I finally came back to this. After some soul searching, I decided I needed to start writing for me again. And this crazy OC thing instantly sprang to mind. I've got a few chapters stored away, so huzzah, this story won't disappear into the deep dark depths of the site archive anytime soon.

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Darkness

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The sun had set at Hogsmeade. Snow was falling. Winter had come. It was far from a joyous time. The village center was dark save for the miniscule glow from the banked coals of the public floo and Severus's pale Lumos. The air was biting and chill. The boy was shivering. He was too late; it had been a mistake to come.

Severus looked from the curfew sign nailed to a doused lamppost to the shuttered windows of the Hog's Head. There, pasted on a wooden slat was a poster of Black, mad and raving. The real thing could be lying in wait around the corner, for all Severus knew. He let his gaze slide beyond the tavern. Nestled between two darkened shops was the crooked cobblestone back-way that was the most direct route to Hogwarts.

The alley led to an archway in the crumbling wall of the village's old fortifications. Through that, an old pig herder's path cut a shallow, repetitive zigzag down the steep boulder-strewn hill and into the Forbidden Forest. The winding ancient path was eventually run over by the carriage road, an invention of the late eighteenth century. The road spanned the distance between the also reasonably new-fangled train station and the old-as-dirt school gates. Pass through the gates, and a traveler found himself confronted with the long stretch of Hogwarts' grounds between the wall and the safety of the castle.

The former servant of the dark lord had looked Death in the eye and kissed his robes. He refused to set one foot down that dark path. Unfortunately, it seemed to be his lot in life to have the sort of options where he really had none at all.

He glared at the wanted poster. Black: the single word summed up his predicament quite nicely.

The castle had sent him on his mad quest while there was a deranged Azkhaban convict with a history of trying to kill him (and nearly succeeding) on the loose. And since Black was trying to pluck precious Harry Potter from Hogwarts, the Floo system was warded against anything more invasive than a fire call. That necessitated approaching the castle on foot, which, given Hogsmeade was boarded up from paranoia, was inconvenient enough without the added host of Dementors let loose to circle the school's boundaries hungrily.

Loathsome and lawless as the creatures were in the daylight, after nightfall who was to say they might not "mistake" a Hogwarts Professor and his young charge for Sirius Black? One wizard looked much like another, especially in the dark, and with the child clutching at the man so tightly from fear it was easy to see why they would think the pair one trembling figure. Why, they even had managed to suck out only one soul with their kissing, as Snivellus clearly never had one to steal. And the boy, he was just a Ministry ward, and a very inconveniently expensive one at that, so no harm done. In fact, give the Dementor an Order of Merlin.

Well, carry on with the Potter Protection Plan, then.

Oh, there were some aspects of the day that even he couldn't lay at Black's feet. The rest had to do with karma—his extraordinarily awful karma. Beyond the usual torments in his life (Dumbledore's infuriating obtuseness, Lucius, having two Weasleys minimum per school term, and Potter's very existence), a castle now wanted to kill him.

That couldn't be the end of it, either. The logic of it all escaped him, but because of the castle, his somewhat-estranged, were-muggle, half-brother had threatened to eat him (and meant it). Because Henri had miraculously developed a backbone and an appetite for human flesh, it had become necessary to…flirt with a woman his dead mother's age with the face of a toad and a penchant for pink and kitten plates. He was also fairly certain that Hogwart's newest student of indeterminate age needed a wand worth Magical England's national debt to survive to Graduation. As a result, a charming young woman with luck almost as bad as his own was about to come under extreme fire for doubling Magical England's national debt.

Inwardly, he cursed. To top it all off, he had misjudged the time difference between Diagon and Hogsmeade. Damn Ollivander straight to Hell.

He had wasted too much time at the wand shop, arguing over price for the Ministry girl's sake. The old wizard actually had the gall to ask for quadruple of what they finally settled on: a number that threatened to make his brain dilate into aneurysm at the mere thought.

It had been a mistake to go to Flourish and Blotts' before taking the floo to Hogsmeade. Making it worse, he had argued too long over the haggling there, too, certain the sun would still be in the sky in Scotland when he arrived.

Severus looked again around the desolate High Street, at a loss and wishing there was something he could strangle. He should have known by now to never trust his luck, but he had and here he was.

At the rate he was going, he thought to himself, Black was going to appear out of a shadow any moment.

The sound of glass cracking on stone behind him was the last thing he or his heart needed to hear. Wand in an offensive grip, he whirled around to the left, dragging Svartálfar behind him.

After a beat, his shoulders slumped and he tried hard not to sigh. Or laugh. A dog. It was just a mangy, slack-jawed mutt with one foot put haphazardly into what had been a neat stack of empty milk bottles. "Black, indeed," he muttered. The dog took that as its cue to leap out of the mess of broken glass and lope out of sight down a narrow alley. The broken base of a bottle rolled slowly after it, clinking, passing eventually of range of the light still emanating from Severus's wand.

The boy only dared to breathe five seconds after High Street resumed its dead silence. "Sir," he began, then seemed to think it wiser to remain silent. He turned his head slightly away and averted his gaze. He couldn't have known it, but doing so offered the Potions Master a choice view of the whites of his eyes.

Severus's mind chose that moment to recall that should the boy die before reaching Hogwarts, the castle would become, as Albus had so whimsically put it, 'tetchy.' Tetchy, he supposed, as opposed to being merely annoyed, when 'the girl' (honestly, only Albus) had taken to flinging about and battering her professors upon her innards.

Finally releasing his sigh, he reached into a waistcoat pocket and withdrew a sickle, which he threw at the public floo's hearth. Green fire flared up. He maneuvered the boy back into the flame and called out "Diagon Commons."

The pair disappeared with a customary plume of smoke.

Black, indeed. And Umbridge flirtations... I am trying to push more of the canon cast into this, though I do hope I haven't scarred anyone. I stumbled across an AU the other day where there was a mother named Delores Pettigrew…let that sink in a moment…yes, my thoughts exactly.

Happy (Unscarred) Readings,
Butterfly

P.S.: Story Alert if you want to know if Severus will EVER make it back to Hogwarts.