A Matter of Black and White
folder
Harry Potter › Het - Male/Female
Rating:
Adult ++
Chapters:
35
Views:
3,935
Reviews:
57
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Category:
Harry Potter › Het - Male/Female
Rating:
Adult ++
Chapters:
35
Views:
3,935
Reviews:
57
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Disclaimer:
I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.
16-Tea Revolt
DISCLAIMER: This story is based upon the works of JK Rowling. Anything you recognize is hers. I’m making no money off of this. I’m just having some fun adding my own little corner to the amazing world she has already created.
* * *
CHAPTER 16—TEA REVOLT
Aurora crumpled the morning’s Daily Prophet and tossed it into the fire. The boldfaced headline slowly crinkled into a charred ball: MINISTRY SPEECHLESS! NO WORD ON ESCAPED DEATH EATERS OR WEEKEND MUGGLE ATTACK. Despite the Department of Magical Law Enforcement’s refusal to comment, the implicit assumption was that the prison escapees had had a hand in the reported mayhem at an amusement park in Windsor. Aurora didn’t doubt that her godfather had been a part of the attack. She knew how he and her father had always loved a good Muggle terror-fest.
Aurora sunk into her chair. Of course, Severus also now had an excellent sense of how the Kiebitzeis and Uncle Antie had entertained themselves. Why had she fed him those ghosts from her past when she was supposed to be learning to guard them? She had wanted to make a fresh start with Severus here at Hogwarts; she’d wanted things to be easier. But how could they be easier as long as the morning papers kept getting owled in with grim headlines and Severus continued acting like she was no more self-aware than a ball of candy floss? Add that to his inability to utter her name without acting like he had poison on his lips and she had lost hope of maintaining her composure.
Yes, she had given him too much at their last lesson, and she had made things even worse by fleeing her hard-earned ground once she had explained the significance of her name and that memory. She had ground to make up now, and doing so on Severus’s territory was going to be difficult.
* * *
When Aurora arrived for her next lesson, Severus once again positioned himself in the middle of his doorframe like a sentry, making her linger for an awkward moment in the corridor. God forbid he make her feel too welcome. Still, when he did step aside (barely) to allow her to enter, she whisked past him and made a beeline for the bookcase. Which book had he pulled before?
Severus scowled at her obvious intention to use his private rooms again. Too bad. She was damned if she was going to sit on that sorry excuse for a stool. If he was too stubborn to add some more comfortable and less degrading furniture to his office, he would have to accept having his private space invaded. He opened his mouth to protest, but she found the red book on tubeworm dissection and the case swung open. A chilly draft brushed her skin. (Did he ever light a fire?) Knowing that Severus wouldn’t offer her the usual niceties, she went in and settled herself on the sofa.
“Do you always make yourself so at home?” he growled.
It was perfect timing—or incredibly imperfect, depending on how you looked at it. With a tiny “pop” and a slight tinkling of china, a house-elf with a tea service appeared in the room. “Professor’s tea?” the tiny creature squeaked hesitantly, her protuberant eyes looking warily around the room into which she had just Apparated.
Whatever reserve Severus forced upon himself with a witch and fellow teacher was lost with the house-elf. “House-elves are not allowed in my chambers!” he barked. “How did you get in here?”
“Excusing me, sir,” the house-elf said in a high, shaky voice that wavered in time to the rattling of the tea cups. “But Professor is ordering tea, and Nilly is bringing Professor’s tea.”
“I’ve ordered no such thing,” he spat. “What is your purpose? Why are you breaking into my rooms?”
“I’m sorry, Severus,” Aurora interrupted in her most courteous tones. (Someone here had to be polite.) “There has been some confusion. The tea is for me.”
“You?” he rounded on her, the vein in his temple bulging.
“And you as well, of course, if you would care for some,” she added graciously.
He didn’t seem to know what to do with this, so he reverted his displeasure back toward the house-elf, over whom he was now towering. “There are wards here that only a wizard can break. How did you bypass them?”
As nonchalantly as she could, Aurora slipped between the raging wizard and the trembling house-elf. “It seems there is a chink in your armor, Severus,” she said with an air of mild academic interest. “It appears your wards are only effective at barring anyone trying to get into your office. But Nilly here was simply wanting to get to me.”
