Fallen Fairy Wings
How Catallena Nocturne managed to end up in the moonlit courtyards of Hogwarts in the middle of the night once again was beside the point. A much more pressing matter was the flowerbed of singing peonies, the tinkling bluebells and the large humming hydrangeas she had stumbled upon. Little snowdrop flowers danced to the music, though there was no wind to move them.
Catallena swayed to the melancholy music. She watched very closely with her nose buried in the flowers as the whole garden held a mournful celebration – a farewell party for the past summer and fall, before the winter, in due course, would cover the courtyards in a blanket of frost and snow. It was the first of November. The beginning of winter was here.
The girl shyly greeted iridescent little fairies that flew about the garden, and the fairies greeted her back as if she was a very overgrown fairy herself. Catallena even licked sweet honey out of a honeycomb piece she was gifted by one of the gnomes.
She was moved by the creatures’ dance and song – moved enough to entertain the mourning dove that buried itself into the girl’s long glowing hair that was knotted around them all, sprawled on the ground. Catallena even broke off a lock of her hair and offered it as nesting material for the plump bird. Her gift was accepted and at that moment, so was the girl.
She was treated as an honoured guest and so she learned their dances and sang their songs. The aches in her body and mind were forgotten for the night and a spring had returned to her stiff and wobbly knees. Even her shaky voice regained some of its colour and carried to the edges of the courtyard.
It felt good. Mourning with someone. They may not speak the same language and she may be the size of a hundred fairies, but they all recognized each other’s feelings. Catallena mourned the second loss of her mum and the loss of her own death. She mourned the loss of warm summer showers, soft grass, budding flowers and lively creatures. Everyone and everything in the garden did.
In the early hours of the morning, fog lowered into the courtyard, enveloping everything in it in a thick cloud. The singing got more desperate and off-pitch. As if the flowers and the magical beasts were trying to finish their song before the inevitable happened, their howls became hurried and the dancing more furious. Catallena’s glow illuminated the gasping flowers’ petals as they turned their faces toward the sky in a last attempt at staying alive and staying beautiful. And when the condensation finally settled and the cold air began to freeze, those bright flowers caved in on themselves, curling toward the ground with closed buds and crimped leaves. Their swaying stopped and they breathed their last breaths, flecks of ice forming slowly on their greying surfaces.
Fairies could no longer fly with their frozen wings that broke off and fell to the ground. One by one, the gorgeous creatures died off as if they were smoke-filled bubbles that the gentlest touch would burst. Gnomes disappeared into holes in the ground that had been hidden beneath the thick foliage.
The dove flew off into the forbidden forest, a piece of shimmering hair flowing in the air behind it like a shooting star. Catallena wished upon it even though she knew it wasn’t a real star.
The girl was saddened of course. She had just witnessed the death of the most magnificent garden she had ever come across. She held in her hands the fragile wings of dead fairies and wondered if they would have liked to not die. Would Catallena’s immortality curse be a blessing to someone else?
But in the end, the little witch couldn’t be too upset over what had just happened. The garden wasn’t lost forever. The witch and the garden were alike, in that manner: When spring would come, Death would allow the school grounds to breathe again. Secondly, the garden of the Nocturne residence was a dead one, yet it was one of her comfort places: She had walked the grounds daily, petting stone statues and whispering secrets to the dried roses. In that garden she had grown to appreciate death as something peaceful and quiet that could preserve something so beautiful, something so memorable.
Her mother was beautiful in her memories. It was precisely those memories that could keep something alive even after death. Mum was undeniably alive in the Mirror of Erised. Her eyes blazed in every ray of sunshine and in the flickery flames of a fire. Similarly, the dead garden at home wasn’t completely dead, as traces of a lively garden never truly left the memory of the mansion. And even though Catallena hated her father for killing her mother, the girl couldn’t help but be thankful to Death for having saved her mother from a fate worse than death. The mother’s untimely death saved her memory from turning into an ugly one.
The girl knew that death wasn’t truly the end of everything. This courtyard, too, kept singing under all the frost, though the sound was slightly muffled and probably completely lost to everyone besides the deathless girl. Being so close to Death, yet forced to stay alive, Catallena had become aware of the blurred lines between one and the other. It was why she got along so well with ghosts. It was why she could hear the purring of her taxidermied cat and why she saw things others couldn’t.'
No-one looking into the courtyard could’ve seen two figures collide with each other, though that was because of the now impossibly thick fog, not because either one of the figures was the spirit of some dead person, or something similar. In fact, Catallena was knocked to the side when someone who was very much alive walked into her sitting form on the ground. She breathed out in surprise and the other person let out a sort of yelp laced with both shock and pain.
Moments later, a wand was pointed directly at Catallena’s face, almost poking her eye out.
