Orion's Pointer

"What are you looking at?"

"You."

"Look somewhere else."

"Why?"

"It's intrusive and impertinent."

"There's nothing else to look at."

"Nice to know I'm a last resort, then." Snape picked up a book next to him and flung it at her without taking his eyes from his own reading material. "Look at that."

Parr caught the book nimbly and looked at the front cover.

"Discussions on the Efficacy of Mycelial-based Anti-dotes," she read out-loud. "Wow, that'll make the journey go faster." Snape glared at her over the top of his book. Parr thumbed through the first few pages noisily. "Don't you have anything that isn't as boring as chiroptera guano?"

"No."

"Well, that explains a lot." She wriggled around on the seat into a more comfortable position with her back propped against the outer wall of the train carriage, legs stretched out at an angle on the seat.

"Get your feet off the seat."

Parr rolled her eyes at him. "My feet aren't on the seat." She waggled them in the air and turned back to the first page of the book he'd chucked at her. The black glare narrowed to a laser-thin line that could've burned a hole through steel. Parr yawned.

The train continued its journey south and through a darkening afternoon. The storm clouds had begun to loom in not long before they had boarded, and the inevitable rain had begun within the hour, hitting the carriage with a metallic drumming that almost, but not quite, drowned out Parr's snoring.

Snape was a few seconds away from throwing another book at her when Parr's head snapped up, cutting off a particularly gusty snore.

"I'm hungry," she announced emphatically and stumped out of the compartment. A few minutes later she squeezed back through the door with an armful of food that would fill the belly of a troll.

"She didn't have any sour grapes, so I got you these." A small, white paper bag landed on the seat next to Snape with a small thump. "I thought they might sweeten your disposition."

Snape didn't take his eyes from his book. "I don't eat lollies."

Parr tipped her food bounty onto her seat opposite him. "Yes, you do," she stated calmly and crammed a pumpkin pasty into her mouth. She settled back into her former position with a rustle of packets.

"Get your feet off the seat."

Parr chewed her mouthful for a bit. "Do you have some definition of feet that differs from everybody else's?"

Snape exhaled loudly through his nose and hitched his shoulders. "Don't spill food on my book."

Parr brushed the crumbs off her front and poked through the food pile next to her. "Don't worry, not only am I keenly aware of where my feet are but also where my mouth is."

"Unfortunately, we're all aware of that," Snape muttered, turning a page and flicking a glance at her. "It's a wonder you can keep any food in your mouth, considering how often it's open."

"Ha!" Parr guffawed and picked up the book again with her free hand. Snape snapped his book shut with a crack.

"Are you going to read that or use it as a napkin?" he asked pointedly, raising an eyebrow.

"No, it's really interesting," Parr slurred with the end of a liquorice wand stuck between her teeth. "I'm zooming through it." She turned to page two. "Mmm, I'd forgotten that liquorice makes me drool."

Snape scowled out of the window and jiggled his leg in irritation. This was worse than babysitting. Not that he'd ever done that... unless one counted teaching. At least one could make children shut up or show some kind of respect.

The rain had turned into a strong squall that rattled the carriage in a frustrated series of shakes. It matched Snape's mood perfectly. If it were possible, he would have wrung the scrawny neck of the whole task that had been unceremoniously dumped on him.

The pulsed flash of lightning scrambled across the cloud bank in the distance. It made the afternoon seem darker and bleaker than ever. Snape sighed. He hated the rain.

"Why do you teach?" asked Parr abruptly around a mouthful of half-chewed liquorice.

Snape swung his gaze away from the window. "What?"

Parr chewed more of the liquorice into black mush, frowning at the book in her hand. "Why do you teach?"

Snape stared at her, wondering whether or not to answer with a lie, if at all. She didn't seem fussed one way or the other, as if it were not really of any interest to her, just something that one might feel duty-bound to say, like "how are you?" or "nice weather we're having." Parr jammed another pasty in her mouth, spraying crumbs everywhere.

"Do you always make this much mess when you eat?" he sniped at her.

"No, only when I'm riveted by literature such as this," she retorted without a pause.

Snape made an exasperated sound and reached for the book. "Give it back, then, and spare me the sarcasm." He missed the book by bare millimetres as Parr bent her wrist to keep it away from him.

"No, I'm at the good part," she replied, cheeks bulging like a greedy hamster. "The action's hotting up."

Snape pulled back into a slouching position and resumed his leg-jiggling.

"So?" asked Parr, turning a page.

"So what?" Snape muttered, throwing down his book on the seat next to him and folding his arms like a barrier.

Parr threw back her head and exhaled loudly, shoulders dropping. "Blah blah blah... the end!" She flicked over the pages with her thumb until she reached the back cover and closed the book with a snap. She held it out to him.

"Why... do... you... teach?"

Snape kept his arms resolutely crossed and stopped jiggling his leg. A staring match ensued. Parr still held the book out, waiting patiently. Somewhere nearby, thunder rolled, sending vibrations through the carriage. One of Parr's Chocolate Frogs fell onto the floor and bounced under the seat. Further down the train, some brief yet noisy fracas broke out amongst the Jacobsons.

