Even Old Morose Bats Can Get Soft

Even Old Morose Bats Can Get Soft

It was a very ordinary day at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place. So ordinary, that plain normality almost lost its significance. The Order of the Phoenix had its standard evening meeting down in the dark old kitchen. Arguing men and women were huddled around the table, surrounded by a ring dance of rippling shadows. Candles flickered, endlessly attempting to elbow the attacking darkness away. Every once in a while, the fizzling crowd fell silent when reports were given. After those various speeches, the noise level in the room usually climbed into such measures, that it was a mere wonder a certain charming painting in the upper levels did not begin screaming on top of its lungs. There was so much to debate now that Albus Dumbledore had been kicked out of his Hogwarts Headmaster job -or rather to say, the loyal guardian gargoyle outside his former office kept kicking Dolores Umbridge out when she tried to claim the top throne.

Although the discussion was rather snappish, nobody actually sported a glum mood - except one single person who looked just as cheerful as a pack of Dementors. In the farthermost end of the long table, where the frolicking candlelight did not even reach, sat Severus Snape, surlier than ever. His personal report time had passed already a while ago, but the man was tied to listen to the discordant symphony of commentaries the others had over the various topics.

This and that, odds and ends, knickknacks, blahblahblah...

The conversation went on. The candle nearest to him died. Even a black hole would have been proud of the darkness Snape’s nook now possessed. Somehow, as the seconds tardily ticked on, the background noise transformed into dull monotonic hum in his ears. His brains seemed no more caring about what the others yapped and barked. He wanted to be alone, left alone in the abysmal cavities of his sunken mind. Presently, in his biased empyreans, everyone was his worst enemy, even his very own soul.

So, why was Severus in such a state? Usually the testy Potions Master was rather loudly opinionated during the Order negotiations. Yet, not today. In addition, heavily beyond normal was his grumpiness. When delivering hellos and good-evenings, all his responses to those raising a hand in greeting had solely been cryptic grunts or hisses. His regard swept the floor and his back remained hunched. It was as though the man had tried to crumple inside himself and only appear as some sort of stirring bundle or muttering robes to the outer world. Shiftless, everyone passing by had only shrugged to this uncanny behavior. Maybe he had just a particularly bad day. And perhaps by the end of the meeting, he would defrost back into his less sour self.

Ostensibly, things were not so. When the clandestine cookroom gathering ceased, he still kept gyrating in his rickety seat like a fierce serpent, murmuring to himself with an inaudible tone. Yet, at the moment this did not seem to bother anyone else, since the rest of the Order members were not quite able to spot him. Snape’s black robes blended so well into the background that he was generally invisible. Not even the curvy line of his excessive nose shimmered in the wane light, as his head was pushed so deep inside the cloak collars that it was almost impossible to tell whether his matted greasy hair was a decorative fur extension of the cape, or belonged to somewhere else.

What was more, not even the scarecrow himself noticed that the tide had turned. A few pairs of legs had already waddled out of the chamber. Lupin and Hestia Jones clattered their chairs nearby, but not even their eyes fell upon the morose man. They picked up a heap of parchment rolls from the table and lastly strolled out together with the scattering squad.

Snape was buried under a boulder of heavy resentment. His whole existence still lingered in the previous day. Flied around his Hogwarts office. Flied around the Pensieve. Flied irately around a certain fifteen-year-old boy. Another illusionary torrent brought forth older and dustier recollections. They became mixed up with the newer ones, mutating into a gray haze of spinning, jeering ghosts. And they kept on mocking him, mocking with all the possible insulting nicknames the world possessed. Severus wanted to close his ears from their hollers, but the glass-splintering shrill screeches seemed penetrating everything.

He clenched his fists involuntarily. And just when he felt his fingernails digging themselves painfully into the flesh of his palms, he startled awake from the gloomy daydream.

The teacher re-flinched when perceiving how silent it was around. Candles furthermore burned in their holders, shadows jogged along various surfaces, but otherwise the kitchen was rather desolated. Only some vague figure in the farthest corner, at the dresser, tinkled with something. His mouth fell slightly open. Had he sunken so deep into his reflections that he had utterly missed the meeting’s ending? With a grunt, the man nodded to himself.

And no wonder why. The previous day kept haunting him from hour to hour, forcing him to re-live the humiliation again and again... The day when he had dug Harry Potter out of the Pensieve.

Out of his very worst memories...

