Love and Symbiosis

Chapter 27

Circadian Rhythms

He had always been a light sleeper. There was a multitude of reasons for this. It had started with, as most negative aspects of his life had (so pretty much all of them), Tobias.

Severus spent most of his childhood locked in his bedroom by his mother: who came from the school of thought that the more Tobias was forced to forget about his son's existence the better. Instead of this feeling like some kind of saving grace, however, Severus had spent every waking (and slumbering) moment in an anxious panic. He often fell asleep with one eye open, waiting… listening… anticipating blows and shouts from downstairs… usually followed by his mother's muffled weeping.

Ever since then it had been a downhill battle. Good for surveillance and catching wayward students; bad for his overall health.

Severus was therefore absolutely unsurprised when he found himself, once again, shaken wide awake from his sleep at what appeared to be a god-forsaken time of the night. He gave a heavy sigh and glared into the dark, cold abyss of his bed chambers.

His leg was panging something crazy still, after all this time. He wondered vaguely if the blasted creature's bite had some venomous property in it that would cause him gratuitous throbbing pain for the rest of his natural life, before omitting yet another sigh and propping himself up upon elbows and reaching for his wand.

It was only then, when his right elbow had sunk far deeper than his left and had brushed against something warm and soft, that Severus realised – conceivably for the first time in his life – that he was not alone in his bed.

Without a single millisecond of hesitation, he had leapt for his wand and whipped back around. Blinding light radiated from him which illuminated the entire room.

"What the fuck are you doing here?!" he demanded angrily, rubbing his hand forcefully against his temple and thanking his lucky stars that he hadn't been so taken aback as to send a few curses in the Astronomy mistress's direction.

Aurora was lying prostrate next to him, fully dressed, out of the covers, gazing vaguely at the canopy of his bed and looking completely unperturbed from being Lumos'd right in the face. This annoyed him even more.

"Quirinus…" came her only retort. She was still gazing upward.

"When I gave you the incantation to get into my quarters, I didn't mean that you could just barge in and out - especially in the middle of the night - whenever you saw fit! I thought we - "

The tirade tumbled out of his furious mouth before he could register what she had even said.

"Quirrell! Quirrell!" Severus repeated loudly and vehemently, he glared down upon Aurora now, his synapses prickling to life. "What did he do? Did he hurt you? I'll - !"

He was halfway scrambling out of the sheets, ignoring the now searing pain in his lower leg and ready to commit a particularly ferocious form of homicide, before he felt a hand grab a fistful of his nightclothes. Severus shot around and finally met Sinistra's gaze; she was shaking her head in a very peculiar fashion.

"It was him, wasn't it?" she whispered shrewdly. "He was the one who Obliviated me."

Severus did not particularly care about discussing this issue at present, the fury that came along with imagining Quirrell in the same room, alone, with Borealis was still bubbling within his chest like a cauldron on the brink of explosion.

"Where was he? What was he doing?" Severus continued in his demands, though he had ceased fighting with the linen for the time being.

Aurora shrugged.

"Nothing particularly underhanded. But he'd been crying, I could hear him outside the staffroom…"

Crying, crying again! Severus thought, his hand continuing to rub his now pounding temples. If the man spent half of the time he spent blubbering into actually trying to get past the protections to the Stone, then he would have certainly achieved his goal by now surely.

"How'd you know it was him?" Severus asked, realising that he was still currently blinding her with his wand. He hastily pulled it back and rested it upon the beside table, where it continued to gleam away.

"I went out into the corridor and found him," Aurora replied. "He was just… weird. I inserted a well-placed comment about my memory returning to me, and then he gave me this look -"

"Look?"

She nodded solemnly, her eyebrow raised indicating that she knew more than she was letting on. "Guilt," she continued. "It was definitely guilt. What on earth do you think he's up to? And don't give me that 'Dumbledore made me swear not to tell anyone, Dumbledore knows everything, Dumbledore's word is law' crap, I think I deserve a proper answer, don't you?"

