hands (professor lupin)✔️

Chapter One || The Punishment

Picture: Train arriving at Gare Saint-Lazare, Claude Monet

The rain was battering against the windows of the train. I didn't even remember the last time I'd taken a train.

"After all, it's only for a year," I tried to calm myself down.

It was only for a year. Twelve months of an exchange period of Hogwarts. One day the headmaster of my school just called me in and told me I was to go there. Apparently, this was a big deal for the school, no one had ever been sent to Hogwarts before. I was in my last year and was considered a good student - an excellent one, in fact.

It's funny how excellent students are frequently the saddest. I almost never went out anymore - just sitting inside, cramming my head full of charms and spells. I used to be very sociable and had in fact been quite popular around the campus - but no longer. Sixth year, I had quite a sad incident. I had developed some feelings for a teacher who seemed as quiet and book-loving as me, but decided not to act on them. However, one day when I was walking through the corridor, the teacher himself pinned me to the wall and started kissing me, the quietness all gone, as I realised I wasn't as calm and composed as I thought when it came to him.

Unfortunately for both of us, someone saw. The teacher was gone and I was sent home for a year - they wanted to expel me, but apparently someone said a kind word about me in the Ministry or something, because my punishment was softened. Still, it was a blow to me. Nothing helped - not my parents' plea to keep me in the school, not my friends testifying that I never made any advances towards the teacher. I wept openly as I dragged my suitcase out of the gates, my parents running towards me as everything seemed like a blur.

The year was tough. I got depressed and at some point was suicidal. My dear parents did the best they could to help me - they did not believe for a moment that I was to blame. My mother cried with me, cooked my meals and tidied my room every day, while my father would always come home from work and hug me from behind, kiss me on the cheek and always say the exact same words:

"You'll show them, Lennie. You'll show them."

Several months afterwards, I could finally face the outside world again. The buzz about my "affair" with an illustrious professor had died down, and no one bothered me about it anymore. The few friends I had from school, I struggled to keep in touch with them - but they were soon overwhelmed with schoolwork and I was left alone in the darkness of my own thoughts and crushed feelings.

Because I did still care a lot for the man who was the cause of my suffering. In spite of all that had happened, that moment when he turned me around in the darkness and pressed me to the wall was the best thing that had ever happened to me. Months later, my best dreams were still about that night. I had no idea when they would stop.

A year after my exile, I came back to school, wary and mentally patched-up. I trusted no one. I didn't get any new friends, although people treated me with respect because I studied hard and did not become cocky because of it.

None of the new students knew about the affair. It was all hushed up. The teachers, however, treated me with disdain. Not all of them, of course. But there was a kind of distrust towards me. The headmaster genuinely felt I owed it to him for staying in the school, even though I was a year older than the other students.

Seventh year, August the 30th, I entered his study, mentally bracing myself.

"Sit down, Miss Limber, "- he enunciated as I sat carefully down on the chair in front of his desk.

"So. The purpose of my bringing you here is to inform you, that, of all the seventh years, you have been chosen to represent our school as an exchange student at one of the finest schools in the world. Their first semester starts in two weeks. "