Part First: The Hart Assurgent: Chapter 9

Chapter 9:

Later that evening, Severus Snape could not sleep at all.

He had gone back to his own subterranean quarters after returning to Hogwarts and exchanging cool good-nights with his colleague. Then he had methodically unpacked. Some time later, he had undressed and gotten into bed, but midnight found him still awake, lying with furrowed brows against his pillow.

This was not an altogether uncommon state for him. Snape would not infrequently find himself in bed of an evening with his thoughts still clicking along at a rapid pace quite independent of his physical fatigue, demanding his alert attention, when everyone else at Hogwarts (or as it seemed to him) was blissfully slumbering.

Occasional insomnia had affected him since boyhood, and as a result, he had come up with many ways of occupying the extra waking hours sometimes imposed upon him. As a student, he had spent his wakeful time studying or reading – a habit which had partially accounted for his excellent marks. Now, as an adult, he still read, or conducted research in his laboratory office; or in milder seasons, he would often go for walks around the castle.

But occasionally, he would pick up his quill and fill the pages of a series of leather-bound notebooks with his impressions of memorable events – or would seek to analyse a particularly thorny dilemma from all angles, on parchment.

Journal-keeping was a somewhat archaic practice, but it did the job for him, serving as confidante and sounding board for an extremely private man. Many other wizards he knew, including Albus Dumbledore, preferred the ease and full-sensory accessibility of a Pensieve – but Snape not infrequently found himself in possession of memories that he didn't want to revisit with such detail, or didn't want to record in such a permanent medium. After he had written himself out, scratching his thoughts into the pages of a notebook, he would come away with a sense of closure, of completion, or at least felt better armed with hindsight. Now and then he would go back and re-examine his entries, revisiting his notes to himself for more clarity of thought – or to marvel at his own folly.

After tossing in bed for a few unrestful hours, Snape got up, put on a robe, and moved to his deep leather desk chair.

There was a particular entry that he had been going back and examining in the last six weeks.

He opened his journal, and began to read.

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22-Sept-94

On the strangest night of my life, a year-old child managed to destroy the corporeal form of the Dark Lord. This, I think, qualifies as the second strangest.

Didn't start and didn't end as a good day. My Apparition licence expired in August and forgot to renew the fecking thing – barely use it other than in summer anyway. Had to take the train to Diagon Alley – almost didn't go, but no Billywig stings and Murtlap growths left at all, and only a fistful of gillyweed, so rather had to.

While I was leaving, Dumbledore asked me to telephone an old crony of his, a Mrs. Figg, and make certain she was doing all right. Gave me a little slip with numbers on it, and a silver and green card. Asked him how exactly I'm to use this to make a phone call (what, do I Transfigure it into a telephone once I reach London, is that it?) Just find a telephone, put the card in the slot, and put in the number, he said. Then Flitwick had to talk to him about something urgent. (It's always urgent with Flitwick – he's like a first-year who needs to use the bathroom sometimes.)

Rotten time in London. Nothing but rain and milling crowds. Flourish & Blotts packed with squealing children and their unfortunate handlers. NO gillyweed to be found in London anywhere. Got to King's Cross late and totally exhausted. Would rather have taken my chances on getting ticketed for Apparating with an expired licence if hadn't been storming fit to drown someone on Platform 9 & 3/4. Found a bench on Platform 9 and was glad I brought Celsus's De Medicina along for a bit of light reading. But at some point my eyes moved up from the page to – completely unexpectedly – someone's very pretty black-stockinged legs.

I looked, I admit it. Though no one here may believe it, am in fact male and not asexual. They belonged to a blonde woman on the bench opposite me, reading a book. She was wearing a long black frock coat over a pleasantly short black dress. Face and body to match the legs. There was a wiry spareness to her that made me wonder if she was a marathon runner or some such, but didn't seem too remarkable at the time, as I am not yet schooled at picking incognito Faery fencing masters out of crowds. There was a trolley next to her with a mountain of luggage on it – steamer trunks, train cases, hatboxes – same sort of thing my grandmother would have taken on a long Continental holiday.

Really deep into her book, too, her dark eyes moving over the page full of that abstracted, thoughtful concentration I see in students with pitiful infrequency. Hermione Granger looks like that sometimes – but Granger is 14 years old and a Gryffindor to boot. On a pretty woman (of about 28? 30?) sitting across from me in King's Cross, not wearing a wedding ring, that expression was rather attractive. Her book was The Fenian Cycle – some sort of Celtic mythology I'd heard of but not read. Her copy looked like it'd been read to rags. Little bits of yellow paper with scrawled handwritten notes stuck in it in very academic fashion, as well.