Severus bit his lip and continued to stare down at her. Yes, she did deserve a proper answer. She'd almost been murdered by the man and yet here he and Dumbledore were waiting for another lead… for an actual murder, perhaps? And Dumbledore had just expected that he would not breathe a word of this to her when Dumbledore knew (he had to have known) how much she meant to Severus. Perhaps Borealis had been right all along; perhaps the headmaster was trying to insert a very expansive wedge between them. Well, no more.

And so he told her everything, everything they had suspected Quirrell of from the start, of trying to steal the Philosopher's Stone for himself, of something happening to him during his Sabbatical to Albania, everything he knew about Quirrell he divulged to her.

It must have been heading toward the break of dawn by the time they had finished discussing the Defence Against the Dark Arts professor. Severus had completely forgotten the baffling oddity that was another human being next to him in his own bed. They were both less than a few inches from each other now, both resting on an elbow respectively.

Aurora had let him finish what he desperately wanted to say - but by the way her brow furrowed and the rate at which her breathing was solidly increasing, he knew that she would not stay silent for much longer.

"… the most maddening thing is the fact that he hasn't left a single trail of evidence," Severus concluded with a stifled yawn. "There is nothing that Dumbledore can use to incriminate him. It is obvious at this stage that you must've stumbled in on him that night he Obliviated you -"

"He almost killed me!" Sinistra bit back angrily from his pillow. "Obliviation doesn't leave a gaping gash in one's head. And you said that he ended up with a black eye… is not that enough evidence to Dumbledore that a scuffle happened between us? That I saw something I wasn't meant to, he threw me across the room, I punched him in the face and then I was Obliviated?" she sighed and leant back on both elbows, shrugging dramatically. "Seems pretty clear cut to me."

"If I could lock him up in Azkaban based on that evidence alone, I would," Severus assured darkly. "I would throw him to the Dementors myself and watch them Kiss him in succession with great pleasure."

Aurora sighed and fanned herself theatrically. She stretched back out onto her back.

"And they say romance is dead. Thank you for that."

He was sure that she had intended her response to come across as mere sarcasm, but there was a feeble earnestness in her voice that both inflamed and assuaged everything inside him. How a person could have ever made him drawn to two polar opposites at once he would never know.

"I'm tired…" Severus lied after silently surveying her floodlit and spellbindingly beautiful face for far, far too long.

"You are, are you? Talk of potential murderers at Hogwarts a bit tedious for you, is it?"

He clicked his tongue irritably and shook his head, now looking in the opposite direction.

"Leave me, Borealis; some people have to get up at a decent time to make a living."

With Sinistra fully clothed in her deep blue robes - a perfect mirror of twilight - and he in nothing but his grey nightshirt, he felt extraordinarily maladroit and mediocre. He half wished she'd disrobe herself… then again, perhaps not.

"When are you going to stop all of… this" Aurora demanded, sweeping a vague hand over him.

Severus cleared his throat indignantly. "I am afraid that this is just the way I look. Unfortunate, but life isn't particularly fair -"

Sinistra threw back her head and let out a virulent snicker. "You are utterly clueless. And your self-esteem is fucked, by the way."

Giant pulses of pain was currently spurting toward his leg and it took all of his will not to grimace, to show her any weakness. Trust it to have a flare up right now, right at this bloody moment.

"Your neck must be sore from carrying around that crown of yours…" he bit sardonically.

Oh yes, he knew what exactly it was Aurora wanted him to stop – she wanted him to stop thinking about her, her and Black, together. But up until this point it seemed nothing sort of a completely impossibility… no matter how swift and meaningless their liaison had been.

Why? Of all the people she could have had, could have touched, could have felt affection for – why did have to be him? It was the most unpleasant thought that kept appearing at the most unpleasant of times. Worse than that, exponentially worse than that, he hated her for just how incensed it had made him. It was an anger that refused to detach itself from the walls of his insides all week. He had eventually learned to live with the excessive yearning to break into Azkaban and kill Black with his bare hands - the yearning that had always been there. But it was distant noise, something he was able to tune out and eventually forget about, save something triggering it.

