Rave Dragon

Rave Dragon

Chapter Three

Snape sat in his classroom, looking over his wand. It was smooth and dark, like a black stone. 13 inches, he'd been told. Dragon's heartstring. He wondered at times how it really mattered. Thanks to most of the students going to Olivander's it was usually easy to see where a student's strengths and weaknesses would lie. Sadly, it wasn't very often he saw a wand like his own.

There was one time when there were two ebony wands were being used by students at one time, and that was when he and Kaida's father had attended. Val Ryu, of course, was no match for him. It wasn't necessarily his lack of skill or talents in potion making that held him back, but certainly his lack of experimentation. While Snape was willing to go at all lengths, Ryu was settled in his current abilities. No spark, no passion, no ambition, no power. Just the good little Ravenclaw.

Kaida was certainly different from her father. He remembered that glaring, insolent, obnoxious little Slytherin 11-year-old coming into his office one day for detention. Not as her teacher, or as a staff member, but as her head of house.

"One more incident like this and you'll be expelled. You've brought your house down at least 200 points now, detention doesn't seem to faze you, and you have this uncanny knack for talking back to your teachers in detention!"

"I don't give a-"

"Like that!" He sighed, exasperated. "What is it? I would rather not disgrace this house with expulsion, nor would I like to see your wand in shards. What else can we do besides expelling you?"

"Nothing."

He narrowed his eyes. "You want to be expelled."

She nodded. "That's right. Expel me."

Snape shook his head and groaned. "Fine. You're expelled. I'll fill out the paperwork and send it into the headmaster in the morning. You, on the other hand, may as well finish your detention." He held out his hand. "Your wand, Miss Ryu."

Kaida reached into her pocket and hesitated, her grip tight on the wand that was there. He could see her hesitating, getting second thoughts at last. She pulled it out, a shining black stone ready to meet its death. She took a moment to look at it one more time, hug it goodbye, and handed it over, holding back tears.

Snape took it and looked it over. It was much shorter than his, but vaguely familiar. There was Japanese writing carved into the handle, what he assumed to be a name. "Was this your father's?"

She shook her head. "Dad had unicorn hair in his. Mine has a phoenix talon. And it's an inch shorter."

He nodded and set the wand on his desk before pulling out some parchment. He began writing down the circumstances of her expulsion when she spoke up.

"It's powerful, isn't it?"

He glanced up and watched her fiddling with her hair. The blue streaks through it had always annoyed him, and he always told her so. This time there was a different annoyance. "The wand? Yes, it is. But if the wizard fails, so does the wand. And stop fidgeting."

"Sorry." She watched the floor for some time, listening to Snape scribble away, her heart pounding. She was no longer a wizard. She would go home, go back to Lamyria, play tama-tatakau with her friends... "STOP!!" she shouted, tears streaming down her face. "I wanna be a wizard! I really do! But what if something happens? What if the bad wizard comes back? What if I... I..." She couldn't continue. She had broken down at last, her walls smashed by her own ambitions. As hard as she tried, she couldn't seem to get another word out.

It was then he realized what the problem was all along. Of course, her parents had been here when the Dark Lord had come into power, and had escaped to their home country. Her wand was likely made in Japan, and he had noticed they seemed to be famous for a sort of polite bluntness. Then she's told she has a powerful wand and is sorted into Slytherin. It was almost enough to make him laugh. She was terrified of becoming like the Dark Lord.

"If you're that worried about it, that terrified, then I doubt you'll be following in the footsteps of the Dark Lord."

She looked up, her hair matted against her face, her eyes still filled with tears. He walked over and knelt down, moving her hair aside in an unusually tender gesture. Just this once, he thought. She could be one of my star pupils if I could just get her going. Bring a little faith in Slytherins again.

"Listen to me, Miss Ryu, and listen well. I will only say this once. This is your final warning as well. You could be a great wizard, and the sorting hat sees that. Apparently your wand saw that as well. Having ambition is as key to Slytherin as anything else. If you use that to gain confidence, yet not power, you will have nothing to worry about." He handed her wand back to her. "You and your father are much alike. Potions will likely be your strong point, and you'll probably get very frustrated with transfiguration. Your father was satisfied with that, and you won't be. That is why he was Ravenclaw, and you are Slytherin." He stood then, looking her over as she clutched her wand to her chest. "Now, this is the last of my patience with you. I will be hard on you from here on out. Go to your dorm, do your homework, and come back and show me I was right next class."

She nodded, grabbed her wand, and tore out of the room.

The following weeks, Snape was true to his word. He did not accept sloppiness nor laziness with her work. She began to excel in potions. Never did he see her in detention again. Until now. He wasn't even entirely sure why. Was it that she'd drugged and seduced him? Was it the fact that he hadn't realized through her half-sister that this was a family tradition? Maybe even the fact that he hadn't realized Meli was her half-sister, and he'd been around when she was born. Well, no. He wasn't around. He was trailing the Dark Lord and kissing the hem of his robes. Even that seemed to get to him. No, he reminded himself. She was here for detention because he didn't allow her any leniency with her work. She got lazy, and her work was not completed. It was rather uncharacteristic of her. A lot of that was because of him, he reasoned, because he allowed her no leniency.