(Yes, her reading Celtic mythology. More like, the bloody wench IS Celtic mythology. All seems absurd to me now – I was terribly self-conscious about my Wizarding background, having had truism of "Never expose our world to Muggles!" drummed into my head from the time I was old enough to understand it. There she was, in pretty little Muggle dress and coat, hiding in plain sight the way her people insist on doing, from everyone, whether it's necessary – or not.)

At the time, though, thought it was kind of charming she wasn't that intent on a tabloid or some mindless trash. Had to seem intelligent as well as nubile, potentially available, all by herself in King's Cross, just happened to choose the seat directly across from me, on a lonesome rainy night. How the Bitch-Goddess Fate does love to mock me.

Just seemed another example of my wonderful sort of cosmological determinism grabbing me by the scruff to show me yet something else I'll never have. Get a good look at what you'd like to have waiting for you of an evening, Snape, after the witlessness of your students drives you to thoughts of homicide. She'll never look at you the first time, let alone twice.

However – just then, she glanced up at the clock above my head, but then paused, and looked at me for a long moment, then looked back down. Glanced up and looked at me again a second later.

Ah, what fools we mortals be.

Kept reading, watching trains rattle by – I flatly refuse to go to pieces over a pretty woman like some callow first-year. Little minx opposite wasn't satisfied with disturbing the universe only twice, either. (No, she had not yet begun to disturb my universe.) I could feel her studying my profile. Back at her book a second later. I had only just begun to enjoy the game we were playing when she lost interest, became absorbed in her book again, but I knew was only temporary to begin with. (Famous last words. I'm now impressed with my own prescience at recognizing the transitory nature of that female so early on.)

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Snape paused in his reading, his eyes clouding. Then he reached for a quill on his desk, and slowly inked out the last sentence. He leaned back in his chair, raking a hand through his hair, which was more than usually dishevelled from tossing and turning on a pillow. Then he reached for his quill again, and scrawled some notes in the notebook margin –

1986 – "haven't been in this world in 8 yrs"

1989 – 1991 – Duration of marriage?

He paused for a moment, then turned toward the hearth and watched the firelight, his brow furrowing slightly. Then he turned back to the notebook before him.

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Still had to make Dumbledore's call for him before my train arrived, so I got up and left. A minute later my hands felt empty – black satchel was gone. Damn bag cost two week's pay in Diagon Alley, with all the ingredients acquired today. Fecking shite – just what I needed to make my day more abysmal.

Security guard pointed me toward the Lost Items office, and Lost Items clerk was of course an idiot. Hadn't yet made the connection that BritRail pays her wages because she's expected to perform some duties in exchange for them. Had to wait while she ended momentously important phone conversation about "this bloke who she fancied the pants off of." (Verbatim quote.) When she did finally deign to speak to me, she answered every question as if I had asked a different question altogether. ("Did someone bring in a large black satchel with lots of bottles in it?" "Uh, somebody brought in a Marks and Spencer shopping bag?") Had to restrain myself from giving her detention.

To make matters worse, someone behind me started blathering at me, too. Had wonderful low comedy routine going on in which I would first ask a question of the dolt in front of me, she would answer something unrelated, and person behind me would repeat back what I had just said. Had to ascertain I was missing a bag – of course I was, what did she think I was just talking about – ! She said, "Then perhaps this one is yours?"

I turned round – behind me was the black-stockinged blonde one, her little book of "mythology" sticking out of the pocket of her coat. Holding my missing bag out to me like she had done something clever.

Completely perplexed as to how I could have left it behind. At the time, assumed that she must have noticed it there, then brought it to the Lost Items office. Of course she must have gotten a nice kick out of looking terribly sensible and honest, and played it to the hilt – oh yes, you're a little angel, you – just an asset to the citizenry in general. Let's make you a Gryffindor prefect straightaway.

Stood there like a little girl who thinks she's too adorable to be punished, perfectly at ease. Her hair wasn't actually blonde, I noticed, but actually a pale red, like the back of a fawn, with the damp from the rain condensing on it in tiny drops of silver. All of which seemed sweet and piquant to me then. She said she hoped I hadn't missed my train (certainly would have been just heartbroken if I had, no doubt) – but I said I wasn't leaving for two hours.

