Chapter Three

'Curricula vitae, Miss Lovegood, are documents normally used to promote oneself in the eyes of prospective employers,' he said. 'They should not be considered as media for thrusting one's adolescent fantasies under their noses.'

'Oh,' she said, and he noticed that was a habit of hers, one that preceded a spark of annoyingly irrefutable logic. 'I thought it was Latin for "course of life".'

'It is,' he replied, snapping up the lure. 'It is supposed, however, to be an indication of one's aspirations as far as one's career is concerned.'

'Does it matter, Severus?' she asked. 'I mean, I'm already working for you; so it's superfluous now, isn't it?'

'Miss Lovegood, I have been asked by the headmistress to supply this document as part of your personal employment file,' he said, omitting to point out that not only had she done no work that day, but neither had he. 'I have no intentions of having the rest of the staff sniggering over the fact that I have taken on an apprentice whose ambitions are...' He glared down at the blue handwriting. '...To prove to the world that the Crumple-Horned Snorkack exists, and to dance by the light of the moon.'

He thrust the offending document at her, only to find that he had exchanged it for a glass of clear dark brown tea that she had been holding out to him; it looked ominously to his taste.

'Drink that, while I change it to something more boring,' she said, pulling a pencil from behind her ear, without disturbing the few remaining tomatoes. 'It's just the way you like it.'

Severus looked down at the tea, not at all sure when she had made it, nor even how it came to be in his hand. 'Not here, Miss Lovegood,' he said smoothly, trying to take control over a situation that seemed to be running very fast in the opposite direction to him. 'You may take the document to your new rooms, and rewrite it there, either before or after you do whatever unpacking you have to do.'

'Shall I just drop it in to Minerva on my way to dinner?' Luna asked.

'Certainly not,' he replied. 'Not until I have seen it.' He watched her stick her wand behind her ear, where the pencil had recently been, and turn to leave. 'Miss Lovegood,' he called as she opened the door. 'Take the box with you,' he said, nodding to where the blue and gold box seemed to take up more space than it had done earlier, a fact proven by the way that it would longer fit through the doorway. He watched her take the wand from behind her ear again, and shrink the box, until it fitted neatly under her arm, and wondered vaguely if it had just been its previous size so that she had had something to hide behind.

He watched the door close, pondering amongst other things if he had made a terrible mistake, and if he could manoeuvre things so that she sat beside him at dinner, on the opposite side to Minerva, in the place Hagrid normally occupied. Severus Snape was rather pleased with himself.

*****

'Luna Lovegood?' Aurora Sinistra repeated to Minerva, in much the same way as Minerva had repeated the same back to Severus.

'My initial sentiment too, Aurora,' Minerva replied to her recently appointed deputy head.

'There'll be tears before bedtime, Minerva.'

'I'm not so sure about that,' McGonagall disagreed. 'Miss Lovegood, call me Luna,' she said, with a sniff and a twitch of her pinched lips, 'is a good deal smarter than many give her credit for. She was an outstanding student, a paragon of the understated brilliance that runs through the Ravenclaws.'

'She's dotty,' Pomona Sprout remarked, removing her pipe from between her lips, and exhaling a cloud of greenish, spruce-scented smoke. She pulled some long stands of vegetation from a pouch at what might have been her waist, but as she was so rotund, it was a bit hard to tell, and stuffed the leaves into the pipe bowl, tamping them down with the end of a brownish thumb the size of the bowl of a soup spoon. 'And Severus must have gone dotty, too, to take her on.'

'Dotty, she may be,' Minerva replied, 'but stupid, she is not. As to Severus, you have to admit, ladies, that is he is a little odd himself, to put it kindly... which leads me to my other concern, a slight concern, but a concern for all that.'

'You don't think he's having an affair with the girl, and brought her here under the guise of an apprenticeship, so he could live with her?' Pomona asked, quite clearly relishing the thought, and hoping that was indeed the case. Hogwarts had been a bit flat, not to mentioned flattened, for a few years, since the demise of the Dark Lord. A nice bit of juicy scandal would liven things up a bit.

'It is not Severus's romantic aspirations that trouble me, it is the girl's,' Minerva said, leaning forward as if to emphasise her point, instead of, as the case was, to inhale the purplish lavender-scented smoke that had begun to billow from Pomona's pipe, in the way that the colours and scents changed with whatever her sentiments were.

