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 this. I’m just having some fun adding my own little corner to the amazing world she has created.

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CHAPTER 9—THE BURROW

It was Friday afternoon and Severus had just left Aurora's rooms with his usual flourishing sweep of his robes. Of course, he would never admit it, but it had been another relatively successful venture into Mentior Occlumency.

Aurora gathered the cards from the table and silently thanked the Muggle magician at Russell Square for his unknown guidance. The slow and steady steps of reading, blocking, and diverting mental images of the Rosetta Stone cards had been just what she needed to gain confidence in a magic she was hesitant to perform. Though Severus continued to give her very little instruction, obviously still hoping that her "card trick" would fail, she had managed to make her own discoveries which advanced her progress. She had found, for instance, that leading the Legilimens to a false memory required finding a thread of similarity between the two thoughts. It was therefore easiest for her to feed him a card that was in the same suit as the original one. Severus, however, had quickly caught onto this trick and had pressed her to show him more dissimilar cards. Cards that were the same color—diamonds and hearts or spades and clubs—were also relatively easy to interchange, and by the end of the lesson she was also able to move between a four of hearts and a four of spades.

She knew, of course, that real Mentior Occlumency would be much more complicated. Moving a Legilimens from lived experience to lived experience would require making much more disparate connections between the two thoughts, and she knew it would also require an emotional factor she had yet to address. She had no feelings about some trivial numbers and symbols on a card, but she had more than her share of emotional reactions related to the memories she would have to reveal in real life—memories like growing up in a Death Eater household. She needed to learn to keep those in check.

Still, the amount that she had learned in the past week was enough to give her hope of progress. She had enough chance for success that she could not make any excuses for giving up this plan to become a spy. As much as she might like to escape in the opposite direction toward her comfortable, apolitical, academic life in Switzerland, on Monday she would be boarding a train heading north to Hogwarts—more a center to this conflict between Light and Dark than even the Ministry in London.

Maybe those Rosetta cards weren’t such a blessing after all.

Aurora tried to shake that thought from her head. It was fortunate that she was dining with Fleur Delacour’s future in-laws tonight. Company would prevent her from being able to stew about how she might never learn Occlumency, about what she might have to do as a spy, or about how she was breaking an oath she had made to herself long ago about never returning to this world that her parents had known so well and terrorized so horribly.

A little before five o’clock, Aurora left the Leaky Cauldron, picked up some wine at Circe’s Spirits, and went to Gringotts to meet up with Fleur. The goblin guards once again glared at her, though this time they threw in a testy glance at their pocket watches (it was closing time) for good measure.

Fleur rushed up to her from behind her counter and gave her a dainty “Bonjour” peck on each cheek.

“My Bill has an errand with his father,” she explained. “We can go now and he will meet us later.”

Aurora followed her silver-haired companion to a chamber off the main hall where the human bank workers were lining up to depart work by Floo. (Aurora wondered where the goblins went after hours. Did they sleep in the depths of the bank? She hadn’t seen any of them in Diagon Alley during her entire stay.) Fleur inserted a Sickle into a Floo Powder dispenser.

“The goblins,” she explained in unguarded French, which she obviously assumed to be incomprehensible to anyone else around them, “are too cheap to provide their employees Floo Powder for the commute home. They say it’s our choice to live so far away. Really, they just want to make a little profit. The Powder only costs them three Knuts a transport. I saw the ledgers one day.”

Aurora was hardly surprised. She had once dated a wizard who worked at a Swiss bank where the goblins had also deducted a surcharge from its human employees’ paychecks for the “luxury” of keeping the building connected to the Floo Network. She inserted her Sickle and collected her powder. “Where exactly are we going?”

“Ottery St. Catchpole in Devon. The house is called ‘The Burrow,’” Fleur explained. “Be careful to say it clearly. The first time I Flooed there, I ended up at the barrow at Sutton Hoo. Then again,” she smiled sheepishly, “my English wasn’t so good at that time.”

Fleur tossed her Powder into the grate and stated, “The Burrow,” still with a definitively guttural French “r.” She stepped into the green flames and disappeared. Aurora followed suit, careful to enunciate each sound. With a tug at her stomach, she found herself whirling past the other grates connected to the Floo Network. After flying by half the wizarding fires in southern England, she was finally spit out onto a large stone hearth. She was greeted by the savory scents of beef stew cooking in a cauldron behind her and to the rants of a round, red-headed woman before her.