Solely the kid’s name made a spasm travel across his sullen visage. With a spurt, he stood up, ready to slither out of the room with lightspeed. After all, it was owned by one of them. He despised this whole house, everything that drifted around it. The more dilly-dallying, the more scorching the remembrances would sting Snape.

The delay had its nasty aspects, like the high probability to collide with Sirius in the hall, which definitely would be the last drop. Such shame and confused anger seethed in his chest that Severus yearned to be invisible, to become merged with the plain air...

---

Nymphadora Tonks had just finished mixing her salad. For there appeared to be nobody left in the kitchen, she had thought to fix herself some snack. There had been this hollow, churning feeling in her tummy ever since Alastor’s major caws over two hours ago. Yet, Tonks was not one hundred percent sure, whether she actually was allowed to tinker with these culinary gizmos residing in this room. For her befogged surprise, the girl had marked that Mrs. Weasley and several other individuals kept more or less bluntly shooing her away from the kitchen supplies. She could not understand why. Tonks loved to lend a helping hand whenever possible, especially when the Order occasionally made and enjoyed common meals. However, repeatedly she was pleaded to stay at the table. She admitted that there had been a few broken cups and tiny accidents with the dishes... but still it seemed illogical to conjure up a personal bodyguard for every single pot and pan when she was around.

Initially, the musty old chamber looked abandoned. The girl felt a tad bad knowing her present act was in a way forbidden from her, but perhaps it was not a deadly sin to peck a teensy weensy slice of nosh. At least the hunger-croaking stomach was openly complaining against such restrictions. So... In a breeze, an ensorcelled set of knives had cut some lettuce, and flying saucers had supplied tuna and mayonnaise into a bowl. And to ensure the peace, she had every once in a while glanced over her shoulder to check if anyone had entered the room. Nevertheless, everything had so far turned up cemetery-silent. Even the upper floors stood without a creak of a floorboard.

Ah, the joys of fresh salad. How deliciously crispy the dish’s inners looked like! Green lettuce leafs, brilliantly red tomatoes, cucumber, paprika, spicy fish... Tonks grinned broadly at her snack and lifted up the bowl. She began to traipse towards the table looming ahead, but did not quite observe the uneven floor slab in a few foot distance. Namely, right at the moment, her eyes were fixed on something else. She could have sworn there was a black, indistinct figure fidgeting near the first chairs. It was far too tall to be Kreacher, whereas its moves were oddly worming... If only there had been a bit more light in this shady hole...

The tip of her shoe hit the floor slab. With a squeal, Tonks lost her balance and felt the even surface disappearing from under her soles. The girl was flying in a wriggly curve of some sort towards the figure that had barely emerged from the sea of chairs. Two or three times her toes reached the floor again, but were instantly drawn back into the whirlpool of stumbling. The glass bowl slipped from her fingers, and flitted joyfully in the air for a nanosecond.

Thud!The woman felt colliding with something very solid, draped in canvas. The blockade uttered a hoarse groan. Mechanically her hands tried to search for support. Haphazardly they grabbed the nearest, random object, which turned out to be some sort of fabric bundle.

Screep! Splat! The fall was unavoidable, and it was accompanied by an operetta of smashes and ripping sounds of tearing textile. A blink later, she found herself on the floor, her stare fixed straight into the eyes of Severus Snape. His callous face was twisted into a hideous grimace, and the situation was in no way helped by the salad bowl sitting lopsidedly on his head. The professor’s hair was dripping with mayonnaise, and lettuce leafs and tomato slices were gently gliding down his front. Half of his traveling cloak was torn, whereas the inner suit was missing its left sleeve. Swiftly she noticed holding a loose parcel of black clothing, whose rear seams were showing signs of heavy rents.

“Uh-oh...” This explanatory remark was everything she had chance to pip before a metaphorical volcano erupted.

Smoke was coming out of Snape’s ears. Under the pressure of his stressed-out senses, his brains were not consciously observing their own synapses. A mere spontaneous instinct made him seize her shoulders into a hard pinch. With one fling, he snatched the woman up, the next moment shaking her ferociously. His vision pictured Potter in the place of Tonks; his mind seemed unable to register the difference. They were all against him; all these sneering mischief-makers were evidently plotting something against him! In his boiling madness, the Potions Master both looked and sounded appalling. His eyes were throwing daggers, his lips were trembling, his exhales were coming out in a rapid sequence of hissing spits. But although the ghost of Potter loitered in his eyes, his mouth was bellowing curses addressed to a very different person.