'And which one of us hasn't had romantic aspirations in Severus's direction,' Septima Vector asked, from where she had been sitting back in the female staffroom, listening with no small degree of tolerant amusement.

'I haven't,' Sybill Trelawney replied, waving her hand in front of her eyes, as though examining some greater truth beyond the understanding of her colleagues, whist in fact trying to dry the nail varnish she had just applied. 'Although I sense I shall, one day. Perhaps my greater sight abandoned on me this matter,' she said, peering at the fingernails before her, as if they were tiny specks on some faraway horizon. 'Maybe I should have applied for the post instead.'

'On reflection,' Aurora said dryly, 'perhaps Miss Lovegood, call me Luna, will be the best all round. I confess to have been rather dreading a Hermione Granger, or some such, turning up.' She looked around the rest of the witches, a pleasing mixture of the odd, the eccentric, and the downright batty. 'I, for one, think the girl will fit in very nicely.'

'We agree,' Poppy Pomfrey added her opinion, from where she sat close to Irma Pince, 'don't we, Irma dear?'

'So?' Minerva asked, looking around her staff, the women whose opinions she valued as highly as own, those from whom she sought advice before presenting the male staff members with faits accomplis, couched in ways that would lead them to believe they had had some say in matters. 'We are agreed then?' She watched the rest of the ladies nod, not at all displeased with the decision she had already taken, as the door opened, without a knock, to admit a young witch in quite the oddest assortment of clothes any of them had seen for a while.

'Please, everyone,' Luna said brightly, 'call me Luna.' She looked down at herself. 'Oh, don't worry, I shan't be wearing this all the time; it's just what I unpacked first.'

*****

'Lovegood?' Binns said, in a way that made the rest of the occupants of the male staffroom look up, partly because he never really saw fit to comment on anything that had succeeded his death, unless it concerned him directly, and partly because his voice had an interested inflection no one had ever heard in it before. 'Can't say I know the name too well,' he went on. 'The only female Lovegoods I can recall from recent years are a pretty girl, who married a Lovegood, and then blew herself up; and a very strange blonde from a few years back, who had an uncanny knack of looking through the wall just before I passed into a room.'

'She could see through the stone?' Flitwick asked.

'I'm not sure that that was it,' Binns replied vaguely, as he drifted to a corner and touched the stone of the wall. 'I used to hear the stones murmur as I passed sometimes, and I noticed that it was when she was in a room, watching me come through, that it happened. I took to going through the wall at different places, but it made no difference, she still knew where I was coming from.' He sighed. 'I rather miss that odd little communication.'

'She spoke with the stones?' Dean Thomas asked, smiling fondly. 'That sounds like Luna.'

'I was more hoping that she was speaking with me.' Binns sighed again. 'Not many students do.'

'Sweet girl, I always thought,' Flitwick said hurriedly, before Binns became his usual morbid self. 'I was rather proud of her. But Luna Lovegood, and our dour uncommunicative Severus...' He trailed off as the staffroom door opened, and Remus Lupin slouched in, with a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth.

'Hear the news, Remus?' Hagrid asked from the corner, where he was slurping from what looked like a bucket of tea. 'Luna's only gone and taken the post of Snape's assistant.'

'Has she?' Lupin replied, omitting to point out that it had been he who had alerted Luna to the fact that a position had become available at Hogwarts. 'That ought to brighten things up a bit.'

'Shall we run a sweepstake on how long it lasts?' Binns asked, surprising them all again.

'I'll have two Galleons on less than a month,' Flitwick said, starting the ball rolling.

'A fortnight,' Dean Thomas said, anxious to be part of things, being, as he was, very much the new boy. 'One Galleon,' he added bravely.

Lupin smiled as the rest of the men added their wagers and speculations to the list Binns had begun to write on the wall. 'I think you're all in for a surprise,' he said, as the door opened again, and Binns Vanished the list from the wall, and Severus Snape stepped into the staffroom, giving Dean a hard look for sitting in the seat he preferred, and Lupin a glare for smoking in the staffroom when he was unsuccessfully trying to give up.

*****