2 Severus' Decision
It's been a long month. The war reached its peak mere weeks ago and I still haven't absorbed the outcome. Even Albus couldn't have foreseen this.
I'm exhausted from walking. I've walked for almost a week now, trying to find signs of life. Of all who fought in the final battle that weekend, a handful remain. Potter, Granger, a few Weasleys, Minerva, and thirty or so other students and their family members. Hogwarts is no more as of last I saw. I'm sure the dungeons are still well intact, but the majority of the castle is destroyed.
Of those who survived, Potter has vanished without a trace. Minerva and a group of parents and older students are trying to rebuild the school, the Weasleys are at their home, and heaven knows what happened to Granger. She left before Potter did, and apparently without telling him.
My thoughts drifted back to Potter as I paused in the intersection. Still marveled at how the "Golden Boy" survived, I wonder where he could have gone to. Surely not anywhere too far, with the Ministry tailing him.
They were tailing myself as well, along with Granger. They wanted to know who had been lost in the wizarding community, and they knew we were still alive.
Scanning the road before me, I realized that I had nothing left to return to. I had to start over, but where? I couldn't do it in Britain, surrounded by the remains of fellow colleagues and those who fought to save the world from the Dark Lord.
Sighing, I came to the only other option I had: I had to leave the country and go overseas.
September 9, 2003
I stood at my desk in a classroom, memorizing my roster. I'd finally found a job that didn't require a full background search in a small city in the middle of New York. It hadn't taken long to make the transition from my robes to casual Muggle attire, but I was still having trouble refraining from mentioning anything related to magic. Now I was acting as a Muggle mathematics teacher at Nottingham High School, and I was intrigued by how utterly ridiculous these American children are.
The bell rang at 11, signaling students to head to their third block classes. It took five minutes for the first few kids to straggle in and sit down. As it was orientation day for the upper-class students, classes were only twenty or so minutes long. I looked up to see a somewhat tall girl with dark brown hair and blue-brown eyes walk in and set her notebook down on a desk. She glanced at her watch as she walked back to the door and look up the hallway.
"Randie!" I heard her call. "In here!"
I scanned my roster again to see how many students I had for this class. There were 13, and so far we had twelve of them. Raising my head again, the girl stepped back into the room, followed by a girl who must have been Randie. When I saw Randie, I had to do a double take.
She was also tall, with chocolate curls and deep brown eyes. But when she spoke, her voice sounded hauntingly familiar to me. Too familiar.
I composed myself as the bell rang for class to start. Instead of calling the students off by name, I decided to give them a little "background" on myself, as I hadn't been a Muggle teacher before. That in itself took the entire twenty minutes, during which I made eye contact with Randie no more than twice. The first time was just a brief glance, a sweep of the faces in front of me. The second was a more lasting gaze. I knew I had unnerved her that time because her glance dropped to the floor before meeting mine again.
Not a thought of her entered my mind again until the day was over and I was preparing to leave. As I walked down to the parking lot, I tried to figure out where I must have seen her before. She was obviously British, as her voice held a thick English accent, but there was another accent to it as well. I couldn't think of where I might have known her previously.
'Must be coincidence,' I thought. 'You're homesick, Severus.'
Perhaps I was.
After that first day, I didn't see her in class for a little over a week. I'd figured that the other girl was her friend or something, so I decided to ask her about it the following Friday.
"Loralie?" I called.
"Yes?"
I met her gaze straight—black on the oddest pair of colors in one's eyes that I've ever seen. "Have you seen Randie at all?"
"Well," she hesitated. I could see from her expression that she was worried about something. "She lives with me and I see her everyday." She smiled slightly. "She's been sick with something, but she just leaves and walks downtown for a few hours before coming back and falling asleep."
I nodded, frowning.
"She's had a rough couple of weeks, Jon," Loralie added before resuming her classwork.
It sounded strange to me, but I knew Loralie was telling the truth. As it were, when Randie finally showed up for class the following Wednesday, she did look worse for the wear. She'd lost considerable weight, her face was pale, and she looked utterly miserable. She stood two feet from me as she gave a very vague explanation of why she had been absent. Her eyes didn't leave the floor until I began to speak, and when they did, I was slightly alarmed by what I saw in them.
