*********Here's your update. It was as smooth to write as butter. Why have I been having writer's block for a year?
A Dangerous Limbo of Decisions
Verona alone had received her brother's truthful confessions on the "tryst to end all trysts" to occur the night of the dance. She alone successfully treated it with discipline and rational thought: Though outwardly she was a scornful sibling, she did care for her brother when occasions turned ripe. She was eager to stretch forward the olive branch to support the dual wishes of two estranged but intriguing characters in her life, Elle and Severus. She was becoming a tad too pragmatic for Severus' taste, but it couldn't be helped, because she had not an iota of romanticism. He discovered this along with her Christmas present: tailoring his robes for him in the dim light of a Saturday afternoon before exams.
"You needn't do this for me," Severus pleaded, sitting across from his nimble-fingered sister and her quick-flashing wand dancing atop a set of his father's best robes from college. "Honestly--"
She glared at him. "Look," she snipped irritably, "it is far too late to play coy, as I had to have Mother wrangle these out of the house when It was asleep. They were It's robes after all, and he is in such a piss now that it's the holidays and the pair of them have to entertain and be entertained by others. So don't play the martyr with me; I had to drag out these horrific spectacles to work on something for your benefit so take the damn gift."
That is Snape compassion.
"Come now, try them on," she ordered.
Docile for perhaps the first time in his life, he complied and allowed her to drape the fine silk of the robe that had adorned his father in his early twenties. His hopes fell when he saw himself in the monstrous mirror in the underground room they were stationed in.
"It's are far too large," he sighed plaintively.
Verona squared his shoulders and took to her wand again. "Stop bitching, I'll fix it."
"I fail to see any way you could---"
"Shut up, I'm doing it."
There was utter silence in the chambers as bolts of fabric drifted from the hem to fit his chassis. The cuts Verona's third-generation wand made we extraordinarily precise and the garb took shape via her patient fingertips. Severus would have been grateful if his sister had remained quiet, but as fate would deal it, she spoke with him brusquely.
"You're getting over your head, you know that?" she remarked placidly.
"Yes," he said grimly.
"Couldn't take someone else, could you? You're not very bright."
"Thank you….Well, it fits now, can I go?"
"Don't be a fool, if I let you traipse around in this homage to fop from the late forties, you'd receive quiet a social lashing. Plus, it's the wrong color for someone like you, it's scarlet."
"I don't care, I want to go," he insisted adamantly.
"Do this for Elle. The last thing you want to do is embarrass her more than she already will be."
Severus ceased breath while she carved away the lace appliqués and trim. "It was not my intention to do so," he insisted darkly, glowering at his own reflection.
"Then what was it?" she asked absently. The lace lay in a dainty heap at her knees like a basket of foam. She rubbed the length of the wand until it grew bristles like a comb and patiently began to brush the color out of the robe, leaving it increasingly white with every stroke while the color bled into the floor tiles.
"What kind of a horrible question is that?!" he demanded nastily. "When you care about someone…you want to be with them without all of the clandestine clutter."
"Whatever you say, honey." She paused in thought. "But it's not like she had a great deal of social prowess before, and being with you is like playing the dangerous game of subtraction. She will become perhaps as loathed as you, and that is saying something for someone as darling as her."
"HOW CAN YOU---?!"
"Oh, shut up and look at yourself!" Verona snapped. He stared at his sister in violent rebellion. "Go ahead, look at the damn mirror. Just look at you." His head wound about to face the likeness of a surly-looking individual with overly-broad shoulders, pallid skin, wilting hair shiny with oil, and merciless black eyes, swimming in robes too fine and too broad for his scrawny body. "Pitiable, aren't you?" she goaded unnecessarily.
For moments, he could merely fume with white-hot rage and against his better judgment, he ripped himself out of her fingers and consequently tore the sleeve of the robe quite a bit. "Well, aren't you a novelty?!" he demanded with an air of the provoked insane. "Save a few things, we could be identical in the right circumstances, and you try to conceal that with taking on beau after beau like no one will think you are wanton or immoral, but truly they talk about your promiscuity, and I've heard them! Do you think that it is any justice to my reputation that you are so impiously free with your boyfriends?!" The look he gave her surpassed rage. She had ceased to work on his robe and her lifeless fingers were clutching each other in a vise, her eyes magnified three times by her purple-rimmed spectacles that showed her eyelids were so far back into her sockets that the eyelashes were plastered against her forehead. The pupils of her eyes glinted eerily. "Well, don't act like you've never heard---"
She obviously wasn't in the mood to have heard anything, because she (in the manner of a stepsister in Cinderella) ripped off the robe from his shoulders, once so delicate a work of craftsmanship, now a brocade dust rag, the dangerous sound of buttons scattering against walls and floors pealing through the room.
