Title: Atonement, Chapter 5
By: PepperjackCandy
Rating: PG13
Disclaimer: You recognize it? It's J.K. Rowling's. All I own is Alex Farrell.

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Snape went to Sprout's offices, but she wasn't there. "You might try the greenhouses." The portrait in front of Sprout's door informed him. So, he headed for the greenhouses.

Snape paused on the threshold of the castle, anticipation fluttering in his stomach at the idea of exposing himself to whoever had apparently attacked him the previous day. Well, it's been a nice life. He took a deep breath to steel himself and stepped outside.

He made it safely down from the entrance to the main path, then to the path that led back towards the greenhouses. Maybe it is all a mistake, he began to think as he gained confidence, maybe it was just an accident. It's not impossible for a ewer-plant to rupture, just because it's never happened before . . .

Nevertheless, he was relieved when he reached the greenhouses. He stepped into the first one, where Sprout kept her plant dissection table. "Sprout!" He called out, causing some of the mandrakes to squirm in irritation.

"Shh!" Sprout admonished him as she came back into the room, a small pair of glasses perched on her nose. "I just stepped into the darkroom for a second to try another test. You didn't need to yell."

"So?" He snapped, nerves making him testier than usual. "What have you found out?"

"You should know, Snape," Sprout said calmly, "these tests are a matter of *ex*clusion, not *in*clusion. Once I've eliminated most of the major possibilities, we'll see what we have left."

Damn Hufflepuffs. 'Hufflepuffs are true and unafraid of toil,' he snorted, What the Sorting Hat *should* say is that Hufflepuffs are so damned detail-oriented, they'd drive anyone insane. He thought. "So, what have you eliminated so far?"

"Well, I've conclusively eliminated any kind of natural aging or deterioration process." Sprout paused as she looked at her sheets of notes.

"And? Is that all? All this time, and you've only determined that the ewer-plant didn't naturally rupture? We knew that from the beginning!"

Sprout took the glasses off and held them up to inspect them, wiping at a spot. "I'm not a first-year that you can intimidate, Snape. Yes, that's all I have been able to determine. These things take time. You will know what I find out once I've found it out."

He stared at her.

"Do you have anything else to ask, Snape?"

His lips tightened. "No. That will do. Thank you." He said tersely as he walked out of the greenhouse.

I can't believe that . . . Snape fumed as he walked back towards the castle. Three hours, and all she can show is . . .

"Professor Snape!" He heard a woman's voice call out.

He looked and saw Alex walking towards him, a trunk levitating in front of her. He waited for her to catch up to him and they walked into the castle together. "I took your advice." She told him, her voice ringing in the entryway.

"Oh?" He was confused, then remembered. "Oh! About the butterbeer!"

She nodded, suddenly a little nervous. "Only . . . I took the liberty of," she paused, "bringing one to you. It's in the trunk. They're in the trunk, actually. I brought mine with me, too.

"We're almost up to my apartments, so I'll just drop this in there and then you can have your butterbeer?"

He nodded silently.

They walked the rest of the way to Alex's apartments in silence, and then she dropped off her trunk, opening it up and taking out the butterbeers. She looked around. "Much better." She sighed, looking at the assortment of furniture that had been moved in while she was in Hogsmeade. "Alastor Moody's furniture was still here when I moved in."

Snape's eyes widened as he took one of the butterbeers from her. "I can't imagine . . .."

"It wasn't that bad. Uncomfortable, but not masochistic or anything." She responded with a smile.

Snape left the room with his butterbeer, and Alex followed him. He looked at her curiously, wondering why she was leaving her apartments.

"I'm not ready to be cooped up inside yet. I figured I'd take this up to the Astronomy tower. You're welcome to join me." She offered, fully expecting him to refuse.

She was surprised when he said, "I think I'd like that."

Together, they walked the rest of the way to the Astronomy Tower, Alex babbling about the purchases she'd made in Hogsmeade. Finally, they reached the open room at the top of the Tower.

Snape put his butterbeer down, tapping it with his wand. "Aperte!" he called out softly, and with a soft, sucking sound, the seal disappeared.

Alex stood by holding her wand nervously in her hand. Snape looked curiously from Alex to the still-sealed mug. "Would you like me to . . .?"

She looked at him, relief in her eyes. "Would you?"

Snape nodded. "Aperte!" he repeated, and the seal disappeared from Alex's mug as well.

They sat down on the floor of the room, which left just the tops of their heads above the wall around it, so the wind wiffled through Alex's hair as they sat there, sipping at their butterbeers.

"It's good to see that you're not letting fear keep you indoors. Too many crime victims do that." Alex said.

Snape's eyes widened as he swallowed a gulp of his drink. "Actually, I did. For most of the day. But I needed to find out what, if anything, Sprout had figured out about the ewer-plant."

"And?"

He snorted. "Nothing. All she'd been able to find out was that it *wasn't* natural."