“What do you mean you invited someone for dinner?” the witch with the wildly scarlet hair demanded, shaking a wooden spoon at Fleur.

“I am zorry. I must ’ave forgotten to tell you. But I do not understand what zee problem is,” the young French witch said with a pout. “Zere is plenty of food here.”

“The problem?” the woman asked, her face going nearly as red as her hair. She directed her spoon at a clock propped up on the kitchen counter, its hands directed, not to hours, but to the words “Mortal Peril.” “The problem is that everyone in my family is in danger at this moment and you are bringing total strangers unannounced into our home!”

“But zee ees not a stranger!” Fleur protested with a little stamp of her foot. “Zee is a classmate from Beauxbatons, and zee is a professor at ’Ogwarts.”

For the first time, the elder woman looked at Aurora, who wondered if she ought to just make her apologies and step back into the Floo right away. “A professor at Hogwarts?” the woman asked with an unexpectedly amiable smile. “What do you teach, dear?”

Thrown by this sudden welcome, Aurora stuttered, “R-runes…Ancient Runes. I’m taking Professor Hrothgar’s position. The Headmaster hired me two and a half weeks ago.”

With an extra effusion of warmth, she said to Aurora, “Albus did, did he? Isn’t that lovely?” But to Fleur she again stabbed her spoon in the air, flicking droplets of broth at her future daughter-in-law. “And what would Dumbledore say to you if he knew you were bringing outsiders here? Who knows who might have been here? You might have put any number of people in danger. We must be extra careful!”

“But you just ’eard: Dumbledore knows ’er. Zee is a teacher,” Fleur insisted. “Aurora ees not dangerous!”

The woman lowered her spoon, and with it switched her personality back to that of the Gracious Hostess. “‘Aurora,’ is it? That’s a pretty name.”

“Thank you,” Aurora answered, still dumbfounded by what was quickly becoming one of the oddest welcomes she had ever received. “I’m Aurora Bernard. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” She offered her hand, though she was fearful that that spoon might reach out and slap it.

“Lovely, lovely. I’m Molly Weasley. Welcome to my home,” she said with an enthusiastic clasp of Aurora’s hand.

“I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Weasley….”

“Molly, call me Molly.”

“Um, yes, Molly,” Aurora repeated, still hoping to back out of this family feud in the making. “I’m terribly sorry if I’ve come at an inconvenient time. Perhaps I should come back at another time.”

“Nonsense!” Molly said, with a far friendlier flick of her spoon. “There’s always room at the table. We’re delighted to meet the faculty at Hogwarts. In fact…Ginny!” she hollered out the kitchen window into the garden, where four young people were playing Quidditch outside.

A slender girl with long locks of the same red hair hovered on her broomstick by the window. “Yes, Mum?”

“Ginny, come inside a moment,” Molly said briskly.

The girl threw a look back at the ongoing game but thought better than to argue with her mother. In a moment, she was in the kitchen looking curiously from Molly to Fleur to Aurora.

“Ginny, dear, this is Professor Bernard. She’s the new Ancient Runes teacher at Hogwarts.” To Aurora, Molly added, “Ginny is going to be doing her O.W.L.S in Runes this year.”

“Good, I’ve met my first student,” Aurora declared amiably. “I’ll look forward to seeing you in class, Ginny.”

“Go make Professor Bernard comfortable in the living room,” Molly told her daughter with a nudge. “Maybe you can have her help you with Runes. I expect you to bring your grades up this year. I don’t want the last Weasley following in Fred and George’s footsteps.”

Ginny threw her mother a beleaguered look but dutifully led Aurora into the living room. No sooner had they crossed the threshold than Molly was back raging at Fleur in muted rasps that nevertheless carried into the next room.

“Of all the inconsiderate…never knew you could be so irresponsible…how could you forget…endangering yourself and Bill too…he and Arthur off somewhere…what if the others had been here?”

Aurora took a seat on the sofa and began paging through a coffee-table book entitled Muggles of the World, trying desperately to pretend like she couldn’t hear the argument her presence had ignited.

Ginny, on the other hand, was eagerly straining to catch every word that carried from the kitchen. “Mum is really letting her have it,” she said with delight.

Aurora cringed. Intellectually, she knew she wasn’t at fault for Fleur’s forgetfulness, but the guilty knot in her stomach still made her feel like the culprit of this family squabble. Still, she was mystified by the unspoken intricacies of this conflict. Of course, it was terribly rude to arrive unannounced, but she could not quite understand why Molly was acting as if Fleur had asked over the Dark Lord himself. “I’m awfully sorry about the inconvenience,” she told Ginny. “I suppose cooks usually appreciate a little more forewarning about dinner guests.”