“Yes,” said a little voice behind her. “Nilly is just doing her job, she is. She is bringing Professor Miss her tea, and Professor Miss is here, so Nilly is bringing tea here.”
“Thank you, Nilly.” Aurora turned to the circular-speaking elf and took the tray from her. “You may go now.”
The tiny being gave her a relieved look and disappeared as quickly as she had come.
“How dare you invite that creature into my quarters?” Severus demanded, now having no choice but to vent his anger at her.
Aurora purposefully set the tea service on the coffee table between the sofa and the empty fireplace. She settled back into her seat and began pouring a cup of steaming-hot liquid—black, of course—which she offered up to him. “Tea?”
The vein in Severus’s forehead looked like it might explode. “Do you have any idea the seriousness of what you have done?”
“Seriousness?” Aurora laughed. “Nilly hardly broke into the Ministry. In fact, she didn’t break in anywhere at all. It was just a bit of confusion, that’s all.” Well, not entirely confusion. She had ordered the tea for this time, knowing full well that she would be in Severus’s rooms—another subtle play in their struggle for power—but she had had no idea that he would react this explosively. It was the first time she had seen him truly lose his composure. His level of agitation had elevated from cranky to livid.
“I’ll have you know that my private stores have been broken into repeatedly in past years,” he growled, “sometimes with dire consequences.”
Aurora stirred some milk into her tea. “Is that why you’ve warded this place as heavily as Azkaban?” she asked with an absentness that might either diffuse or ignite his volatility.
“…Not to mention the fact that I possess sensitive items and documents pertaining to my extracurricular work. You would do well to ward your own chambers.”
“Look on the bright side, Severus. I helped you uncover a chink in your wards, and now you can fix it.” As light as Aurora was trying to make of the situation, she couldn’t help but add with a touch of flippancy, “All your potions and paraphernalia can now be safe from Nilly the house-elf.”
“The house-elves wouldn’t have been barging in here if they hadn’t been coming for you.”
“And I wouldn’t have requested tea if I wasn’t likely to catch frostbite down here.”
“Dress warmer,” he spat.
“It’s a summer’s day,” she countered.
“You’re in Scotland.”
“I’m from the Alps.”
“Then you should have been prepared.”
What followed was a stare-off. Unfortunately, locking eyes with a Legilimens was not the best way of holding one’s ground. She felt him invading her mental territory, seeking out the nastiest, most hurtful memories he could resurface. This wasn’t a lesson; this was warfare, and she wanted to fight back with her strongest Legilimens-hurling form of Pure Occlumency. After weeks of trying to subdue this reflex, though, her old defensive line maneuvered clumsily. Instead of hurtling him away with a satisfying bodily crash, she felt a new sort of liquid pull, and unfamiliar images started washing over her.
The visions were scattered at first—teenage boys laughing in ridicule, Death Eater revels at their ugliest, and then something more whole, something so fixed and concrete that it did not whisk past the mind’s eye like the other fleeting images. Overshadowing every other thought was a towering man with a black beard and matching robes, leading Aurora to assume he was a wizard until she noticed the white collar and silver cross at his neck. In his white-knuckled hand he gripped The Standard Book of Spells, which he shook violently in the hook-nosed face of a boy in his early teens.
“What is this Devil’s scrawl you’ve brought into my house, boy?”
“It’s…it’s for school, Father,” the young man admitted cautiously.
The robed man backhanded his son across the mouth, splitting his lip. “Don’t lie to me, Severus. Holy Blood Academy doesn’t teach this sacrilege.”
“He’s not at Holy Blood, Tobias,” a woman’s voice quavered.
Tobias spun to face a woman with stringy brown hair who was clutching the folds of her thin cotton housedress. “Where is he then?” he asked, his voice low and dangerous.
“Hogwarts,” she whispered. She added quickly and pleadingly, “He has the Gift, Tobias. It would be a sin to waste it.”
“A sin?” the cassocked man demanded, grabbing his wife by one frail arm. “A sin is lying to your husband.” He threw her back into a wall. “A sin is keeping your son from his religious education.” He shook her so that her head rattled against the garland-papered wall. “A sin is spawning another child of Satan like yourself!” He dealt her a pounding blow to the face. “You swore you had renounced your sin before I agreed to marry you, Eileen.” He spat out her name as if it fouled his mouth. “Why have you propagated it in him?”