"That's not bad. Eliminating all of the possible natural causes in only," she checked her watch, mentally calculating the amount of time between breakfast and Astronomy Tower. "Three hours."

"'Only'?" he quoted back to her.

"What? You were expecting a faster turnaround time from forensics?" She laughed. "I could tell you stories that'd turn your hair white. In one gunshot case we worked on, they spent three hours trying to figure out what the gloves the shooter'd been wearing were made of.

"I wouldn't expect anything definite from her earlier than noon tomorrow."

She paused. "Professor Snape?"

"Yes?"

"I wanted to talk to you about something this morning, but the whole ewer-plant investigation just knocked it right from my mind."

He switched position slightly. "Oh?"

"I was up here last night, while I couldn't sleep, and I saw you coming out of the castle. And I followed you."

She could see suspicion in his eyes. "Why'd you do that?"

She shrugged. "I couldn't sleep." Knowing that wasn't the whole reason, she continued. "And I used to be a police officer. I'm just sort of nosy that way."

This is what she'd feared. That whatever it was that had made him so mistrustful would make him angry at her when she told him. "And so you chose to skulk around in the darkness, not even letting me know you were there?" He yelled.

Instinct taking over, she yelled back. "By the time I got downstairs, you'd disappeared. I couldn't very well walk off into the Forest yelling, 'Oi! Snape! Where are you?' now, could I?"

"So what did you do instead?" He snapped.

"I walked to the edge of the Forest, and I could hear your voice, so I followed it."

"And then what happened?" He asked without inflection.

"I saw you. Talking. With a centaur." Then she pushed the rest out in a rush. "And he saw me, and looked right. At. Me. And I heard a voice in my head telling me to leave, because *you* wouldn't like to know that I'd followed you."

"So you left?"

She nodded.

"Because you didn't want me to be angry with you for following me."

"Right."

"Then why are you telling me this?"

"Because I need to tell you the truth." She said simply.

He was silent for a long time, then, and when he picked up the butterbeer mug, she thought that he was going to walk away and she'd lose the closest thing to a friend she'd found so far at Hogwarts. Instead, though, he took a sip and put it back down.

"You know." He said. "I wish I'd been able to do what was right simply because it was right. My life would have been a whole lot simpler." He didn't add what was in his mind, which was that he wouldn't be sitting in the Astronomy Tower drinking butterbeer with the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher in that other, simpler, life. He'd be living a quiet life in the country, married to his first love, in that other life.

But his nightmare of the night before reminded him of the things he'd done in spite of the fact that they were wrong, so he broke his silence again. "And some of the things I've done in my life would, as you put it, turn your hair white. So I can't very well hold you following me against you, either." He sipped his butterbeer again with an air of finality, as if his speech solved everything.

Alex watched him uneasily for a while, then, but he seemed to be true to his word that he wasn't holding it against her.

"So," he said after another pull on his butterbeer, "what else did you do while you were in Hogsmeade?"

Soon after they'd finished their butterbeers, they parted, and Alex went to start putting her apartments together. Realizing that she didn't have a hammer and nails, she forewent the Muggle way of attaching her art prints to the wall in favor of using a gluing spell she'd learned in wizarding school.

She also put out a frame with the first wizarding photograph she'd ever made - of her parents and her best friend from wizarding school. They smiled and waved at her as she placed it on the mantel above the fireplace.

She laid an afghan her aunt had crocheted for her on the end of the bed - which was easily big enough for two people, and put a throw pillow needlepointed by her mother at the head of the bed.

She took out a selection of her favorite Muggle novels from her trunk and set them up on the mantel next to the photo of her parents. Then she selected one, and moved to the overstuffed couch that Filch had put under her window to read until it was time to get ready for supper.

Snape left the Astronomy Tower and went directly to his office in the dungeons. He picked up the potions book he'd been paging through the night before, continuing his search for a sleeping draught. I need this more than ever now, he thought, why, suddenly, is this all coming back to me? Why am I remembering her? Why now?

He lost track of time as he frantically searched for something, anything, that would give him a night's peaceful sleep, to help him hold those memories at bay.

Then he found it. He read it through once, twice, exultation running through his veins. He laughed, slightly manically, as he heard someone behind him clearing their throat.

He turned and saw Alex standing in the doorway behind him. He nearly dropped the tome. "Professor Farrell! What brings you here?"

"Professor Dumbledore and I thought you might like to come up for supper, but I'll leave you alone if you want."

"Is it that time already?" His gaze was still somewhat unfocused. "Of course I'd like some supper. I just lost track of time searching for something." Without looking at what he was grabbing, he stuffed a sheet of parchment into the potion book and went up to supper.

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A/N: Before you go telling me that Snape's OOC for just letting go of the whole "Alex followed him in the Forest last night" thing, I already know that. I just wanted to skip several chapters of Snape being angry while he learned to trust Alex again in favor of more time spent on the actual plot.