“TONKSSSssss! WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?” he roared, while a few paprika pieces slid down his hair and slimily found their way inside his collars.

“Eh-e-e-e... I-I-I-I-I’m t-t-t-t-erribly s-s-s-sorry...” Because of the continuous shaking of her shoulders, the words plopped out as incoherent stutter. “M-m-m-m-Mr. S-s-s-s-nape, t-t-t-that h-h-h-urts, p-p-p-lease l-l-l-et g-g-g-go o-o-of m-m-m-m-me!”

Indeed, the way his hard bony fists squeezed her upper arms, was parsecs away from any gentle Care Bear pat.

Nonetheless, right then, his mind opened with a click. That was not Potter’s voice yelping, but someone else. The apparition of the scar-head boy slunk away and was replaced with the picture of a slim girl an amount shorter than he, today with copperish pigtails and a frightened look painted on her young visage.

Instantly he ceased the shaking, remaining to scowl at her. His thick, black brows were furthermore crumpled deep, yet the expression was showing minor surprise. Gradually the clues were gathered: the mayonnaise dripping from the tip of his hooked beak had something to do with the cracked glass bowl, currently on the floor. And then again, that had something to do with this clumsy Auror...

It was the distressed Nymphadora who spoke first. “Look, I’m terribly, terribly sorry, but would you kindly let go of me? That kind of hurts.”

It is troublesome to decide whether the girl’s subsequent act was a good or a bad thing. She did not have the tiniest idea of Snape’s inner anxieties or phobias, and thus could not foresee the jumpy reaction that followed. She plainly took a hold of his hands - which were furthermore attached around her upper arms like some sort of sets of pale, skeletal talons - to unhook their grip. Her fingers had a few darting seconds time to touch his skin, before Severus was attacked by another mental whirlwind. He literally bounced a few paces backwards. A petite cloud of perky lettuce leafs smoothly fluttered down around him, as he was left fossilized in an oddly warped pose, hands in clawlike petrification at his chest, his wide-flown eyes gawking at her in confused disgust. It was as though an invisible steel fist had tightened itself around his throat. The lake of syllables was drained; not even the tiniest squeak wheezed out from his gob.

Puzzled, Tonks gazed at him. What was the problem of this bloke? She had always considered him as a peculiar old rooster, but today Snape just sailed beyond all logical understanding. At first all that bawling, and abruptly the professor looked like an oversized crow that had just crashed against a brick wall. As deduced, she had no idea whatsoever about Snape’s age-old phobia of being touched. Whether it was a friendly knock on the shoulder or a brotherly slap on the back, he loathed it beyond measure. Such things just plain happened to make him feel tremendously awkward.

And this occasion was no exception. Or, in one sense perhaps. Usually the teacher burst out into snapping curses accompanied by a few liters of flying spit, yet now he merely resembled a mute newt.

The candlelight shook a leg around them. Snape’s pallid appearance together with his toothy grimace were quite as charming as the Dark Mark’s lovely snake-tongued simper, which equally scowled at her from his presently bare, sinewy arm. Such a cheerful, goggling duo was only prone to increase her awkwardness. Why on Mars had he reacted that way? Was there something odd in her hands? She raised them on her noseline to inspect whether there was possibly something sharp in them, something that would grant explanations. And for her horror, Tonks recalled that earlier the same day she had during a moment of boredom tried to grow spikes out of her fingers. Although Nymphadora saw no trace of them in her skin any more, she assumed that some sly residue pair of such things had stabbed the Potions Master.

Naturally she was one hundred percent wrong with this belief.

She cast a nervous smirk up at him. “Uh... eh... really, I’m sorry. Clumsy me. Now eh... I guess I need to clean up this mess.”

The man did not stir an inch, the lopsided grimace only persisting. She mumbled a rushed Reparotogether with an extemporaneous Evanesco, and soon the cucumber slices were history. The torn cloak shreds were attached seamlessly back to their big brother, and the emblem of Voldemort’s fan club was hidden again under an intact sleeve.

“Umh... that’s a bit better.” She evaluated at the result. Somehow Tonks had not succeeded to get rid of the mayonnaise perfectly. It still resided among his greasy locks, nonetheless not really changing the impression. Oil was oil, no matter if it originated from his scalp or a dip bottle.