The door opened and Kaida slipped quietly inside. Her black hair fell into her eyes, and she made several futile attempts to shake it away, then brush it aside. She sat at a desk and glanced around, careful to avoid Snape's gaze. "Isa-chan isn't here..."

He raised a bow. "Isa-chan?"

"Isabella. She said she didn't like Bella, so I started calling her Isa-chan. Used to annoy her. I think she kinda likes it now."

"I see." He began writing on the board. "She fainted in the hall earlier today. She'll be in the hospital wing for a few days. Apparently she hadn't been sleeping well. I'll write down the ingredients lists for these potions." He glanced over the list, making sure he hadn't forgotten anything before sitting at his desk.

"NEWTs, I guess. It's like entrance exams back home. They're really killer. Pressure gets to them and the next thing you know your friend is gone." She began writing, almost in a form of shock. Her mind felt blanked, filled with nothing but a dark fog. She was just going through the motions, letting habit fill in the blanks.

"Gone?"

She nodded. "Here if you fail NEWTs or OWLs, there's still options, right? But in Japan it's really big. You need to take entrance exams just to get into a good junior high, or you just end up in a mediocre one. Most don't mind. But when high school entrance exams come up, you're always going to prep schools and extra study classes to get into the best one. Friends are often separated because one scored higher than the other.

"And college is a big deal. Parents are really pressuring their kids to get into a good college, and which one you go to depends on your entrance exams once more as well as which high school you went to. Lots of students have committed suicide over entrance exams for just about any of those levels."

Snape shook his head. "I'm sure we have some sort of preventive measure for that sort of thing around here. Knowing the headmaster, the grounds are probably covered by anti-jumping spells or something."

She finished her ingredients list and looked it over, thinking quietly. "You know, I'm glad I stayed at Hogwarts. I never really got to say it, but thanks. If it weren't for you I'd be back at home, brushing up on my kanji and hoping I'll make it into a top university. And... I'm sorry for being such a troublesome student." She walked over and laid the parchment on his desk.

He glanced over the listing. "You actually weren't that bad once you decided you didn't want to be expelled."

"But you were always yelling at me. I had to have been at the bottom of the class."

"No, I just little patience for you after all your little stunts. You were actually top of the class. Had you and Malfoy been in the same year I could see quite a rivalry."

"Draco's still way ahead of me in transfiguration, though."

"I told you it would frustrate you. I also told you to drop it after OWLs. Sometimes I think you manage to excel in things just because I said you can't."

"I haven't excelled in transfiguration. Or herbology."

"You still try."

Kaida shifted her feet and Snape checked off her work. He set it aside and brought out two pieces of parchment. "Here you are. I want all of this done and turned in with your next assignment."

She nodded and began to walk out then realized the one question she'd wanted to ask since she was a child. "Why were you always so hard on me? You were really nice that day."

Snape uttered a small disgruntled sound. "That's precisely why. You were so delicate I was afraid you'd have a nightmare and come crawling into my bed."

"You're still hard on me."

"I have a renewed fear of you crawling into my bed."

The silence that ensued became deafening and Kaida once more made for the door. "I'll have the assignments for you soon."

Snape considered his next choice of actions carefully. After all, these were rather treacherous times, and it was becoming harder to tell what was safe and what wasn't. However, the tension that seemed to have a way of weaving between the two was already forming wall. Comfort her? Bed her? Or let her continue to walk away?

The door was closing and he felt it might be the last time if he didn't do anything. Bedding with a student would likely be frowned upon, but perhaps in Voldemort's eyes it would be a good thing. If nothing else, she was a pureblood, and that might have something to account for. She may even be seen as a valuable inside source.

Before he could wonder why he was rationalizing such a thing, he called her back. She slipped back through the door, her eyes never leaving the floor. "Yes?"

"What's happened has happened, and there is no changing that. However, the past must be built upon. How it's built relies on the builder. This event will either separate us, or unite us. And for Merlin's sake, would you look at me?!"

She hesitantly looked up, unsure of looking at his eyes. They were simply there, like stone, blocked off as always. She wanted to look down, but she willed herself to continue watching him.

Her eyes seemed empty, yet scared, as though she were that upset, frightened, little girl with no purpose to living all over again. "Listen to me carefully because I will only say this once. If you get those to me early, I just may decide to... entertain your efforts."

She blinked, unsure of what he'd just said. She smiled, nodded, and dashed from the room, closing the door behind her. Likely off to the library, he thought. She was still a child in so many senses, but looking back on things, he decided he would look into her family tree and try some research. He had an odd feeling that this was all part of some corrupted rite of passage.