A/N: Written as a birthday gift for lilyevans_snape on Livejournal in 2009.

Warnings/Contains: Unbetaed, unBritpicked, not as snappily witty as my usual fare (hah! hear that? that's the sound of one's own horn tooting), just a random bit of fantasy I tried not to think too hard about (but still failed in some places).

Cold Hands, Warm Hearts

•·•·•·•·•·•·•

Despite it being the middle of December, it hadn't snowed yet this year, only pelted freezing rains that left the grounds a slushy mess. It wasn't raining now, but the air was damp and quite chilly even when still. When the wind gusted from the north, it assaulted Severus's exposed skin with myriad icy needle-pricks, and he wondered if it might make him crystallize, like a malformed black snowflake. His ears and the tip of his nose burned from the cold, but he tried to ignore this as he trudged through the muck towards the shore of the black lake.

Holding his lit wand over his head, Severus scanned for the glint of reflecting bits of ice lining the shore. Then, a short distance out from a crescent-shaped crusting of ice, he spotted what he had come for: a patch of freshwater ice-lobs. They bobbed in small groups of walnut-sized globes just below the water's surface, a faint point of blue-white light visible inside each one. With their transparent, jelly-like appearance, they resembled clumps of frogspawn, albeit the spawn of a frog that Severus wouldn't fancy meeting alone on dark night (or at any other time).

Ice-lobs emerged in late autumn from nearly-invisible spores that had dropped the previous spring and waited out the summer in the cool mud of the lake-bed. They "bloomed" in winter, reaching maturity when cold weather frosted their home waters, becoming bioluminescent and floating near the surface.

When the moon and stars were out, they glowed brightly in response and were easy to find, but like herbs better harvested before their flowering, ice-lobs were more potent if picked with less glow. It was good that this night, like many winter nights in Scotland, was not a clear one, because at the new moon two weeks ago they wouldn't have been ready and at the one two weeks hence they might be spoiled.

Severus set down his wand and reluctantly stowed the gloves he'd worn for this expedition in a pocket, trading them for a pair of wide-mouthed jars which he set on the muddy ground. He wished he could Summon the ice-lobs from the water, but they were too delicate to survive the smack into his palm. He'd have to collect them by hand, so potential frostbite or no, he was damned if he was going to ruin these gloves.

Remembering well what it was like to have inadequate protection against winter weather, they were one of the first non-essentials he'd purchased with his new salary. He'd allowed himself the small luxury of fur-lined black leather instead of knitted wool. Precious little good they'd been doing his stiffening fingers tonight, though. He flexed said fingers to little avail as he prepared to plunge his hands into the icy lake water.

"On three, then, Snape?" he said softly to the empty air, and mentally ticked off the count. One. Two. Three...!

Despite how cold he thought his hands already were, he had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from shrieking like a castrato at the feeling of the water. Apparently his gloves had been doing some good after all!

When he recovered from the momentary shock, he quickly cupped two of the ice-lobs. They felt like giant beads of tapioca, slippery, firm but yielding. He pulled very gently, and soon he felt the light snaps of them separating from the thin threads that tethered them to the lake-bottom. He placed them gently in one of the jars, steeled himself for the cold, and prepared to pick another pair.

After several such plunges, the water somehow didn't feel as bad. In fact, it was almost pleasant. Were his hands literally freezing, then? Hypothermia? Wouldn't that just be wonderful. He had to go on, though.

When Severus had finally collected as many lobs as he could fit in the jars, he topped them up with the lake-water and corked them, taking care not to let the corks press down against the fragile contents. He dried his hands on his cloak and briskly rubbed them against the wool, trying to get some heat from the friction. He reminded himself to work some more on getting the knack of making charmed clothing so his gloves could warm his hands more directly. He knew he could probably have asked Professors Flitwick or McGonagall for help, but was loath to reveal any weaknesses in his spell-work to anyone, least of all his now-rival Minerva McGonagall.

Wand in his pocket and jars in his arms, Severus tromped back towards the castle, scowling and thinking sour thoughts about how he'd allowed Dumbledore to strong-arm him into this position (although it was true that over a year later he was still quite glad of the side effect of being kept out of Azkaban, unlike some erstwhile compatriots of his). Not that he minded hard work, but being a Potions professor had turned out to entail so much petty hard work that it really grated on a man:

Ordering, collecting, and organizing all the ingredients necessary to feed the brewing of hundreds of potions a week, much of it utterly wasted due to failures and substandard performance.

