A Matter of Black and White

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.

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CHAPTER 26—CRYING OVER SPILT TEA

Late Saturday morning, between sending Fawkes and Lilitu out the window with some leftover bacon and starting on a long-neglected pile of Runes papers, a crisp knock came at Aurora’s door. It was Severus.

“We’re having a lesson,” he said briskly.

She blinked in confusion. “I didn’t know we had one scheduled.”

“We don’t,” he said as he whisked into the room. “Think of this as a pop quiz.”

A quiz? Hadn’t she proven herself enough last night?

Severus swept over to the fireplace and took a pinch of Floo Powder from the mantle, nodding curtly at Weissman, who was waving his bass at him. Severus tossed the powder in the fireplace and stuck his head in. “We’re ready,” he said into the fire.

No sooner had Severus withdrawn his head from the flames, than Nilly the house-elf popped in next to him, rattling a silver tea set.

“Professor Sir is calling Nilly, Sir?” she asked hesitantly, obviously still recalling the last time she had delivered tea in Severus Snape’s presence.

Severus motioned toward the tea set. “Set it there,” he said, directing her to a breakfast table by the window.

Aurora shook her head. “Weren’t you the one, Severus, who was lecturing against inviting house-elves to someone else’s quarters?”

Severus waved for Nilly to go and shrugged as if to say that turnabout was fair play. “Sit down.”

She obeyed, if only to find out where all this was headed. “If this is all to get a few more Milk’ems, I should warn you that you nearly cleared me out last night.”

“I’ll manage,” he said, far more shortly than she had expected. “Serve the tea.”

Aurora looked curiously at him. “Since when have you considered beverages part of the lesson plan?”

“Since now. Do it.”

Severus was being short…even for Severus. She cast him a sidelong glance and then reached for the teapot.

“Not like that,” he barked.

“Not like what?”

“Not like a Muggle. Do it with your wand.”

Aurora blanched. “I see no difference.”

“There’s a difference, and you know it.”

“Then you do it,” she insisted, pushing the tray toward him.

“I already know that I>I can do it.” His black eyes scrutinized her. “Can you?”

Aurora pushed back from the table. “This is silly. Let’s just do the lesson.”

“This is the lesson.”

Aurora found herself balling up a corner of the lace tablecloth in her fist under the table. She was tempted to give the cloth a yank and send the china flying across the room. Instead she slowly withdrew her wand and carefully placed it in front of her at almost the edge of the table. Most times the smooth piece of aspen seemed invisible to her, something she never noticed because it was practically a part of her. In moments like these, though, it was a foreign object, one with unrecognizable black knots and with the strange weight and rigidity of a sword in the hands of a monk. Head bowed, she scrutinized the length of wood that made her a witch, that defined everything she was.

“I didn’t ask for wandless magic,” said Severus.

She cast him a dark look and picked up her wand. A white wisp of steam was curling out from the spout of the teapot. She directed her wand at it and limply moved her wrist. Nothing happened.

“Concentrate,” Severus growled.

She tried again. The container shakily hovered an inch off the table before clattering back down.

“It’s simple Levitation,” Severus reminded her.

She nodded and repeated her wand movement. It took all of her will to make the pot float in the air. The closer the container wobbled toward Severus, the fuller she felt her eyes filling with something hot and stinging that was not tea. She was not meant to do this. She was simply not meant to do this.

“Stop thinking,” Severus ordered her.

The spout dipped precariously toward Severus’s cup, then titled suddenly, splashing tea all over him. Severus sprang to his feet, cursing the hot liquid that had spilled onto his lap.

Aurora buried her face in her hands. Things had just gone from bad to worse. “I’m sorry!” she moaned.

Severus muttered a Cleaning Spell. “I suppose,” he said dryly, “I had that one coming.”

Aurora couldn’t believe he hadn’t just exploded in front of her. Severus never tolerated this kind of ineptitude with his students. But what was the point? She had spent twenty years with her demons. A silly little tea party wasn’t going to exorcise them. She felt her throat swelling shut as tears brimmed in her eyes, causing her to hide her face further behind her hands. “It’s no use,” she choked. “I can’t do this. I…I see that day…those women…every time I try.”