“Revelio!” that someone growled and the fog around them cleared up, leaving behind two damp wizards. At the sight of the frazzled girl, Professor Snape’s face settled into a more neutral one from the sneer he brandished. Confusion. Bewilderment. Worry?
“What in the name of Merlin are you doing here, Miss Nocturne? Past curfew. Outside. Again.”
“...”
“Are you so desperate for detention? You go looking for trouble outside and wait for someone to find you crumpled on the ground?”
“...”
“I was lenient with you last time. Maybe you need to be reminded of your position at this school as a student. Professor McGonagall already had you clean her classroom for swimming in the Black Lake, I heard. Perhaps you would like to clean mine?”
Catallena thought about this proposition and promptly nodded as confirmation. She liked the potions classroom. Professor Snape was silent before the sneer returned to his face at once. His sarcasm and threatening tone had been entirely lost on the girl.
“You find this funny, girl? We’ll see if you think it’s funny once you’re scrubbing all the cauldrons spotless,” he pushed out from between his clenched teeth. Catallena was really getting under his skin with her worry-free attitude. How shameless was she? Students usually cowered in fear, repeating things like “yes, sir” and “no, sir”. At least this kid didn’t look him in the eye.
When Catallena shook her head as if to reassure him that ‘no, I don’t find this funny at all’ and showed no other reaction, Snape narrowed his eyes with suspicion but didn’t press for more. Maybe he saw the hurt that had nestled in her. Instead, he discreetly examined his injured shin that had once again began bleeding after he had kicked the girl with it. He muttered a few cuss words under his breath. A wave of his wand produced bandaging over the open wound.
Before he had the time to get even more twisted and before he had the chance to march the student up to her bed, he noticed the familiar fairy wings scattered on the grass next to his black shoes. Upon further inspection he noticed the girl holding a fistful of those same wings. In fact, now that he had recovered from the startling collision, he became very aware of the odd glowing hair that reflected off each small wing on the courtyard.
He had no more snarky comments to say and he had completely forgotten his foul mood. His pre-existing intrigue over the girl’s hair resurfaced. He stood speechless for a while, simply taking a closer look at it now that he was close enough and now that the little girl had returned to distractedly playing with the wings between her fingers. Strange little girl.
Taking another look around, the professor realised that the wings that were usually hard to make out in the grass were now fully visible to him, thanks to her shimmer. Usually, foraging for fairy wings was tedious work: They fall in the night after the first frost settles and they must be picked as soon as possible lest the wind picks them up and scatters them further away. And picking them warrants precision and gentleness, since the wings break and turn into fine powder at the slightest amount of pressure, which isn’t ideal as they stay more potent longer if they are kept intact. Of course, for the same reasons using magic would destroy the potions ingredients as well.
The Potions Master looked on for a long moment as the girl picked the wings up easily and gathered them in her hands as if she had a silken touch that didn’t have the power to break something so precious.
So, naturally, he reached into the basket he had been carrying and pulled out a labelled glass jar for the wings and set it next to Catallena. “Put in as many as you can find,” he advised in a much more neutral tone.
The girl accepted this without further questions and carefully tipped the contents of her full hands into the jar. Professor Snape himself kneeled down onto the wet ground to do the same, though the wings he picked up tended to break into at least halves.
They worked in silence, which suited the both of them well. They were both in their own heads. Snape was thinking about the strange situation, the great amounts of fairy wings he would have acquired by the end of that night and of the sick little girl. Catallena thought about death, as she often did.
When the courtyard was cleared of all fairy wings (except those few Professor Snape managed to pulverise), Snape got up with a bit of a struggle with his injured leg. He dried his robes with a swish of his wand and with one look at the shivering girl, did the same to her nightgown.
“Thank you,” she whispered and skipped off toward the castle having had her fun in the garden. Professor Snape stopped her.
“How am I to believe that you will suddenly become a rule-abiding student and go straight to bed? For all I know, you could be off to some other little adventure, Miss Nocturne.” His voice was drawn out and low, but this time it didn’t hold the threatening tone it had before. It was almost… humoured.
“I can’t see you off to bed tonight, either, since there are still ingredients left to be gathered tonight.” Snape thought for a little bit and eyed Catallena carefully, weighing his options. He sighed in resignation. “Consider this part of your detention, Miss Nocturne.”
The teacher didn’t seem very thrilled transfiguring a frozen bluebell flower into a coat for the girl. Catallena, however, was stunned by the gesture. The midnight blue coat had to be draped over her and Snape became annoyed at the girl’s rigidness. It took her a moment to recover from her paralysing gratitude and disbelief, but when she did, she stuffed her arms into the arms of the soft coat and wrapped it tightly around herself. Catallena wouldn’t have minded the way the coat dragged slightly on the ground or the sleeves that hid her hands entirely, but Professor Snape made a few adjustments anyway. A pair of shoes was next, made from a single lily flower.
