"Right," I agreed brightly. "Nice!"
He slumped down over the table again, staring at nothing.
And that, Notebook, was essentially the end of that.
Although it's stupid, I couldn't help but feel a little . .. well, disappointed. It's just that . . . I suffered quite a lot throughout the process of selecting that gift – I treated it as matter of life or death, thank you very much, and he didn't even have the decency to acknowledge he understood that it was for his iguana!
Hmph.
Men.
Even the evil mastermind-type ones are completely clueless.
Thankfully, fate decided to do a little something wonderful to ease the pain.
"Oh, Severus, you doll!"
I glanced over just in time to see Professor Trelawney throw the scarf I'd picked out around her neck and start grasping rather desperately for a sprig of mistletoe that had been used to decorate one of the gifts and afterwards left on the table.
"Professor Trelawney, your enthusiasm is unnecessa—"
Snape was stunned into silence, through, by the rather enthusiastic (not to mention lengthy) kiss she pressed against his cheek.
"As of late, I've found myself yearning for a new scarf!" Trelawney announced after she pulled away, gazing delightedly up at him. "I think this suggests quite the connection, don't you?"
"No." (Twitch.)
"Nonsense! Severus, your heart may be hardened and cold, but I sense the passionate soul which lingers within! However hard you might attempt to hide," she concluded, not without a rather horrifying amount of coquetry, "my Inner Eye shall always see you!"
Destiny du Maurier would have been proud.
Snape, however, was not particularly impressed. On the contrary, he forced perhaps the most disgusted smile of all time before transitioning into full-on angry bat mode and beginning to swoop toward the door when—
"Severus! Surely you won't leave us and put such a grievous damper upon our festivities," Dumbledore called, perfectly agreeable, from where he stood.
Snape stopped, took a few very deep breaths, and then turned to return to his corner of solitude and general unpleasantness.
"After all," I couldn't resist muttering as he stormed past me, "it's not as though you're in the position to berate someone for observing that particular tradition, now, is it?"
I'm not sure I can begin to understand how one might accidentally crush another person's foot beneath their own when the poor victim foot is completely under the table and therefore technically unreachable. Somehow, oh-so-surprisingly enough, Snape managed it.
Bastard.
Anyhow, save for my poor, suffering foot, the rest of the event went rather well. Hagrid came in around halfway through, apologized for being late, and promptly came over to me. Now, I love Hagrid. I do. He's terribly sweet, and is the only person I've ever met who is capable of making McGonagall giggle. That is nothing if not impressive.
But the thing is, I couldn't quite bring myself to expect the best gift from him. I was expecting some sort of tooth-breaking pastry, or perhaps a baby Niffler.
So by the time he came over, grinning broadly, I was already entering accept-graciously-and-never-stop-smiling mode.
"Auriga," he said, beaming as he handed it to me. "Happy holidays."
"You too, Hagrid. Thank you!"
"I think yer really goin' ter love it," he threw in excitedly, making me feel quite profoundly terrible about myself. Smile pasted on, I pulled off the paper to find—
A book.
But not only a book: a gorgeous leather-bound copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets with a beautifully designed cover and gilded pages.
I stared at Hagrid, rather bemused.
"Whaddya think?" he asked, clearly pleased by the six thousand degrees of awe that had passed over my face.
"Hagrid, it's beautiful!" And then, because I couldn't help being slightly curious, "I didn't think you even knew I liked Shakespeare."
"Well, I didn'," Hagrid admitted. "But – er, a lil' bird let me in on it."
He cast a rather sly look in the direction of the corner of solitude and general unpleasantness, and then got called away by Dumbledore and McGonagall.
"You enjoy," Hagrid said rather furtively, winking at me before taking off.
And, well.
The rational assumption would be that Snape told him what to get me.
But . . .
No. Just no. I will not allow my mind to venture there.
And besides, when we finally all broke up the festivities, he made such a display of being eager to leave and never return that he sort of slammed up against me as he was trying to get out the door.
Although not in a sexy way.
I don't think.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say he's practically abusive.
No amount of pretty Shakespeare can make up for that.