“Ah now, let’s see...” She raised her wand again in order to trim Snape’s coiffure. “I, uh, didn’t learn this spell all that perfectly because I don’t really need it... eh... well you know the Metamorphmagus thing...” Nymphadora carried on her antsy one-woman conversation to muffle the unenviable silence under it.

A flick of wand, and his locks turned lurid pink, folding up into a neat bow on top of his head. The sight was so utterly ludicrous, that Tonks had to fake coughing to hide somehow her sudden, jittery giggles.

“Uh, no, sorry, I didn’t remember it right. Now this ought to do it...”

Zip, zap, her wand swished around, making Snape’s hair perform an amount of ridiculous tricks. At one point, the locks transformed into a grassy flowerbed full of bright-purple tulips. On a second occasion, every single hair turned into a wispy white plume. Soon after, his head was supercharged with singing and dancing daisies. But in the end, the locks stood clean and shiny; with no trace of grease or dip, the hairdo’s edges neatly trimmed as if real scissors had finished the work.

“Now... That looks ok. Hopingly I remember the incantations better in the future. Eh, field practice is always a good thing...”

His stonelike pose still prevailed, and there hardly was a millimeter’s worth of alteration in expressions. Excluding that his rigid jaw had clicked perhaps a tad more open.

The girl could only shrug at this phenomenon. She so much wanted to tiptoe away and leave behind all the discomfiture. The food had been missed, a certain tummy kept composing ever louder jeremiads, and Snape’s continuous stare was beyond annoying. And the Auror definitely had no interest to stay here and fix herself a second salad. Who knew, maybe that grumpy old raven was hatching a revenge, and would hex the extra bowl to splatter her head with ketchup.

However, she was given a swift excuse to leave. The kitchen stairs rattled; someone else was descending towards the Order’s common room. And if she stayed longer, she would most likely be scolded heavily for being once more like a blind three-legged rhino in porcelain factory.

“Well, eh, I better go.” She pretended to glance at her watch. “Blimey, it’s late! Uh... see you around, Mr. Snape.” Hence the girl took a hike, on the way almost toppling Lupin who had appeared in the doorway.

The petrified Severus remained to frown after her.

---

Darkness silently fell over the Forbidden Forest, and nighttime became the new overlord. The trees melted in raven shadows, and no moonbeams filtered through the heavy curtain of clouds draping the sky. The Hogwarts Castle itself was delineated over the black panorama as a figure even blacker. Its towers protruded towards the empyreans as needle-sharp spikes. Thus, from a distance, it resembled more like a giant, hostile porcupine than a school that was slumbering in the nocturnal vista.

Hours drifted past. The sand inside a silvery hourglass slowly sloped through the minuscule hole in its middle. The tiny grains of sand glittered vaguely in the dying firelight shimmering farther away. Alike in the old kitchen of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, the roughly sculpted murs received a blanket of dancing shapes over them.

The air felt chilly. Down here, in these ancient Slytherin dungeons, the cold earth polished off even the last remnants of silky summer warmth. And as this particular season was not yet even galloping on the green meadows, these chambers were ever colder. On the other hand, the impression of slight Ice Age was only boosted by the permanent resident, the mighty flint-heart Snape.

Under the canopy of massive green-silver tapestries carrying pictographic embroidery of winding serpents, on a four-poster, lay a male figure. Despite the coldness, he had not dived under the quilts, but just sprawled there, on top of the made bedsheet pile. His eyes were wide open; his inhales were shallow and disjointed, like those of a pollen-allergic asthmatic in a gloriously blooming garden. Knuckles ever whitening, his bony, sallow hands were clutching hard the topmost sheet. The shady male looked as if he had desperately tried to choke down a squirming tumult of displeasing sentiments. And, so it was.

Snape’s neurotic thoughts were riding a violent merry-go-round around his head, giving him ceaseless cuffs on the ear with their cold, raw-boned fists. The well of his inner anxieties was starting to overflow and badly. First the conflict with Potter and now this.

He still sensed the touch of her fingers on his skin... A petty skim, lasting just a few seconds... but yet still it was there, tingling like pseudesthesia. Severus attempted with his whole concentration to rip his sentiments away from that one single ghost’s grasp, but was rather helpless in front of the mental foe.

He absolutely abhorred even the thought of someone touching him. And unfortunately in real life, it happened occasionally. Usually the consequences however were not this thorny. The Potions Master habitually walked past such dilemmas just with a slight increase in the commonplace sulking and grunting –thus hardly anybody even observed the difference between his normal-day self and trouble-day self. This day, nevertheless, had a grimmer shade.

