Hearts are Blind (Severus Snape X OC)

Sneaky Snake, Sneaky Snape

It was early; earlier than he'd usually get up during the week, on a school day. It isn't that he couldn't get up or wake up. If anything, sometimes he had to force himself to stay in bed just a little longer. The sun would not yet be on its way to rise over the castle and his eyes would snap open. He had his own silent alarm that sounded deep in his chest. He'd feel the flutter of anxiety there and it would shake him until his feet were on the floor and he'd stumbled to the wall to feel the cool stone beneath his palms and not the rough, splintering wood of his past. He was at Hogwarts. He was at school. Nothing was going to happen to him here. Nothing was going to go wrong. There was nothing to be afraid of. He was safe, he was safe...

Xavier Michael rolled to his side and then sat up in bed on this particular morning and remembered all of the things that he told himself he'd forget. It was nearly impossible and very improbable that he'd completely forget. Not enough time had passed. He needed more contact with people, more smiles, more jokes and laughs, more time spent with his friends... At least, that's what he kept telling himself; that all of the bad feelings would go away if he simply drowned them with good memories. But that's who he was: the epitome of an optimist when nothing in his life warranted an attitude so positive. He was a Hufflepuff. He was good all the way to his core; even when he didn't think so most of the time and even though he still didn't really see it. He was starting to, though. Hagrid helped him with that.

When that fateful day happened, Hagrid was there. He was the only one who was there. Everyone else was too caught up in the rise—and then the fall—of the Dark Lord and couldn't be bothered with him. And he wasn't being bitter or spiteful; he accepted it with a level of understanding and finality. Not to mention, he was used to it and really, truly, he did not mind it. Everyone had their own worries and friends and loves and wants and needs. X had Hagrid... and he was his best friend. He saw him at his absolute worst and that was only a year ago when he was fourteen. There had been blood everywhere. He still found some of it in his ears for days afterward...

Xavier shook himself. He jumped up off his bed and physically shook himself all of the way from the tips of his fingers stretched over his head and then all the way down, bending over to touch his toes. He then did thirty jumping jacks and puffed the air out of his lungs in great comical rasps. Not gonna think about it anymore, he said in his head. Gonna start the day with some awesome freakin' breakfast and then go see Hagrid! Frick yeah!

By this time, one of his roommates had awoken because of his little morning ritual and threw a pillow at him. It smacked the red-headed boy in the back of the head and he tumbled over.

"Bwah!"

"Damn it, X—can't you go be weird somewhere else?" the pillow-thrower hissed through the dim light of dawn.

Xavier scrambled back onto his bed on all fours and hissed back, "You're just jealous of my odalisque physique! Maybe you could be like me if you didn't spend all night in the kitchen!"

The other boy leaned forward and his round face was illuminated by the first stream of sunshine coming through the tunnel that lead out of their dormitory.

"Hey, I was just helping them—um—clean up and—!" The boy stopped in mid-sentence, frowned and then flopped back onto his pillow, closing his eyes with a sigh. "Yeah, you're right. But at least go away so I can sleep longer."

X grinned. Then he picked the pillow up off the floor and threw it back at the already-snoozing boy. It landed on his face, but the boy continued to snore through the cotton confinements and X rolled his eyes and clambered through the passage out of their room.

He spent another hour running circles around the common room, watering the plants in all of the windows and stoking the fire in the round fireplace. When mostly everyone was awake and heading upstairs for breakfast, he zig-zagged in and out of people back to his dormitory to change and then he, too, went to breakfast. He took silent notice of the fact that Lucinda wasn't there and he imagined she was probably still avoiding whoever it was that had upset her, though he still didn't know who. He had a pretty good idea, however, when he also noticed that Professor Snape wasn't there. It wouldn't be that small of a coincidence if he hadn't also noticed for the past day that the professor would stay for half of the meal, looking very directly in the area where Lucinda usually sat and then would eventually get up quite abruptly and storm from the Hall. This time, however, neither was there at all.