"It's early," she said, smiling. "Let's go get tea then."

Now she asks me. Couldn't have just gotten her pert arse up off her bloody bench and suggested that when I was right in front of her and would have been glad to hear it. As it was – took me a moment to comprehend that she was suggesting I go off somewhere, sit down, and take a cup of tea, with her. Actually felt a bit floored. Hoped that she would speak again and clarify exactly what she was asking of me. Then asked me if I had a favourite spot for tea near King's Cross. So I had heard her correctly. Well. Most unexpected, this. No precedent for it in my experience.

Was still mulling over exactly how one responded to this sort of thing when a crestfallen expression came over her – apparently I had not answered fast enough, and she had taken that as a refusal, and was starting to turn away. Protested that I did indeed like tea. Ended up in a little teashop, rain plashing mightily against the windows. Almost the only people there, in the blessedly quiet late-night dimness. I wasn't sure what to order – to me tea is what the house-elves bring pots of to my office. This place had so many exotic choices I needed my Potions education just to understand them all. Finally just asked for what she was having.

All right, we had ordered, now we had to talk to each other. All very awkward for me. Hit on asking her where she was from.

Her family came from the Lake District, she said. (Maybe there is a lake somewhere in the vicinity of her birthplace, but I wouldn't count on it.) At the time, it put me in mind of Wordsworth, country manors, people who took pastoral walking tours for excitement. But she hadn't been back there in awhile because she was lecturing at Cambridge University. Ah – that explained the academic-looking book with yellow notes in it. Another professor – that was a talking point.

But I thought that for someone who said she was from the Lake District, she sounded awfully Irish. (Should have been my first clue.) Or maybe Australian, or New Zealander? Distinct lilt to her voice, nearly a brogue, but with soft English r's, and full th's – when she said she taught folklore and mythology, it was myth-ol-o-gy, not a Dubliner's mi-tol-o-gy. Closest thing ever heard to it was when I met a herbologist visiting Professor Sprout from the Appalachians in America. If that lady spoke with professorial diction, she might have sounded very much like the stranger sitting across from me. (Of course now I know why I couldn't place her accent – never having spoken to a native Arcadian before. She could have put me out of my misery of linguistic analysis at any time, but didn't.)

Got distracted because she was leaning her chin on the heel of her hand, fingers making a little curved half-frame for her face, waiting for me to speak again. Always annoyed by people who just wait until I stop speaking so they can talk again (a habit I shall call Gryffindor Syndrome.) Not so with her. She looked at me as if what I was saying was utterly fascinating. Making the most of the fact that she of course knows she's no strain on the eyes, but at the time I was rather stupidly eating it up.

Was enjoying being listened to so fetchingly (it's sort of a novelty to me) that had half forgot she had just asked me what I teach. What do Muggles call Potions... chemistry. Asked where I taught – I said a boarding school for young people, taking my cue from stupid Lost Items clerk and answering a question other than the one asked. (Well, I thought at the time that if I announced that I taught Potions at a School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, this hapless Muggle would think I was a dangerous lunatic.)

Under such encouragement I held forth on the topic of my misadventures for awhile – she laughed at some of the antics of students in my classroom, a topic which, between teachers, apparently transcends wizard/Muggle differences. Was sort of impressed by that – there are people here who have known me for decades who have yet to notice that I have a sense of humour, whereas she picked up on it in about two minutes. Starting to curse inwardly as to how little I could really tell her. Actually was starting to think Muggle university sounded quite interesting as well, but when I asked her about it, one would think I was trying to extract her pretty teeth from her gums. The woman really is about as forthcoming as a block of cheese.

In all though, the situation was quite the opposite of what I'm used to. Most people fall all over themselves to interrupt me with dull information about themselves. Instead, she was coaxing me to tell her everything about me, which didn't take long. (Born in Scotland. Went to school in Scotland. Now teach, ah, chemistry at the same school I attended. In Scotland. That's all for me – yourself?) Was becoming increasingly curious about her. Recalled with embarrassment that I hadn't asked her name – tried to pry it out of her indirectly. No luck at all, of course – knew only that it had a Y in it. In all though, at the time I would have been willing to play this particular little game for hours. (Can imagine it getting awfully annoying though. If I wanted nothing more than a rapt audience to twinklingly watch me go on about myself, I've certainly chosen the right line of work, haven't I. But no doubt there are narcissistic dolts out there who would adore that sort of thing.)