His imagination had begun to picture a stone dish, decorated with runic writing, to hover a few inches below his nose. The Pensieve, the original source to all this soul-scorching embarrassment. Its silvery fluid contents were swirling calmly, but white wisps of rippling smoke were emerging from it. This hallucination of his jaded mind felt almost unbelievably real. The mist spiraled and whirled, tardily beginning to form identifiable shapes. James Potter, a younger version of Sirius Black... one puff was transforming into Harry Potter... These curses of imagination joined the existing nightmares, continuing the same mocking as earlier today, only presently having a novel ally added to them. Nymphadora Tonks, smirking and swinging her wand, looking so devilishly innocent.

They all had contrived a mutual treason against him, so it had to be...

Severus flung himself up. “Stop it! Stop it!” he hissed from between his clenched teeth. His hands were whisking around his face, as if trying to shoo away a swarm of mosquitoes that had decided simultaneously to sting his oversized nose.

“STOP IT!” The final yell was roared with such force, that the whole chamber reverberated. It had power enough to awaken the man from his phantasms, which lingered somewhere between the alert consciousness and true dormancy.

The apparitions vanished with a puff. Stupefied, he glanced around in the dim room. It was empty, only the robust furniture squatting in the corners were present with their ominous shadows. No Potters, no Tonks, no tormentors lurking hideously in the nooks. Just he and his eerie, waned existence.

The male massaged his temples. Had he fallen again into that weird world between actuality and the dream realm? Just like earlier today. Just like yesterday. Just like so many times before that...

“What is the matter with me...?” he uttered a low groan. Was he little by little losing all his marbles?

No, there was nothing wrong with his endocranial functionality. No mental defections, no software bugs, only some random cooties that enjoyed gamboling amongst his unwashed locks. And as noticeably his hair was not growing inwards, these latter fellows had no influence whatsoever on anything.

He rose up, and felt the cold stone floor under his bare soles. The slabs were bumpy, but smooth. The toes recoiled at first due to the bitingly cool radiation, but soon learned to accept the surface’s characteristics. Severus did not know where he had lost his slippers when tossing himself onto the bed - almost right after he had arrived back in Hogwarts. Thereupon, he had merely lounged there for hours... living his dour illusions, decades and millennia becoming diluted, time losing its significance.

“Why have you become so pathetic, Severus?” he accused himself while trudging towards the fireplace. And how much he ever strived, he could not answer this self-addressed query.

“Why are you letting your reason fail, you pathetic fool? Why are you letting your sentiments control your mind like that? You have brains - Merlin’s beard - use them! You are supposed neither to snivel nor quaver in front of your feelings; you are NOT supposed to show such pitiful weaknesses!”

The hook-nosed teacher sat down in a roughly chiseled, high-backrest chair right by the fireplace. The few feeble flames were diminishing all the time, and would need more wood for their menu if they wished to grow stronger and create gentle warmth inside this repelling room. Snape picked up a coal poker and prodded the ashes, before offering the fire more logs for supper. With a sigh, he set the dojigger back to its holder, and leaned back in the wooden seat.

Now as he scrutinized his recent behavior, he understood the amount of uncontrolled deeds. How childish. During the Potter skirmish, he had let his anger flow unrestrained, whereas he could have just simply thrown the rascal out of his office without sacrificing his valuable potions and dishes by tossing them after the overcurious Pensieve-sniffer. Additionally, a very simple way of avenging would have been to snatch some house points from Gryffindor - perhaps a few hundred - and direct the kid to have detention with the Giant Squid or the very last Blast-Ended Skrewt that still prowled somewhere in the deepest pits of the castle. A malevolent grin spread across his visage, as he considered such tidbits of punishment.

However... in the end, that sounded just as immature. Severus squirmed in his seat, the acid taste returning on his palate. He was again letting his resentful feelings dominate. Actually when had he used his brains lately? Or had they become so cobwebbed and dusty during all this elapsed time that they had turned torpid for forever?

His yellowish hand traced nervously the chair’s armrest. These two unassociated things, the perch and the perchee, seemed to have a lot in common. Both were unyielding, coarse, and somehow weather-beaten. If the oblongish, uncomfortable seat had owned a human mind, it would have probably been a very cranky and sullen individual. Perhaps a hermit, who had decided to dwell the rest of his days in a deserted cave beyond the scope of modern life. Id est, very Snape-ish.

