Absquatulate: to leave without saying goodbye
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Alex's last potions session with Severus before the Christmas holidays was on a Friday night.
There are many problems with Friday nights, especially ones that occured during a person's OWL year. You've pretty much already given up on life itself and the hope of ever making it out of the endless grey monotony of school days and lessons. The weekend seems like a mirage on the distant sun-starved landscape of shitness. Seconds take minutes, minutes take hours, hours lasted forever and Alex was sure those were the lyrics to a pop song her annoying cousin had liked when they were ten.
Needless to say, she wasn't paying one hundred percent attention as she shoved lacewing flies into her very rough approximation of a Draught of Peace. It didn't help that Severus maintained a strict rule of 'no Gryffindor potion in the potions classroom'.
"Careful." Severus hissed warningly as the potion, which was by that point a bubbling grey colour, spat at her.
"Sorry." Alex muttered, eyes downcast. Her oversized dragon hide gloves chafed on the blisters that had already formed as a result of carelessness.
"The Draught of Peace," Severus said as he gently gestured her out of the way and took over trying to save her feeble attempt at the potion, "Is one of the most contradictory potions ever created. If you get even one component the slightest bit wrong, it can prove fatal, as it has in many accounts throughout history."
Alex bit her lip, and glanced around for a slip of parchment, "Will I need to remember this?"
"Unfortunately not." Severus articulated, barely glancing down as he swept a perfectly measured handful of charmander tails into the cauldron, "If you will excuse me for trying to fill in the atrocious gaps in the education system."
"Right." Alex smiled to herself, "Sorry again."
Severus flicked his wand through the air, and the little fire burning under the cauldron dimmed a little, so that his face became less of a blur through the steam, "Your transformation, then? I assume it took place?"
"Um," Alex lowered her voice, as if there was someone listening outside the door, ready to throw her out of the school at a moments notice, "Yep. Full moon. I'm a werewolf."
Severus observed her through slitted eyes, "Interesting."
"What is?" Alex asked, slightly alarmed.
"The fact that you felt compelled to point out that you turned onto a werewolf on the full moon." Severus raised his eyebrows, speaking smoothly. Alex flushed red, "Curiously enough, even half bloods know that little fact."
"You're a half blood?" Alex inquired curiously. There wasn't an awful lot that she knew about Severus Snape. She had just sort of assumed that he would have been a pureblooded Slytherin, like all his friends.
The boy frowned in concentration as he stirred in a very particular way that looked just a bit too fussy to Alex, "Yes, I am. Are you rethinking these tutor sessions now that you know they're taught by such an inferior creature, your majesty?"
"Why would I do that?" Alex felt her anger slowly building. It was always like that after her potion wore off. Like everything she hadn't felt just came rushing back, overflowing out of her centre. And always, always, there was that hole in the middle of her chest, just tugging everything in.
Severus quirked an eyebrow, still not looking at her, "His status didn't seem to do Logan Mitchell any good."
"Why does everything always come down to blood status with you lot?" Alex fumbled for words angrily, "It's... Anything bad happens to you and it's the purebloods being racist again. Why aren't I allowed to be angry with someone because they're being a dick?"
Severus put the spatula he had been using to stir the potion with down, and raised his eyebrows at Alex, "How cathartic. I didn't know you were capable of such an outpouring of emotion."
"Yeah, well..." Alex trailed off, temper dissipating almost instantly.
Severus held his hand out formally to Alex over the table, "I'll see you after Christmas, Fawley."
Dragon hide gloves still in place, Alex clumsily returned the gesture, shaking once, gripping too loosely and letting go too soon, "You too, Severus."
The Slytherin boy nodded to her before beginning to clear away any of the clutter from that night's session, instantly absorbed in the task. Alex gave an awkward half smile and left, quite relieved at Severus' continual lack of care about whatever state she turned up in this time.
Alex was, unsurprisingly, feeling extremely guilty about Logan. She spent most of her time trying not to think about it, or if she did, it was in the middle of the night, when the Gryffindor potion wore off and she buried her head in the duvet and thought about unicorns until it went away. That was what she'd done when she was a kid, and nightmares chased her through dreams and into the shadowed corners of her bedroom. Unicorns, she had supposed then, were the epitome of goodness and innocence in the universe. There was absolutely nothing threatening about unicorns, even when they were trying to kill you.
But still, every now and then, she would glance Logan out of the corner of her eye, laughing with James Potter or the Prewett brothers, or sitting by himself doing astronomy charts by the fireplace, and it would all slip away. She knew, had always known, that Logan- brilliant, amazing, eternally patient Logan- deserved so much more than her. She would never be good enough.
