Chapter Two

Thriving Willows Not Only Thrive (or "Verona's impeccable Sight")

Disclaimer: I used a couple ideas from "The Simpsons" and the "Bring It On." JK Rowling created most of these people. Too lazy 2 make this long. *blushes* God, I can't believe I used this stuff from "Bring It On"....but I didn't know any cheers, so I just used theirs. Don't sue. I gave them credit 4 them.

Dear Widow Spider,

It's official. Fleece is a Thriving Widow. Good call on the name.

Got another question: is it true you're dumping Moony? GOOD GOD, GIRL! GIVE HIM TO ME! I'M SO LONELY! PRONGS/ BUTTERCUP, YOU/ MAN OF THE MONTH, WHEN DOES MY TURN COME?!?! Just kidding. Ha ha, I think you have the right idea ditching Moony: he's too poor. (Ha ha, just kidding again.)

Cheerleading practice today. Can you believe Dumb. wants to get rid of it? Cheerleading rox. Ha ha. Hope your creepy brother isn't there. Why won't he leave Fleece alone? I feel so bad for her. She's so pretty and he's such a freak.

Luv,

Broadbones

Verona Snape's sharp cheekbones jutted in a wry smile as she read the first scroll of parchment Galatea the Owl brought her at the breakfast table. Yes, the relationship between her and Remus was none existent. Beyond that: it was dust. She was so very tired of his gentleness and mealy-mouthed ways. She much preferred Sirius's radical passions and rebellious nature. He was also a sight more mysterious to boot.

The second scroll was from Fleece (Elle).

Dear Widow Spider,

Just Fleece here. Thanks for the offer to cheer, but I'm turning it down. I've never had any luck with those cheerleader pants. They're just too chafing.

You and Sirius would make a great duo. I just thought of it while I was brushing my teeth this morning. Consider it.

Did you lock your brother in the storage closet again? I don't really think he likes it. You should really leave him alone, he's not as bad as you try to pretend he is.

My first letter. How'd it go? Respond, si'l vous plait.

Respectfully Yours,

Fleece

Ugh. The last thing Verona needed in the Thriving Widows was a humanitarian/orator. Where was Elle getting off treating her like this? For the most part, Verona had liked her. She'd also become quite bored with Fiona and Lily's bubbly demeanors. Elle was a smart smack in the face: something the group needed. Verona made a mental note to inform Elle that Severus was not only the greatest "square" that ever tread the earth, but also a very bizarre little creature. She smiled again with the thought of spilling out some of her brother's greatest blunders to a girl he obviously pestered.

Across the table from her, Severus was tranimpy supping on his meager breakfast of oatmeal and toast, his sinister eyes locked on a freshly-turned page of his latest book interest. The sight of him made Verona want to vomit.

"Oh, Sevvy," she murmured, nudging his skeletal calf under the table.

His large, black eyebrows furrowed at the sound of her voice and he raised his needle-thin eyes to meet her similarly constructed ones. "What is it?" he inquired curtly, lifting his tilted spoon to his lips as he savored his breakfast, his thin cheeks moving in a revolting way as he enjoyed his meal.

"There was a train accident this morning. Care to see the victims?" Verona stretched out her tongue, which was coated with a repulsive paste of congealed bacon and eggs.

"Ew! That's horribly nauseating!" Severus squealed, his squeamish muscles contracting as he squinted and tried not to look at her.

Verona leered. "You're right," she sighed. "They deserve a proper burial." She promptly spit the mash into his bowl of meal and stood up, shaking toast crumbs from her school robes and sauntering away as he brother shrieked in shock and rage, leaping up from his seat and almost running from his bowl like an animal from a predator.

Life was good.

* * * * * * * * * *

"Okays, everybody attentive today?" Verona bellowed, charging out on the Quidditch field, which was perpetually verdant, even through the winter months: a very crucial thing for cheerleading practice.

