Cassiopeia's Tale

Cassiopeia Sommers sat with her arms folded and her mouth slightly open. She was staring at Lilith (who was biting her fingers and rocking back and forth on her chair) and tried not to let the History of Magic lesson interfere with her reverie. After a while she fished her quill out of her bag, dipped it in Mara's ink and wrote something in her journal.

Cass liked collecting information and kept several journals. There was one for newspaper clippings, one for notes of interesting magic that might come in useful later, and one for writing down observations about the people around her, to name but a few. She liked to watch instead of talk, and formed silent opinions of everybody and everything, which then got written down in one journal or another. She especially liked to wonder about the secrets of others, for instance, why an extraordinary woman like Minerva McGonagall never married, and how on earth Dumbledore's nose got so crooked.

Mara gave a start and sat upright, looking bewildered. Then she straightened her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Cass smiled. Mara was one of her only friends, and usually provided a solid stream of entertainment with her strange behaviour and odd comments.

"Had a nice nap?" Cass asked, closing her journal and stuffing it into her bag.

Mara shrugged. "It wasn't as nice as the one I had in Divination."

"Oh well," Cass said, "we've got Potions next, so you can try again."

"That's true. All in the name of having the perfect nap and avoiding as much classes as possible." Mara said, stretching.

They walked down the dungeons together, stopping only to visit the bathroom so that Mara can flatten the crazy curls that escaped their clips during her nap. Cass leaned close to the mirror and examined her reflection.

"It's a pity," Mara said through a mouthful of clips.

"What is?" Cass asked, looking away from the mirror to frown at Mara.

"The fact that you're so pretty and not even interested in boys."

Cass continued to frown at Mara, who went on undeterred. "There are a lot of us who would use your looks to attract handsome Quidditch players or extremely rich wizards. But no, you have to go waste that pretty nose by sticking it in a book. There, I'm done."

Mara gave her hair another critical look in the mirror, then picked up her bag and headed for the door. It took Cass another second to come to terms with Mara's extreme statements.

"Hey! Wait! What does that mean?" she yelled, running after Mara. Cass could see her curly head bobbing a little way ahead in the crowd, but there was no way to catch up to her. In the dungeon Mara sat down at a table with an unknown Gryffindor girl, sticking out her tongue at Cass.

"This is absurd," Cass said under her breath as she sat down at an empty table on the other side of the dungeon. Mara had a horrible habit of making comments like that, and then refusing to elaborate beyond a certain point. Anyway, Cass was pretty certain that she did like boys, and that it was they who didn't like her.

-oOo-

Professor Snape set them their work and then walked from table to table peering into cauldrons. Cass chopped and stewed and did everything that was expected of her but might as well have been miles away. She was thinking about Italy and then about the Alps, and about anything except the potion she was making. School bored her senseless, and she was glad that their seventh year was almost over.

"Finally someone who has done something right," a voice suddenly said behind her. Cass jumped and almost cut off her own finger with her silver knife. She twisted around in her chair, but Snape was already moving on to the next table.

"If any of you are in the least interested in seeing what this potion should be looking like, have a look at miss Sommers' attempt. It's almost something that will scrape an Acceptable in the upcoming N.E.W.T.s," he said aloud to the rest of the class and continued on his terrifying examination of their potions.

Cass took this as a compliment, even if the words 'scrape' and 'acceptable' were used to describe her work. She narrowed her eyes as she stared after him. Now there was another interesting question: who had broken Severus Snape's heart like that? For that was obviously what was wrong with him, even if no-one else had managed to figure it out. He showed all the signs of secretly nursing a badly maimed heart.

While her potion stewed for a while she dug another journal out of her bag and crushed one of the ingredients that she had used into a clean page. After wiping her fingers on her robes she dipped her quill and wrote a few sentences next to the smear, wondering how much time she still has to kill before the lesson was finally over. Off to her right Mara was sitting bolt upright with a vacant expression on her face, clearly fast asleep while the annoyed Gryffindor girl finished their potion.

When people stood up and started cleaning out cauldrons and packing bags Cass assumed the lesson had reached it's end and started throwing her own books in her schoolbag. It was at that moment that the boy who had shared a her table decided to throw a nameless phial into the fire to "see what would happen". His name was Marty Farnsworth and Cass thought he was an idiot, which was why she had not acknowledged him before he started doing unforgivably stupid things.

Predictably, the phial exploded and Marty whooped as he ducked. Cass, who wasn't as caught up in it as he was, didn't and a shard of flying glass cut into her leg. She screamed more out of shock than pain, but her legs gave way under her almost immediately and she toppled backwards, hitting another table.

Everybody started to panic, and Snape had to shove people out of the way to reach the commotion. He gave Cass one look and rounded on Marty.

"What was in that phial?" he snarled, but Marty only shook his head, too shocked too say anything. "Where did you get it from?" he then asked, grabbing hold of the front of Marty's robes.

This time Marty was prepared and pointed at a shelf on the opposite wall which was lined with phials filled with bright liquids. Snape gave it a quick look, frowning, and then rounded on Marty again. "What colour?"

"Gr- er.. gr.."

That seemed to be enough information for Snape, since he shoved Marty out of his way and swooped down on Cass. By that time the world had gone all blurry and Cass could feel a strange warmth stealing over her, darkness threatening to envelope her. Snape grabbed her roughly around the waist, heaved her of the floor and pushed her into a chair. The class gasped as he ripped her robes and then her stockings away form the wound. Around the shard of glass her skin was turning an alarming shade of blue, and everybody crowded in closer to stare at it in horror. When he touched it a lighting bolt of pain seared through her entire leg and she screamed and twisted away from him.

"Be still!" he hissed at her. "Do you want to lose the leg?" At those words the class crowded even closer, mesmerised by Cass' possible misery. "Get out of my way!" he yelled at them, but it was no use.

He pointed his wand at the wound and started muttering under his breath. It was the strangest incantation. Through the blurry fog in her head Cass thought vaguely that she wanted to write it down in one of her journals, but then the pain became to much and she gripped Snape's shoulder in an effort not to move her leg. If her nails digging into his shoulder caused him any discomfort, he didn't show it. All too suddenly it became very hard to breathe, and then everything became too much and she slipped into the waiting darkness.