“Oh, Mum always cooks so much that a whole Quidditch team could drop by for dinner,” Ginny said offhandedly.

Once again, Aurora had to feel as if there was more going on here than the need to set out another plate at the table.

Ginny looked at her incredulously. “Are you really a friend of Phle…Fleur’s?”

Aurora tried to ignored the sound of wooden spoon against iron cauldron. “I suppose I haven’t known her long enough to call her a ‘friend.’ We both attended Beauxbatons—I much earlier than she. We met when I stopped into Gringotts and had fun comparing notes about our school days.”

“So you haven’t known her very long?”

“No, not really.”

Ginny nodded as if this explained a great deal. There was another clatter and Ginny giddily pressed her ear back to the kitchen door. But no sooner had she gone back to her eavesdropping than the door swung open, pressing the girl against the wall, and Molly popped her head into the living room.

“Would you like lemonade or tea, dear?” she asked as pleasantly as if she and Fleur had merely been in the kitchen discussing whether the stew needed more seasoning.

“Tea,” Aurora answered with a bewilderment she could barely mask.

In a moment, Molly was back with a tray balancing a teapot and cups. Fleur followed silently with a put-out pout and a plate of biscuits.

“Go and get the others and wash up for dinner,” Molly instructed Ginny. “Your father and Bill will be home any minute.”

Ginny scampered out as Molly whisked out her wand to direct the teapot to levitate and fill three mismatched cups. Fleur set the plate of biscuits on the coffee table and with a haughty flip of her hair managed to completely avoid looking at Molly.

The matronly witch directed her attention toward Aurora with interest that was as exclusionary toward Fleur as it was hospitable toward her guest. “Milk, dear? Sugar?”

“Milk, thank you.”

A little canister of milk floated up into the air and poured a swirl of white into a cup of tea, which then glided into Aurora’s hands.

“It’s so nice to spend an evening in an actual home,” Aurora said gratefully, hoping to maintain the peace. “The Leaky Cauldron has been so desolate since I’ve been there.”

Molly beamed at her. The idea that she was doing a good service in hosting this guest even allowed her to notice Fleur long enough to send a cup of tea her way. “Sitting up there in those little rooms so far away from home must be miserable for you,” she crooned.

“I’ll be glad to get settled at Hogwarts,” Aurora admitted. Mostly glad, anyway.

“I don’t know how the professors do it,” Molly said. “Hogwarts has always been a second home for my family, but that’s just not the same as having a place of one’s own. Even the teachers with their own houses live in them only a couple of months out of the year.”

“When I taught in Bern I kept a flat in the city and used to spend my weekends in the country south of the Bodensee in the house I grew up in,” Aurora explained with a sudden pang of longing for those verdant summer mountains. “I doubt I’ll be doing that anymore. There are too many International Boarder Wards between Scotland and Switzerland to simply Apparate back and forth.”

“A home in the Alps!” Molly cried wistfully. “Isn’t that lovely?” But her daydreams were interrupted by the banging of a screen door which made her jump and toss the biscuit in her hand into the air. It landed in the jaws of a Fanged Geranium that crunched on it noisily.

“Honey, I think the garden needs to be De-gnomed!” a male voice cried from the kitchen.

Molly slumped in visible relief. “Arthur, we’re in the living room!”

A thin man with a receding red hair line popped his head into the room. “Bill’s out tossing some now.” His eyes fell upon Aurora. “Goodness! Guests!”

To Aurora’s relief, this man seemed fully delighted about her presence, and Fleur was spared another round of scolding.

“Arthur, dear, Fleur has invited a friend.” Apparently Molly felt Arthur should also appreciate the gravity of this indiscretion, though he made no sign of doing so. “This is Aurora Bernard, the new Runes teacher at Hogwarts.”

Arthur bounded forward with the energy of a golden retriever and shook her hand heartily. “Arthur Weasley. Pleased to meet you.” He popped half a biscuit into his mouth. “So you know Fleur, do you?” His question carried none of the dark insinuation that Ginny’s had.

“Aurora went to Beauxbatons,” Fleur piped up, sensing that she was on safer ground with this man.

“Ah, Beauxbatons, splendid. So you’re French?”

“Actually, I was born here in England,” Aurora explained. “But I grew up in Switzerland.”