"Ready as I'll ever be," Lily chirped, wetting her fingertips and dragging a few straying tresses back into their plaits. She squared her shoulders and tumbled off into a flawless routine of handsprings. Verona smiled. Despite her plumpness, she was as nimble as a supple breeze and three times as quick. A captain of the Slytherin cheerleading squad could appreciate that effortlessly, even if Lily was the captain of a rivaling adversary.

Fiona was sprawled out on the lawn in plum leg-warmers and wrist bands: house colors. She was listening attentively to Errit Fowler, the Ravenclaw cheer captain, as she rambled off the complicated routine. Fiona, as usual, was the only Ravenclaw who looked perplexed. It'd been a great enigma to everyone (her parents, primarily) that she'd gotten into the most intellectual house of them all. Fiona was a little obtuse. Actually, she was the foil of everyone else in her house. Mostly, the girls were reedy, dour-looking ice queens who found pleasures in the arts and in their texts. They rarely socialized and when they did, it was only with a select few. Fiona was a bumbling, bubbling little puppy. Just as portly as Lily and just as coquettish, she giggled, devouring rich sweets as she browsed through the sports sections and attempted to blaze conversations with the other Ravenclaw girls, who looked at her incredulously and avoided her like a violent plague.

"We ready yet?" Calypso Debris demanded petulantly, eyeing Verona beadily as she shivered in her daringly short cheerleading costume.

Verona sneered. "This isn't Minsky's Burlesque, Debris. Pull down that skirt." Verona brushed by a flushed and irritated Calypso and circled the girls in their bottle-green skirts and blouses, calling out, "First routine, as much as we've rehearsed."

Gathering in a small formation and performing under the scrutinizing but wandering eyes of a cloaked Professor Jinx, the crotchety, middle-aged Astronomy teacher who hated Lily and Verona's sauce and salt feverishly. He pretended to be indifferent to the challenging glare Verona gave him before commencing the rehearsal.

"C'mon, bring it, Jinxy," Verona mumbled before clapping her hands and joining the girls in yelling:

ALLLLLLLRIGHT

WE'RE SWEET

WE'VE GOT THE BEST, WE CAN'T BE BEAT

WE'RE THE BEST, SO SCORE THEM POINTS

TO WIN THE GAME, WE'LL ROCK THIS JOINT!

GO SERPENTS, GO SERPENTS, GO-GO-GO SERPENTS!

GO SERPENTS, GO SERPENTS, GO-GO-GO SERPENTS!

"Aw, gee, girls, I feel chafed!" Verona shrieked.

"It's chilly!" Byrd Sinclair and Skye Matthews roared back.

"Too cool!" Garnet Williams bellowed.

I SAY "BRR, IT'S COLD OUT HERE,

I SAY THERE MUST BE SOMETHIN' IN THE ATMOSPHERE!"

I SAY "BRR, IT'S COLD OUT HERE,

I SAY THERE MUST BE SOMETHIN' IN THE ATMOSPHERE!"

* * * * * * * * * *

"I don't see why the astute must suffer so to study in the fresh air," Elle sighed grudgingly, glaring at the prancing fools on the field as she brushed ice and slush off of a bench in the stands so she could sit. "I bet if I shook my money-maker in a skirt rolled up to my navel, I could sit in comfort, too." Elle raised a gloved fist to an unseen presence. "Bastards! Bastards, all of them!"

"Oh, I don't know," Severus murmured quietly, trying not to look too admiringly at the scantily-clad girls as they called out their little mocking cheers. "It's really not SO bad, honestly."

Elle leered and shuffled tetchily in her frothy-pink woolen scarf that swathed her neck entirely, batting absently at the prickly red earmuffs she wore as well. "Don't say I should join too. You're the last person I need to hear that from. I'm so fed up with goddamned cheerleading I could vomit up a whale." Stretching out her knee-socked legs and bashing the planks of the row of seats in front of her, Elle furrowed her brow pensively. "You don't really want me to join, do you?"

