Title: Atonement, Chapter 8
By: PepperjackCandy
Rating: PG13
Disclaimer: You recognize it? It's J.K. Rowling's. All I own is Alex Farrell.

WARNING: Same sex couple (Harry/Draco) in this part. No snogging or anything. Just an FYI.

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At dinner that night, Sprout walked to Snape and told him the final determination in her investigation. "It was undoubtedly the laceratio hex." She informed him.

"What?" He yelled so loudly it bounced from the rafters of the Great Hall. "You took two days to decide it was the very first thing you suggested?"

While Sprout spluttered her explanations, Alex, who had just arrived in the Great Hall, leaped into the fray. "Thank you for all your hard work, Professor Sprout," she said in a pointedly polite tone, silently reprimanding Snape for his lack of gratefulness. "I know this took a tremendous amount of work."

"You're . . . welcome." Sprout seemed uncertain whether she meant this or not.

As she left the table, mumbling to herself, Snape turned on Alex. "You can't possibly believe that she spent all that time actually *working,* do you?"

"Yes." She responded calmly as she sat down in the seat next to Snape. "I do. And she's obviously worked very hard on your problem."

"But . . ."

"What if she'd just assumed that it had been natural causes, or a booby-trap of some sort?"

"Well . . ."

"Because you do know what this means, don't you? That it was a hex?"

"It means nothing." He snapped, thought he knew very well what it meant. It meant that someone had been watching them, and that his attacker had been right there when the ewer-plant ruptured. Of course, the threatening note had made that much clear. This only confirmed it.

Alex sighed, obviously tired of arguing with him. "Whatever you say, Professor Snape."

Snape tensed up, then, hissing slightly between his teeth.

"What?" Alex looked around. Neville had just walked into the room. She guessed that Snape was remembering her suggestion that he talk to the round-faced young man.

Neville made a beeline for Snape and Alex. "Good evening, Professor Snape." He said in a businesslike tone. "Are you feeling all right?"

"Yes. Thank you, Longbottom." Snape responded stiffly, but without malice.

Neville paused at the table a moment longer, as if there were something he wanted to say, but Snape pointedly ignored him, and eventually Neville went away.

"And what are you doing sitting there?" Snape snapped at Alex.

Alex, unruffled, looked at Snape coolly. "Eating dinner." She said simply, pointedly spearing a bite of her pheasant on her fork and putting it in her mouth.

They ate their dinner in silence. After he'd finished, Snape mumbled something about work that needed doing and left the table.

For the next few days, Snape was distant, and Alex left him alone. She had lesson plans to work on, and only three more weeks before the term started.

Then one morning at breakfast, Hogwarts was hosting the annual Wizarding Schools Headmasters Association convention, and the table was nearly full of staff of Hogwarts and other wizarding schools around the world, when Snape came upstairs. He sighed and nearly left the room, thinking he'd just get some food from the house-elves later, even if wrestling with the dishes was an awful hassle that he really didn't need on top of everything else.

Then he saw an empty seat next to Alex. He debated for a moment whether avoiding dragging dishes from one end of the castle to the other was worth bending his stiff neck long enough to eat a meal civilly with her, and decided it was.

He walked over to her. "Is this seat taken?"

She looked up at him, no emotion showing in her gray eyes. "No. Feel free." She turned back to her meal.

Soon, Snape's scrambled eggs and toast arrived and he tucked in. Eventually, he broke the silence. "How are things going with your plans for the term?"

"Just fine." She said in a neutral tone, like she was chatting with a stranger, not talking to someone she'd once considered a friend.

Silence descended again, but Snape tried to fight it off. "I want to apologize for avoiding you these past few days."

"Oh? Have you been avoiding me?"

Snape looked at her pointedly. "I'm trying to apologize here . . . "

She let out all of her breath at once. "All right. Apology accepted." She didn't smile, but her gray eyes lit up with the warmth that he'd remembered from their first days as friends, and they continued eating in silence, but this time it was a companionable silence rather than an awkward one.

After breakfast, they walked to the foyer together. "You mentioned Remus Lupin a while back. What do you know about him?" Alex asked.

Snape's black eyes grew cold. "Why are you asking me?" He asked suspiciously.

"I was just curious," she responded defensively. "I was looking over some of his old notes and there was something splattered on one of the pages. Drops of something."

"Blood?" Snape asked, widening his eyes melodramatically.

"Well, Martian blood perhaps," she said facetiously. "The drops were green."

She continued, shrugging, "It doesn't really matter, but given some of the strange things I've learned of the other Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers, I just thought that it might help me understand him a little better."

"Well, it's probably just some kind of herbal tea," Snape said nonchalantly. "Though you're welcome to bring the page to me and I can look it over for you."

"Thanks." She smiled at him. "I'll run up to my office and get the page. Will you wait here, or should I bring it down to your office?"

"Bring it down to the classroom. I'll be in there trying out some new potions I've just found."

They split up, Alex to her office, Snape to his, to get the book that had the potion he wanted to try. After he'd set up the cauldron and was setting out the ingredients, he heard footsteps in the hallway. "Professor Farrell? Is that you?"

For one heartstopping moment, there was no response. All of Snape's fears since the attempt on his life surfaced. His pulse raced, his respiration accelerated.

A quiet knock on the door. "Professor Snape?"

Snape knew that he should recognize the voice, but his mind was in too much turmoil for it to register.

The door cracked open a little. "Are you in here?" The quiet tenor voice continued.

Malfoy! Draco Malfoy! Snape suddenly could breathe easily again. "Is that you, Malfoy?" He asked as Draco stepped into the room, followed a moment later by Harry.