Teashop proprietress said that it was midnight and they were closing. Still had to make Dumbledore's phone call and get to my train. Also wanted to contact my new companion for a reciprocal taking-out-to-tea (not realising at the time the likelihood of that ever happening.) Also still had to get away unseen to the platform. Then – figured if I had to use a Muggle phone card, perhaps I should ask a Muggle, and Miss Has-a-Y-In-It certainly was handiest. She led me to a red call box – a little booth with a phone – and explained it to me. (Either they have phone boxes in the Faerielands, or she is the most assimilated supernatural creature alive.)

I was expecting Mrs. Figg to say "Hello" on the other end and was readying an apology for calling her so late – but instead got a woman's voice saying the number had been disconnected. Spelled-With-a-Y offered to try it for me – number really didn't work. Well, supposed I must needs tell Dumbledore, and hoped it wasn't too desperately important.

She was still bending over the phone and I glanced down at her face – probably my first big mistake. The line of her cheek struck me as quite lovely, as did her profile. This proximity was making a long inventory of unused hormones demand to be accounted for – suddenly envisioned her turning round and brazenly insinuating herself into my arms (which seemed just so bloody unlikely at the time). Then she hung up, turned round, and said quite casually – "You've wanted to kiss me for at least the last hour and a half, and haven't done it yet."

Utterly shocked. Because – well, I had. But I'm not used to people just saying that sort of thing out loud like that though.

Still – made it quite clear that kissing her was an entirely acceptable possibility. Can't say I minded that. Indeed, all of a sudden seemed imperative to remedy that unfortunate omission straightaway.

Tried to be very gentle about it – wasn't sure whether I was expected to embrace her as well – compromised on lifting her face up. Thought I'd forgotten what female lips feel like but actually, no, I hadn't. Afterward, she looked up at me with the most mischievous smile – no, mischief wasn't the proper word. More like hormonal anarchy. (Shall call that her "Puck surveying a sleeping Athenian youth" look from here on in.) Then she kissed me. Not some polite, tentative thing – instead put her arms around my neck and kissed me like a sixth-year behind a greenhouse.

Well then. All right, madam, if that's how you want me to kiss you, I suppose I must needs oblige.

After that had been going on awhile she said something about going out on the platform. (Leaving me a way out if I wanted one, I suppose. Or just being insufferably coy yet again.) Asked her quite directly if she really wanted to leave, and she gave me another one of those brazen smiles and said no. All right then, glad to have that squared away.

After that we really did just fall on each other like randy teenagers. It was shameless. It occurs to me now that my conduct last evening was very unbecoming to a Hogwarts professor, but I'm not made of fecking stone, damn it. I probably should have known better, but I plead duress. The Faeries made me do it, your Honour.

No idea how I'm to now be expected to share meals at the same table with her. Am I now expected to just forget what we did to each other that night? Is that sort of thing such a wholly commonplace occurrence to her? I'm finding it excruciating that I'm now going to have to discuss lesson plans with McGonagall over dinner with her there, and just choose not to remember how she kissed me, how she eased my face down onto her cleavage absolutely shamelessly. She smelled green, tonic – like freshly gathered herbs. Woodsorrel, or lemon verbena. I had my hand on her thigh, not entirely sure how it got there, discovered a stocking top giving way to a drift of warm thigh flesh. I didn't think anyone wore suspendered stockings for everyday anymore, but certainly didn't mind. She certainly didn't seem to mind anything either. More like – positively encouraging.

Started unbuttoning the bodice of her dress – but my hands were shaking so that she did it for me. Very complicated black lace brassiere underneath, but found the cleavage far more interesting. Remember thinking it couldn't really be happening, this is not my life, this can't be my life as she opened my fly and her warm hand closed around the base of my cock and stroked forward. I've seen cats and Kneazles get so ecstatic with being stroked that they practically try to wrap their bodies around the hand doing the stroking. She was like that. Natural, unselfconscious, even joyous. No listlessness of Imperio in those eyes, no desperate mental calculation of "If I go down on him, he'll do what the Dark Lord wants him to do" going on. No, she just wanted me, right then, seemed perfectly willing to have a nice little gladhearted fuck right in the middle of King's Cross. By now was half-convinced that I must have fallen asleep on the bench and was having some utterly surreal and improbable erotic dream.

