Sonata and Destructions

She was beautiful, he thought, and he loved her.It became a refrain of sorts, echoing around in his head.Somehow, that single sentence had come to embody both the hope and misery that plagued his waking hours and his dreams.

The sudden, raucous applause of the crowd jolted him out of his state of self-pitying reflection.I even sound ridiculous to myself, he realized, and with little more than a last mournful glance at the girl walking off stage and down the aisle, her light blue robes and long blond hair fluttering behind her, he turned his attention to the next performers to take the stage: his friend and fellow Slytherin, Lucius Malfoy, performing a very loud and very dramatic rendition of Hamlet.

Despite his general mood of despondency, Severus Snape caught the irony immediately and chuckled to himself.Trust Malfoy, of all people, to fancy himself a master of drama and tragedy.Bet he didn’t even know that the character he was so fantastically butchering had been written four hundred years earlier by one of those muggles he despised so much.Of course, Severus had more than a bit of suspicion that Shakespeare was a warlock himself.Fairies, ghosts, and sprites were not the sort of safe topic that muggle writers were eager to tackle at the time.Without some sort of protection above and beyond the mundane, the offending writer was all too likely to find himself dancing on the end of a rope.

But Malfoy, unlike many of his peers in Ravenclaw, and unlike Severus, was not the type to immerse himself in any aspect of academia, or even to do basic background research before signing up for the first annual Hogwarts talent contest in the dramatic reading category.As such, he remained on stage blissfully unaware that the emotion he was primarily fostering was amusement, not sorrow.Ten minutes in, though, Severus began to lose interest and his mind wandered back to the previous performer.Lily.Lily Evans.She was his secret obsession.She had to be.He couldn’t even imagine what his friends would think if they knew he had fallen in love with a Gryffindor and a muggle.The first would amuse them.The second they would find nothing short of revolting.The secret rejoicing he had observed in his Third Year upon the opening of the Chamber of Secrets had made that clear enough.

Lily Evans had the oddest sensation of being watched.A bit silly, she knew, as she was sitting in Hogwarts Great Hall surrounded by well over half the school, but still, she felt paranoia kicking in.Just then, James whispered something vaguely suggestive in her ear.She blushed, but turned around and kissed him anyway.From behind them, she heard familiar sounding cat calls.As James turned around to deal with his friends and fellow Gryffindors, Lily felt the feeling of being watched return.She looked around, and from across the hall she saw an unpleasant Slytherin boy with whom she was only vaguely acquainted looking at her intensely.For a moment, their eyes locked.

But at that point, applause broke out as Headmaster Albus Dumbledore stepped forth to announce the winner.

“Let me begin by saying a few words.”Loud moans resounded from the audience.“Boo.Walk.Squirrelcookie.Thank you, Lucius for a brilliant rendition of that great muggle tragedy: Hamlet.”Lily glanced over at Lucius, who looked more than a bit startled and annoyed by that revelation.

On the opposite side of the Great Hall, in the middle of the Hufflepuff section, someone else noticed Snape’s apparent fixation as well.She’s beautiful, thought Nina Cosanthium resentfully.No wonder she gets every guy she wants, and half of those she doesn’t.The applause begin to die down, and students began to file out of the Great Hall.But, before she joined her friends in their cheerful banter about local gossip, she snuck one last mournful glance at Severus and saw him still looking, enraptured, at the group of departing Gryffindors.