Alex sometimes wondered if there had ever been three more destructive words than 'not good enough'. Each of them set heavily in your chest as some kind of impossible obstacle pushing you back. They implied that everything you did, no matter how much you tried, would fail, that your best work meant nothing. It was completely and utterly useless, and it was all your fault. There could not be a person in the world that the one simple phrase didn't cut through like a knife through butter that had been left out in the sun all day.
By the time Alex had managed to zombie her way through getting ready for bed that night, it must have been one in the morning. It was certainly late enough to warrant creeping around the dormitory so as not to wake the other girls. And sleep didn't come easily either. She clutched at the pillow and stared at the ceiling and counted hippogriffs for hours, but her eyes were only beginning to slip shut just as the first rays of dawn began to filter around the edges of the curtains, and Marlene MicKinnon, ever the frustratingly chirpy morning person, was up and shoving last minute clothing items into her trunk.
Alex groaned, and nuzzled deeper into her covers, mentally begging Merlin for a time turner.
"Up and at em, Lils." Marlene happily chided Lily, two beds over, who seemed to be experiencing a similar struggle to Alex, "Last day."
Alex shot bolt upright. Last day. Last day, which meant crowded carriages and making sure you got the Hogwarts Express first so that you didn't have to awkwardly excuse yourself for being in someone else's carriage. There was a small vial of her potion on the bedside table. Alex narrowed her eyes at it. Not today. Not in front of her parents.
Nevertheless, Alex couldn't help the compulsion to gently wrap the glass in an old sock and tuck it into her carry-bag, just in case. The rest of her packing was completed much more haphazardly, with a blurring tornado of unfolded clothes and textbooks wedged down the edges of her trunk. Her last letters from home were folded carefully into the top pocket.
Alex had a whole train journey to plan how to tell her parents that she was a werewolf.
And she didn't think about it once.
She tried to sleep. Honest, she did. But the churning pit under her ribs woke her up every time she thought she got close, locked off in the little compartment by herself. Every now and then she felt tears of self-pity well up, and shoved them back down again with a harsh glance at the very see-through glass of the sliding door. In the end, the silence was too much, and Alex had to bury the lack of noise in the heavy, thumping base of her suddenly-working headphones. More than once, the temptation of the Gryffindor potion called to her from the railing where her trunk sat, if only to catch a few hours sleep.
"Hey." A voice at the door called softly, about an hour from Kings Cross.
It was Micah. Alex could safely say she had never been more pleased to see her brother. He slid the door shut after him and took the seat opposite Alex, even though by this point she was on the floor, knees drawn up to her chest as she leaned against the cushion and watched the sky from her strained position to see out the window.
She snapped upright instantly, giving a swift tug of the cord to disconnect herself from her headphones, and grinning with rather too much enthusiasm at Micah, "Hey!"
"You doing okay?" Micah asked.
"What, because I'm curled up on the floor of a train for five hours by myself you think I'm not okay?" Alex asked. It took her a moment to realise she had said it without the potion. Micah laughed.
He leaned forwards, planting his elbows on his knees, and knitting his fingers together, "What are you going to tell them?"
"Mum and Dad?" Alex asked, even though she already knew, "I don't know."
"I'll help you." Micah offered unexpectedly.
The old Alex would have stuttered that he didn't need to, going from pink to scarlet in the process. But little-bit-weak-but-still-better Alex just smiled hesitantly, "Really?"
"Yeah." Micah grinned, "It's not just your problem. And they're gonna be mad."
"I'll tell them it wasn't your fault, don't worry." Alex reassured him.
Micah glanced at his hands, "That's not why I offered."
"Oh." Alex really did blush then.
There was a silence that stretched for an indeterminate amount of time between them. Alex felt her body rock to the movements of the train, letting the sensation lull her off into an in-between that wasn't quite sleep.
"So." Micah said at last, pushing a hand through his hair, "Logan?"
"We... Um... I messed up." Alex confessed, "And please don't ask."
"Okay." Micah spoke slowly, processing her words, "So you haven't replaced him with the Marauders?"
"What?" Alex demanded, caught off guard, "No!"
Micah raised his hands in surrender, "Just checking."
"Right."
"Cause, you know, I'd have to do a little background research on them before hand otherwise." Micah smirked, "As an act of brotherly protection."
"Oh Merlin." Alex buried her face in her arms, hiding a grin, "Please no."
Logan gave a small laugh that faded to a smile as Alex raised her head. He gave a vague gesture with one hand, "So... We good?"
Alex grinned, and it felt like a real grin, like she was beating back that pit for the first time, "We're good."