“He can’t help what he is, Tobias.”
“Maybe not,” he answered, his eyes glinting dangerously. “But I can.” He tore back to Severus. “Where is it?”
“What?” the young man answered, his voice shaking with both fear and rage.
“They consult a wooden idol and are answered by a stick of wood. A spirit of prostitution leads them astray; they are unfaithful to their God! Don’t play stupid, Severus. I know what your kind uses to prostitute themselves to evil. I already snapped your mother’s when I was fool enough to marry her.”
“But my wand,” young Severus faltered, “…my wand is everything.”
Tobias wrestled the boy to him and groped at his pockets. In his jacket, the raging man found a crooked length of wood. “I will destroy your witchcraft and you will no longer cast spells,” he recited, pushing Severus away from him.
The boy stumbled into his mother, faltering at the sight of her already swelling face. He turned back around in time to hear a sharp crack and see a trickle of purple sparks fall pathetically to the floor. Their dying embers were the last remaining vestiges of the memory as it faded to black.
This time both Aurora and Severus toppled over when their connection was broken. Somehow, however, Severus managed to make his usual graceful fall onto the sofa while she, who had already been seated, actually thudded to the floor, knocking down the tea service with her. Strangely, she didn’t notice the indignity of her position on the cold, dusty flagstones. Tea-stained and sitting two-feet off the floor, she knew she must look exactly like she felt.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured, unable to meet Severus’s eyes. “The visions came, and I didn’t know how to stop them.” When he didn’t answer, she added quickly, “I would have—stopped the visions, that is—if I’d been able to. Really.” She bit her bottom lip and added quietly, “Memories aren’t meant for display like that.”
She wanted to get up and leave him like she knew he must be willing her to do, but instead she sat frozen by his silence. It was worse than any rampage or maliciousness he could muster. All she could do was squeeze her eyes shut in the shameful hope of being able to blind herself to the hypocrite she had inadvertently made herself.
“You do have a great deal to learn, Aurora,” he said at last.
She met his dark eyes once to give him a quick nod, then collected herself and left him to his solitude.
* * *
AN: Tobias is quoting Hosea 4:12 and Micah 5:12 respectively. Did anyone see that bit of Snape’s history coming?
This is going to be my last posting for awhile. I am moving out of town in a couple of days, and it will be awhile before I get internet access again, let alone regain a bit of sanity. Thank you to everyone who has read this far. Please has patience!
See you on the other side.
* * *
CHAPTER 16—TEA REVOLT
Aurora crumpled the morning’s Daily Prophet and tossed it into the fire. The boldfaced headline slowly crinkled into a charred ball: MINISTRY SPEECHLESS! NO WORD ON ESCAPED DEATH EATERS OR WEEKEND MUGGLE ATTACK. Despite the Department of Magical Law Enforcement’s refusal to comment, the implicit assumption was that the prison escapees had had a hand in the reported mayhem at an amusement park in Windsor. Aurora didn’t doubt that her godfather had been a part of the attack. She knew how he and her father had always loved a good Muggle terror-fest.
Aurora sunk into her chair. Of course, Severus also now had an excellent sense of how the Kiebitzeis and Uncle Antie had entertained themselves. Why had she fed him those ghosts from her past when she was supposed to be learning to guard them? She had wanted to make a fresh start with Severus here at Hogwarts; she’d wanted things to be easier. But how could they be easier as long as the morning papers kept getting owled in with grim headlines and Severus continued acting like she was no more self-aware than a ball of candy floss? Add that to his inability to utter her name without acting like he had poison on his lips and she had lost hope of maintaining her composure.
Yes, she had given him too much at their last lesson, and she had made things even worse by fleeing her hard-earned ground once she had explained the significance of her name and that memory. She had ground to make up now, and doing so on Severus’s territory was going to be difficult.
* * *
When Aurora arrived for her next lesson, Severus once again positioned himself in the middle of his doorframe like a sentry, making her linger for an awkward moment in the corridor. God forbid he make her feel too welcome. Still, when he did step aside (barely) to allow her to enter, she whisked past him and made a beeline for the bookcase. Which book had he pulled before?