His thoughts revolved furthermore around the emotional dilemma. How to shoo that pint-sized bespectacled copy of Prongs away from his awareness...? As he brooded, deliberated, and mused on, the intracranial house-elves began dusting his frontal lobe, thus giving space for clearer reflections.

“Perhaps it shall be more adequate just to ignore the whole brat...” He tapped the armrest with a long chapped index, and his piercing eyes stared at the reddening flames. “Yes... that is the way I ought to do it. I shall not be ensnared by the tricky traps my other self seems to be setting on my path...”

Severus did not have the slightest idea of what this other self was. With this conception, he merely referred to the ‘weakling’ mental state that relied more on sentiments than perception. In addition, how much he ever would have wanted to torture Potter after the Pensieve rally, he had his oath and debt to Dumbledore, and was bound to protect Harry in spite of the despise. So... was ignorance the answer? Would the Potions Master - in the long run - forget the whole aggravating mishap if he pretended that the boy’s existence was nothing more than a random nitwitted amoeba on the bottom of the lake?

Still... it was rather impossible to can a piece of reality like this, and just toss the jar away. He, however, would try. Perhaps he would gradually achieve his infinitesimal, yet sufficient, inner peace back. And maybe this way, the mind-monsters would little by little cease pecking his withering self-confidence.

It only felt that too much dismay had been crammed in the course of these two days. And as soon as the bio-computer inside his skull had processed satisfactorily the first mental assignment, another one was dumped instead. He felt a minor tingling in his fingers, as if something feathery or itchy had skimmed them. Then, all abruptly, his both hands experienced an aggressive tremor, clenching into knobbly fists. The professor’s whole digestive system seemed throwing a few quick somersaults.

Tonks... and her tricks...

Severus could not comprehend what actually was the bogie in a little non-malevolent pat or touch that made him feel so thoroughly ill. Year by year, the phobia had only grown worse, and now ostensibly had reached another milestone in its evolution. Angsty fright, petrification, those were its kindest gifts.

And more hot coals were shoveled down his collars as he recalled the salad, his torn clothes, and the naïve game with his hair. Luckily nobody had seen the pink terror of a coiffure bursting with butterflies and pixie dust. Even the local cockroaches would be laughing at him for the rest of his life, if that calamity ever leaked out and became common knowledge. He frowned, grunting. Had this kid done that on purpose? Just to play at his cost? Just to add her own roguish portion to his already stifling hours; just to join the expanding multitude of mockers?

Or... was he falsely accusing her? Tonks neither knew a piece of frog’s hind leg about the Pensieve adventures nor basically anything about his life. She was just one random individual working for the Order, unless of course her dear cousin had tittle-tattled her all the treats starting on from his underpants that met a real cake of soap perhaps once a decennium. She was a spawn of the Blacks, a misbehaving stunted klutz who had always lacked the delicate skill of potionmaking, just like all these rivals were prone...

Yet, something deep in the subliminal pits was accusing him of being heavily biased.

“Perhaps... It truly ought to have been... just an accident. That is what the reason says. She is such a child, I daresay... Merely a naïve little girl who possesses just as much subtlety as a Flobberworm. I truly wonder how they let such a clumsy thing to become an Auror in the first place...”

His lip curled slightly. Glee was a sin, but he could not help sneering at the possibilities of what that strolling disaster might by mistake cause to the two remaining people that had ruined his youth here at Hogwarts.

Snape’s fingers tingled again. Somehow the though of Nymphadora trying to detach his hands from her upper arms had been superglued in his vision.

And that innocent, surprisingly frightened look...

Severus slapped hard his cheek with a pallid palm. Why did not these pointless, stupid fantasies just go away?

The skim had been so soft...

“STOP IT!” he screeched for the nth time, cursing aloud the pathetic remembrances that granted him absolutely no peace.

---

Finally, the Potions Master rose up from the chair and sauntered his way to a little cupboard just beside the chamber’s exit. He needed some sleeping-draught so that the blissful nightly drowsiness would finally take the throne. And, concerning the ghosts, he simply would need to neglect the whole chaos rumbling in his head. Ignore it.

Use his reason...

And be oblivious of the horror that his locks had for a fleeting instant been pink. The cleansing spell was in any case beginning to wear off. The lank black mass had already gathered a healthy amount of oil, and by the following morning, they would be just as sticky and greasy as ever. With added mayonnaise or without.