Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

'I have already informed you, Minerva,' Severus said, sighing heavily, 'that I am not going to any Yule Ball, not dressed in my dress robes; nor, as Miss Lovegood would have me dressed, as Merlin alone knows what creature of her own imagination; or even bollock naked. In fact, I am not going at all.'

'Yes, yes, Severus,' Minerva said, waving aside his objections, 'but you were drunk, if I recall.'

'In vino veritas, Minerva,' Luna piped up from Severus's side, and he wondered how that helped him at all, and just how she had managed yet again to accompany him to a private meeting.

'You're going,' Minerva snapped. 'I do not see why I should have to be the one who has to patrol the grounds, and the entire castle, to make sure that there are no inappropriate goings on... going...on,' she said, seeming quite displeased that she had finished on a low. 'That's my final word.'

'Oh, very well,' Snape conceded sourly, in the understanding that he wasn't expected to participate in any frivolities, only in the quashing of them, an altogether more entertaining prospect. 'But I'm not dressing up.'

'I am,' Luna said brightly, and Snape wondered why he didn't tell her not to poke her nose into what she should consider to be his business.

He had already stood up when there was a respectful knock on the headmistress's door, and Minerva looked over as though she had been expecting someone, and had only been interrupted by Severus's tiresome tirade.

'Ah, Professor McGonagall,' Harry Potter said, striding across the office and holding out his hand. 'So good of you to see me... in private,' he said meaningfully, looking at Snape, who had sat back down, and Luna, who hadn't stood up anyway, as the other two parts of the gruesome threesome walked into the office behind him. 'Luna,' Potter added in some belated type of greeting, 'Snape.'

'Professor Snape,' Luna corrected him, her eyes wide and innocent. 'But you can call me Luna. And if it's a private meeting to talk about me, surely I can stay?'

'Who said I'm going to talk about you?' Potter asked, seeming a bit flustered at being so easily seen through.

'Why are Ron and Hermione with you, if it's private?' Luna asked in her way of answering a question with another.

'It's a private matter between us, Luna,' Granger explained, the way one might reason with a recalcitrant toddler, 'between us and Professor McGonagall. So if you don't mind...' She trailed off, nodding suggestively to the door, a condescendingly hopeful smile pasted on her face, as Snape felt his temper rise, but bided his time, feeling Luna quite capable of removing the smile herself.

'Mrs Weasley,' Minerva said, cutting in quickly, as though she sensed Snape was about to hex whichever of the trio was nearest, and possibly all three at once, as not only Dumbledore grunted himself awake, but so also did Phineas Black, as if the Slytherin-Gryffindor ratio might have been tipping too heavily for even Severus to handle. He obviously hadn't accounted for the Ravenclaw wildcard, Snape thought rather smugly. 'This is my office, my dear,' Minerva went on, even more patronisingly than Hermione, 'and as such, I would consider it a favour if you would allow me to finish the meeting I have with my staff, before engaging in the few minutes of Hogwarts's time I have allocated to Mr Potter.'

'Harry's a busy man, Professor,' Ron Weasley said anxiously. 'He's got a meeting with the Minister of Magic later. He can only spare you a few minutes.'

'Mr Weasley,' McGonagall replied, and Severus hoped that none of the three saw the twin danger signals of the pursed lips and pinched nostrils that indicated that the Headmistress considered herself slighted, 'I am a busy woman. That said, I was courteous enough to grant Mr Potter five minutes of my valuable time, when he asked to see me.' She dipped into her robes and withdrew the fob watch she wore around her neck, and was just putting on her spectacles when Luna piped up again.

'They've had three minutes, Minerva,' she said. 'So they've only got two left. Come on, Severus,' she said, picking up a smaller version of the blue and gold box, a box that Snape supposed contained whatever vegetable peelings the kitchen elves could spare that she wasn't already wearing as jewellery. 'If they're going to talk about us, they haven't got long left, and we need to feed the Snorkacks before class.'

Harry shook his head, as though sadly. 'This is what we want to talk to you about, Professor ... Minerva, if I may,' he added, stumbling on when McGonagall made no attempt to accept his invitation to familiarity. 'Luna seems to have a problem, and... well, quite frankly I, that is, we, feel that she may need a change of surroundings.'