Severus scowled at her obvious intention to use his private rooms again. Too bad. She was damned if she was going to sit on that sorry excuse for a stool. If he was too stubborn to add some more comfortable and less degrading furniture to his office, he would have to accept having his private space invaded. He opened his mouth to protest, but she found the red book on tubeworm dissection and the case swung open. A chilly draft brushed her skin. (Did he ever light a fire?) Knowing that Severus wouldn’t offer her the usual niceties, she went in and settled herself on the sofa.
“Do you always make yourself so at home?” he growled.
It was perfect timing—or incredibly imperfect, depending on how you looked at it. With a tiny “pop” and a slight tinkling of china, a house-elf with a tea service appeared in the room. “Professor’s tea?” the tiny creature squeaked hesitantly, her protuberant eyes looking warily around the room into which she had just Apparated.
Whatever reserve Severus forced upon himself with a witch and fellow teacher was lost with the house-elf. “House-elves are not allowed in my chambers!” he barked. “How did you get in here?”
“Excusing me, sir,” the house-elf said in a high, shaky voice that wavered in time to the rattling of the tea cups. “But Professor is ordering tea, and Nilly is bringing Professor’s tea.”
“I’ve ordered no such thing,” he spat. “What is your purpose? Why are you breaking into my rooms?”
“I’m sorry, Severus,” Aurora interrupted in her most courteous tones. (Someone here had to be polite.) “There has been some confusion. The tea is for me.”
“You?” he rounded on her, the vein in his temple bulging.
“And you as well, of course, if you would care for some,” she added graciously.
He didn’t seem to know what to do with this, so he reverted his displeasure back toward the house-elf, over whom he was now towering. “There are wards here that only a wizard can break. How did you bypass them?”
As nonchalantly as she could, Aurora slipped between the raging wizard and the trembling house-elf. “It seems there is a chink in your armor, Severus,” she said with an air of mild academic interest. “It appears your wards are only effective at barring anyone trying to get into your office. But Nilly here was simply wanting to get to me.”
“Yes,” said a little voice behind her. “Nilly is just doing her job, she is. She is bringing Professor Miss her tea, and Professor Miss is here, so Nilly is bringing tea here.”
“Thank you, Nilly.” Aurora turned to the circular-speaking elf and took the tray from her. “You may go now.”
The tiny being gave her a relieved look and disappeared as quickly as she had come.
“How dare you invite that creature into my quarters?” Severus demanded, now having no choice but to vent his anger at her.
Aurora purposefully set the tea service on the coffee table between the sofa and the empty fireplace. She settled back into her seat and began pouring a cup of steaming-hot liquid—black, of course—which she offered up to him. “Tea?”
The vein in Severus’s forehead looked like it might explode. “Do you have any idea the seriousness of what you have done?”
“Seriousness?” Aurora laughed. “Nilly hardly broke into the Ministry. In fact, she didn’t break in anywhere at all. It was just a bit of confusion, that’s all.” Well, not entirely confusion. She had ordered the tea for this time, knowing full well that she would be in Severus’s rooms—another subtle play in their struggle for power—but she had had no idea that he would react this explosively. It was the first time she had seen him truly lose his composure. His level of agitation had elevated from cranky to livid.
“I’ll have you know that my private stores have been broken into repeatedly in past years,” he growled, “sometimes with dire consequences.”
Aurora stirred some milk into her tea. “Is that why you’ve warded this place as heavily as Azkaban?” she asked with an absentness that might either diffuse or ignite his volatility.
“…Not to mention the fact that I possess sensitive items and documents pertaining to my extracurricular work. You would do well to ward your own chambers.”
“Look on the bright side, Severus. I helped you uncover a chink in your wards, and now you can fix it.” As light as Aurora was trying to make of the situation, she couldn’t help but add with a touch of flippancy, “All your potions and paraphernalia can now be safe from Nilly the house-elf.”
“The house-elves wouldn’t have been barging in here if they hadn’t been coming for you.”
“And I wouldn’t have requested tea if I wasn’t likely to catch frostbite down here.”
“Dress warmer,” he spat.
“It’s a summer’s day,” she countered.
“You’re in Scotland.”
“I’m from the Alps.”
“Then you should have been prepared.”
