Darkness Descending

Chapter 1

He stared longingly at the picture on his scarred and pitted wood desk, watching as the young woman twirled about happily. Snow drifted lightly through the air, settling on the bridge of her flushed nose before falling off again as she smiled and nodded to someone just out of the picture.

Her dark red hair shone and her face glowed underneath the leather cap she wore. It made her ears stick out just the slightest bit, making the tips even redder than the cold normally would. Her green eyes sparkled merrily.

He closed his eyes, sighing deeply. He had lost her a long time ago, if she had ever truly been his. Lost her to that insufferable git of a man, and finally lost her completely to Voldemort.

He tried to reconcile the past with himself, reminding himself that he never would have done what he needed to had it not been for the impetus of her leaving. The words sounded hollow to his own ears, especially when he was reminded of the other, less pleasant consequences of her actions.

The woman in the picture grinned, her pretty crimson lips stretching apart to show pearly white teeth. Her clothes had a decidedly Muggle taste to them, something that surprisingly did not seem to bother the man gazing at her nostalgically. Her coat was a deep tan and well-fit to her body, emphasizing all the correct places. Her legs were clad in a pair of blue jeans, almost bleached from so much use.

They were her favourite pair, he remembered with a smile. She wore them almost every other day. They were like her, soft and warm and supple, but with an underlying durability and hidden strength.

Bits of scarf flew around her as the wind picked up, making a tangled mess of her hair. She did not seem to mind, laughing merrily and tying the green knitted scarf firmly around her neck once more. They had a matching pair, the colour chosen to represent her eyes and his House.

The picture was one of the few he had of her. He could barely remember the months after she had left him, telling him that she was not safe with him. Most of his memories consisted of staring morosely at increasing numbers of empty fire whiskey flasks and snippets of torture sessions where the Muggles and Mudbloods screamed for mercy and he found that he had none left to give them. She had stolen his heart away and, when it was returned, he found the feelings emitting from the pulsing organ so painful that he buried them deep inside himself, trying to forget that they had ever existed in the first place.

He turned his attention away from the moving picture, trying instead to focus on grading the essays. The class would be returning tomorrow and he needed to finish marking the many errors with rough scratches of his eagle feather quill. On most of them there was more red ink in his barely legible angry scrawl then there was of the students' work.

He set aside Granger's five-foot long parchment, disappointed as always that there were no mistakes. Of course, he still wrote in a few biting comments for the sake of it, but they were a half-hearted attempt at best. In her eagerness to learn, even the dreaded subject of Potions, she was so much like the woman in the picture that he found it difficult to be too scathing with her.

He reached for the next, scowling fiercely at the name hastily scribbled at the top corner of the parchment. As far as he was concerned, the boy should not even be in his N.E.W.T.s class. He had barely achieved an O in his O.W.L., something which irritated him to no end. How in the world had Potter managed to attain such a high score when he had purposefully assured that the boy would not learn anything in his class?

"Probably Dumbledore's meddling," he growled. He knew, of course, that the boy wanted to be an Auror and that in order to do that he would need the advanced Potions class. Severus, however, had other ideas. He did not want to put up with the boy for any longer than completely necessary; he stirred up far too many painful memories of...

He shoved the thought aside with a glance at the woman in the picture. He returned his attention to the essay, reading it with interest. The assignment had been to write a three-foot long parchment on the interactions between two ingredients in the mild truth serum they had brewed earlier that week. Surprisingly, Potter had not chosen the two easiest ingredients, as most of the other students had done.

Trying to impress me, is he? he thought with a sneer. He would have thought even the idiotic Potter would have realised that he would just flounder even more than normal if he did that.

But as he read further into the body of the essay, he found himself rather impressed despite his earlier skepticism. The boy actually knew what he was talking about. Furthermore, it did not appear to have been copied from a book or Granger.

Perhaps there was some hope for Potter after all. Snape snorted at himself and scribbled a comment on the top. As ifa Potter would ever be any good at Potions.

Harry glared all the way down to the dungeons, causing several first years to jump out of his path like scared rabbits. He ignored them, instead focusing on how painful Potions was bound to be. Despite the fact that he would have been severely disappointed if he would not have been able to attend the high-level class and subsequently become an Auror, he had not wanted to put up with Snape of all people.

Hermione tailed along behind him, rambling on about her Arithmancy class. Harry had no interest in the stuff (what good would numbers do him? He had a Dark Lord to kill), and ignored her.

Harry took a seat as far back as possible, per usual, and Hermioine as far forward as possible, per usual. Aside from a handful of eager Ravenclaws, they were the first ones there.

The bell rang shortly after the rest of the class filed into the room. Snape, with his usual flair for dramatics, entered in a billow of robes, brandishing a stack of parchment. Harry bit back a groan with an air of long practice; despite all the time he spent on his Potions homework (in previous years, more than the rest of his classes put together), he had never received more than a half-way decent grade.

"These essays," Snape growled, focusing on each member of the small class in turn, "were simply horrendous. Few of you properly understood the proper interactions between your chosen ingredients, even though you chose the simplest ones. I should burn them, the whole lot."

Still muttering under his breath, Snape passed out the essays to each person, sneering in satisfaction each time a pair of black-clad shoulders slumped with a heavy sigh. Harry's was one of the last ones handed back, but he did not even bother to look at the grade. It would not do to get mad and ruin whatever potion they were instructed to make today. He could look at it after class.

So he set up his ingredients, following the instructions on the board precisely, and boiled his potion. When it was bottled and properly labeled and stored, he finally flipped his parchment over.

Scrawled across the top was a "see me". Harry gulped, and shuddered as the bell rang.