'She's just had a change of surroundings, Mr Potter,' Minerva replied, emphasising her "Mr Potter" only very slightly. 'She has just joined the staff of Hogwarts. Didn't she tell you?' She looked across to where Luna and Snape still sat in front of her desk. 'Run along and feed the little Snorkacks, Luna,' she said, much the way Dumbledore would have done at his most annoying, as Potter, Weasley and Hermione exchanged pained looks with one another. 'Perhaps I shall call down before dinner to see them again, if I may,' Minerva went on, over-gilding the lily to Snape's way of thinking. 'I would like to check a few things before we get in touch with Ministry Department for the Classification of New Species.'

'They are real, Minerva,' Snape said dryly, breaking his silence for the first time since the trio had come in, content to be party to anything from which the incredible threesome were excluded. 'I have already run every test I can on them.'

'Harry,' Weasley said, nudging the boy-who-saved-the-world and became the most-self-important-bore-of-the-day in the process, 'I think we should go.'

'Yeah, you're right,' Harry replied, smiling tightly, and Severus was gratified to see he was resigned to trying to make the best of what had become a bad job. 'See you at the Ball, Luna. Make sure you don't make Dean as crazy as everyone else,' Potter added, looking around at McGonagall, who drew back in surprise; Luna, who waved as though through a window to someone in the distance; and Snape, who sat frozen to the spot, with an all too familiar knot sitting in the middle of his chest.

'Well, I never,' Minerva said, watching the door close, but Severus didn't really hear her, and wouldn't have much cared if he had.

'You didn't tell me you had tested the Snorkacks,' Luna said, turning to Snape.

Short of replying along the lines of, "You didn't tell me you were going to the Ball with Dean Thomas", Severus couldn't think of anything to say.

*****

'Dean Thomas?' Aurora said. 'But I thought... well, I had rather hoped, I suppose...' She trailed off.

'It's his own fault,' Minerva replied. 'If he weren't so stubborn, he would have agreed to go to the Yule Ball right at the start, and taken Miss... damnit, Luna... with him.'

'He has rather let the grass grow under his feet, hasn't he?' Aurora murmured.

'I'm really quite vexed,' Minerva said. 'I had just managed to bully him into going. Of course, it had to be Potter, of all people, who dropped the bombshell.'

'Oh dear, Severus wouldn't have liked that,' Aurora replied. 'Perhaps we've been wrong all along, Minerva, and the girl has no interest in Snape at all.'

'After dropping everything she was working on in the Andes, and travelling halfway around the world to be with him, on the strength of a single owl Lupin sent her?' Minerva said. 'And I just know I'm not mistaken about Severus either.' She stopped talking as the door opened, and the rest of the ladies began to come in: Sybill bickering with Septima, as they were in the habit of doing; Pomona happily puffing a rainbow out of her pipe; and the inseparable Irma and Poppy, chatting like the couple of gin-soaked old maids they were.

It was only a few moments later when the door opened again, and a large blue and gold bird hopped over the threshold. It had four legs: two arms and two legs to be precise. 'I bet you all guessed it was me,' Luna said, transforming back into herself, and spitting out a couple of feathers.

'I didn't know you were Animagus, dear,' Septima said sweetly.

'Oh, I'm not... it was just a charm.'

'Have you checked to see if Severus is allergic feathers?' Poppy asked.

'Oh, Severus isn't going to the Ball,' Luna replied, 'so I asked Dean to take me.'

"Stubborn, stubborn man," Minerva snarled to herself, as Septima and Sybill cheered up enormously. Minerva had been quite put out with Harry Potter and his friends, coming so soon after the distressing meeting she had had in Hogsmeade earlier that day with Ginny, and she was determined to make one last ditch attempt to save the situation before the Ball, one or two situations, if she could.

*****

'What are you all dressing up as to go to the Ball?' Dean asked.

'I'm going as Hagrid, and he's going as me,' Flitwick replied, as Dean laughed, Lupin rolled his eyes behind his newspaper, and Hagrid seemed to be trying to work out the complicated logistics.

'I'm not sure if I shall go or not,' Binns said from where he stood at the window. 'Last time I went to a Yule Ball was the night Nearly Headless Nick nearly lost his head. Horrible mess it was; it quite put me off my dinner.'

'What are you going as, Lupin?' Dean asked enthusiastically, in a way that made Lupin realise that he wanted someone to ask what he was going as.

