Shadows || A Severus Snape Fanfiction

Chapter 4 - Detention

To Asha's triumph, she made it to the storeroom undetected, where she waved her wand and silently sent all the items to their designated shelves. When she emerged from the storeroom, the potions master was still hunched over his desk, his head resting lazily in one hand while the other scribbled no doubt condemnations on below-par essays.

With her new illicit method, Asha was getting through the boxes at triple speed. After half an hour, the pile had shrunken dramatically. She was just getting overly confident, walking with a levitating stack of scales that would barely make it under the storeroom doorframe, when he finally noticed.

"What- Winters!" he barked.

Asha stopped in her tracks. All the exhilaration that tends to accompany getting away with mischief was sucked out of her feet through the hard, cold floor. She stepped back, out of her fake carrying stance and waved her wand at the cupboard before turning to face him. The scales glided into the storeroom and gently settled on the shelves.

For a second, Snape looked half furious, half surprised. His eyes moved between a guilty Asha and the near-vanished stack of boxes.

"Have you been using non-verbal magic?" he demanded, sounding sceptical of what he had just witnessed.

"Yes," Asha admitted. There was no point in denying it, he'd seen her. Snape was wearing his usual cold, blank expression.

"Show me," he ordered.

"What?" Asha half laughed in surprise. When he didn't reply she mumbled, "Er... okay". As much as she didn't like the idea of anyone finding out about her non-verbal abilities, the look on Snape's face was deadly. She pointed her wand at the box that remained to be emptied. Viles of moondew and dragon blood hovered into the air. Asha then moved her wand in a subtle swooping motion so it was now pointing at the storeroom, before flicking it in a subtle figure-eight motion. The viles bobbed across the classroom and within seconds were settled in their intended places in the cupboard. Snape's face was unreadable.

"I've got sixth years who can't do that half as well as you've just done," Snape said slowly.

Asha's face reddened. She was well aware that she was overly skilled for her age. It was a fact she definitely wanted kept quiet. Not only did she not want the attention, she was almost certain her obsession with practising magic was abnormal.

"Who taught you?" demanded Snape, somehow looking even more severe than usual.

Asha shuffled uncomfortably, unsure what she should say to minimise the repercussions of what she'd thoughtlessly revealed.

"Answer me." His voice was quiet but threatening.

"I just sort of taught myself, okay," Asha blurted out. She saw Snape's face twitch.

"A likely story," he spat, standing up from his desk. "Third years don't just 'teach themselves' non-verbal magic".

"I read about it in a book-"

Snape actually scoffed.

"-but the book was rubbish" she finished. That caught his attention. Asha plunged onward: "I remembered reading somewhere that it's theorised that magic came before language, and incantations became the basis for language, not the other way around. And from that, I came up with this theory that ...well... if you imagine magic is like an energy that flows within you, that you can learn to channel it in specific ways. Words help you to capture to essence of how you need to channel the energy to perform spells and influence the physical world." The words were spilling out of her mouth before she could stop them, like she had been desperate to share them. "I figured that to do non-verbal magic, you need to stop thinking of the words as words, but as a flow of energy. Different consonants and vowels representing the intensity and direction of the flow of magic in your body. It's like I'm feeling the words, not saying them in my head. I know it sounds stupid and it's probably very inaccurate but it doesn't matter because thinking of it in that way just works for me."

The shrewd way Snape was looking at Asha made her feel stupid and vulnerable. She wished she had just stuck with 'I read about it in a book'.

"Why don't others know you can do this?" Snape asked harshly, "Surely you would relish in being admired by your peers and commended by your professors?"

Asha averted her eyes. In truth, she didn't know the full answer. She just liked to keep to herself; didn't feel like people were worth confiding in. She didn't feel very connected to her friends. Despite living in a castle full of her peers and teachers, Asha couldn't shake the feeling of isolation. Totally unaccustomed to this dreadful feeling of exposure of what was far too close to her true self, Asha resorted to a shrug.

"Fine," said Snape curtly. He had an almost suspicious look on his face. "If you finish the unpacking by hand you can go." He returned to his desk and leafed through a book, though Asha had the impression his thoughts were still focussed on the unusual ability of his fourteen-year-old student to perform non-verbal magic.