𝙳𝙴𝙻𝙾𝙲𝙰𝙿𝙾𝙽𝚄𝙼 » 𝚂𝚂/𝚁𝙻

𝚅𝙸𝙸 >> 𝙲𝙷𝙰𝚁𝙼𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙲𝙾𝙽𝚂𝚄𝙻𝚃𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽𝚂

< 1 MONTH >

He's decided that he must remedy his spell, and he's settling that today is the day to at least start the ridiculously asinine process.

He spent all of last night lying insomnolent, urging himself to just go to sleep, beseeching his own instincts to let him alone and leave him to fall into his own dreams. But he couldn't do it. Thoughts kept running around him, hissing against his ears in the fashion of the unforgiving snake like which he himself is described. Hypotheses. Dubiety. Complete uncertainty. And all this, inopportunely, orbiting tight round the memory of Remus Lupin standing out in the rain, and the sensation of his hand laying itself gently on his unsheltered shoulder.

He's decided that he shouldn't be letting this affect him in such a way. Absolutely so.

He's decided that he shouldn't remember Remus going out of his way to make him tea the way Albus said he liked it, or the pleas to offer him assisting services in compensation for some very free Wolfsbane. He won't pay any notice to how he likes Bruce Springsteen and house plants and accents his entire home with greens and reds. He won't think any longer about his soft handwriting on half of the bottles in his classroom, or how all of his suits and vests are tailored in colors that match each possible shade a leaf revolves through, green and dark mustard and deep mahogany and many, many browns.

In fact, he has no idea why this kept him awake at all. But he doesn't like it. It irks him, not knowing why. It's muddled. Labyrinthine. It's as ambiguous as he is considered to be, and anyone with any minuscule sense of emotional intelligence knows that Severus Snape's least-favorited thing in the history and colossal expanse of the universe, in whole, is his own self. Living in his own flesh is his greatest grievance, all quietus and tribulations and only-partly-deserved defamation completely aside.

So, after hours of insomnia, as the sun peeked too soon over the pivots and bourns of Hogwarts and confirmed that any rest would no longer be had until it set again, Severus had torn himself out of bed and hied into his robes. He now catapults himself down the hallways with the most extortionate possible speed at which one can walk before breaking into a sort of frenzied skip, gripping his wand as tightly as he can bear and shuffling through the empty, slumbering edifice to the ward of Filius Flitwick.

He needs to repair the spell because it pains him to know that he's letting his mind wander from Lily. He wants to respect her passing, to avenge it in little subtle ways, and so he wants to remember it. But this is something that's difficult to do when you have nothing to remind yourself as you slowly step out of the initial wave of grief. It's difficult to do when the only way to acquire a reminder is through a system that doesn't even work.

He fleets up four sets of staircases, recklessly refusing to falter as they move beneath him. Leaping from the detached end of one onto his desired platform, he shoves open the door leading to where he knows Flitwick is settled. It slams against the wall, resulting in a startled whoop from the classroom ahead of him. Knowing immediately that this is the voice of Filius himself, Snape oils his way into the Charms room with a cadence to his step that of a tiptoeing tap-dancer and secures the door behind him. He barely has time to turn dramatically back to the man before he's responded, clearly not giving in to his such necessary theatrics.

"Severus Snape," Flitwick exclaims with an enthusiastic tone that Snape would never dream of adopting into his repertoire, closing a book and setting down a blue feather pen. "I'll be."

"We were bound to meet again at some point, Filius," Severus replies dryly, "given that I work here. Don't treat it like the coming of Christ."

"Oh, and congratulations on that, by the way," Flitwick remarks pleasantly, stepping down from his desk and making his way to where Snape stands on the lowered floor of his classroom.