"How dare you talk about me that way! To think I was going to help you, you little… well you know, I think I will help in a way, to say won't James be surprised that you're taking out his little sister as more than a friend!"
"You PROMISED you wouldn't, you BITCH!" he bellowed in return.
"And don't ever think that you know what's going on with me, don't even TRY," she roared. She seized two fists worth of his hair and dragged him across the tiled floor, so angry that the use of her wand exceeded little more than a tool to attempt to gouge an eye out.
His guttural snarls must have reached the outside hallway, because within moments, distressed little feet he knew belonged to a certain three-foot male teacher were above their heads and quickly descending the spiral stairs. Verona's only response was to fling open the door with one hand and cast him out of it with the other. "And take this rag with you!" she flung after him coolly, lobbing the carcass of the robe in a wad beside him. With no more compassion in her step than a cold rock, she quietly closed the door to the room they had both occupied and drifted past a few onlookers like a queen in a court.
Attempting to achieve such serenity, Severus took the carcass of the robe and stuffed it into the rucksack of a passing second-year student in the manner of disposing of a chewed off fingernail. Inside, he was fuming and the hairs on his arm bristled lividly. Not only had he lost his only confident in the matter, now he had nothing to wear. It was even less of a consolation to think of what his father would do to the rest of the family when the robe was found missing in action. The injustice of how his mother would probably pay for Verona's pilfering enraged him to the point where if just one word was spoken to him, just one word---
"Hiyee," drawled Narcissa, henchwoman of Lucius Malfoy, the leader of the school's strongest gang who held unsettling interest in him. Personally, he found it best to ignore the pair of them, especially Narcissa who was an exceptional bore. Narcissa was accompanied by a girl with big teeth named Courtney and a girl with a small vocabulary named Regina.
"Piss off, you little lemmings," he hissed.
The girls erupted in a tempest of high-pitched squeals that made his brain scream in agony.
"Lemon? Who calls someone a Lemon?" demanded Courtney between giggles.
"Lemming, lemming, you cow," he snarled.
"Oh, be quiet, Lemon," Narcissa threw at him like it was the wittiest thing.
"A 'lemming'," he informed them dangerously, "is a rodent that travels in packs with very little willpower outside of the pack."
"Lemon, Lemon, Lemon---"
"Hey, Regina," crowed Narcissa, "let's make that his new name: Lemon."
For some unspoken reason, when it would have usually suited his being to walk away quickly and drown out their clatter, something unnatural snapped in Severus' whirring clockworks and, just as Professor Flitwick entered the room from his long flight of stairs, Severus rounded on the gaggle of girls, nearly jabbed poor Regina's left eye out, and screeched, "Laetae Virgini!"
For a fleeting second of horror, neither Severus nor Flitwick could not believe what he had done or why. Severus felt like he had just about personally thrown himself out of school when he heard the trio scream in unison:
"Oh my God, I'm blind!"
The next few moments were a torrent of pictures with no connection: three stumbling girls who howled and wept piteously, a Flitwick so angry that he took to stamping his feet, a few boys laughed, a strong set of five claws dug into his skin as he was drug out of the hall, Flitwick was in his office demanding an explanation, all ending in Severus vomiting passionately into a hastily presented wastebasket before collapsing on Flitwick's shag carpeting.
What a horrible, horrible day….
* * * *
That horrible, horrible day was preceded with a Sunday devoted to manually rewriting the letters on the 300 globes of the school so they were again legible, a devious punishment for someone with such minute and chaotic script. Any lack of tidiness with his writing was soaked into the globe and he would have to redraw all of the names of the countries again.
Two other people were in detention in Sprout's empty greenhouse: a Griffindor first-year boy named Deems who was polishing crates and crates and crates of silverware and another Slytherin, a girl in his year named Galatea peeling and washing potatoes and carrots. There was utter silence in the greenhouse, save the sound of snow making delicate heaps outside of the heated house, until Deems wretchedly overturned a crate of silverware, setting Galatea and Severus on edge.
"This is ridiculous!" Deems bellowed. "My Dad's a judge for the stupid ministry and I'm sitting here because I, well you know, nobody's watching us anyway. You know what?" He sprung to his feet with a little bit of rebellion swilled with a great deal of spoiled brat. "I'm just gonna leave. What they gonna do about that? Huh? Tell me?" Both Slytherins returned to their toil. "You guys should leave too….You can if you want…." He received empty stares. "Well…f-fine," he stammered, throwing himself down on the stool and returning to his polishing, only taking time to emit intermittently, "Jeez, guys….Jeez…."