"Yes it is, Professor Snape." Draco said as he walked over to shake hands with his old Potions Master and Head of House.

"It's good to see you, Malfoy. And you, too, Potter." He added as an afterthought. "What brings you back so soon? Homesickness?"

"Oh. No. We just brought the first batch of my father's old Dark Arts books over to Dumbledore and thought we'd stop by for a visit." Draco said.

"Why don't we sit down?" Snape said, indicating the student tables arranged in the room. Harry and Draco sat at the right-hand front table, and Snape pulled his chair over from the desk where he graded papers and sat down.

"So," He opened the conversation, "how is cleaning out Lucius's store of Dark Arts materials coming along?"

"Well," Draco responded. "Except that I think we're going to have to hire a curse-breaker or Auror or something, pretty well."

"A curse-breaker or Auror? Why?"

"My father erected a rather . . . cruel security system around the house, and while we think we've been able to find out what it is, we cannot find anything that will give us an idea of how do disable it."1

Snape was about to ask which security feature they wanted to disable and offer his services to solve it if they needed it, when Alex came into the room.

"Here's that page I was telling you about." She said, walking directly across the room to Snape.

She had handed the page to him and as he began pretending to examine it - he knew it was the wolfsbane potion he used to prepare for Lupin as soon as he smelled it -- she looked around and noticed Harry and Draco sitting silently at the student table. Her eyes widened in disbelief. "You - you're --. Oh, my God. Do you know who these are?" She said to Snape.

"Of course you do." She corrected herself. She looked back at the two young men. "You're Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. Of the Chudley Cannons." She burst out in girlish giggles.

Harry and Draco looked at each other bemusedly. Snape furrowed his brow. "Can - can I have your autograph?" She asked.

"All right." Harry said, as Draco nodded.

She gasped. "I have the issue of Quidditch Weekly with your picture on it in my apartments. I'll go get it and be right back."

She dashed from the room, and the three men watched her leave, confused. "Who was that?" Draco asked.

"That," Snape sighed, "was this year's Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. She's not normally like that." He insisted.

"Oh, ho!" Draco grinned. "So you know how she normally is?"

Snape missed Draco's tone completely. "Yes. She's competent. Intelligent. She was a Muggle police officer before she went to wizarding school."

Draco winked distinctly at his boyfriend. "Seems Professor Snape's got himself a girlfriend."

"Looks that way to me, too." Harry leaned back in his chair, smiling.

"She's not my girlfriend!" Snape hissed in a tone very like that which he used to use for cursing at Harry.

"What do you think?" Draco asked Harry.

"Girlfriend." Harry nodded.

"I've been showing her . . ."

"A good time." Draco inserted.

"No! I've been showing her the ropes around here a little. We eat our meals together occasionally, but She's. Not. My. Girlfriend."

"Well, we really didn't come by to argue with you about your girlfriend." Draco said smoothly. "We came by to ask if you'd like to join us for an outing in Hogsmeade."

Snape shook his head. "I can't. Some of us," he deadpanned, "have real jobs. We don't play games for a living."

Harry sighed. "Looks like it's just the two of us, then, Draco."

"Yep. Looks that way to me, too."

"Say, why don't we invite him to join us for dinner?"

"What a good idea! I knew there was a reason I keep you around." Draco kissed Harry quickly and then turned to Snape. "So, how about it, Professor Snape? Or may we call you Severus?"

Snape shook his head. "I'm afraid that won't be possible." He didn't want to admit that he was afraid that another attempt would be made on his life. "I simply cannot take the time to leave Hogwarts."

Snape got his first inkling that this was planned when Draco said, "You don't need to leave Hogwarts. We'll meet you here. Around 7:00?"

Snape nodded, privately wondering what the two young men were up to. "7:00 will be fine."

Just then, Alex came back in, carrying her copy of Quidditch Weekly and a quill. "I didn't know if you had a quill," She said as she handed the magazine to Harry, "so I brought my own." She blushed.

Harry winked at Draco. "Of course, Professor," Harry said. "It might be easier to autograph this if I knew which name to put on it."

"Oh." Her eyes widened and her blush deepened. "Farrell. Alex Farrell."

Harry wrote on it, To Professor Farrell, Good luck in the DADA position. Harry Potter.

He passed the magazine to Draco, who simply wrote Draco Malfoy on it and handed it back to Alex. "You know," he drawled, "that'll be a collector's item one day."

"Oh?"

"Yep. After Harry and I get married, I'm changing my name to Potter, so the things autographed by 'Draco Malfoy' will be few and far between."

"Oh. Congratulations on your engagement, then." She smiled widely at the two young men.

Snape cleared his throat. "Professor Farrell?" He asked.

"Sorry. Yes?" She turned to him.

"The spot? Herbal tea, just as I'd guessed. For insomnia."

"Thank you." She said cheerfully as she took the page back from him and, smiling at Draco and Harry again, left the room.

Snape somewhat bemusedly watched Alex leave the room. "I have to apologize for her again." He said to the two budding young Quidditch stars. "She really isn't like that normally."

"That's quite all right, Professor Snape," Draco assured him as Harry fixed him with a pointed gaze.

Some form of silent communication passed between them. Draco smiled, and Harry stood. "I've got to . . . er, use the facilities." Harry said by way of excusing himself as he dashed from the room right behind the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor.

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1 This is more fully spelled out in another fic I'm writing. My working title for it is "hdfluff," because it will, indeed, be pretty much a plotless series of vignettes, but I don't have a real title decided on yet. Once I have it written and uploaded, I'll try to remember to change this file so that there's a link to that story here, rather than this explanation. return to story