"It's a tough choice," he muttered sincerely.

She laughed dryly. "You're a tough guy."

Beneath them, they heard a dull din of rambunctious spirits. Craning her neck, Elle spotted her brother and his spineless cronies making a mockery of the sashaying girls by imitating their movements and struts and bellowing as they primped each other and giggled. The girls on the field were overtly battling the urge to combust into guffaws; even the Slytherin ones had a difficult trial in veiling their pleasure at seeing them.

"Ugh, Gay Pride parade," Elle grunted gutturally, narrowing her eyes malignantly. "Honestly, where do they get off thinking that looks remotely attractive?"

"What do you mean?"

"Seriously, Severus! You probably know them as well as anyone, having schooled with them so long. Ugh. They're just so...infantile. Mm. Ten-dollar word."

"All of them?"

"Yes. Every one an asinine."

"But I thought you and Sirius---"

"Well, I d---"

Elle glanced up at him and was a little bewildered by the seething glint of intent in his alarmingly ebony eyes."What's the matter?"

Severus flinched and reddened to a ruddy shade of blood.

"What?" Elle paused and nibbled her peeling lips in concern. "If you're tormenting yourself with the possibility that I'm going to become friends with one of those buffoons, you're sadly doing so in vain."

"W-w-w-what?" Severus stammered in utter shock. "You mean to say that...that I'm the b-better man?"

Grinning, Elle pressed a firm fingertip against the narrow tip of his nose. "In more ways than you know," she assured him, pinking a few shades darker herself.

"Yes," he replied, emitting a quivering laugh as he used one of his long skeletal fingers to incise his initials in a patch of frost on the back of a bench. "I surmised as much. Me the better man. Ha. Really. I've been telling that to myself since I was barely eleven."

Elle beamed quietly. "You're not going to slip into the 'You like me, you really like me' oration, are you? If so, be courteous and give me enough time to run shrieking into the woods."

"You're a pitiful, sickly, deranged form of a girl, aren't you?"

She flexed her oddly thick eyebrows in reply. "You have no clue."

+ + + + + ++ + + + +

"One more lap, girls, c'mon!" Verona goaded, dashing after the panting girls as they made their final circle of the field.

"Yes, girlies, c'mon!" Sirius mimicked, pretending to shake a long luxurious head of hair as he strutted like a Southern belle around another patch of field.

From elsewhere on the Ravenclaw sector, Verona heard the sound thud of Fiona collapsing in fatigue. "I WANNA DIE!" she professed to anyone who took the time to even take a second glance at her heaving, sprawled-out figure on the playing grass. "LORD, I WANNA DIE!"

"No, you don't, then you'd be with all those goldfish you accidentally killed," Verona called over to her as the head of Fiona's squad shook her head in a forlorn way.

Verona herself was in exceptional shape. Like a well-kept mare, she trotted about at a full sprint, her billowing black hair like a handful of crepe streamers behind her, her eyes glittering like a prowling vixen as she felt the eyes of the boys that encircled the field. They saw. The admired. They praised. But they never caught. Never.

Suddenly, a twinge of an impulse caught her. For no certain reason, she found herself raising her eyes to the stands for something. An odd energy was throwing her off. Something was amiss in routine, something.....

She stumbled onto it with a gasp.

Her thoroughly aloof recluse of a sibling curled up beside the charismatic Tinkerbell named

Fleece, offering her his gloves, chuckling unnecessarily when she accepted them, all a while his face was the color of a fine red wine.

"Oh my god....." She staggered towards the stands, exceedingly long strands of oily hair creeping into her parted lips. "Severus is in love."

+ + + + + + + + + +

Severus slunk downstairs after lunch to peer inside Filch's spare broom closet. True to his name, Argus Filch was overly notorious for pinching things students left about the school, even if they'd only set them down for a moment. At the moment, Severus was rummaging through carton after carton on a quest for his Charms textbook. Sighing tetchily at finding it absent, he briskly slapped a palm against the door, hearing it crack against the threshold with a grim satisfaction.

