Note: Ok, couple of things to clear up. Firstly, you'll notice that this is not a Monday update. It is a Tuesday update, and in future all updates will be Tuesday updates, namely because I will be suffering from Mondayitis on a Monday. Secondly, the idea of glamouring which I talked about last update has been around in fantasy novels for a while; Garth Nix didn't create it but it was in his works that I first came across it. Thirdly, ages ago I was talking about a German anthropologist and I said I'd find out who he was. Ok, his name's Michael Tomasello and he's not actually German, but his work is interesting nonetheless. Onwards to the chapters, or else the note will be longer than the update!

Chapter Thirty-Five

The Stars Behind the Clouds

It was one o'clock in the morning and the previous evening's lesson was at an end. Aurora Sinistra looked out over the Hogwarts grounds from the top of her astronomy tower, purposefully avoiding glancing at the sky. Oh, how she longed for the days when all she had to do was look to the heavens for the solutions to her problems. Now, it seemed that all the stars were hidden beyond the clouds that had set in after Professor Dumbledore's death and showed no signs of wanting to lift. How could she be expected to teach when her pupils couldn't even see the celestial bodies to which she alluded? Aurora was at her wits' end with the blasted weather, and not for the first time she considered trying to control it. She could create small pockets in the cloud cover through which her classes could focus their telescopes, but the effects only lasted for a few minutes. The weather was one thing that witches and wizards preferred to leave to take its own course, lest their meddling have unexpected side-effects. Aurora vaguely remembered the cautionary tale of an Australian wizard who had cast a spell to summon rain in the middle of a drought, only for the precipitation to continue unrelenting for the next thirty-three years.

Aurora pulled herself away from the thought, as tempting as it was. She focussed on the twinkling lights of Hagrid's hut – what was he doing up at such an hour? She sighed and let her shoulders droop. On the one hand, her nocturnal existence was a blessing. With very little in the way of interruptions, Aurora had always felt herself the master of her domain, a true queen of the night. On the other hand, it could be incredibly lonely. It was not often that Aurora felt the need for companionship – her isolated life had taught her to cope without it – but when she did, it was often hard to come by in the small hours. She was just about to go back inside the castle with the intention of pouring out her woes to Hagrid when a voice stopped her and made her jump.

"Morning, Rora."

Aurora turned and saw Bathsheba standing in the doorway enveloped in an outsize multicoloured scarf.

"I didn't hear you come up, Bathsheba," she said.

"I'd be amazed if you had," the older witch replied. "You've been in a dreamworld for the past six weeks." She came up beside Aurora and shivered. "It's a cold night to be standing out here doing nothing."

"I don't feel it."

It was true. Aurora was so used to the cooler temperatures of the night that it took a lot to make her feel the cold.

"Maybe it's just my old bones," said Bathsheba. The two witches remained in silence for the next few minutes until the ancient runes professor spoke again.

"What's eating you, Rora?"

Aurora turned and leaned back on the railing, closing her eyes.

"You can read people as easily as you read one of your ancient texts, can't you? How's the knitting coming along?"

"It's a well known fact that I can, and we're talking about you, not me."

There was a pause.

"It's all so real," said Aurora finally with a sigh. "I mean, all this business with Septima really hammers it home. Nowhere is safe. Not even Hogwarts. We're still here, limping along, but it's not going to be long before we're completely overrun."

It felt good to talk, Aurora would admit that much. She could almost feel the worries lifting off her shoulders as she gave them voice. Bathsheba was a patient and sympathetic listener, nodding in all the right places and never butting in with critique or commentary that would have been, at this stage, both unwanted and unwarranted. If Aurora didn't get everything off her chest in one go then it would simply continue to build up until she was on the verge of throwing herself over the railings of her own tower.

"And then there's Severus," she said at last. "I just can't understand what he's doing. He's like a ghost in bat's clothing; I've seen him about three times since the beginning of term and I'm certain that it has nothing to do with our living through opposing times of the day. Where is the man?"