“She has a home in the Alps,” Molly said dreamily.

“The Alps?” Arthur asked eagerly. “Do you wear those snow-shoe thingies up there?”

“Snow shoes?”

“Yes, those long sticks the Muggles wear to go down the mountain. It seems like they would be awfully inconvenient for making a short trip to the butcher’s.”

Aurora spent the next fifteen minutes explaining that skis—not snow shoes—were used for Muggle sport. He was especially fascinated to learn about the lifts that took the skiers back up the mountain.

“Ingenious, the Muggles,” he exclaimed. “The things they come up with!” He looked absolutely crestfallen when Molly announced that it was time for dinner before he had a chance to page through the Swiss section of his Muggles of the World book with her.

Dinner was at the scrubbed wooden table in the kitchen. As Aurora walked in from the living room, Fleur, who had stepped outside to collect Bill from the garden, was entering with her fiancé.

“Aurora, I would like you to meet my Bill,” she said fondly, hanging on his shoulder in a manner that elicited glares from Molly.

Aurora could understand why Fleur was engaged to this man. He was ruggedly handsome, even with a sweaty brow and muddy trousers after his bit of De-gnoming. Like the rest of the Weasleys, he had shocking red hair which he had pulled back in a ponytail. He wore a stylish dragon tooth earring and a charming smile. No doubt Fleur’s grandmother could rest easy about the attractiveness of her future great-grandchildren.

Molly settled the three of them into some roomy places near the end of the bench. Then she called up a set of crooked little stairs. “Ronginnyharryhermione! Dinner!”

Four sets of feet came thundering down the steps, shaking the floor beneath Aurora’s feet. There were two boys and two girls, counting Ginny, and gauging by yet another thatch of red hair, at least another one of them was a Weasley. He and a dark-haired boy with glasses came bounding down the stairs two at a time and landed on one of the benches in front of most of the food.

“Everyone, Fleur’s brought home a guest tonight.” From the curious glances directed at her, Aurora suspected Ginny had already told them as much. “This is Aurora Bernard. She’s going to be teaching at Hogwarts this year. Aurora, this is my son Ron.”

“Nife-tu-meetchu,” the red-haired boy said through a mouth of dinner roll he had already torn into.

“And these are his friends, Harry Potter and Hermione Granger.”

Aurora did a double-take at the second boy and caught the trace of a red scar on his forehead beneath his dark bangs. He nodded awkwardly and he smoothed down his hair in what seemed a second-nature gesture. She admonished herself for staring. No doubt the boy known even so far as current-events-blind Switzerland as der Junge der überlebt got more than his share of ogling. She smiled at him and his companion, a girl with bushy brown hair. “It’s a pleasure to meet you all.”

The boys tucked into their meal, but Hermione remained intently focused on her. “Excuse me, Professor, but Ginny says you teach Ancient Runes?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Are you studying the subject?”

She nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, I’ll be doing my N.E.W.T.S. in them. I’ve been looking ahead with past reading lists.” The boys came up from their suppers long enough to roll their eyes. “The bit about the arbitrariness of language is fascinating.”

“Actually, I think we’ll be looking at some counters to that argument, at least as far as magical runes are concerned. I wrote a paper on the magical meanings and properties of the runic sign while I was working at Das Institut.”

“You’ve taught at Das Institut der Magischen Linguistik?” Hermione breathed.

“Yes, I actually came here from Switzerland.”

Harry was suddenly more alert. “Wait, there are other Wizarding schools in Europe besides Beauxbatons and Durmstrang?”

“Zere are others,” Fleur explained. “But Beauxbatons eez ze best.”

Aurora sighted Ginny making gagging actions with her spoon and interjected, “Of course, Fleur and I are biased, but it is a fact that the Swiss Minister of Education sends his own children to Beauxbatons.”

“But everything you hear about Swiss boarding schools….” Hermione trailed off.

“True perhaps for the Muggles, but the Magical ones are really atrocities. They are no better than expensive finishing schools—fine for marrying well but not so good if one wants to learn anything more than Wingardium Leviosa and some glamours in the course of seven years.”

“But this Institute then…?” Harry asked.

“It’s a center for advanced magical linguistic study. Few of our scholars did their compulsory education in Switzerland though. I certainly would never have been qualified to teach and study there, much less join the Holdahexe, had I attended one of the Swiss schools.”

“The Holdahexe?” Hermione asked.

“We’re a group of witches from all around Europe. We study the old magic.”