"Hallo, lavey lave."

Gasping in a startled manner, he saw Verona slouched against the wall beside the closet, looking utterly devious.

"Good God, Verona, give a boy an ulcer, why don't you."

"Nah, it's how I accidentally knocked off grandpa." He saw her eyes twinkle merrily and cordially as she produced a pleasant beam.

He had an inkling that something was amiss.

"What do you want?" he demanded warily.

Verona grinned. "If you say so." She placed one of her knobby elbows against the wall and used the palm connected to it to prop up her chin. Her eyes dilated mischievously above the luminous smile. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you what? What is it that you're blithering on about today?"

"Elle."

Tiny patches of rosy skin dappled his sallow complexion, but he tossed his head with seemingly convincing arrogance. "Potter, you mean? Well, what of her?"

Verona used on of her spiky fingers to prod his gaunt collarbone. "What of her. Silly little fool. You think I wouldn't comprehend it by now? I saw the two of you snuggling outside in the stands like two waifish cats come home." She took her finger to drag her lower eyelid further down her face. "Brimming with tears, I was. Utterly quaint."

His skin was a flaming crimson. "You don't know what you're talking about! Y-you really know how to create a fuss over nothing, you know. S-s-she was cold. I just, uh, happened to be there. It's not like I talk to her often. She barely knows my name. Honestly, I don't think she knows it at all, really. I'm really not her type. You know she and Remus are destined to hit it off."

Verona smirked. "What's her middle name?"

"Jane," he shrugged without hesitation.

"Who's her favorite actor and actress?"

"Zero Mostel and Audrey Hepburn."

"Birthday?"

"Twentieth of May. Who transformed you into a sphinx, eh, Ron?"

"Come to grasp with it, Prince Mishkin, you're hooked!"

"Prince Mishkin?"

"I haven't the might to thoroughly explain that jibe. Truth be told, I don't think anyone does. Cliff notes of it means you're loony, though."

"Hmm, not too flattering, eh?"

"Thoroughly beside the point. Why didn't you tell me you fancied her?"

"Fuck off."

"Ooh, getting peevish, I see."

"Quite!" he admitted, beginning to work out a strategy for escape by furtively making note of the possible exits behind her.

"Well, does she like you?" Verona pressed intently, her redwood of a body making it a bit of a trial to weasel away from her.

"I haven't a notion, go away."

"That is to say," she continued imperatively, "that you don't care if your love is unrequited and tragic?"

Severus clucked his tongue and furrowed his brow at her. "I hardly say I fit either of those categories, not being a dramatic like yourself."

"Narcissus and Echo."

He spun his beetle-black eyes to the ceiling. "Not likely. But I would like to make note that with any of your lovers, it's always been Hades and Persephone...you playing the rather uncomplimentary role of Hades with a Persephone mask."

"Stinging."

"Shut up."

"Really, I'm damaged beyond hope."

"I said go away."

"And where are you going in such a rush?"

"It's none of your business."

"Into the caressing limbs of your dove?"

"Candidly, I was going to the men's room."

"Some clandestine tryst, no doubt."

"I never referred to the function in that manner, but to each his own."

"Have a care, sibling o' mine," she called after him in a superlatively gay manner as he dashed out of her sight. "I'll make a lover out of you yet!"

"It's not likely!" he returned over his shoulder, slowly feeling the liberation of being free of her talons as he rounded a corner. "In fact, I believe it's utterly and enigmatically impossible!"

He'd fled into the safety of a vacant corridor and took off into a sprint. He was emancipated at last! The joy of not hearing her smooth voice emit those abrasively mortifying words she was so fond of. But when he thought he'd at last found complete solitariness in the chilled depths of the corridor, he swore he could have heard her voice behind him murmuring:

"Ho, ye of little faith!"

It disturbed him.

***Verona rocks. She HAS to be my favorite character. R & R******