The Scrapbook

Disclaimer: To my eternal annoyance, I am not being paid to write fanfiction. If I were, I would quit my job, drop out of school, and spend the next twenty years breeding plotbunnies. Er, anyway. JKR owns the characters and the settings you recognize, and well as what's "really" going to happen. She's very kindly allowed loons like me to play with them, and We Praise Her For It. I seem to recall that the movie people have some sort of rights, too, so genuflections to them as well.

Chapter Description: Entry #1

August 27, 2003. Hogwarts.

Buried in the fifth or sixth box I found a bedraggled old teddy bear. It looked like it might have had an animating charm on it at one point, but now it just blinked its beady little eyes pleadingly at me.

"Look what I found!" I said, waving it at Severus.

In the early days he would have blown a capillary or two, and maybe hexed me for my trouble, but as it was he just glared at me and kept sorting.

"You know," I said conversationally, "I used to give my toys really pretentious names---comes from my parents; look at what they named me---I had a pink rabbit named Beatrix, and a llama named Ophelia, and a big stuffed St Bernard I called Lenore. I named my dolls after characters from Greek mythology. I thought my cousins were so stupid for naming theirs what was on the box."

He ignored me, so I kept talking.

"I guess my earliest choices were a little different. I got a free Bassett hound toy when I got my first pair of Hush Puppy sandles, and I named him Froot Loop for some inexplicable reason."

Master strategist that I was, I fell silent when he started to look interested. We worked in silence a few more minutes.

"Systematically," he said finally.

"What?"

"I named my toys systematically. You have, um, Little Little Bearie."

He blushed. He actually blushed.

It was so cute I just had to kiss him, and then he... well, we didn't finish going through those boxes.

I got the whole story out of him a couple of hourse later, when we were snuggled up and he was feeling a bit less embarrassed by the whole thing. Turns out he really did name them systematically---I had to stifle my laughter when he told me the larger of his two flying dragons (scales and all) was called "Big Bird", and then I had to soothe his injured pride, which was fun in an entirely different way.

I felt bad when I found out why he only had the one left---I know some things can seem unforgivable at the time, but I pray I never do something like that if we decide to have children---but he seems to have forgiven me my clumsy banging around his psyche. After all, he is letting me help with the sorting again tomorrow.

And so I lay next to him, watching him sleep, and I think about how he was probably always a control freak, and anal-retentive, and so utterly a scientist. And you know what? I think he's just wonderful.