2. Dark Nine

It would be a gross fallacy to say that Severus' thoughts the following day revolved around what would happen later that evening. It would be incomparably more accurate to say that he had forgotten about his scheduled session with Miss Parkinson entirely. Understandable, since his day turned out to be quite full. Most of his classes were doing labs that day, and by the time second hour rolled around two cauldrons had been melted, and four students were sent to the hospital wing to be treated for burns, all on top of which the Longbottom nitwit managed to somehow glue his head to his desk and had to be sent to Pomfrey on a trolley. Aside from all this, because there was a block schedule and Miss Parkinson's class had been yesterday, no material apparition showed up to remind him of her impending arrival at 8:00.

Generally, on nights when he knew paper-grading would meander into the wee hours or when he was hit with a bout of insomnia, he took up a practice he developed as a spy: smoking. That he smoked wasn't common knowledge, and most who knew of him would declare with certainty that he more than likely thought the practice disgusting. However, he found that there was nothing more soothing than breathing smoke, filling his lungs with poison whilst participating in these various past-midnight activities.

That night, after noting with a detached kind of displeasure the collectively massive amount of essays he would have to grade, he lit up early. One, he thought, before the dreaded process, another to help him begin, and however many he desired once the gothic-style clock over his door hit twelve.

Thus, he had just finished lighting his second cigarette when she walked in.

Form the way his eyes traveled smoothly from her billowing skirt to her heart-shaped face, one could hardly say that he looked surprised, which indeed he wasn't. True he had forgotten, but (in accordance with the expectations of others and his self-imposed regulations) Severus Snape just didn't do "surprised".

If anything, she was the one with the look of slight astonishment. Her slack-jaw attention traveled from the cigarette held expertly, lazily between his slant fingers, to his face, cool and collected. He noted this and raised a charcoal-grey eyebrow, which made her subtly parted lips snap themselves back into immaculate form.

"I— um— I'm here to take my test, Professor." He watched her throat as she swallowed.

"Miss Parkinson," he said, memory coming back instantly. Of course. "You are approximately," he glanced at the clock, "fifty seconds late."

She didn't say anything. She merely stared patiently with those fey eyes which, Severus surmised, was markedly worse. When he felt that he could stand it no longer, he took a short, disdainful drag of his cigarette and dropped his right hand to pull out a drawer in the side of his desk. Finding her test, he slapped it onto his desktop.

"You have one hour."

Lowering her eyes, she nodded and fumbled to take up her test.

Severus gave her one last glance as she let her bag drop from her shoulder, she herself slumping into an empty seat placed conveniently in the center of the room three rows from the front. Then he went back to his papers.

There was a solid minute of shuffling coming from her general direction. Then she was back at his desk.

He looked up to find her shifting uncomfortably, normally stoic eyes now quite occupied but unreadable.

"May I borrow some ink?"

It was all he could do to keep from growling, which was strange because she wasn't blatantly annoying him. She wasn't simpering— actually, the half-curious, half-helpless tint to her voice made it the most believably ordinary to date. Still, he had half a mind to snap that it was her own damn fault if she did not come prepared and send her to her dorm room, test undone, with a detention to boot.

He opted for a more agreeable response by holding the growl, grabbing a spare inkwell and setting it on the edge of his desk.

Even though he returned his gaze to the essays, there was no mistaking her lingering presence or the fact that the inkwell remained untouched. He looked up biliously, attempting not to crush the cigarette between his fingers.

"What is it, Miss Parkinson?"

"I didn't know you smoked."

His blood spiked as an icy spear passed briefly through his veins. She was using it again, the voice. The sensual orchestration of vowels and consonants filled him more deeply than the smoke ever could.

"I do, as do many of the other teachers and staff. The wonderful Professor Trelawny especially smokes like a chimney."

"Do you smoke often?"

He was prepared for the spike in his blood this time and let it pass without much tension. "Only when I remember that dying of lung cancer may be a more preferable death compared to the ones that the fates, the war, or my students have in mind for me."