Continually correcting inattention and disobedience in his classroom, no mean feat considering he was still a somewhat weedy young man who had once shared a dormitory with some of those students, and some of whom had seen his pants on one—he gritted his teeth—memorable occasion.

Spending hours researching appropriate textbooks (all inferior as far as he was concerned; perhaps he'd have to write the proverbial book himself someday) and making lesson plans far better than Slughorn's that would turn up the heat on everyone and at least raise them to a higher O.W.L. standard than the average so far.

Constantly coping with the variously chirpy and condescending attitudes of his colleagues, especially when anyone made the mistake of trying to engage him in light conversation over the breakfast table (and what he was expected to endure from Dumbledore on Christmas, which was dangerously close again, was hardly a thought to be borne).

And of course the endless marking, marking, marking of homework, for which he supposed he partly had himself to blame as he was the source of the assignments, but Christ, it was necessary if those dunderheads were going to shape up any time soon.

•·•·•·•·•·•·•

Having reached the steps of the castle, Severus sat with his jars beside him and positively sulked, for all the world not a school-master but a boy who didn't want to go back inside and study for his exams on a lovely June evening. It wasn't a lovely June evening, of course; it was an ugly December night. Besides the biting wind, the damp in the air was turning to a mist; condensation clung to his hair, plastering frigid black strands to his forehead, cheeks, and the back of his neck. The stars were nearly invisible behind the layer of cloud that high winds swept along overhead like a grey river, but the full moon backlit the sky to a silvery grey, revealing the black outlines of the forest treetops beyond Hagrid's hut.

Severus was just contemplating having a fag (it would be warmed air to breathe, at least) when he heard the creak of the door-hinge behind him. This wasfollowed by a soft "Oh!" from a female voice, which then said, "Severus, what are you doing out here?"

"Collecting," he said, gesturing at the jars beside him but not looking over his shoulder at the owner of the voice, whom he recognized as Aurora Sinistra, the Astronomy professor some ten years his senior in age, although only three years in teaching experience.

"On a night like this?"

"It's the best conditions. I had to." He pursed his lips; why was he explaining himself? Aside from his patrol duties he had the right to come and go as he pleased. "Not as though I'm breaking curfew. I'm not a student anymore!" he snapped, jerking his head.

Aurora chuckled and sat down a respectful distance from him, drawing her cloak around her. "No, you certainly aren't, Professor, but you're going to catch something out here. I can see your hair's all damp, and it's freezing. Why not go back inside?"

"Where it's all drafty and a few degrees above freezing? Yes, miss, be right in, miss. Be a right improvement, that will," he said, still not looking at her.

Aurora bowed her head to her arms, crossed on her knees, and laughed. "Yes, Severus, and where there are also fires, you know, I hear even in some parts of the dungeons." She turned her head to the side to look at him. Now he did look back, but said nothing. Hints of moonlight, struggling through the cloud cover, gleamed on the silver embroidery ornamenting the neckline of her cloak and the small silver earrings she wore.

"If you won't go in," she continued, sitting up straight again, "then at least wear this." The tip of her wand poked out from her cloak and waved in a circle, conjuring a dark knitted wool cap which she deftly caught on the tip of said wand. She proffered it to Severus, who paused befeore accepting it grudgingly. He rotated the brim of the cap through his hands, fingering the yarn, and noticed in the light of the torches by the door that it wasn't quite black, but a heathered grey. It reminded him of a winter hat he'd once owned as a child. And he had to admit, his head was awfully cold.

Feeling a bit of a fool, he pulled the cap on, and immediately felt a bit warmer, though he said nothing aloud. Instead, he fished out the cigarette he'd been thinking about having and lit it with his wand, carefully staring at the foot of the steps as he felt his cheeks flush red. He prayed that couldn't be seen in the available light, and blew two irregular smoke rings as he exhaled.

He didn't quite manage to dodge the incoming hand he glimpsed in the corner of his eye, and it snagged the rolled brim of the cap and pulled it down over his left ear.

"Augh! Hands off! Just what d'you—?"

"Come on, Severus, your ears are about to fall off. Better cover the other one too."

Severus blinked, nonplussed.

"I'll do it if you don't. Don't make me be your mother."

"Don't talk like you know my mother," Severus snarled, although he knew the effect was lessened by the boyish way his hair was sticking out from under the hat.

"All right, I was only making a joke." She paused, regarding him with a faint look of concern. After a moment she snaked her other arm out from her cloak, slowly reached towards him, and folded down the other side of the cap to cover Severus's right ear.