1:25 P.M.
Well . . . maybe if Much Ado About Nothing somehow factored into the equation.
But as it doesn't, we will just leave it at 'abusive.'
Bedroom Quarters
5:49 P.M.
All right, I suppose I should have given Wimmy a few pointers concerning how to act about my mother.
Prancing around my room in a Santa hat while straightening up and crooning out Santa Baby far more suggestively than any Christmas song should be approached? Perhaps the kind of thing I should have warned him against.
"Auriga," my mother said, most elegantly disgusted as soon as I came in, "perhaps you should request another house elf."
"What do you mean?"
"Been an awful good girl, Santa Baby!" came the voice of ultimate squeaky seduction from the bathroom. "So hurry down the chimney tonight!"
My mother arched a perfect eyebrow at me.
"Oh, don't worry," I said, as nonchalantly as I could. "Wimmy's all talk. He doesn't actually, you know, want Santa to hurry down his chimney."
My mother cleared her throat pointedly.
"He's just spreading holiday cheer," I informed her, in as rational a tone as one can possibly use to defend a morally questionable house elf. "That's all."
"Think of all the fun I've missed!" Wimmy contributed not-so-helpfully from the bathroom. "Think of all the fellas that I haven't kissed!"
"This seems like vastly inappropriate behaviour for a house elf," my mother remarked coolly. "Of course, I could very well be out of the loop about such things, but from what I recall, they consider it the gravest misconduct to so much as make their presence known to their masters."
"Dumbledore's a bit . . . lenient with the ones at Hogwarts."
("Santa baby!")
"And besides," I couldn't help pointing out, "you can't see him."
This, apparently, was not satisfactory.
"Perhaps I'll mention this to Albus," my mother went on, gazing rather formidably in the direction of the bathroom. "It doesn't seem remotely appropriate."
"Mum--"
"Hurry toni-ight!"
Hmph.
If she loses me my house elf, she will pay. The woman can only go so far.
5:56 P.M.
Why hasn't she brought up the Snape snogging yet?
Astronomy Tower
6:09 P.M.
The Weasley twins have spent the majority of the afternoon following me around making over-exaggerated kissing noises, then leaping behind suits of armor or into empty classrooms whenever I turn around.
How is one supposed to respond to this sort of thing in a mature and teacher-ly manner?
They'd better be doing it to Snape, too. The whole stupid situation is his fault, after all.
Of course, his version of responding in a mature and teacher-ly manner probably involves a few Unforgivable Curses, or at least a dark, dank dungeon where no one can hear you scream.
6:11 P.M.
How is it again that he is an educator of children?
Albus Dumbledore is truly bonkers.
9:42 P.M.
Christmas Eve really is rather lonely when you've no one to spend it with. Even my mother is off having charming intellectual conversations with McGonagall, thus abandoning her own daughter whom she allegedly came here to spend all of her time with!
Thank God for McGonagall.
I suppose I could go down to the dungeons and see Snape - he was considerate enough to make a point of sneering at me all through supper - but somehow the idea of being around him without anyone else around just seems . . . unwise.
After all, they call him Sporadic Angry Kissing Attacks Man for a reason!
9:44 P.M.
Fine. I call him Sporadic Angry Kissing Attacks Man for a reason.
Whatever.
10:01 P.M.
I cannot shake the feeling that I would be much happier if I could just go back to my room and have Wimmy serenade me with the complete collection of vaguely naughty Christmas songs. (I somehow sense he does a mean rendition of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.) Knowing my luck, however, he'll have dipped into the eggnog, and will allow his drunken, tiny house elf hands to wander to very inappropriate places the precise moment my mother comes in.
No thank you.
10:11 P.M.
Bah humbug.
Wednesday, December 25, 1991
Bedroom Quarters
3:49 A.M.
Exactly one hour and forty-three minutes ago, the door to my room burst open.
I didn't happen to notice this, on account of the fact that I was asleep. Which, I suppose, does not bode well for me, should I ever become the target of some menacing merciless night-attacking evil or something. Thankfully, this was not the case this time around.