Once done, he turned on his heels and walked toward the pathway that led out of the gardens, his black robes billowing beautifully in the cold night air. Catallena followed him on her tiptoes, hugging her new favourite piece of clothing and hopping in her incredibly light shoes. She had never gotten gifts like these before. The coat smelled of flowers, still.
Limping into a field, the professor turned slightly towards the left and headed toward the Forbidden forest. It loomed with its darkness even under the bright moonlight. Catallena wasn’t at all scared. She was quite liking this detention.
The fog had managed to slip into the woods. It settled eerily between the large trees and moving bushes. It was harder to see here, where the trees created a roof under the starry sky. Professor Snape produced light with his wand and almost tripped on his bad leg when suddenly behind him Catallena cast an even brighter light without a word. He whipped around, long black hair in his face, and stared at the little witch’s hair. Catallena walked past him as if nothing were different. Snape took a few strides to catch up:
“How do you do that?” he asked, walking ahead of her and turning to face her. (He had to bow down quite a bit.) He sounded almost accusatory with his nose scrunched up in thought.
When Catallena only looked at his feet, he continued: “Are you a Metamorphmagus?”
“A what?” Snape almost seemed taken aback that she had answered with any words at all.
“A Metamorphmagus. Someone who can change their appearance at will.”
Catallena thought about it. Then she thought about having a pair of bunny ears on her head. She imagined it in great detail, but when she touched the top of her head, she found no ears.
“Maybe not. It’s just the hair… to make it glow more…” She couldn’t not answer the man who was looking at her so imposingly. Like he was trying to read her mind. Like he was looking for any signs that she was lying.
“Very well.” He straightened up and began to turn around to make his way deeper into the woods, deep in thought, when the girl piped up on her own this time, looking at his leg.
“Are you hurt?”
He stopped and looked at her over his shoulder. With gritted teeth: “No.” Though the lie was so bad even the silly girl caught it.
And then they kept walking in silence.
Professor Snape was only slightly sour for the rest of the time they spent in the forest, for they managed to find many of the things he had been meaning to forage that night. In fact, they had gathered much more fairy wings, moondew and cowbane than he had expected to find by himself. They even picked some of the fall’s last remaining mushrooms that could be used in potions.
A mutual understanding had been created. They were silent unless Snape was giving instructions on how to properly pick berries, pluck leaves or identify insects. He found Catallena to be surprisingly great at following his instructions. She also had a keen eye and he was sure they had found all the forageable potions ingredients this part of the forest had to offer.
So when the two of them walked slowly back toward the castle with their hands full, they breathed deep to enjoy the smell of the refreshing air. Neither one of them was in a hurry to get back inside the school where Catallena would have to return to her roommates and Professor Snape to his nightly rounds in the castle.
The air in the castle was only slightly warmer, which suited Catallena as she didn’t want to take off her lovely coat. They walked side by side down corridors and Snape only slightly raised one of his eyebrows when the girl followed him to the dungeons instead of climbing the stairs to the Ravenclaw tower. He was feeling quite forgiving at the moment.
A couple of candles were lit in the classroom and it made the space even more inviting to Catallena. She paced around a bit, peering into bubbling cauldrons and rather disgusting bottles containing body parts of some unidentifiable creatures. More interestingly, the door to the storage room was opened and the little girl followed her professor in to find shelves stacked full of similar jars to those she and Snape had been filling all night.
The professor didn’t acknowledge the intrusion to his storage room that was usually out of bounds to students unless they were under strict supervision. Instead, he let the sleepy girl wander around as he worked on labelling and organising jars. Occasionally, he would extend one of the containers to the witch and point to a low shelf that would require bending down or kneeling on his bad leg and she would do the work for him.
Once Snape was satisfied with the state of the storage room, they returned to the dimly lit classroom. Even when the girl didn’t give any indication of leaving, Snape didn’t fight it. The teacher tended to his brews and Catallena sat quietly at the table, resting her chin on her folded arms. Her eyes drooped impressively and a yawn escaped her every once in a while, amusing Snape.
And when at last the girl fell asleep at the desk, the teacher let her. Between stirs of his pot he stole glances at her relaxed yet thoroughly exhausted face, the permanent crease between his brows deepening. He didn’t move her and made sure to work quietly so as to not disturb her precious sleep. The steam around them warmed her cheeks and lulled her deeper into her slumber.
And when Catallena magically woke up the next morning in her own bed, she thought she had dreamt of the garden party, the scavenger hunt and of the potion making. But when she dressed for the day a fairy wing fell from underneath her lily flower shoe.
It seemed hurt recognizes hurt. Already, Hogwarts had proved to Catallena Nocturne that one needn't be alone in their despair and injury. There are people and creatures in the castle whose magic is incomparable to those outside it. If you only know where to look.