There was no chuckle solicited from her because he didn't intend there to be, though her lips did noticeably curl upwards. Why was he having this conversation with her? He never spoke so candidly or easily to anyone other than Lucius Malfoy, and recently even to him with some reserve.

A thoughtful look came over her face. "Yes. Most people agree that a faster death equals a better death . . . but I think there's something very elegant about killing oneself by smoking. It's a willing ingestion of toxin over time— a kind of leisurely suicide."

He took a long drag, drawling, "How very poetic."

And then he did something that he could never in a million years imagine himself doing. He took the cigarette from his mouth, slipped it loosely between his fingers and offered it to her.

Furthermore, he found himself genuinely surprised when she gave his offer only a moment of genuflection before taking the cigarette from his extended fingers. With the practiced ease of a psych patient downing meds, she brought it to her lips and drew a deep, delicate drag. Severus watched, fascinated.

"Wonderful," she murmured, exhaling perfectly, and he almost cringed pleasantly in his seat. Only in the conversations between her and Lucius had he ever heard her do that.

She considered the gaseous substance expelling itself from her mouth and he knew she was noting how it ate up her lungs deliciously, added another thin coat of texture to that delectable voice. He watched her eyes stray, and followed them to the open pack on his desk; they both skimmed the foreign labels.

"Temnyee Devyat." Her flawless accent subtracted nothing form the fullness of her voice and she drew again also quite delicately but with a casualness that made her seem coquettish, skanky almost. "So they're Russian," she handed the cigarette back. She smiled. "Excellent."

By taking a millisecond's pause to brush her skin in taking back the half-depleted cigarette, he was able to determine that, were it a centimeter or so closer, his hand could cup hers perfectly. Their curves were nearly perfectly similar, the only difference being the soft feminine slopes of hers.

Perhaps she was having inklings of his thoughts, but there was a glint in her eye that put him ill-at-ease; it even made him ephemerally fancy the notion of slapping her, and then inflicting some like punishment upon himself.

His eyes dropped leisurely to desk level, and he knew that to her his patronizing gaze could be fixing on the untouched inkwell as it could be roving her adolescent body. He eliminated the second option by tapping the well and thrusting it the rest of the way across the desk. His semidangerous intonation of "I believe you have a test to take," sealed the fact. Dutifully, his student picked up the inkwell and wordlessly carried it to her seat.

As she was sitting down, he stubbed the cigarette out. How could he possibly bring his lips to it now? His pulse pounded in his chest, in his head, and pulled another cigarette from the pack.

But why another one? he couldn't help but wonder. He wasn't a chain-smoker, rarely went through more than two at a time . . . he didn't want to give the impression. . . .

He saw clearly, though, that the point was to make it seem as though the one she'd touched had no more value than the rest. This, and the fact that they soothed him enough to help him focus on the mountains of essays with only slightly less interest than usual, resulted in two more cigarettes.

It took her only a half hour to complete the test; ten minutes after his fourth cigarette was stubbed out in the dish, eight after the smoke-cloud he'd conjured began to dissipate, she was at his desk again, holding out her test.

He accepted it from her and told her she would have her grade tomorrow. She nodded, gave an obscure little thanks in a tone that left him dissatisfied as he watched the door close behind her for the second time that wee.

Five minutes after her footsteps faded down the hall, he stood and collected his cigarette dish. Walking around his desk to the wastebin, he made a move as if to throw them out; then paused.

Carefully, without disturbing the rest of the contents, he plucked from the ashes the longest cigarette stub, the very one her lips had touched. He stared at it long and hard, thinking without forming an actual stream of thought. The slender, delicate paper cylinder rolled in his fingertips, was worshiped by his touch. Why should he be so fixed on such a petty thing? It was no more than paper, just a slip of paper with a few poisonous herbs, herbs from which she inhaled a premature death, paper around which she had place her lips. . . .

He recalled her parting locutions, the unremarkably uttered, "Thank you," that had left him hanging so high and dry.

Scowling, he flicked the stub into the trash.

"Temnyee Devyat" is Russian for "Dark Nine", thus the title. It doesn't really have anything to do with the story, but it sounded cool, so ...