Dearest Friend
It was late, but not as late as it was when she usually looked up from her desk to notice how many hours had passed since she had started grading papers. The clock had not even struck half-past ten, she gave it a perplexed look, trying to understand why she felt as if she had just been pulled out of her routine despite sitting alone and undisturbed in the silence of her living room. Perhaps it was the silence itself; she had always graded her papers in the staff room on Saturday nights, and students, ghosts and paintings formed a familiar, soothing jabber she was used to hearing there. There was nothing like that in her tower, which she used to enjoy very much; but now, alone with the ticking of her clock, she found herself longing for that never-ending chatter. It was why she had deserted the staff room. Now, no matter the hour, no matter how many children were roaming the corridors, all was always terribly silent, and that silence was only ever broken by the consistent ringing of the bell and military-like footsteps. This sounded nothing like Hogwarts; she felt alienated. It was like looking at a beloved, familiar face and seeing nothing but foreign traits, being unable to understand why and how the muscles of that face moved, to decipher any kind of feeling behind the once friendly eyes – to see nothing at all.
No need for metaphors. Severus carried out the task very well: he personified that silence with formidable charisma.
She looked down at her papers again. She had been grading them inattentively, with the kind of automatic skills that years of practice and a recurring lesson within the curriculum could afford a teacher – thank Merlin for small mercies. However, the paragraph she was now reading, written in shaky handwriting by a first-year student who clearly had not used many quills in the past, was absolutely mind-boggling. She could not quite pinpoint what had been going on in that boy's brain, most likely he hadn't had the time to proofread his essay, but that spelling mistake was unfortunate, especially in that context, and it was only because he was a first-year that she was ready to believe it was an innocent error.
So she understood. That was why everything had felt so out of place all of a sudden: this right here was funny, and a part of her must have felt like laughing, but that too felt foreign, so here she was, wondering what was wrong. And it was as simple as that. Something was triggering a long-forgotten instinct, that of laughing, and she could not entirely process it, because she usually shared the funny student mistakes with someone. And they laughed about it together, in the staff room, on Saturday nights.
She felt that the stream of her thoughts was about to continue. She feared what reason would tell her; she precipitately took out her wand, duplicated the essay, put it aside, sat down again, went on to the next paper. At the end of the school year, there was a good chunk of assignments on that pile – all hilarious or terrible mistakes, answers and witty remarks from her students. That pile of papers only existed for those moments of timeless nostalgia she desperately needed to indulge in, and she kept on adding to it, arranging it in a neat stack, hiding it in one of her drawers. She could never open it without feeling the simultaneous burn of shame, guilt, anger, and past friendship.
There was a thin line between demonstrations of power and vulnerability. If you gave the impression that you were never around, if people started thinking perhaps all power had been relegated to your right hands, then you and the entire fragile ecosystem you were the centre of would be targeted by reinvigorated rebels; if, on the contrary, you were seen too often, you would become just as much of a target, and risk exposure. Severus was not meant to lead – in fact, his whole life had been spent creating a persona that could fake an innate sense of authority with simple but masterly use of demeanour and voice. Suddenly all that careful work fell into pieces, and he was thrown into a new system of hierarchy on whose preservation countless lives, and the outcome of the war, depended. There would be no use in trying to depict the mental state of the newly appointed headmaster; the dichotomy between inner and outer selves was such that doing so would certainly spark a literary debate on the theme of vraisemblance. Severus thus proceeded as he usually did in times of crisis, shutting down all emotions, putting on a familiar mask of indifference, scheduling his appearances in the corridors and Great Hall with care and repressed anxiety. His face became accustomed to the tension; it grew around his facial muscles as quickly as warm water freezes in the cold of winter.
Strangely, it was not the moments of intense pressure and unspeakable horrors that had, more than once, endangered his carefully crafted composure. It was, in fact, his rounds in the corridors: he sometimes crossed paths with unfortunate students who, because he was especially skilled at moving quietly, never heard him coming. There were a few seconds during which they kept on talking – even in situations of crisis, teenagers can be insouciant, if only to cope with reality. Thus Severus found himself interrupting many a conversation which were not of the highest intellectual standard. Many times he felt the shadow of an ironic smile on his lips, the taste of a sarcastic remark on his tongue: these were always followed by a vertiginous sense of estrangement from everything that surrounded him. By this time the students had spotted him and deserted the place, or they were waiting, terror-stricken, wondering what would come next. There Severus would have to compose himself, and the effort drained him in a way he could never fully explain. Often, when the students had left, he felt the urge to look over his shoulder, ready to mock the conversation he had overhead once more; then he was very still; and, finally, painfully, he kept on walking.
So he kept a list. It was cathartic, and he enjoyed the puzzled look on Albus' painted face when he responded to him that this was a 'private matter'. Very neatly, in the manner of the Domesday book, which is to say in a very organized fashion, he wrote down the silliest bits of conversations and remarks from students, sometimes adding comments in the margin such as 'typical', '6 years of education wasted. Glad I am not the one having to meet them for their orientation session' or the occasional 'colourful. To keep on hand in case of a meeting with the minister.' In contrast to every other aspect of his life, from material matters to the most existential ones, he did not plan what to do with this parchment; he filled it carefree; it sat in one of his desk's drawers that May evening.
It only left its place to be covered in remorseful tears, but the pile of essays in Minerva's drawer remained desperately still.