Her chin remained tucked against her chest, her eyes pressed firmly shut, but she heard Severus move around the table. “Give me your hand,” he said from behind her. When she didn’t move, she felt his hand press against her upper arm, then glide slowly down to her elbow, pulling her right arm away from her body so that she could no longer hide her head in this hand. Grasping her arm firmly, his hand slid down to her wrist, helping her direct her wand at the tea set. His other hand he used to grasp her left arm, whether to steady her or keep her from escaping, she wasn’t sure. Either way, she found herself enveloped in the dark, billowing robes of Severus Snape with just the rungs of the chair separating their two bodies.

“It’s just Levitation,” he murmured in her ear. “Just breathe.” She felt him inhaling around her. “And make it happen.” His fingers tightened around her wrist and guided the motion of her wand. “Wingardium Leviosa.”

“Wingardium Leviosa,” she repeated and felt a warm tingle run up her arm as his magic combined with hers. The side-turned pot righted itself in the air and floated toward Severus’s cup. She trembled as it tilted again; it had to slant so drastically to pour the remaining contents of the pot. Aurora waited for the splash and clatter of disaster, but instead she felt pressure at her shoulder that seemed to squeeze the magic out of her. She nearly choked on a sob when the tea poured neatly into the little cup.

Aurora felt the folds of Severus’s robes withdraw from around her. “Again.”

Still sensing him standing just behind her, Aurora brought the pot back toward her. It wobbled a bit until she felt Severus’s hand return to her shoulder. She let the spout tilt and pour the dregs of the tea into her cup and then set the pot back on the table. The she levitated a little white pitcher and poured some milk into her cup.

Aurora stared blankly at the two china cups somehow filled with steaming dark liquid, one lightened by a swirl of white. Then she caught her breath as she realized that she was the one who had filled them…with magic! She flung around in her chair and clung to Severus’s waist. “I did it!” she exclaimed. “I did it!”

Severus stood stiffly, his arms hovering just above her like a tea pot frozen in midair. Bewildered, he touched her once on the top of her head and then withdrew. “Drink your tea,” he told her, returning to his seat.

Aurora sniffed. “Why?” she asked, a bit of her old spunk returning to mask her outburst of a moment ago. “Are you going to test my willpower against Veritaserum now?”

“No, you should drink your tea because you deserve a break,” he answered simply.

Aurora stared thoughtfully over the rim of her tea cup. “Do you really think this will help?” she asked.

“You’re the one who’s always dragging that thermos of tea down to my dungeons like a security blanket.”

“Not the tea,” she said slowly. “The magic.”

“I think you needed to see what you are capable of.”

“That’s the thing. I know what I’m capable of,” she sighed.

“Honestly, woman,” Severus exclaimed exasperatedly. “You have the conscience to carry the deeds of an entire battalion of Death Eaters, not just those of your parents.” He shook his head as if she didn’t know that this way lay madness. “You confuse your own actions with your parents’. You were just a child.”

“And children can’t do wicked things?”

As Head of Slytherin House, Severus couldn’t refute this point. “Your parents were wicked.” He told her firmly. “They did wicked things. You saw them…but you didn’t participate in them. You are not responsible for those women’s deaths.”

Aurora looked away, knowing he couldn’t understand. “Not theirs maybe.”

“Aurora,” Severus said slowly, as if to an exceptionally dense student, “you are not responsible for anyone’s death. You did not wave your hand to decide whether anyone was going to live or die.”

Something sunk sickeningly in her stomach. When her answer came, it came distantly, as if from someone else in another room. “That’s precisely what I did.”

Severus peered at her under knitted brows. Instantly, she regretted having volunteered this information, but he kept his eyes fixed on her, awaiting more. Though she did not feel the familiar tug of mind reading, she felt as if he might as well have been using Legilimency with that stare.

Aurora rose and went to the window, her white robes trailing wraithlike across the floor. “My father and I had a game,” she said, staring across the grounds to the Quidditch pitch where students were racing brooms in the grey mist. “Sometimes he’d tell me about missions he was planning. Sometimes he’d bring his ‘work’ home. Either way, he’d tell me about his captives. Some were magical enemies of the Dark Lord. Others were simply Muggles.” Aurora paused to brush some owl kibble from off the windowsill.

Severus waited.

Aurora turned back toward him; it seemed better to speak to him than to tell the whole world outside. “My father used to let me choose which Unforgivable to use on them.” She spoke resolutely, but tears were welling again in her eyes. “I decided…decided…how….” She trailed off and the words hung in the air like the sickly vapors that still haunted Severus’s dungeons. “Some of the Holdahexe believe that your soul is marked by the intent behind an Unforgivable, not the casting of it.”