Parr's mouth twitched into a faint smile. "My eyeballs are drying out. Let's just say that you won because I know it'll give you a thrill." She blinked her eyes a few times, swung her legs off the seat and stood up. Crumbs rained down onto the floor as she stepped over and placed the book next to him. The woman went back to her nest of wrappers and food and fidgeted snugly into the corner. She busied herself with sifting through the pile for the next snack and was just about to put some kind of lime green sweet in her mouth when Snape surprised her, and himself, by answering her question.

"I have limited options open to me. Teaching was the best one."

The sweet hovered near Parr's mouth as she stared at him in mild amazement. She brought her hand down slowly. "But you don't like it." It was a statement, not a question. She had that weird, penetrating look in her eyes that unsettled him.

Snape turned his head to avoid the grey scrutiny and squinted out into the gloom. He shrugged his shoulders slowly. "Like I said, I have limited options open to me." He watched the stream of rain slip down the outside surface of the glass.

"Surely there was an option that didn't involve so much contact with people, especially children? After old people, they're the most irritating of the lot, and you're not exactly bubbling over with interpersonal skills," Parr stated before popping the sweet into her mouth. "Eurgh, tastes like boot polish." She picked it out of her mouth and held it out to him between thumb and forefinger. "Do you want it?"

His head swivelled around, incredulity pasted across his face.

"It was a joke!" Parr emphasised, eyes innocently wide in the blast of disgust aimed at her. She discarded the sticky offender onto an empty packet that she scrunched up into a tight ball. "These limited options," she paused to lick the stickiness from her fingers with an exclamation of distaste, "do they have something to do with that thing on your arm?"

Snape didn't move, other than a slight tightening of his shoulders, but Parr immediately picked up that this was a bad question to ask. She went as still as if she had been Petrified, nostrils flared and lips pressed together.

How did she know about the Dark Mark? Snape's mind went blank, almost as if it had overloaded and short-circuited. Lightning flashed close by outside, increasing his mental confusion. Thoughts came back online in weird patterns, rather like hypnagogic dreams where unrelated objects and events meshed together in a bizarre pastiche. The tragic thing was that this was how his reality was at times: a series of seemingly unrelated events that balled together in a big mess he didn't like but had little control over. He shook his head to clear the nonsensical fog and was left with a peculiar sense of time distortion where a moment had expanded into days and simultaneously contracted into a fraction of a fraction of a second. How much time had passed since she had asked that question? Seconds? Minutes? Surely not hours or they would've reached their destination, but the feeling was that hours were just as likely as minutes.

The view outside the carriage window gave no hint as to whether it had been seconds or minutes--it was still the same, unfocussed panorama of dark shapes sliding past through the curtain of rain like animals slinking away from a dangerous predator. Snape frowned and tried the bluff.

"What are you talking about?" he said in an even, flat voice that was a blatant contradiction to the anxiety burning a hole in his stomach.

Parr was looking at him with an assessing air, eyes squinted and brow furrowed deeply. She was chewing on something that he hadn't noticed her put in her mouth. She swallowed whatever it was and tilted her head to one side. There was a heavy pause.

"I thought the efficacy of mucilaginous waterfort was found to be overestimated."

Snape stared at her blankly. Had he missed a section of conversation here? He couldn't see how it related to her previous question.

Parr noticed his expression and pointed at the book she had returned to him.

"Your book is out of date." For the first time, at least that he'd ever seen, confusion rippled across Parr's face, and she brought her left hand up to her damaged eye, pressing her fingers into her face, as if something pained her. "I've read it before... in hospital." She pursed her lips and let her hand fall back to her lap. "Marconi said I should read it," she added quietly, looking at the floor with a now-watering left eye and flexing her fingers briefly.

Who would have told her? His arm was never uncovered, except in private. There were a handful of suspects. Pomfrey knew, but she had the silence of a medical practitioner when it came to giving out private information, so it was improbable. Dumbledore? No, Dumbledore knew a lot of things, but he spoke about very few of them. The most probable suspect was Moody. The man had all the subtlety of a brick in the face and wouldn't hesitate pointing something out that he disapproved of, but Parr didn't take Moody's class, and he had never seen them talking together the way she did with other teachers. In fact, he had never seen her talking with him at all.

"Why were you in hospital?"

Parr looked up from the floor, and her left eye still squinted as if the light in the carriage pained her. "I'm sorry?"

"Why were you in the hospital?"

Parr shrugged and blotted her watering eye with her sleeve. "Oh, for the reason that most people go to the hospital."

"Does it have something to do with that thing around your neck?" Snape countered smoothly.

Parr showed far too many teeth in a responding smile. "Touché," she noted gently, her red-rimmed left eye opening to gaze at him with its unclouded twin. She sniffed slightly and looked out of the window, her face painted with that bland expression she usually wore in class.

