Chapter Four

Severus watched Luna cross the Hall and head for the staff table. She appeared to have found two matching shoes, which whilst both pink and matching one another, clashed violently with the dress she wore. It was an odd streaky shade of mustard, as though it had been yellow, and had been washed along with blue, and the colour had washed out of the blue... the Ravenclaw Quidditch robes, he suspected, reigning in his inane thoughts as Luna bent to the headmistress.

'Would you move along a place please, Minerva, so I can sit next to Severus?' she asked, as Snape felt his jaw drop in time to the headmistress's. 'It's my first night, and I'm a bit nervous, and I'd like to sit beside someone I know.'

'Miss Lovegood,' Snape said, when McGonagall seemed bereft of a reply to the request that she move from the head teacher's ornately carved seat, the very one that had been handed through generations of illustrious incumbents, and a few whose portraits hung in the rogues' gallery, instead of her office. 'If I am not mistaken, which I am not,' Severus said, glancing down the staff table in both directions, to where almost all of the teaching staff had already arrived for dinner, and were all watching back, 'you are acquainted with, or have indeed been taught by, every professor here.'

'Of course I have, Severus,' she replied. 'But I don't know them all intimately.'

Severus felt himself swallow, as Minerva's eyebrow rose into her hat, and the insufferable Hagrid's shaggy eyebrows danced as though with a life of their very own, and an intelligence far above the brain behind them.

'In'ermittly?' the giant bellowed. 'I didn' rightly knows yer two were in'ermit,' he went on, beaming in pleasure, as Snape felt something like a wave of nausea sweep over him.

'Oh, not that kind of intimate, Hagrid,' Luna corrected him. 'I just meant that I know Severus personally...'

Snape stood before it got any worse, took Luna's arm, and bent to Hagrid. 'Get up, you great oaf, and give Miss Lovegood a seat,' he hissed. 'Miss Lovegood, please sit, and please also consider your remarks more carefully in future, and try to avoid any double-entendres.' He drew himself up, disinterested that everyone on the right side of the table had to move along one place, until Sybill Trelawney found herself standing at the end of the far right-hand side, and had to walk the full length of the table, muttering to herself, to where a single unoccupied seat remained at the far left.

The Hall had filled with students too, and the soup had appeared as the last couple of stragglers took their seats. Severus was quite hungry, he realised, not awfully sure why he had missed lunch. He went to lift his soup spoon, as the aroma of the hearty lentil broth reached him; he would have done so too, had there been any spoons on the table. He had a very bad feeling about that.

'Miss Lovegood,' he said from the corner of his mouth, trying to ignore the fact that Minerva had already summoned the head kitchen elf, 'are all of your Nifflers accounted for?'

'I think so,' she replied, looking at him in some sort of appeal that Severus didn't want to consider meant that she wasn't at all sure.

The elf had instantly appeared in front of the High Table, and she was standing wailing her eyes out, bawling in an ear-shattering shriek. 'We has no spoons, Headmistress McGonagall Lady Minerva. They is all gone.'

'Well, make some more,' McGonagall replied, and Severus was at least relieved that she hadn't seemed to have made the connection he had.

He was just about to begin his fast-cooling soup with the new spoons that had appeared on the table, when the fat oaf spoke up again from two seats away.

'Nifflers,' Hagrid said darkly to Flitwick, who sat at his far side, like some ludicrous contrast. 'They likes spoons. Uses them as mirrors, they does.'

Snape laid his newly procured spoon down, glancing quickly at Minerva, but she seemed not to have noticed, engaged as she was in conversation with Aurora, probably on the merits or otherwise of him having hired Miss Lovegood, he thought a bit sourly. Severus had quite gone off the idea of soup now; it was cold anyway. He turned to the girl... young woman... at his side, as he felt her stiffen slightly and bite her lip as Hagrid's mutterings grew more intense.

'Illegitiminus nil carborundum, Miss Lovegood,' he murmured, giving her a thin smile. 'If you are going to work for me, you may as well live by the maxim I live by. I suspect it will serve you well.'

'Should I excuse myself, and go and check the Nifflers?' she whispered anxiously, and for the first since she had barged through his door, she seemed unsure of herself, and he was rather sorry about that. She glanced around at where the giant and Flitwick were discussing the various possibilities of the mystery of the missing spoons, having moved away from Nifflers, to some obscure Vanishing Charms that Snape was quite sure Flitwick was making up as he went along.

'No,' he said, his lips twisting in disdain of all but very few of the teaching staff, wondering at the same time if Luna had understood his little Latin motto, and suspecting not. 'Let it pass,' he said. 'The fool seems to have moved on.'

'Alma mater vult decipi,' she replied, her blue eyes wide and ingenuous. 'Ergo, decipiatur.'

'Quite, Miss Lovegood.' Severus smiled to himself as Luna's lips twitched in mirth. He noticed they were a pretty pink colour, and pushed away the unkind thought that at least something matched her shoes. He felt her lay her hand on his arm in a gesture he knew was one of shared, yet innocent confidences, the sort of gesture everyone present would misread, he thought, as he drew his arm away slightly regretfully. That would do very well for now, he reflected, pushing his other thoughts to the secret compartments of his mind, to be summoned in private, as was fitting. He didn't notice Remus Lupin watching both him and Luna, from where he sat a few seats to the far side of Minerva.