He felt the line between his eyebrows deepen and was all set to deliver another scathing remark when he saw her wand make another circle. Something pale appeared in her hand, a knitted hat with a very long tail that looked like it had been sliced off a medieval wizard's liripipe. She pulled it on and piled the tail atop the crown of her head.

Severus stifled a snicker. The shape of the hat was definitely amusing, its off-white colour against her dark brown hair looking like a drift of whipped cream on a chocolate pudding. "Fetching," he said, the corner of his mouth quirking in the hint of a grin. "You must get me the name of your tailor."

"Thank you," she replied, equally deadpan. "Aurora E. Sinistra, Cardiff's finest. I just thought you should be appropriately dressed if you were going to stay out here, which you shouldn't, you know."

"Which I shouldn't—!" Severus sputtered, then stood up, blew out an important cloud of smoke, and whirled to face the wall, his cloak snapping behind him. "I thought we had recently established that I am no student and therefore may be here if I wish!"

"Severus, don't go all 'Professor Snape' on me. It won't work," she said to his back.

Severus turned and glared at her. "Professor Sinistra, don't go all 'just Aurora will be fine' on me. It won't work."

She grinned dangerously. "Severus," she said slowly. "Just 'Aurora' will be fine."

A shiver raced up his spine and back down again at the way her teeth touched her bottom lip in making the "v". Did his name really sound like that? He hadn't heard it that way since... since that one time with Lily...

He squeezed his eyes against the sudden horrible threat of tears from the memory she had unwittingly evoked, and put it firmly from his mind. When he opened them again, he saw that Aurora was sniffing the air with a curious look on her face. After a moment, she seemed to recognize something, and he didn't much like the look of fond amusement she regarded him with then.

"Vanilla-flavoured, Severus?"

He felt his cheeks flame again against the cold. Well, at least now he had something to be annoyed about; that would put him off his melancholy thoughts of Lily rather quickly. "Yes, if that's quite all right with you."

Aurora shook her head, still smiling, then glanced briefly up at the sky. Apparently she saw something of significance there, because she pushed herself up from the castle steps and hurried about two hundred feet away, towards the front gates.

What was she up to? Severus took a last drag off his (hrmph!) vanilla-flavoured cigarette, ground it out against the castle wall, and Vanished the butt, then followed Aurora onto the grounds. As he approached, he saw that she had a small leather-bound book out and was making various marks in it with a thin stick of graphite.

"See the moon, there?" she said, unprompted. She wasn't pointing or even looking in any particular direction, so with the cloud cover, Severus wasn't quite sure what she was talking about at first. He moved to stand close beside her and faced back towards the castle as she was doing.

The smudgy light of the moon behind the clouds was easy enough to see from that perspective. At the moment, it seemed to be balancing on the tip of one of the castle's turret roofs. "What about it?" he said, not really understanding what she was getting at.

"You know Stonehenge," she said, in a tone which hinted she'd consider him a seriously inadequate wizard if he did not.

"Yes, obviously," he replied in a tone that made clear he was definitely not an inadequate wizard.

She smiled, not looking up from her book, and continued, "And Stanton Drew, Castlerigg, the Rollrights, the Merry Maidens? Muggles say sometimes these are primitive observatories, not that that's far off."

"Your point?" Severus said, feeling exasperated even though he was genuinely curious. He peered over at the page she was writing on. Aurora had drawn a quick sketch of the skyline of Hogwarts, placed the moon in its current position atop the one tower, and was scribbling numerous arcs, angles, astronomical symbols, and bits of mathematical calculations over and around the drawing and the facing page.

"It seems Hogwarts has alignments too," she said. "I was very surprised to find nothing about it in the library." She paused, tapping the graphite against her lips as she thought about something.

Severus considered this information as he looked up at the blot of moonlight and the few pricks of light that were visible from the brightest stars. "That is odd," he agreed. "What dates are its alignments meant to calculate?"

"No idea, yet," she replied, sounding disappointed. "I mean, I can tell you that on the autumnal equinox the sun rose just there and the full moon will be precisely over that tower April next, but that sort of thing's not very useful by itself. Doesn't tell you what the whole scheme is really about. But I've only been studying this for a couple of years, of course, and that's not long enough to plot out the longer sorts of astronomical cyc—" She cut off her speech abruptly and looked at him, a puff of her breath steaming in the air like his cigarette smoke had. "You can't really be interested in this, can you?"

Severus didn't quite know how to answer this. Although he'd liked Astronomy moderately well as a school subject, he didn't see what real use it had beyond timing the brewing of certain potions. Lily had gotten bored with it by third year, so he'd felt safe in letting his attention lapse, which had nothing to do with the delicious curves of breasts, hips, and bum she was getting, nor those of any of the other girls in the class, honest.