The unexpectedly dark afternoon was periodically punctuated by pops of lightning that freeze-framed the countryside in a confused series of stills. Parr started to hum a tune quietly and ran her hands down one of her hip-length tresses repetitively in a smoothing motion, head tilted slightly to one side. She seemed to have dismissed Snape from her attention for now.

The tune she was humming was a strange mix of minor chords that seemed to soothe her, her eyes closed, and hands on her hair moving in a counterpoint to the tune. There wasn't much of the journey remaining, and Snape was happy to have it pass without conversation. The woman had a sharp tongue and too fast a wit to let snide comments and subtle rebukes pass without some kind of retort. The last thing he needed was her asking him awkward and prying questions.

He stared at the bandage around her neck, wondering for the hundredth time about what kind of injury it hid. Snape's question about Parr's hospital stay had been asked reflexively, as a way of changing the subject from the Dark Mark on his arm, but he discovered that it was yet another topic she was close-mouthed on. He made a mental note to find an excuse to speak to Madam Pomfrey and slip in an inquiry about Parr's hospital stay. Pomfrey was pretty shrewd, though, and she'd clam up if she thought that anyone was being nosey about one of her patients. Snape shrugged slightly--nothing ventured, nothing gained.

He rested his head back on the seat and studied Parr's profile through half-closed eyes. The faint smile on her face caused a ghosting of a dimple in her cheek, and the muted light in the carriage threw a shadow just under her cheekbone and accentuated the contours of her face. The woman was not gifted with good looks. The best that could be said was that she was plain. The fact that her face was usually set in one of two expressions didn't help. The neutral, almost vacant look was most common, especially in his classes, but it often alternated with a hard, flinty visage that one could hammer iron on. In comparison to the girls around her at the school, there was little femininity in Parr, and she made no attempt to imitate any.

One thing she did that stood out in its rarity was the use of her nose. It was almost guaranteed that she'd test the air at some point, surreptitiously, with a flare of her nostrils. The sense of smell was poor in humans, especially when compared to animals, and it was one of the least-used of the five senses. Parr's was obviously more developed than most, and she seemed to rely on it more heavily perhaps because of that. Snape gazed at her nose to see if there was something that visually hinted at her heightened sense of smell, but it was just an ordinary nose, if a little straighter than most. Instead, he watched the hypnotic movement of her hands on her hair, the silvery strands shimmering in ripples. That, coupled with her continued humming, caused Snape's eyes to close, leaving him with an almost floating sense of bone-deep fatigue.

~*~

Snape could have sworn that he'd remained awake, but when he opened his eyes again, Parr had changed her attire from her customary pseudo-uniform to an unbroken black. He'd not heard her move at all, and he was usually a light sleeper.

Her overcoat was of a similar yet longer style to her usual jacket, fastened high and close to the left shoulder and extended down to mid-calf level. Her trousers still stopped short of her ankles, turned up in crisp cuffs. Parr's gloved hands rested on her lap as she stared at Snape's feet thoughtfully through slightly narrowed eyes. Folds of material rested on her shoulders neatly, like a cowl thrown back. Her hair made two silver stripes down her front, crossing over the strap of her bag.

"Fancy dress party?" Snape asked with an amused twist to his mouth.

Parr's eyes travelled languidly from his feet up to his face. She pouted her lips slightly before answering. "Outside of Hogwarts, I do not exist," she stated in a flat, emotionless voice.

Snape blinked at her, slightly flummoxed at her response. "I hope Lupin knows who you are then, Miss Incognito." He rubbed at his eyes and sighed.

"I should hope so; he's been my tutor for four months," Parr replied in a gently amused tone.

Snape stopped rubbing his eyes. Her tutor? "In what?" he asked before he could stop himself.

Parr cocked her head to one side and flared her nostrils delicately. "Defence Against the Dark Arts." Her grey eyes glittered at him under her slightly raised eyebrows.

Lupin was teaching her Defence Against the Dark Arts? Outside of Hogwarts? Snape realised that he was goggling at her like an idiot. "Is there something he can teach you that Professor Moody can't?"

Parr tipped her head back up and quirked a more open smile at him. "Does it bother you?"

"Why the hell should it?" he snapped back at her.

"Remus said you two didn't get along, especially after last year." She emphasised the last four words in verbal italics.

Snape smirked. "Lupin proved unsuitable to the position and was duly removed from the school." He looked out of the window dismissively to find they were minutes from pulling into platform nine and three-quarters.

"Mmm," said Parr quietly. "It was my understanding that he resigned because of someone's loose tongue."

"Yes, tragic," muttered Snape without a trace of sincerity in his voice and stood up to get his wooden crate from the overhead luggage rack. He could feel Parr's eyes burning two holes in his back. "I hope I'm not expected to wait for you to finish your lesson," he pointed out, stuffing as much contempt into the last word as it could take. "I have other things to do than chaperone you about."

"Professor Dumbledore will fetch me tomorrow," said Parr's voice from the doorway. "Your reclusive evening will not be affected."

Snape scowled at the black-robed figure as she wandered out of view. He tucked the crate under his arm and stalked after her.