April Fools, snapelike! Title: An Airing Out in Autumn & Under Scrutiny Recipient:snapelike Author/Artist: Fool # 28 / nightfall Word Count or Medium: 1431w - Origami, sharpie, white-out, and photoshop (We’re supposed to work out-medium, but I loved the prompt and just had to write for it, too) Pairings/Characters: SS, MM, AD, a hint of LM/SS – SS, MM, Hogwarts Rating: Worksafe Warnings/Kinks: Woe. A purplish sort of hue. Dub-respect. Summary/Notes: Dumbledore’s announcement of Snape’s status as a spy for the Order wasn’t met with a demand for evidence, suggesting he’d already been cleared. People go to Azkaban even to wait for trial. The prompt was ‘a new professor seeks comfort,’ but comfort isn’t something they really believe in.
Author/Artist's Notes: Thanks to McG for the character consult, and to our gracious PR1 for the beta (and her patience)!
Once the world was painted in greys, and shadows were comfort and safety. Once, color was eggshell-tempura, fine and delicate, each gradation of hue and saturation clearly distinguished, however smoothly blended, and the bold black lines of fear-hatred illuminated the quiet moments, framed their glow, soft seaglass-green.
Once there was a room, cold stone, rough-hewed and haunted with black-hole vampire vapors, its most vibrant life the moldy, dun-green, damp-fed moss in its corners, small life in uninspired lungs. A bold man was hurled in shattered, once, and came out, twelve years later, hunted and honed to pale and broken-sharp bone. The tatter-sleeved hand that reached to hold a ragged back was met with twitching and fumes, and the rage-poisoned echoes of sun-drugged days that were never so bright as the gaps of memory dream them.
A twisted-round-about man had bent his head willingly to the lintel not so very long before him. This one came out, twelve days later, squinting into the strong light, impossibly resolved to fade into and stand against it, and never bend again. The hand in the velvet sleeve that gripped crow-winged shoulders, dark feathers, hollow bones… this hand wrought of gnarled oak, no fine, steel-smooth fingers now (not ever again: a resolution false and futile and meant from the soul), and a silver-parched spider’s snare fell comfortably into red lines etched by a net of soft white gold into spare flesh too numb for flinching.
While she’s less ignorant of all these things than most, she’s come to believe, over the years, that the best remedy for tragedy is getting on with one’s work.
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He barely looks out of school, as he barely is, until a person looks at the eyes. Perhaps those dark vacuums had been her charge once, in a distant, several-times-removed sort of way, but they’re his own responsibility now. In any case, a person who refuses to ask for help or even accept any, she feels, can’t expect to simply have it forced on them. She feels, as a rule, no obligation to initiate eye contact beyond the superficial, and he shows no eagerness to do so himself.
Before school’s been in session three days, there have been several of the kind of fights Horace was too secure or lazy for. The older Slytherins look shellshocked and haunted for weeks, the young ones give every appearance of being in love. The dungeons are in disorder for precisely one week; he pulls his all-new team of prefects in for the Friday meeting, and the chaos has ground to an abrupt halt by Monday. The Ravenclaws walk out of his classes looking at once intrigued and ready to scream, the Hufflepuffs sulk or shrug at being graded P-for-pedestrian, and her own children tend to hesitate when they pass her, not sure whether she’d want them to speak up for themselves or endure.
She speaks to him about it. He says he might have more sympathy if they weren’t constantly making juvenile and incompetent (the latter, she gets the impression, being the real crime) attempts at inflicting vengeance on a professor for keeping order, although it’s highly unlikely, and that if she feels she must observe, it’s her right as Deputy and that, one way or another, invisibility is well within her capacities if she wishes her visit to be unannounced.
He’s as much a martinet and more as might be expected from a new teacher who never hoped to win his students’ hearts, but the only more closely-mastered classroom in the castle is her own, and if his cautions tend to the withering, potions accidents are already down a good forty percent from the average, and her files have years worth of accident reports to prove it.