I reached over and grabbed the homework assignments from the pile of papers next to me.
"Here's Friday's and Tuesday's homework. Only do the problems that are circled, on a separate sheet of paper, and just hand them in either next class or Monday," I told her and handed the papers to her.
"Ok," she said slowly. "Thank you."
"See you Thursday?"
She nodded, turned, and walked slowly out. Sighing, I sat in my chair and put my head in my hands.
Green eyes…..dulled by years of pain…..he looked at me as we stood in the center of it all, and suddenly, he looked rather old to me.
"Professor…Severus," he said, "When will it end?"
"Soon." I answered wearily, not even bothering to correct him for calling me by my given name.
"You think so?" Neither of us believed me.
"I hope so."
Green eyes that flashed in anger and pain when Granger screamed, a sound that cut through me like a thousand knives……the agony she endured obvious in voice only….her limp form as I lifted her off the cold ground……she was still alive…but Hermione Granger was gone forever.
The final bell was what took me out of my trip down memory lane. Shaking my head, I shut down the machine on my desk, threw my papers in my case and strode out of the building.
She came to class the next day, but it was apparent that her attention was not on the subject at hand. I saw Loralie glancing over at her from time to time, before Randie said something to her that must have been along the lines of, "I'm fine, leave me alone."
I left her alone to her thoughts, however morbid they might be. I could see that she wasn't even working on math, but I knew that if I pressed her, she'd fall apart right then and there, and would probably hate me for it.
'Wait—since when do you care about whether someone falls apart or not?' A little voice demanded in my head. I ignored it; however much I enjoy making people's lives hell, this wasn't the right place to be doing that.
It was by far the quietest class I'd taught since I left Hogwarts.
"Mike, how do we solve this kind of problem?"
It was almost 2pm and I was standing at the board, waiting for a student to answer my question.
"Find the roots?" he finally managed. "I don't know."
Biting back a sarcastic remark, I walked the class through yet another problem involving the quadratic formula and what its results mean.
"Your homework for this weekend is on the board," I said when the bell rang. "You'll be having a quiz on Tuesday on quadratic equations. Have a nice weekend."
There was quite a lot of noise as the students gathered their things together and left the class, making the already noisy hallway even louder. I waited until the noise died down a bit before sifting through the homework that had been handed in at the beginning of class. Surprisingly, it didn't take long for me to mark the grades in my book, and when I was finished, I wandered up to the main building to sign out for the week and check my mailbox.
As I was pulling out of the parking lot, I saw Randie getting into a green car. I braked long enough to give her room to back up and pull out in front of me. Glancing at the clock, I decided I had enough time to do some joyriding.
The Ford Focus turned onto Genesee Street and sailed down the curving road towards Manlius. I managed to stay close behind her by sheer luck, as the traffic was high with everyone heading home for the weekend. I thought she might be heading to the mall, but I was proven wrong as she rolled on by the intersection and continued past the highway bridge. For about ten minutes we rode down Genesee as it forked off to the left, until we reached Fayetteville. I was already pretty much lost, praying that either I'd remember how to get back or be fortunate enough to follow her back.
Ten more minutes of straight road, a few turns, and finally some pretty damn steep hills. I had to do 80mph to keep up with her, breaking hard to get around the sharp turns safely. The scenery was great, but I couldn't get a proper look at it while speeding through Madison County. And then I saw the lake.
It was massively long, enveloped between West, East, and North Lake Roads, and very blue. The sun glittered across the surface, glaring with every ripple of the water. But we apparently weren't there to examine the lake.
After a few more turns and what I thought was a sudden drop over a hill, she pulled into Chittenango Falls. I rolled to a stop in a spot at the far end of the lot and watched her turn the car around tightly. Then she looked over in my direction. Even from a distance I could tell that she recognized me. It never occurred to me that I should look away so that she wouldn't. I saw her check her watch for the time and then proceed to leave the park. Shifting into Drive, I fell into place behind her and resumed the reckless drive back to the city. Instead of going own Genesee, she turned onto the highway and it wasn't long before I lost her. I had no desire to follow her home. I was too tired to do anything but return to my own apartment and collapse onto my sofa.
Yea, I know: lack of dialogue. That's because they don't really know who they are in terms of who they were….or whatever.