What the hell. Come here, you – there was no one around. (Amazing what some people will do with a bloke when they have no intention of ever asking him what his bloody name is, isn't it.)

I ripped some of her clothes – but she didn't seem to care, so I didn't either. And then her thighs were around my hips and I was clutching her against me like probably the most radioactively needy bastard alive. Oh God yes, the narcotic slickness of female lubrication, and she was pulling me into position just shamelessly, her eyes locked on mine and her arms around me... never had any woman make it so very clear that she wanted me inside her, never even imagined something like this before. Little catches of soprano breath in my ear. It felt... oh hell, I'm not a poet, I've never been able to find the words to properly describe the way it feels to penetrate a woman. Barely even bother remembering or imagining it too much.

Still there is no doubt in my mind that she enjoyed it as much as I did – can't even begin to conceive of a sound more soaked in oestrogen than her gasps while we were at it. I had my arm around her hips and was simply crushing her against me, no conscious sense of establishing a rhythm, just clutching the unbelievable fluid warmth of her onto my cock with all the strength I had – but I've never exactly gotten to subtly hone my powers of control with long practice. God help any security guard or policeman who had knocked on that bloody callbox door then – I would have Stunned the bastard into a puddle on the pavement.

A second later I'm listening to that woman-seized-by-orgasm cry, her muscles clamping down on me – if that wasn't climatic for her, she's world-class at faking it. My first act of coitus since the eighties, probably lasted less than three minutes, but I still managed to finish a gentleman's second. Rather elated by that.

No, I'm not a bit embarrassed at how I treated her.

Felt like I'd been picked up and thrown over the edge like... oh, like I have students who aren't as old as the memory of the last time I had sex, and she was exciting to me, and that's hyperbole enough for a journal only I will ever read. Fecking hell, who cares now.

Really might have almost fainted afterward. Evidently there isn't quite enough blood in me to allow me to have an orgasm like that and remain standing. She caught me as my knees nearly buckled – really was rather stronger than I expected a woman of her size to be, but was feeling too much like a besotted teenager to notice. Fell forward onto her shoulder – she put her arm around my head and held me quite tenderly. Shaking horribly, could hardly breathe. At that moment, the most perverse thing in the world to me seemed ever wanting to move from exactly where I was.

I'm embarrassed about how I felt immediately following. Infatuation and desire seemed too pallid of words. I wanted only to take her somewhere where I could spend the proper number of years making love with my coy mistress. Without her real name, I imagined all sorts of names and identities for her, each more far-fetched and romantic than the next. There simply had to be world enough and time for me to find some way to see her again, Muggle or no. Fuck what Lucius would think – I'd just shagged a Muggle, and bloody well liked it, and liked her. He didn't need to know about her. I imagined meeting her in Cambridge on weekends, seeing her in lecture hall in professorial robes, having dinner at her flat, and then having more of this insanely intense sex all over the living room afterward. Given the number of students at Hogwarts who claim mixed parentage, evidently it could be possible to maintain some kind of affectionate relationship between a wizard and a Muggle, the example of my own parents notwithstanding.

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Sitting at his desk, Snape's expression twisted – something about the above paragraph suddenly irritated him beyond measure. He reached for his quill again and methodically slashed it out completely.

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She said something about being sorry I couldn't make my phone call. Bother the fecking phone call. I'll make Dumbledore's telephone calls for him when he's got an accurate call number. I was far too interested in kissing her cheek, the side of her neck – the bits I had been coveting when I thought there was no chance I would ever get to touch her. She pulled away – felt a stupid pang of loss at having to withdraw and let go. She got down off the callbox ledge, pulled her skirt down almost modestly. Then grabbed me by the coat collar and it was starting again with the sweaty behind-the-greenhouse kissing.

Seemed a bit put out about missing her train, but fuck the trains, they're gone, we missed them. I would stay in London for the night, if she would stay with me. Enough of this cold uncomfortable standing-up business – I wanted her in bed with me all night, with a hot shower and breakfast afterward. Dumbledore would understand if I missed one entire day out of my teaching career. If the twinkly-eyed old goat knew what was going on, he'd probably have told me to have a good time and covered my classes himself. He's always prevailing upon me to get out more often.

Now stop being so damn coy and tell me what your name is, I said. After what we'd just done, it really seemed like very little to ask of her. But she seemed troubled now – pulled away from me, walked out of the booth. I started to follow, but had to address certain sartorial concerns first. I called to her to wait.