No one expected to miss Horace in staff meetings, but the boy does glower so, and very nearly makes his own shadows to speak unexpectedly from within. After the first time, no one ever asks him to pour the tea again, newcomer’s job or not.
His fierce northern pride and wasp’s tongue had, in his student years, reduced more than one inexperienced young Defense teacher to tears, and so, when he asks to consult with her, she looks at him in surprise for far too long. Although the cold fire sizzles behind his eyes and spiked drawbridge gates slam down in his face, there’s no black flurry, no stalking retreat, and she remembers the way a wisp of smoke had risen above his gimlet eyes on the large stool, ten years ago, the way the hat had choked and sputtered before consigning him and his grim air of triumph to the underwaters.
“Certainly,” she says, as briskly as though she hadn’t been staring at him through the lush fronds of a decorative and uncandied pineapple, lion and panther eyeing each other through jungle fronds over a the civilized lace of a clean white tablecloth. “After supper in my office will be fine, Severus.”
Bluest eyes beam affably down from between them, and consequently get snarled at for the rest of the meal, in between the light ringing and furious clanking of silver on porcelain. However disrespectful the precipitant, she must feel, it’s good to hear that note in that laughter again, and so she applies herself to her meal and doesn’t concern herself with what hundreds of wide eyes are making of what must look, to those who can’t hear, like the most insubordinate of squabbles.
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At first she thinks it’s a very bad joke, and shoots him a severe look. “You may still take your laundry difficulties to the house elves,” she begins, and barely cuts off a Mr. Snape.
He sneers, and pulls an interestingly-shaped vial full of black stuff—dye, perhaps?—out of the holster at his belt, letting it fall onto the pile of cloth, where it disappears. A paring knife with an ebony blade follows it, a dull thud and soft clink, and a black leather bookmark. “Plain glass,” he bites off. “Empty. An altered form for temperature distribution, from a stock vial. That’s a copper knife—the blade needed thinning, for precision work. This was a green jumper before becoming a waistcoat, and this was a white shirt before a reparo was used on the elbow. The bookmark was re-made from rags, and was intended to be brown. The pattern is new and pervasive, persists outside the dungeons and off school grounds, Professor Flitwick can find no color-altering charm or glamour, and,” with the clipped assurance of one who doesn’t think it really needs saying, “I have not been hexed.”
“Your sartorial preferences are hardly any concern of mine,” she says, because long habit insists that snippiness needs immediate pruning.
But she’s already reaching toward the pile, and when he snaps back, “I should hardly be bringing the matter to your attention if it were intentional,” the emphasis is on the adjective rather than the pronouns, and she hardly has to be Slytherin herself to understand the distinction.
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Their first battle over the booking of the Quiddich pitch for practice is epic, and involves such volume and so many flying spells that Albus finally appeases poor little nervous Sybill by coming down to create compromises between haughty sniffs and sparking glares. He clearly enjoys himself. So do the students. Detentions fly fast and heavy that afternoon, and not just from one end of the castle, and not without cause.
At supper that evening, the tables are ablaze with autumnal branches, arrangements of pumpkins and butter-yellow corn and dried ferns, but there’s a folly of blue roses winking from her place setting, the unlikely playfulness of black hydrangeas filling the spaces between the heavier blooms, making it nothing like an apology.
She thanks him placidly, just as though it is one, quite loudly enough to be heard, and has the satisfaction of seeing coal eyes widen from their furious narrowing at the faint touch of smirk she lets him see when she turns to address herself to her plate. He taps the table with a finger, this new narrowing done in thoughtfulness, and Albus has to nudge him several times to remind him that there’s food in front of him. His reamed face is as bland as ever, but she can feel the glee vibrating from behind it.
She makes sure to leave the table first, to strengthen all her wards and, perhaps, plan a pre-emptive strike.