But it seemed he'd thus acquired a subconscious association between stargazing and pretty-girl-gazing, because the earnest look in Aurora's pale eyes and the general closeness of their bodies was giving him a funny feeling low in his belly. When he noticed this, Severus was angry with himself. What business did he have getting lustful tingles about a woman ten years older than him and, in a way, his superior—or about anyone, for that matter?

"Not very keen on Astronomy, no," he replied with a fainthearted sneer. Aurora pressed her lips together, but let the hinted insult to her subject pass without further comment. "But I am interested in the mysteries of Hogwarts."

"Then I have some more extensive charts you should see, maybe." She held up the book in one hand, flexing the fingers of the other stiffly in the cold; Severus noticed now she was not wearing any gloves herself. "This is just notes. I do most of the working-out later." Her face was suddenly illuminated in bluish silver as the moon shone through a passing break in the clouds, and Severus could see its disk reflected in her eyes. Suddenly she looked down, straight at the castle steps, as if focusing on something she'd noticed in her peripheral vision.

Following her gaze, Severus saw what had attracted her attention: the ice-lobs were responding to the increase in moonlight by glowing in their jars like miniature star clusters.

"Shit!" he exclaimed, forgetting any idea of propriety in front of a senior professor (and a woman at that), and dashed back to scoop up the jars and get them inside and down to his storage closet before the damned things expended too much of their virtue in luminescing.

As he tucked the jars carefully into the pre-arranged spots on his shelves, he wondered if he should go back and say anything to Aurora, assuming she was still there. Not that he was concerned about her feelings as such, no!, but he did wish to seem more mature, more adult, than his exit had just proclaimed (so he felt). Yes, he would check quickly to see if she was there, and if not, he might have himself another cigarette to calm his breathing. Not that it needed calming. It was just that she had been looking at him rather oddly and might have been planning something. And smoking helped when he was under stress. Not that this was stressful. And—

Shut up, Severus. Shut up, and go if you're going to, or don't if you're not. Just shut the hell up and choose.

•·•·•·•·•·•·•

Aurora was just contemplating giving up and going back inside to her warm bed when she heard the creak of the door-hinge behind her. This was followed by a soft sigh of relief from a male voice, which then said, "Aurora?" There was a pause. "I, er... I'm... shouldn't you come back inside?"

She smiled softly, not looking over her shoulder at the owner of the voice, whom she knew to be Severus Snape, the intriguing young Potions professor who had just admitted a grudging interest in her work on the astronomical alignments of Hogwarts castle.

"Mmm," she said, and surreptitiously folded the page she had torn out of her notebook before she stood and turned to face him. She pocketed the book and the stick of graphite, swiped the silly cream-coloured hat off her head, and shook her hair out. He said nothing, but blinked a couple of times. Holding the folded page out to him, Aurora watched as Severus hesitantly took it from her hand.

"What's this?" he asked, and started to unfold it.

She grasped his hand to stop him from doing so, and his dark eyes snapped up to meet hers, startled by the contact. His skin was cool, but not icy to the touch as she had been half-expecting. "It's not much," she said quietly. "There's no need to open it right away. Good night, Severus."

With that, she let go and made her way out of the entrance hall towards her rooms.

•·•·•·•·•·•·•

Severus watched the sweep of Aurora's cloak and the spill of her brown hair down the back of it as she left, and frowned. What was she playing at? He had no intention of being on the butt end of a joke from anyone, student or professor. Muttering ill-tempered things under his breath, he unfolded the sheet Aurora had given him, and stopped cold at what he saw there.

It was a sketch of him sitting by the doors outside, his eyes fierce black dots under sultry eyelids, his hair falling gracefully into his face (...what? it had been stuck to his skin with wet, hadn't it?) and his cloak pooling all around him on the steps; the tip of his cigarette glowed between his fingers and the jars of ice-lobs shimmered faintly by his side. Despite the hurried nature of the drawing, it was quite lifelike. Severus didn't even immediately hate the way he looked, as he always did with photographs.

Huh.

Well.

This was probably going to be an interesting Christmas.

The various stone circles Aurora mentions can all be found on Wikipedia, if you're curious.

Two people have drawn me illustrations for this fic, depicting Aurora's sketch of Severus: http: / /mimimanderly .livejournal .com/ 62182 .html, http : / /cosmiccoz .livejournal .com/ 21225 .html