And then the bastard had to appear again, right in front of him, in as physical a form as he could without him actually being in the room. It wasn't enough that Black alone had led to the eventual death of Severus's best friend in the world; the felon was also to be found, naked, in the arms of the woman he…

Severus let the grimace show freely now. The physical pain of his leg was immaterial to what he was feeling in his chest.

He couldn't even think that word. That blasted 'L' word. He was sure it was enough to rip his entire body apart.

Yes, he hated her for how much more she made him hate Black. Up until now Severus had been positive that it was a complete impossibility to hate him more than he already did… but Borealis had proven that all wrong, like she had proven everything else he thought about himself wrong. Fuck her, and fuck Black, and fuck himself for all of this. It would be an eternal thorn in his side forever, he was sure of that.

Severus barely noticed that Aurora was now eyeing him with concern from her side of the bed (his side of the bed! Both sides were his, damn it).

"What's hurting?" she asked, a deep crease between her black brows.

Everything. Everything bloody hurts and it's never stopped. He wanted to say.

"My leg is playing up - it's nothing!" he said, waving Aurora away when her hands suddenly moved toward him. "If you won't leave, could you at least shut up and let me try to get some sleep for another hour or so?"

"I can see why you didn't go to Poppy now" Aurora replied. "Bit hard to explain that you'd been skulking around the third-floor corridor and been accosted by the gigantic three-headed monstrosity guarding the portals to the Stone…"

"Precisely."

"Just a stroke of luck that you have me to misappropriate hospital wing supplies, huh? You're bloody lucky Poppy and I get along so well."

Severus sniffed amusedly, his eyes feeling graciously heavy once again. Whatever was said after that had been swiftly forgotten by the following morning - for the next thing he knew it was daybreak; a dull, orange light illuminated the cracks between the heavy curtains over his windows and had stirred him awake once more.

He rubbed his forehead, failed to suppress a weighty yawn and turned slowly to his right… the Astronomy professor was still there, still left side of the bed, and still clothed – only now she had managed to wrap herself up in his bed sheets. Her breathing was steady and peaceful, black ropes of dreadlocks fell around her softly closed eyes and her half-opened mouth. Severus had never seen her asleep before; it was rather beguiling, and she was rather beautiful. He put that down to the fact that she was, for once in her life, not coherent enough to vex him senseless…

Making sure not to rouse her (not that it was difficult – he was a former spy, after all), Severus flung himself around to sit on the side of the bed and bit down on his tongue preparatory to putting pressure on his leg. He hobbled off to the bathroom praying to all hell that it was just a fleeting bout of pain, and he wouldn't have to suffer another day of embarrassment limping around the castle.

Aurora was still asleep when he returned to dress himself and get started on his legions of buttons. Severus supposed she would be slumbering for quite some time; her familiarity with the dead of night would put all of the owls in the castle to shame. He finished fastening the very button on the tip of his sleeve, pulled on his cloak, and walked over to her side – his side! – of the bed where he very gently pulled up the sheets so that they completely enveloped her. Sinistra grasped at them unconsciously and curled up tight into a ball.

It was with a deep feeling of heaviness, something inexplicable, which Severus left his quarters with that morning. With his mind still on the altercation between Quirrell and Borealis the previous night, he made sure to place all of the protective charms he could think of on his doors – so that no intruder would be able set foot in there without suffering severe consequences, so that Borealis could sleep without such anxiety.

Perhaps… perhaps that was why she ended up in his rooms in the first place… perhaps she really did trust that he wouldn't dare let anything happen to her under his watch…

And so there the rather conflicted Potions master silently sat at breakfast that morning, feeling like both his mind and his body were residing in two places at once. He made sure to put extra effort into his scowls and glares to compensate for the unbearable feeling of uneasiness.

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