She stopped, finally having come to the end of her tirade, and she waited for Bathsheba to say something. For a long time the older witch remained silent, fingering at the ends of the scarf that, Aurora realised, was not a scarf at all but her latest knitting project, the needles glittering in the obscured moonlight.

"I think that Severus is an enigma," she said finally. "I think he's on his own side, playing both adversaries for his own ends. Don't ask me quite what he hopes to achieve with such a methodology," she added hastily, "but I'm certain that there's something going on that we aren't aware of. He's hiding something, that much is for certain."

"The fact he's a heartless murderer, perhaps," muttered Aurora sourly.

"No," said Bathsheba, her voice matter-of-fact. "We all know that already, he doesn't need to hide it. No, this is definitely something else. Related, perhaps, but not what you're thinking of."

Aurora was not quite sure if this declaration was meant to mollify her or make her more wary.

"As for Septima, Poppy says that she is going to make a full recovery." Bathsheba laughed softly. "I think we might have finally managed to convince Brian that it wasn't all his fault."

"The last I heard, he was apologising for the forty-eighth time."

"Forty-ninth," corrected Bathsheba. "Numbers are very important to Septima and Brian. Dear me. Brian's a good chap; he means well but…" She shook her head in mock despair as she pulled a ball of wool out of the bag slung across her shoulder and began to work out a knot in the black and orange speckled yarn. "Men. They're a liability, especially when you put two or more of them together."

Aurora allowed herself a small smile. She had heard that Filius and Horace's attempts to console Septima's distraught husband had not ended particularly well. Her thoughts turned to the staffroom and the way that the teachers seemed to naturally gravitate towards and away from each other. Although it was rare for Aurora to be in the staffroom at the same time as anyone other than during the weekly staff meeting, she knew its ins and outs. Aurora herself naturally gravitated towards Charity, her equal in age and teaching experience, and the menfolk (there had always seemed to be less wizards than witches on the staff) had a tendency to group together, perhaps working on the principle of strength in numbers should their female co-workers turn hostile. She found herself coming back to Severus, and wondered where he fitted in to the equation. He had always been on the outside, an observer rather than a participant, just like Bathsheba was. It could be no coincidence that they were both so extraordinarily good at reading people; years of practice in the staffroom had taught them to analyse ever-changing relationships.

Speak of the Devil… Aurora caught movement in the shadows of the tower and she froze as she realised that it was Severus standing in the doorway, watching the two witches with calculated interest. The astronomy professor held more than a little bit of fear for the man himself, but her main unease at that precise moment was that she had no idea how to react to his presence. Her gut instinct was telling her to run as far as she could in the opposite direction, but what she retained of her fighting spirit told her to attack him with as much force as she could muster. Yet another part of her could not help but recall Bathsheba's words, spoken but a few moments previous. He was such a completely unreadable character.

"Relax Rora," said Bathsheba next to her without looking up from the wool. "You and I aren't important enough to be assassinated."

"But…"

"Professor Sinistra, Professor Babbling." Severus chose that moment to make his presence formally known, stepping out of the tower and into the little observation area, although still keeping a respectful distance from his colleagues. Aurora's eyes never left him as he moved, watching his every measured step, but Bathsheba seemed far more interested in a particularly tricky knot in the yarn rather than the fact that they were alone at the top of the tallest tower with the man who had killed their leader in this very spot. Either the ancient runes professor had a death wish, or she truly trusted that Severus was not out for their blood.

"What brings you here at such an hour, Severus?" asked Bathsheba, and Aurora was glad that her older friend had taken the initiative to speak since her tongue was as frozen in place as the rest of her.

"I could ask you the same question, Bathsheba," he replied. "It is a cold night to begin the practice of a new art, don't you think?"

Bathsheba did not reply immediately, instead placing the at-last-untangled yarn back into her bag and turning to face their intruder, regarding him sagely over the top of her spectacles. It was only then that Aurora realised why Bathsheba could retain her calm in his presence. She had taught Severus during his time as a Hogwarts student, and the image that she always retained of him was of a thirteen-year-old sitting in her class for the first time. It was always said that the past was a dangerous weapon, and Bathsheba had seen an awful lot of past in her many years with the school.