*****

Severus paused at the door to Minerva's old rooms, quite unsure if he should knock or not. Not that he had any intention of simply barging in on her, the way she had exploded into his rooms, but he wasn't sure if he should go in at all. He wondered if she would view the intrusion as inappropriate, something he would not care for, or if she would understand that he was concerned for her welfare on her first night, and even more concerned about the Nifflers. He should have dealt with them himself, he knew that, and he wasn't sure why he hadn't.

He took a deep breath, and knocked sharply, looking around belatedly to check no one was watching, and failing to notice that Remus Lupin had just slipped behind a statue.

'Come in, Severus,' she said.

He opened the door before he wondered how she had known it was him, failing to catch the gasp that fell from his lips. He had been in Minerva's private rooms on many past occasions, when they had contained a pleasingly eclectic mixture of not too feminine knickknacks, which looked as though they had been placed where they rested with the precision of a Knockturn Alley drug dealer; and the floors had been covered in tartan carpeting; and the walls had been hung with claymores and battleaxes, and a wizard portrait of a red-bearded warrior in a drab green kilt, with a sword, which whilst planted between his feet, ran with blood, presumably from the severed troll head lying at his side. All of that was gone now, of course, to Minerva's new rooms, and what had replaced it, in the few short hours that Luna had been there, was no less diverse, and considerably more eccentric.

'The Nifflers?' he asked, remembering why he was there, and pretending not to be trying to take in the fact that although she had arrived at Hogwarts with but one large blue and gold box, there were now several, each one with a long furry snout poking through an air hole.

'They're all here, Severus,' she replied.

'Yes,' he acknowledged. 'And so, I see, are the spoons.' He nodded to the huge pile of spoons that had replaced the tartan carpet.

'What shall I do about them?' she asked, biting her lip in a way he rather liked, one that suggested to him that she was looking to him for some sort of assistance in the matter, something he had hitherto always been loath offer to anyone, but in the case of his assistant felt it was his duty: a suitable enough explanation for him to be going on with.

'The Nifflers or the spoons, Miss Lovegood?'

'Well, both, I suppose.'

'We shall be spending the rest of this evening some considerable distance from this castle, digging holes, Miss Lovegood, quite deep ones.'

'And the spoons?' she asked, clearly relieved that the Nifflers would be disposed in a manner not only acceptable to her, but to them too.

'What spoons?' he asked, glancing to where the spoons no longer covered the floor.

'What did you do with them?' she asked.

'I put them back in the kitchen, of course.'

*****

'They were out at the edge of the forest last night,' Hagrid said. 'Digging ruddy great holes, they were.'

'Yes, so Filius said at breakfast,' Dean replied, glancing past a pair of feet, which were all that could be seen of Flitwick behind his newspaper, to where the werewolf was slouched in the corner of a settee, as though hoping to spur him into joining the conversation. But Lupin had draped the "Sunday Prophet" over his face, either asleep or pretending to be, as he normally was on a Sunday morning.

'Wonder what they was looking for?' Hagrid pondered, nodding sagely to himself. 'He'll likely be needin' stuff fer research, an' took the girl with him ter show her where ter find the best things. There be a lot of very strange things ter be found in the forest.'

'He's a very strange man,' Flitwick offered from behind his newspaper.

'Strange girl too,' Binns remarked, as he drifted to the window to look out at the rain.

'Where is Snape anyway?' Dean asked. 'He doesn't seem to come to the staffroom much.'

'Bent over a cauldron, most likely,' Flitwick replied, showing his head over his paper, and hiding his feet at the same time. 'Knee deep in research.'

'What's he researching anyway?' Dean asked.

'Who knows?' Hagrid replied with an attempt at lacing his voice with mystery. 'Ain't no one brave enough ter ask.'

Only Lupin didn't see fit to offer an opinion or a speculation on Snape and Luna's late evening ramblings, contenting himself with a slow smile behind his "Sunday Prophet", wondering how Severus had managed to cobble up such a good excuse for peace and quiet at the weekends, when he couldn't think one up himself.

*****

'They went out last night,' Pomona said, her pipe billowing out an enquiring colour of forget-me-not-scented blue smoke. 'I saw them from the greenhouse window.'

'A walk in the moonlight perhaps?' Septima offered, in a rather wistful way that sounded as though she might have fancied a moonlight stroll with Severus herself.

'With two spades?' Sprout replied. 'And a large box.'

'Perhaps burying something of the past,' Sybill said, dropping her voice to a low dark murmur as she nodded to where Irma and Poppy sat together, looking out at the rain, possibly in the knowledge that they were the two least likely to tell her to keep her nonsensical mutterings to herself. 'The past must be buried before the future can begin.'

'I doubt that one buries one's past in a box, Sybill dear,' Aurora said, looking up from where she had been trying to read her newspaper, but kept being interrupted.

'When they came back, they only brought the spades,' Sprout replied, hoping to fuel more than Sybill into speculation. 'The box was gone.'

"And so, thank Merlin, were the Nifflers," Minerva thought to herself, grateful at least one of her concerns had been laid to rest in whatever deep hole they had dug, as she rustled her own "Sunday Prophet" in a way that asked for a little peace and quiet to read.

*****

Footnote

Illegitiminus nil carborundum: Don't let the bastards grind you down.

Alma mater vult decipi. Ergo, decipiatur: My school deceives itself. Therefore, let it be deceived.