There was another pause.
Severus acknowledged Galatea with absent thought. He had seen her before in classes, but she had never spoken with him and he had taken that as life. She seemed to have Puerto Rican parents, but he knew for certain she had been born in Wales, his own birthplace. She was not overly gorgeous, but she was…nice, in a way. Very big teeth. BIG teeth.; nice, toasted-looking skin; tiny, smaller in stature than himself; not thin at all, curvaceous. She had the blue, semi-extraterrestrial eyes of a Siamese cat. She was sort of extraterrestrial altogether in a school of pasty, brown-haired children.
Galatea's blue eyes slid to one side of her face. "Hey," she choked out in the tiniest tit-mouse voice a human ever had. Severus hastily returned to painstakingly repairing the "f" of Africa. Galatea let out the gustiest sigh he had also ever heard and went back to washing out a peeled potato in the sink before tossing it in a bucket with an unsettling clatter.
"Is it true you're here because you flipped out at a teacher?" Deems demanded loudly in a turrets-reminiscent voice, dropping a handful of forks.
Severus was under the impression that he was being spoken with , until Galatea spoke in a harsher voice that wobbled: "I don't want to talk about it, okay?"
Tactless Deems struck again. "He's here for beating up girls."
Galatea gave him such a disturbed and elevated look that Severus felt himself go nine shades to burgundy. "Why?" she asked quietly.
Severus stopped short of blotting up the last "a" in Australia, saving himself from having to start all over again. "How can you ask that of someone you don't even know?" he demanded.
"I'm sorry," she muttered in a way that made him feel slightly sympathetic but greatly irritated. "I…heard you blinded Narcissa," she offered helpfully.
"What, are---"
"No, no, I think that's wonderful!" she said in a voice so eager that Severus had to bite his tongue because it sounded either completely moronic or virtually insane. "She's a bitch, great job." There was a disturbing pause as Severus stared her down like a cat does before approaching an animal it has never seen before. "Is it permanent?"
He laughed guardedly. She was a tad too fluffy.
"No, serious….Serious."
He paused. Or utterly bipolar.
"You frighten me. Don't talk," he commanded darkly.
She obliged and returned to her work moodily.
He waited, weighing thought against reason. "Wait." She turned around. "Were you being sarcastic…or truthful…when you were happy over Narcissa almost being permanently blind?"
She swiveled about and tilted her peeling knife in an unsettling way. "I'm really just lonely, I think. It does a lot to people."
Severus wasn't sure if he liked her.
But then again, he wasn't sure if he hated her either.
It was a limbo of decisions.
* * * *
"Hey," said Elle smoothly, touching his arm very gingerly as he walked out of Sunday detention.
"Oh, hello," he replied.
"Surprised to see me?"
"Didn't you have anything else to do?"
"Well, you're my best friend, so…just homework."
Severus felt guilty about something, but he could not determine it. Something about her being so eager to see him. He felt like he had betrayed her on a level he could not remember.
Just as they began walking, he caught the back of Galatea's long sheet of coffee-bean-colored hair. "Galatea, where are you going?"
She whipped about, startled in a way to be spoken to. She then gave a brief shrug that seemed a tad too casual. "Oh, I don't know. Back to my room, I guess, there's no one else to talk to."
"How so?"
"Well, they just disappear places when I want to find them. I guess that's my fault, isn't it?" She looked to the ground in absent, shallow thought, fingers locked together. "Or at least my problem, I think. So it goes, anyhow." She seemed to be hinting to wanting an invitation but did not want to be one to invite herself.
"Would you like to come with us and talk?" He still was tasting the novelty in using that word, "us". He planned to use it increasingly every day.
Her low cheek bones rose in a smile then fell in a matter of moments. "Oh, no…I don't think I…yeah….So, anyway, I hope I'll see you outside of detention…."
"Right--"
"Because it sucks," she finished unnecessarily, but somehow it still sounded right. She waved a brief parting and walked away calmly.
"Well, shall we---What's your problem?"
Elle was giving him the stoniest look. "Who was that?"
"Oh….That's Galatea Roganich….I think that is her surname, I will have to….Why?"
"Why did you think I would want to walk around with someone I didn't even know?" she goaded irritably.
"How the hell should I know, girls like to be with other girls, right?"
"Not with their boyfriends."
Severus fell short of saying "Who says I'm your boyfriend?" before he caught himself. Why did he say that? He would have been…this was what he wanted….
They walked together for about an hour, but it was leaden with something imposing: guilt over something Severus couldn't decipher. There is nothing like riddling yourself, especially when there is no certain answer.
