Aurora had just returned to her dorm after dinner when she noticed that the magic rose was missing. Then looked at the empty pen holder leng for three seconds, without hesitation to open the bag will be inside the contents of the upside down.
The old, dark green diary bounced on the desk and clattered open, and the serpentine Salazar was staring at the little thing that had flung him roughly with his chin up. "What are you looking for?"
"My flowers are gone." Aurora checked her bag several times and then turned her desk into a mess. Still no sign of it. She remembered where she had been that afternoon, and when she had not had the flower in her hand. Suddenly, a terrible feeling came over her, and her handwriting was scrawled: "Oh dear, I think I left it in the greenhouse!"
And next to the dragon's blood.
"Then go and get it." The snake took a disgusted look at the crooked words, reached out the tip of his tail and poked them all into pieces and rolled them into a ball.
Aurora was sure that she had lost the rose in the greenhouse, but when she ran to the greenhouse, she found that it had backfired. She quickly went to the hospital and found Amanda, who was helping Madam Pomfrey deal with the students' injuries. With Potions due soon, the number of burns in the hospital wing had soared, and Madam Pomfrey always joked that she could just sit here and find out the Hufflepuff Potions schedule every year without having to do anything.
Amanda, surprised by Aurora's words, stammered that she had not seen any roses that were different and had taken them all away to Professor Snape's office.
Aurora thought she might have to wait for the Slytherin trash collection in the morning to retrieve the flowers Professor Sprout had given her.
It's a really juicy idea. Aurora frowned and left the hospital wing.
"What to do?" She opened Salazar's diary and scrawled ghost characters on it with her wand. "I left my flowers at a professor's."
Salazar narrowed his eyes, the gold in his snakeeyes almost burning, and after barely making out what the other person had written, hissed the letter back: "I'm more concerned about who the professor is."
'Why?
"If it was a professor you knew well or knew well, would you have made a point of letting me know?" The snake swam lazily, smoothing Aurora's writing with its body. Aurora sighed and asked suddenly, "What if you found a magic rose in your potions?"
Both heads of Slytherin houses, equally proficient in Potions, might not have reacted any differently to this?
Salazar sneers: "The garbage dump is at the back door of the school. You can get in with a lockpick charm. It's all handled by the house-elves every morning at half past four, you're welcome."
"..."
Although the worst outcome of their own imagination is just like this, but why is it said by others with a heavy sadness.
"But you may be in time soon." "Salazar added.
After reading this sentence, Aurora snapped her diary shut and ran back toward the greenhouse, her light skirt leaping and blooming with the girl's long hair under the rapid rotation.
She rushed into the greenhouse, neatly took the rubber gloves, put them on her thin arms, grabbed the scissors and cut a dazzling dragon's blood at the root.
With no time to wait for it to drain away the SAP that would eat away at even the tiniest bit of it, Aurora took off her gloves with one hand, wrapped the streamer that hung casually at her waist around her waist, secured the diary behind her back, covered it completely with her long hair, and then carefully pinched the dark green branches of the flower, lifting her skirt and rushing toward the ground.
The door to Snape's office was open, and a clear song poured out of the room like the white fog of a valley morning. It's a good sign, because it means you don't have to wade through all sorts of rubbish with house-elves at 4:30 tomorrow morning.
The bad news was that Snape was obviously in his office, so the tea roll unlocking function didn't work, which was sad.
She pressed her lips together and finally sped into the Potions Professor's office.
The thick earth overhead shut out all sunlight and heat, and the dark corridors were empty and as cold as the Atlantic Ocean 10,000 feet below.
For a moment, Aurora thought she was the Titanic of seventy-one years ago, heading inexorably towards an iceberg called Snape.
...
At last, the rose returned to its desk, and the tea roll touched its delicate petals with his lanky fingers, while the green leaves on top of his head quivered merrily.
Aurora freed the diary from her waistband, opened it and wrote good night, then kissed the tea roll and Brett as usual, and climbed into bed and opened some loose books from the library.
Early the next morning, as Aurora and Caroline arrived at the table for a hearty breakfast brought by the elves, it became clear that something was wrong with everyone around them. It would be as normal as Professor Dumbledore's breakfast of custard tarts and honey milk if it were just the little badgers who gathered to mutter lovely gossip.
But if even Slytherin was talking in twos and threes, and glancing over to Hufflepuff's long table from time to time, something was going to happen or had happened.
For, as a rule, Slytherins were not inclined to cast their eyes across the room.
Aurora scooped up a spoonful of raspberry sauce and spread it on toast as she grabbed the nachos and toast in front of her, then added lettuce leaves and tomato slices and onion rings, some slices of ham and beef sauce, and a cup of pumpkin juice for the perfect breakfast pairing. She can eat the same meals in order for an entire school year, like last year.
Then Cecilia sat silently beside Aurora with her dinner plate, her soft brown hair brushing Aurora's arm. With a wary glance at the Slytherin side, who also had their backs against the wall, she whispered, "Aurora, did you visit Professor Snape yesterday?"
Aurora froze for a moment and nodded strangely. "What's wrong?"
Puzzled, she followed her roommate's gaze around her and saw many looks of admiration, surprise and sympathy, most notably Slytherin's disdain and sneers.
"Did you really look for him? Are you really going to bring him flowers, Merlin?" Cecilia stared at her partner, her blue eyes full of wonder.
"Flowers? Aurora weighed the word on the tip of her tongue for a while, rolling it around in her mouth like a sugar ball, and deciding that the blood of the dragon was a difficult plant to define as a flower, asked, "Who did you hear that from?"