Instead, I rather groggily found myself being shaken awake by--
Victoria Vector.
Now, the first thing that came to mind was that I was dreaming, and would have yet another opportunity to give the Victoria of my subconscious a rather scathing and eloquently phrased piece of my mind. This theory, however, was promptly laid to rest when I glanced over and saw my mother fast asleep in the other bed that's been moved here for her stay. In no way would a dream so delightful that it involved shouting at Victoria exist in the nightmarish realm where my mother resides.
And so as it was, I found myself staring at her in rather irritated bewilderment. "Victoria, what th' hell're you--"
"I'm sorry," she interrupted rather awkwardly. There are few things I've seen as wrong as an apology coming out of her mouth.
"What?"
"I'm sorry," she said again, this time with this rather rushed sense of urgency. "So sorry. I had no right to look at your diary and no right to interfere with Snape and Algernon and it was stupid of me to never really consider what it would do. I don't tend to consider things, you know -- if an idea comes to me and it seems like it'll work, then I generally tend to think it will work, which is just the sort of way that you start thinking when you've spent your whole life being spoiled and pretty and used to everything going exactly as you'd like it to because everyone tends to fall at your feet all the time."
She seemed to realize right here that she was going off-track a little. Fortunately for her, I was so bleary-eyed and generally disoriented that I couldn't quite manage any sort of ultimate glare of death.
"But that's not the point, of course that's not the point," Victoria said, shaking her head slightly as though doing so would help her remember the point. "It's just that I'm sorry, and I had no right to do that to you, and I know that you must hate me sometimes because everything in my life is so perfect and you've always got all this awful stuff happening, and I know it must seem like I think it's all a big joke, but I just . . ." She took a deep breath and sank down onto the foot of the bed. "I don't know how to be reassuring. I don't know how to make people feel better. And I realize it's no excuse for treating you so terribly; I've been wretched and it's been eating me up over the past month because I miss you and I know how wrong I was." She smiled in a weak, emotionally vulnerable sort of way that would have probably sent any male in the castle into raptures had they witnessed it. "You're the best friend I've ever had."
After all that, I had finally managed to regain the power of speech. Sort of.
"Aren't you s'posed to be in Paris?"
"I couldn't stay," she confessed. "It's exhausting being surrounded by the soulless and sophisticated. I'd rather be here."
Which was, of course, quite the blow to the non-sophisticated inhabitants of Hogwarts, but I let it slide as she genuinely didn't seem to notice.
"What about your fiancé?"
"He'll live," she said, rolling her eyes good-naturedly. And then, with a rather anxious smile -- "So, um, in the spirit of the season . . . forgive me?"
I paused for quite the satisfyingly long amount of time, trying to look as though I was offering the matter utmost contemplation, before sighing heavily. "Oh, fine."
She threw her arms around me in a most un-refined, un-Victoria sort of way and started laughing, all relieved. "Thank God. I thought I was going to have to make friends with Trelawney for the rest of my career--"
My mother chose that moment to let out a rather light, graceful moan and shifted slightly in her sleep.
"Oh, God," Victoria said, breaking away from me and staring in faintly awed disbelief. "Is that . . .?"
"Yep."
"She's here?"
"Uh huh."
"Oh, you poor thing," Victoria said, frowning sympathetically. "You want to go see if we can coax mind-numbing amounts of butterbeer out of the house elves?"
"Butterbeer isn't mind-numbing," I protested.
"Obviously, you've never seen yourself under the influence," she said, smirking.
And so we set off on our way downstairs, and for the first time, I found myself not particularly caring that I was in pajamas with frightful hair while she was still in her traveling cloak looking utterly flawless. Honestly, it didn't seem particularly important.
A thought dawned on me as we were halfway across the corridor.
"Speaking of house elves," I said, "what did you have to do to get Wimmy to let you in my room?"
She smiled rather deviously, and I decided that I was far better off not knowing.
I've just gotten back upstairs, all pleasantly warm and fuzzy courtesy of butterbeer and mended friendship, and d'you know, I can't help suspecting that maybe this whole holiday thing might not be so bad after all.
Happy Christmas, Notebook.