"Not everything we do is for an obvious reason, Severus."

The sentence was part statement and part unspoken challenge. Severus paused in thought for a moment before visibly conceding to Bathsheba's stern wisdom.

"Indeed it is not, Bathsheba."

He came a step closer then, his movements still slightly wary, and it dawned on Aurora that he was just as uneasy as she was. Whilst she feared his presence, he feared her reaction to his presence, and all the while, Bathsheba observed this delicate ballet in her inimitable manner. Presently the ancient runes teacher spoke aloud.

"What are you hiding, Severus?"

It was such a blunt and obvious question that Aurora was startled. Surely he would not freely give up such information.

He produced a bottle from under his cloak and Aurora had to laugh that the question and its answer had pertained to something so simple. Somehow, the girlish giggle defused the taut atmosphere slightly.

"I thought you might appreciate something to lift your spirits. The conditions are hardly suited to stargazing," he added pointedly on seeing Aurora's eyebrow raise of its own accord, "and I noticed that you were still up here an hour after your class had finished."

Aurora shivered at the thought; she did not need to ask how he knew. One could see the astronomy tower clearly from the Hogwarts gates. Anyone who had apparated as far as the boundaries would allow and was making their way inside would have seen her staring out like Juliet waiting for Romeo. She purposefully pushed her mind away from that singularly scary thought and she looked at the bottle as Bathsheba, ever practical, drew glasses out of mid-air and began to pour.

Severus took a sip of the amber spirit first, perhaps a conscious act to prove to the witches that he meant no harm in the strange gesture of goodwill. Aurora could not make sense of it. Why would he suddenly do such a thing? Was it an attempt to make peace with her after what had occurred in her tower in July? 'I'm sorry I murdered the headmaster in your domain, here, have some whiskey to compensate?' No, that was too crass, too awkward, too blatantly inappropriate. It was not like Severus. For as long as she had known him, the Slytherin had always been subtle. Aurora viewed it more as a token of acceptance, neither a denial nor an apology, a simple statement of the status quo – for as long as it took, they were going to have to get along with each other for the good of the school.

Aurora took a sip, and although she had not particularly felt the cold beforehand, the whiskey warmed her from the inside out. She thought about the irony of the situation. In any other circumstances, she and Bathsheba and Severus would not be enjoying a quiet drink in the middle of the night at the top of the astronomy tower, but something unspoken meant that these were not normal circumstances. They were being civil to each other instead of resorting to mindless violence, and it was because of the venerated establishment in which they stood. Bathsheba had said at the beginning of the year that it was essential for the staff to band together against the influences of You-Know-Who; ostensibly against Severus. Severus, who could have made the school's downfall so terribly quick and so terribly easy, and yet, he was the one who was keeping it strong and keeping it alive; his general absence allowing the others to function as normally as they could.

For the first time since the terrible incident of the previous summer, Aurora began to look at the defence professor in a slightly new light. She still did not trust him; how could she after everything that had happened? But something in his manner suggested to her that, at heart, he was first and foremost a Hogwarts teacher as opposed to taking a specific side. She thought once more of Bathsheba's words, of the something that was going on without their knowledge and of the something that Severus was hiding. She had never yet had cause to doubt the wise old witch, and she was not about to start doing so now. As they continued to drink in silence, Aurora noticed a small pocket of sky open up through the cloud cover, finally allowing her to see the stars that had always been the driving force in her life.

Something was happening, something that neither she nor Bathsheba, nor Severus in all probability, could hope to control. They were all pawns in a far higher, far greater game, and when the time came they would have to play their part. Until that time came, however, Aurora was content with the status quo. Whether it was true thought or alcohol speaking, she didn't know, but the astronomy professor finally felt at peace for the first time since July. It was strange to think that adding more mystery to the turmoil of her existence had had such a tranquilising effect. Aurora shrugged. That was the way that Hogwarts worked, and for as long as she could, she would strive to keep it that way.

Note2: And onwards!