“I’ve never read about them,” she said, as if its lack of printed verification threatened its credibility.

“I’m not surprised. There haven’t been many of us from England. Our headquarters are in the Belalp in southern Switzerland, and we conduct business in French or German.”

“Eet is no wonder zere are no Eenglish Holdahexe,” Fleur pointed out. “You do not learn foreign languages ’ere.”

This, of course, was true—language was a definite barrier between English witches and the Holdahexe—but Aurora sensed Fleur’s observation about this deficiency in British Wizarding education was lost on the rest of her audience.

“Do you study old modes of living?” Arthur asked. “It must be fascinating to learn about the days when Muggles and Wizards lived together.”

“We all have our own specialties,” Aurora explained. “Dagmar Stemme does a great deal of work in Ancient Muggle Relations.”

“She’s with the Danish Ministry, right?” Arthur asked. “I’ve read some of her reports.”

“Arthur works for the British Ministry,” Molly said with pride. “He was just promoted to head the Office for the Detection and Confiscation of Counterfeit Defensive Spells and Protective Objects.”

“That sounds like quite a big job.” Getting the name out in one breath certainly was.

“It has been recently. You caught me on a light day. There’s been a raid most every night on the manufacturers of faulty Sneakoscopes and the like. Just the other night we confiscated someone trying to pass off purple rabbits’ feet as charms to ward of Death Eaters.”

“People honestly think those are effective?” Aurora asked incredulously. Had they ever seen a Death Eater at work?

“You may not realize it yet because you haven’t been here long,” Bill said darkly, “but these are desperate times. People believe whatever gets them through the day.”

“You can’t blame them for wanting to protect their families,” Molly said, throwing an accusing glare at Fleur. Aurora started to appreciate why her sudden appearance had set the woman on such edge. “You ought to be careful too, dear,” she said to Aurora. “Diagon Alley would be a prime target for an attack. I wish everyday that Fred and George hadn’t decided to live above their store in London.”

“Wait, not Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes?” Aurora exclaimed.

“Why, what have you heard?” Molly asked nervously.

“Nothing. It’s only that I went in their store one day when I was exploring. They must be quite the characters. Those Skiving Snackboxes…who hasn’t wanted to fake a sick day or two?”

“Did you actually buy something from them?” Ginny asked in amazement.

“Unfortunately, no. I mentioned that I was going to be teaching at Hogwarts, and suddenly nothing in the shop was for sale.”

Bill laughed. “I’m sure they were afraid you were spying for the enemy.”

“The enemy?”

“Filch and Snape,” Ron said, finally taking a break from his dinner.

“Snape?” Aurora asked. She might not be the kind of spy Fred and George Weasley were thinking of, but maybe this was a time to start testing her spy skills nonetheless.

“Doesn’t have much of a sense of humor that one,” Ron explained, then added under his breath, “Greasy git.”

“Ron!” Molly scolded. “Severus Snape is very…strict,” she explained to Aurora. “But whatever trouble the twins got into with him was the boys’ own fault. Besides, Albus thinks highly of him.”

Harry scoffed at that one, but Aurora had no doubt that Severus had to have earned Albus’s respect after going back and forth between Hogwarts and the Death Eaters. She could only hope that she could live so long to be so lucky.

The rest of the evening was spent hearing about the antics of the Weasley twins (Aurora couldn’t help but be relieved that she wouldn’t be subjected to their Dungbombs) and explaining to Arthur about the Muggles’ United Nations. By the time the last of the custard had been scraped from everyone’s bowls, Aurora felt both exhausted and invigorated by all the bustle of the Burrow. (She could only imagine what the house must have been like when its resident pranksters were still living there.)

“Thank you so much for dinner,” she told Molly when she finally prepared to Floo back to the Leaky Cauldron. “You have no idea how nice it is to have someone more than the inn proprietor to talk to for an evening. Plus, your stew is far better than the pea soup I’ve been eating at the Leaky Cauldron. Thank you so much for the leftovers.” Ginny had certainly been correct about her mother cooking too much.

Molly beamed and patted her on the arm. “Any time, dear. You looked as if you might waste away before you got to Hogwarts.”

“Au revoir, Aurora,” Fleur said, kissing her daintily on the cheeks. “Stay in touch.”

“See you at school,” Hermione chimed in.

“Best of luck with this lot!” Bill said, slapping Ron and Harry on their backs.

And with that, Aurora took their well-wishes and stepped into the flames, one step closer to Hogwarts and a life where she was going to need all the luck she could get.