JUST FOR FUN , a comedy of sorts . All characters,places,artifacts,plot points e.t.c. are owned by their respective original creators, I don't own that stuff, I own nothing except my wit

I will try to update/post a chapter every Saturday night-Sunday (Greek time) , please know that English are not my mother language and it's my first fanfic but I appreciate critique and I am not easily offended

thank you for reading!

Professor Snape was sitting in his office, still at school, still at Hogwarts. He had survived the war, he had survived Nagini's bite, Voldemort was defeated, and his mission as a double agent was over... and he was free from peril but still felt doomed, trapped in a meaningless existence, condemned in perpetual misery.

"After all this time, after all my suffering ..."

After all his suffering, after all torment and toil , after years upon years of service and coming back from near demise and sweet oblivion he was still stuck in this damn school, teaching all these unappreciative brats the same lessons he had been teaching all his life. Oh the injustice, the cruelty to be forced day after day to tolerate their (literally) exploding stupidity.

One could think that after all those years of secret service, they would at least let him teach "defense against the dark arts", something that might make him feel more invigorating, more battle-tested like those damn muscular dunderhead muggle superheroes (which a cousin of his used to read and admire when they were kids) but at the same time true to himself , clever ,alluring, mysterious there he could at least pretend he tolerates those agents of doom all the other professors called "students" .

Alas, he wouldn't be tempted; even if he was a spy for Dumbledore for more than a decade, even if everyone learned his contributions to the victory of the last war and all the sacrifices he had to do still he was not totally trusted by everyone, with everyone meaning the ministry, the studious wizard society and security services. He was considered lucky to keep his position and job and that merely to pay for essentials as the tight economy after the war made the upper echelons to cancel all war pensions except the disability ones.

"Lucky LUCKY" thought in silence while boiling inside. If he had to be the crazy magic-scientist, at least he should have gotten a position to teach at the university or been placed in a spell or potion research group. Now that Voldemort was dead and finished, and therefore his own mission as a double agent was over, there was no special urgency or need to stay in Hogwarts. His talent in potions could be used in other jobs, places, or professions, he was more than able to fill those positions but no, the ministry wanted him here in this accursed school. This was only for one reason, distrust, he was considered addicted to the allure of the dark occult as so had to be controlled. In any research he would be too independent and therefore dangerously free to get involved in dark magic, left alone equally dangerous. As for university, it was a bit of the same, but working and living in Hogwarts, he would be under constant surveillance from the headmistress and the ministry officials...

He sighed and looked at the test sheets with the students' answers lying in front of him. "I don't know… what those youths…consider… as satisfactory preparation for a test today… I dread for the future… of magic." Most of them were failing miserably to even pass. He didn't want to continue grading those, it was even more tortuous than the cruciatus curse besides it was already too late and it was the evening of Halloween the feast would start from time to time, he could bother with the tests another time, for now he had to get ready for the feast but first he had to do something else.

He stood and walked to a closet at the side of his office… The package had arrived at lunch and it had something strange to it, headmistress McGonagall wanted to examine it before they opened it and he wanted the exact same thing. It could be anything, it could be something cursed sent by a deatheater who escaped the arrest, it could be something poisoned... anything sent to him had the potential to be just death in a box, slow and painful like the one by which Dumbledore was rotting away for almost a year. He felt too old for all that .The ministry should just quit being stingy and give him a spy pension to let him live his days in tolerable exile... preferably somewhere in the tropicals, but no he had to stay here where everyone could find him easily and every package for him was a potential deathtrap that had to be magically examined.

After much testing they had opened the package, it had two things inside a black candle and a book, the candle was of no importance -just a candle made traditionally from some type of organic animal fat, probably pig fat- he and Minerva concluded, he had tons of those (useful for certain potions and also for lighting the space manually instead of magically) but the book was strange, it was a book with a cover of stitched leather, with wonderful snake decorations, it seemed alive and had an eye that rolled in the front cover. The eye opened and closed like a human eye, looked a bit like moody's eye. When they opened the book it was full of dark magic the kind of which was unknown to them, it certainly triggered his interest, academically of course, but no….Headmistress McGonagall decided to keep it, seize it, confiscate it, snatch it away from him. It wasn't cursed but she said that such dark magic is fueling his addiction to dark activities , in vain were all his complains she had made her decision to keep the book in her office away from him and it was final. He left her office fuming in anger. He had been reduced to be treated like a student where a professor could have his things snatched from him like he was an underage child with magical fireworks and not a respected war-veteran and professor. When he arrived at his apartments in the dungeons, he threw the black candle to a bucket near his office, it landed on a pile of black candles he kept for use when working in the night. At least the one who sent it knew his taste, the color suited him perfectly but still he was outraged, McGonagall kept the only interesting item of HIS package and left him with just a black candle... just a candle...

But it was not just a black candle, not just a candle! Alas none in Hogwarts seemed to know that.