What followed was a stare-off. Unfortunately, locking eyes with a Legilimens was not the best way of holding one’s ground. She felt him invading her mental territory, seeking out the nastiest, most hurtful memories he could resurface. This wasn’t a lesson; this was warfare, and she wanted to fight back with her strongest Legilimens-hurling form of Pure Occlumency. After weeks of trying to subdue this reflex, though, her old defensive line maneuvered clumsily. Instead of hurtling him away with a satisfying bodily crash, she felt a new sort of liquid pull, and unfamiliar images started washing over her.
The visions were scattered at first—teenage boys laughing in ridicule, Death Eater revels at their ugliest, and then something more whole, something so fixed and concrete that it did not whisk past the mind’s eye like the other fleeting images. Overshadowing every other thought was a towering man with a black beard and matching robes, leading Aurora to assume he was a wizard until she noticed the white collar and silver cross at his neck. In his white-knuckled hand he gripped The Standard Book of Spells, which he shook violently in the hook-nosed face of a boy in his early teens.
“What is this Devil’s scrawl you’ve brought into my house, boy?”
“It’s…it’s for school, Father,” the young man admitted cautiously.
The robed man backhanded his son across the mouth, splitting his lip. “Don’t lie to me, Severus. Holy Blood Academy doesn’t teach this sacrilege.”
“He’s not at Holy Blood, Tobias,” a woman’s voice quavered.
Tobias spun to face a woman with stringy brown hair who was clutching the folds of her thin cotton housedress. “Where is he then?” he asked, his voice low and dangerous.
“Hogwarts,” she whispered. She added quickly and pleadingly, “He has the Gift, Tobias. It would be a sin to waste it.”
“A sin?” the cassocked man demanded, grabbing his wife by one frail arm. “A sin is lying to your husband.” He threw her back into a wall. “A sin is keeping your son from his religious education.” He shook her so that her head rattled against the garland-papered wall. “A sin is spawning another child of Satan like yourself!” He dealt her a pounding blow to the face. “You swore you had renounced your sin before I agreed to marry you, Eileen.” He spat out her name as if it fouled his mouth. “Why have you propagated it in him?”
“He can’t help what he is, Tobias.”
“Maybe not,” he answered, his eyes glinting dangerously. “But I can.” He tore back to Severus. “Where is it?”
“What?” the young man answered, his voice shaking with both fear and rage.
“They consult a wooden idol and are answered by a stick of wood. A spirit of prostitution leads them astray; they are unfaithful to their God! Don’t play stupid, Severus. I know what your kind uses to prostitute themselves to evil. I already snapped your mother’s when I was fool enough to marry her.”
“But my wand,” young Severus faltered, “…my wand is everything.”
Tobias wrestled the boy to him and groped at his pockets. In his jacket, the raging man found a crooked length of wood. “I will destroy your witchcraft and you will no longer cast spells,” he recited, pushing Severus away from him.
The boy stumbled into his mother, faltering at the sight of her already swelling face. He turned back around in time to hear a sharp crack and see a trickle of purple sparks fall pathetically to the floor. Their dying embers were the last remaining vestiges of the memory as it faded to black.
This time both Aurora and Severus toppled over when their connection was broken. Somehow, however, Severus managed to make his usual graceful fall onto the sofa while she, who had already been seated, actually thudded to the floor, knocking down the tea service with her. Strangely, she didn’t notice the indignity of her position on the cold, dusty flagstones. Tea-stained and sitting two-feet off the floor, she knew she must look exactly like she felt.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured, unable to meet Severus’s eyes. “The visions came, and I didn’t know how to stop them.” When he didn’t answer, she added quickly, “I would have—stopped the visions, that is—if I’d been able to. Really.” She bit her bottom lip and added quietly, “Memories aren’t meant for display like that.”
She wanted to get up and leave him like she knew he must be willing her to do, but instead she sat frozen by his silence. It was worse than any rampage or maliciousness he could muster. All she could do was squeeze her eyes shut in the shameful hope of being able to blind herself to the hypocrite she had inadvertently made herself.
“You do have a great deal to learn, Aurora,” he said at last.
She met his dark eyes once to give him a quick nod, then collected herself and left him to his solitude.
* * *
AN: Tobias is quoting Hosea 4:12 and Micah 5:12 respectively. Did anyone see that bit of Snape’s history coming?
This is going to be my last posting for awhile. I am moving out of town in a couple of days, and it will be awhile before I get internet access again, let alone regain a bit of sanity. Thank you to everyone who has read this far. Please has patience!
See you on the other side.