Ashes Between Us

Chapter One: The Lion's Daughter

The Gryffindor common room was, as usual, a cacophony of noise. The fire roared in the grate, casting flickering shadows on the crimson tapestries, and at the center of it all, on the squashiest sofa, sat Y/N Snape. Her legs were thrown over the armrest, a Charms textbook open on her stomach, though her eyes were fixed on Hermione Granger who was perched on the edge of her seat, her voice a hushed, frantic whisper.

"No," Hermione breathed, her eyes wide. "He didn't."

"He did," Y/N confirmed, a slow, wicked grin spreading across her face. She leaned in, her voice dropping conspiratorially. "Pansy Parkinson was crying in the third-floor girls' lavatory. Crying, Hermione. Said he told her her new haircut made her head look like a 'withered Blast-Ended Skrewt.' Which, to be fair..." she mimed weighing a scale, "accurate."

Ron, sprawled on the hearthrug, let out a snort of laughter. Harry, cleaning his glasses beside him, shook his head with a rueful smile. "And you just happened to be there, did you?"

"I have sources everywhere, Potter," Y/N said, tapping the side of her nose. "It's part of my considerable charm." She punctuated the statement with a dramatic hair flip, her Y/H/C hair catching the firelight.

At eighteen, Y/N was a paradox Hogwarts had never quite managed to solve. She was a troublemaker of the highest order, with a mouth that could launch a thousand cutting remarks and a glare so withering it could make first-years cry. Her grades, however, were impeccable, a fact that infuriated her professors and delighted her. She was bratty, unapologetic, and cultivated an aura of untouchable disdain that had half the school convinced she hated them.

They weren't entirely wrong. She was selective with her hatred. And the primary object of it was the color green.

Slytherin House had a permanent mark against it in her book. It wasn't just school rivalry. It was the quiet, seething knowledge that the people who had killed her parents—her real, birth parents—had worn those silver and green colors. The Death Eaters who had murdered her Ravenclaw mother and father, leaving her to be found and taken in by the one man who understood the depth of that loss: Severus Snape.

He was her father in every way that mattered. He had raised her, taught her, protected her. The world didn't know. To them, she was just Y/N, the brilliantly awful Gryffindor who always seemed to know exactly which potion ingredient would make Neville's Shrinking Solution turn his toad back into a tadpole, or who could identify a bezoar with a bored sigh before Snape had even finished his question. The secret of their relationship was their own, a small, sacred rebellion against the roles the world had assigned them. He was her exception. Her only Slytherin exception.

A sudden hush fell over the common room. A third-year boy, his face pale, stood by the portrait hole, which had just swung shut behind him. He gulped. "Y/N? Professor Snape is asking for you. In his office."

She saw the flicker of concern on Hermione's face and the protective stiffening of Harry and Ron's postures. They knew how much she despised being called to his office—they thought it was because he was a greasy git who always deducted points from her. They didn't know it was because she worried about him, worried that one of these summons would be the one where he told her something had gone wrong, that his double-agent life had finally caught up with him.

"What did I do this time?" she sighed with theatrical weariness, swinging her legs off the armrest and standing. She straightened her jumper. "Probably incensed about my essay on the properties of moonstone. I may have suggested it's more useful as a paperweight than in a Draught of Peace."

Hermione grabbed her hand. "Just... be careful," she said, her eyes saying a thousand more words.

"Always am, 'Mione," Y/N said with a wink, though they all knew she never was.