When I got onto the platform, she wasn't there.

No one there. Vanished. Without a word, without a sound, even.

I tried to call her name, but didn't know it.

It was impossible that she could have walked away that fast – nothing to hide behind – the platform was wide, deserted, and featureless. Could she be some kind of incognito witch and have Apparated? I hadn't heard any telltale popping noise. Definitely not carrying a wand, from what I had felt of her, and I had felt most of her, really. No room in her pocket for an Invisibility Cloak, I don't think.

But even if I couldn't figure out how she had done it, WHY would she choose to vanish, right then? Had I offended her somehow? Hadn't she enjoyed it? I thought she had – I'm sure she had. Was she perhaps some sort of wildly impulsive adulteress?

Worse – could she be in some sort of desperate trouble? Even worse – had becoming even briefly involved with me somehow made her a target for him? Was he back, watching me? Did he know what I've done? Was I now going to start receiving gift-wrapped pieces of her by owl post every morning? There were a few moments where I was genuinely terrified for her, idiotic as that may sound now. (The way Dumbledore is going on about her, I think it's more likely that that young lady could take care of herself as well as I in that situation.)

I debated for one second if perhaps she was some kind of ghost – an especially pleasant ghost who haunted sexually frustrated people waiting in King's Cross on rainy nights. May have thought, rather stupidly, that if I waited long enough, that she would come back.

Another half-hour went by. Then I bloodied my knuckles punching the brick train station wall.

In the end I did simply Apparate, figuring I would just pay the ticket if I got caught, but don't think anyone noticed. Had to hurry up to Hogwarts in a downpour. Got into dry clothes and made it to breakfast very late, my hair fairly stinking of wet wool. Then Dumbledore made an unexpected announcement – there's another DADA session being added, weeks after the beginning of term. Something about distraction tactics, to be used without a wand, and how to fight and use weapons. Well. That'll be a lot of safety waivers for the parents to sign, won't it.

And he went ahead with it without telling any of us. Barely noticed this new professor appearing out of nowhere at the far end of the table. (Late arriving DADA professors usually being such pleasant, attractive, well-groomed sorts this year, after all.) Only noticed she had a feminine name. Struck me as a bit odd that a woman would be teaching Crabbe & Goyle, et al., how to fight, but I'm old-fashioned that way a bit.

After breakfast, we moved to Dumbledore's anteroom. They all chattered – I had some more tea. Took it as brief respite before going off to correct some more atrociously spelled papers on remedies and antidotes. (I've never seen such resistance to the idea that perhaps being poisoned might be unpleasant, and perhaps precautions should be taken against it, but that's the Hogwarts student body for you. Maybe if I threaten to actually poison one of them, it would make them pay attention. Can't help but think that if any of them had actually seen someone die of ingesting poison, might make them take this lesson seriously for once.)

Dumbledore began making the rounds of introductions with his new protégée. She seemed to be intent on listing every academic publication any of us have ever made as though we've commissioned an inventory of such from her – and everyone else was eating it up like Honeydukes' best chocolate. Knows the name of my last piece, the one about bezoars for Alchymia Et Potio Diurnalis. Well – little Miss Granger has definitely done her homework. Overcompensate intellectually for your blondeness much? Or are you really just that much of a shameless kiss-arse?

Dumbledore was benevolently insisting on introducing me to her, so finally had to face the obsequious git.

Whereupon I "met" my stranger from King's Cross.

Same fair hair, now wet and dishevelled, same clothes, now damp. Her face looked different, somehow. But unmistakably her. A few hours earlier I had had that same dress half unbuttoned and her black lace breast under my hand and my tongue in that mouth, and now she's shaking hands with McGonagall like they're best friends and addressing me as "Professor."

After she had gone, Albus told us that she's not a Muggle. Oh no.

She's a Faerie.

To think I was horribly self-conscious about the idea of telling her I was a wizard – when she's not even from EARTH !

She's the first Faerie I have ever met – they're an elusive lot, from what that transparent bore Binns said. (Imagine that.) They would no doubt qualify as "beings" to the Ministry, but as I recall, the representatives Burdock Muldoon sent to invite them to his meeting of bipedal beings in the fourteenth century came back with no useful information (not to mention drunk as lords, crowned with daisies, and sporting asses' ears). No Faerie ever showed up to Muldoon's summit of beings, and like Centaurs and Merfolk, they maintain their own government entirely separate from ours. They mostly live in a different dimension or some such. If there is a Faerie Liaison Office in the Ministry it's probably as much of a joke as the Centaur Office. (I wonder which unfortunate MoM official was responsible for getting work papers for that little expat.) It's supposed to be rather pleasant in the Faeries' world, I've heard – Lucius was making a big fuss about going there awhile ago, but then he'd always been on about the exotic holidays his father was sending him on.