She wasn’t really speaking to Severus; the non sequitur thought had simply come into her mind, yet Severus answered anyway. “Damn you white witches,” he said dismissively, “speculating about things you know nothing about. If cruel intentions and complicity were enough to rend the fibers of the soul, I should have withered to dust by now.”

Aurora came out of herself enough to appreciate that self-deprecation was not a standard mode of speaking for Severus. In fact, even now he looked as if his mouth were filled with some dryly sifted powder. Still she looked skeptically at him.

Severus sighed and got up. “Here,” he said, offering his hand to her. “Do I feel like Filch could whisk me away with a feather duster?”

She took his hand tentatively. It was flesh and blood, even if it was thin and pale. He led her back to the table. “You might need just a little dusting,” she said sheepishly.

“Drink your tea,” he told her blandly.

She obeyed.

Severus watched her carefully, waiting for the drink to settle her. “It’s amazing,” he observed, “how a few ground up leaves mixed in hot water and served in some frilly china can have the same restorative powers of a Calming Draught. I’d write a paper,” he added, “if I didn’t have to spend my time tutoring white witches.”

Aurora recognized his final comment for the perfunctory but half-hearted jab that it was. She took in the unusual sight of him sitting comfortably across from her, a tea pot between them, as if they were engaged in easy conversation. She took a sip of tea to let the moment linger and then said astutely, “So I guess that berating and belittling aren’t the only tools you know for teaching?”

Severus raised his teacup to her. “I do whatever is best for my students.”

Aurora arched her eyebrows over her tea. “And making your students cry their eyes out is supposed to be ‘best’?”

Ordinarily, any discussion about Severus’s teaching methods would have cued a fight. As they sipped their tea in a civilized manner, however, he seemed to sense that this was more of the easy, albeit pointed conversation to which they had recently been becoming accustomed. He simply rolled his eyes. “Your eyes don’t seem to have washed away,” he said with familiar mockery. “They still appear to be firmly attached to your face.”

She saw his eye roll and raised him an unamused frown. “You know what I mean.”

Severus’s lips twitched behind his cup. “At least I don’t mislead my students into believing in some sugar-coated world by littering their essays with hearts and hold starts,” he baited her.

“I have never drawn a heart on a student’s paper,” she sniffed.

“And a gold star?”

She took a gaping bit out of a biscuit Nilly had left them and jabbed a finger across the table at him, still chewing. “I would’ve loved to have had you as a student. I bet you wouldn’t have lasted two weeks.”

“I’ll have you know that I received a N.E.W.T. in Runes.”

“And what grade, Professor Perfect?” When he scowled, she knew she was onto something.

“I received a N.E.W.T., alright?”

She smiled triumphantly. “Good. You’re going to need it.”

“I rarely find I have need for Runes,” Severus said, waiting for her to bristle.

“But you will soon,” she answered coyly.

“What for?”

“For our co-teaching project, of course.”

“I can handle my class perfectly fine on my own. I’ve no need for a partner.”

“Too late,” she said briskly. “I’m sure Pomona has told the whole school about it by now.”

“Sprout? Why did you tell that busybody that we’d be working together?”

“The art of deflection—isn’t that the work of a spy?” When he looked blankly at her, she continued, “She and Poppy had noticed that you and I had been spending a lot of time together. They cornered me in the staff room the other day. I couldn’t very well tell them what we’d really been doing, could I?”

“But now people will actually expect that we teach a lesson together!” Severus protested.

“Mmm-hmm,” she nodded brightly. “Besides,” she said, nibbling some of her biscuit, “how else was I going to explain our meetings—some torrid love affair?”

Severus flushed at the thought. “I should go. I’ve got a Saturday detention.”

Aurora shrugged and showed him the door, though she promised him that it wouldn’t be so easy to escape from their co-teaching project. Before he left, she told him, “Don’t make your student cry, Severus. You’re really not such a terrible teacher when you want to be.” Then, before either of them fully realized what she was doing, she pressed a hand to his chest, rose up on her toes, and pressed her lips to his cheek. Pausing just inches from his face, she said, “Thank you, Severus.” Then she dropped back and ushered him out the door.

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When Snape’s detainee arrived at the dungeon office still reeking of Emetic Potion, the trepid student could have sworn he saw the curl of a smile playing at the Professor’s lips.

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AN: I’ll join with the rest of you in saying…IT’S HIGH TIME!