'A sheep, of course,' Lupin said, still behind his newspaper. 'What else would a wolf go as? Go on,' he said with a disinterested sigh. 'You're dying to tell us.'

'Well, Luna's going as a huge blue and yellow bird, called a Burping Chumper, and I've to go as a fish,' Dean replied. 'I just hope I'm not her dinner.'

'A fish?' Flitwick asked Dean, as though the Burping Chumper were to be expected, but the fish was altogether odd.

'Like a cod perhaps?' Binns asked Dean, as though he had never heard anything so strange.

'Or a haddock?' Hagrid asked Dean, just trying to think up another species of fish.

"Luna?" Lupin asked himself, wondering how it had all fallen apart again so quickly, as Minerva popped her head around the door.

'Remus,' she said, 'I wonder if I could have a word?'

*****

Severus's head was pounding. He didn't know how often he could go through all the remarks she had made, and those that Ginerva Weasley had made, and yet keep coming back to her expostulation about Lupin being old enough to be her father. Dean Thomas, he snarled to himself, another ruddy Gryffindor, a boy barely out of ruddy Hogwarts, conveniently forgetting Dean was a year older than Luna.

'Who is it?' he snarled at the door. 'Go away, I'm busy.'

'I want to talk to you, Snape,' Lupin's voice came though the door, followed by the slouching werewolf himself.

'What do you want?' Severus snapped. 'And put out that ruddy cigarette, and stop fouling up my private space.'

Lupin looked at the overflowing ashtray on the desk, and the cigarette Severus was holding, and sat down. 'Severus, why is Luna going to the Yule Ball with Dean Thomas?' he asked, without preamble, or removing his own cigarette from his lips either.

'Why don't you ask Miss Lovegood that?' Snape retorted, without mentioning that she and Lupin seemed cosy enough with one another to have such a conversation. 'I am not her father, only old enough to be so,' he added pointedly.

Lupin sighed, at last taking the remnants of his smoke from his mouth, now that the hairsbreadth of white paper above the filter tip had disappeared. 'Oh well, have it your own way,' he said. 'I kind of thought you might have had a passing fancy for her.'

'I am not a cradle-snatcher, Lupin,' Snape replied, bridling uncomfortably. 'By the way, speaking of cradles,' he said, a thin smirk crossing his face.

'Why don't you mind your own business?' Lupin suggested quickly, standing up.

'And why don't you mind yours?'

Severus watched the door close, wondering if he could bear to give it one more try, if he could bear to find out just whether the mixed signs were actually pointing to "lost" or "found", in case the answer wasn't the one he had finally admitted to himself that he hoped for. He had just settled on some kind of plan, when Luna came in, or at least he assumed that was who the blue and gold bird was; he certainly wasn't expecting another.

'What do you think?' she asked as she transformed herself to at least looking like Luna, though every bit as oddly dressed.

'You look like your box with a beak and feathers,' he replied, succeeding, as he had promised himself, not to snap at her, having recognised that he could do well without another dose of self-induced remorse to add to his self-pity.

'And guess what?' she said. 'I've talked Dean into going as a Fugu... a Japanese Pufferfish.'

'I am aware of what it is, and I think that suits him very well, Miss... Luna,' he replied dryly, omitting to add his satisfaction that it was one of the ugliest sea dwelling creatures ever created, and resisting the urge to tell her not to eat him unless he was prepared by an experienced Japanese chef, and then hating that he had even entertained any thought of Luna eating anything to do with anyone. 'Why are you going with Dean Thomas?' he asked, not having intended to do so at all, and wondering where the words had come from, or if the werewolf had slipped back into the room and was standing at his back, pulling his strings.

'Oh,' she said. 'Is that inappropriate, Severus? I didn't realise. Is that why you're not going?' she replied, answering his question with a couple of questions of her own, as she was wont to do, and leaving Severus no further forward.

'No, not at all,' he replied, giving up, and contenting himself to his original plan. 'Attend to your Snorkacks, Luna, and get off to your bed. You have a busy weekend ahead of you.'

He watched her back, as she busied herself feeding her little creatures and fussing over them, mulling over the fact that it had become so much easier to use her name, and how he had enjoyed her bringing Potter down for calling him "Snape", and how he got a warm little thrill every time he heard her call him "Severus".

*****