Now, with her as my one Faerie acquaintance, I can't say that my impressions so far have been entirely favourable. She's not done anything for stereotype of Faeries being charming liars with their own tricksy notions of morality.

Evidently they have Faeries teaching at Cambridge – if that part was even true. Twenty Galleons says she majored in Women's Studies and thinks treating males like dirt, the same way the worst of men treat women, is somehow going to free women from the crushing yoke of the effing Patriarchy.

I had barely caught her name earlier – Miss Emily Beauregard Swain. How repulsively middle-aged Sloane-Rangerish. Sounds like an old Mayfair housewife with collections of little spoons on her shelves and tatty lace doilies on the arms of chairs. Emily spelled with a fecking Y, thanks. I think I'll spell it Emilie on faculty memorandums just to annoy her.

So I did manage to find out your precious name after all, madam. She left me without so much as a sperm to accompany me home, but someone else had to finally tell me her name.

Of course she never even asked me for mine. Yes, it's pretentiously Latinate like every other damned Slytherin in my year, and my surname gives rise to far too many ssssssssstupid jokes, but she might have fecking expressed some interest, seeing as how she availed herself to most other parts of me.

Still managed to be contentious about some trifling point of academic minutiae within a minute of "meeting" me. Likely she hasn't read my bezoar paper at all.

Seemed surprised to see me, but remained cool as anything when Dumbledore "introduced" us. (Whereas I blushed so much I've now got Dumbledore asking me morning and noon "if there's anything I would like to tell him, anything at all" – I hate it when he does that!)

Also seemed rather pale, exhausted, and shivering.

So she left, and Dumbledore regales us with the tale of how she's Ye Mightie Fencing Master and beatifically noble and wonderfully clever and can probably walk on water and give sight to the blind besides, and how he's been trying to get his old boyhood chum the King of Faerie, her great-uncle, to send her to him as a Defence Against the Dark Arts professor for going on two years. He's just off his head that she's finally here. How really ripping for him.

(Now that I know all that, what does Dumbledore think I would say to him even if I did want to talk about it? "All right, Albus, since you asked me, persisted in asking me, how's this for a good cry on that soft, comfortable shoulder that everyone here so loves to abuse. What happened is, your lovely new DADA professor, whom you had been begging the loan of for years, of whom you and your old friend the King both think so very highly, used me quite shamelessly in the forests of King's Cross, then vanished. Now she's pretending she doesn't know me, and frantically well-laid or not – I'd rather remain a confirmed bachelor than be toyed with by the likes of her. I dearly wish you would send her back from whence she came, because the prospect of seeing her every day looks miserable to me.")

What good will that do me, or him, or anyone?

Truthfully, there isn't any way to seek his counsel here, not without all the particulars coming out, which will of course mean sacrificing any shred of reputation and dignity I've regained with him since 1981.

Is there a positive side? I've dealt with infinitely worse, certainly. She can't be as dangerous as Quirrell or even The Lupine (and nobody could be as big a fool as Lockphart). Also thankfully doesn't have same wood-chipper-accident countenance as Moody, nor appears to be as psychotically paranoid either. But – even if what she did is unprecedented in my experience of DADA professors, it still bloody well stings.

Dumbledore is prevailing upon me to attend her lecture on Wednesday. Something about Faery magic he wants me to learn. Another theory of wandless magic. (As if I can keep track of all the theories of wandless magic floating around – !) I can't describe my joy at the idea of getting to sit supplicant as a first-year before her. Don't mind me, madam, I'll just obediently accept that I'm disposable, and so find an ashcan to throw myself into now that you're finished with me.

I used a Healing Draught on my knuckles, but they still hurt.

Ye gods. I dearly hope Lucius never makes her acquaintance, because he'd be in love.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

His black eyes, gone harsh and impenetrable, lingered over the last line for some time.

Then he ripped the entire September 22nd entry out of his journal and threw the pages on the fire.

Once he was sure the parchment was consumed, he went back to bed.