"That's what everyone says." She seemed to take Aurora's avoidance as acquiescence, and her expression grew more frightening. Aurora, for some reason, suddenly remembered that Remus had made a similar, if less exaggerated, look when she had heard that Snape was a professor at Hogwarts when she had taken her to school.
Aurora suddenly had a bad premonition, but her point was always clear, and she continued to ask, "Who are they?"
"That's a lot of people. Last night, several people said they saw you go to Professor Snape with the rose that Professor Sprout sent you." Cecilia rattled off the whole story. "And then I saw you get rejected and come out with a rose. Are you all right?"
The sympathy in her eyes was genuine.
Aurora paused for a moment, then slowly turned her head to look across the wall at Slytherin and realized that they had been looking at themselves all along. The discovery made the beef and tomato taste like raw bone water in her mouth and stuck in her throat.
So it's really bad to have fewer people. Hogwarts takes in only forty or fifty students a year, and the whole school has fewer teachers and students than fish in the black lake, and everything can fly around the castle in a moment like a bird with wings.
"I don't know how you believe in such things." Aurora, mentally tossing a coin in silence for the Hogwarts population, sighed helplessly and licked her sauce-stained fingertip. Maybe it's because the gossip is about Professor Bat, who looks like he's afraid to cry, so it's a conversation starter whether it sounds like it or not? It sounds exciting, after all.
Human curiosity.
"What did you do yesterday?" "Cecilia asked, watching her initial surprise and lack of response fade.
Aurora rolled her eyes and continued cutting the breakfast on the plate, where the rich gravy and sauces swirled on the white China plate. "The intern at the hospital campus had the wrong potion ingredients, so I went to change them. They are different plants at all. They are just a little more festive and a little more anxious. But do you believe that? Why don't you ask Amanda at the school hospital, she didn't just send one, she sent a bunch!"
And it's not just one person who believes it. Aurora looked across at her fellow student, who was staring at her with strange but halting eyes. She was holding half a lettuce leaf in her mouth and biting it inch by inch as if it were noodles.
"Because your Potions, no matter how much Professor Snape revises the standards, will always beat them. They all say you went to great lengths to get Professor Snape's attention." Cecilia's voice sounded a little uncomfortable, and the tangle and sympathy in her eyes, like those of a doctor dealing with a terminally ill patient, were so thick they almost dribbled out.
Aurora's fork slipped in her hand, and the hard fork and plate made a short, sharp sound. She thought it might be time to turn the Salazar plug on for good. At least Cecilia was right to warn that tramping on the wire was not a permanent solution. If Salazar was there to help her learn, now she's there to learn.
You can't expect a man who is disgusted by people being near him to have a good reaction to such childish and ridiculous rumors. Of course, there was no need to think too much about it, given that Snape didn't seem to be reacting to the long-held idea among students that the Dean of Slytherin was a vampire who transforms in the middle of the night.
But the truth is, nothing happens if you don't make any mistakes in front of him. It was too much of a challenge for him. Although Aurora didn't have the great ambition of becoming an Auror, she didn't have to be one of his most impressive blacklisted students, did she?
In a word, risk aversion is the best way.
"But he doesn't look very kind, does he?" Aurora thought so, and simply followed the other person's words, "I admire the kind of person who is gentle and wise, full of gentleman and humor, you know, personality is more reliable than appearance."
The little girl looked wide-eyed at her roommate. "You mean the Ravenclaw boys?"
Aurora shook her head and replied earnestly, "I mean Professor Dumbledore."
Cecilia was suddenly petrified.
Aurora dropped the last bit of mango pudding in front of her into her mouth, and her eyes fell on the very center of the teachers' table, looking at the headmaster, who was gleaming from coat to beard and hair, and saying, "It's a pity Potions aren't taught by Professor Dumbledore, or you'd know that sometimes stepping on the line and being first is a real matter of teeth."
Trembling, Cecilia returned with her plate. Aurora took her last sip of pumpkin juice and began to think about Potions and other things for the afternoon.
She wasn't too worried about the longevity of this episode, knowing that for a bunch of schoolboy wizards cooped up in castles with imaginations big enough to hold an entire interstellar universe, gossip was the last thing on campus.
They come and go with mind-boggling speed, they never repeat themselves, and they even produce causal connections long after that would have put Holmes to shame. So never underestimate the power of the masses.
...
The afternoon Potions lesson was as grim and dull as ever. Snape had surprised the class with a pop quiz covering everything that had been covered since the beginning of the year.
Aurora huddled in the most inconspicuous corner of a stone classroom filled with shadows and the students' low laments. The look on the face of a nearby classmate as she opened the parchment paper was as painful as if she were tearing her skin with punishment and carving the words into it with a hot iron needle until hot blood flowed.
What an iconic look. You can tell what class they're in by looking at it.
Aurora smoothed out the test, then picked up her quill and examined the questions. She got a mean look back.
The time is forty minutes, not a lot of questions but the quality. Time was up when the last speck of pale green sand fell from the top of the hourglass near Snape's desk. Then he took the paper back and began to announce the answers to the quiz.
It's a stomach-churning habit, Posting the answer as soon as you put it in, and cutting you in while your memory is still fresh. Aurora guessed that their Potions professor was enjoying himself, in the face of all the low whines in the room.
After all, he was going to be tortured by those horrible papers, so he might as well get there first.
I can't believe they're going to spend seven years hurting each other with this potions master. It was only the second year, and it was clear to Aurora that she was losing her nerve.
She looked up, scanned her most uncertain answers with her brown eyes, then silently took Salazar's diary from her bag, placed it on the table where it was hidden by the raised columns of the wall, and wrote:
"Just had a Potions quiz."
Salazar erased the words with his tail and slowly replied, "Can I recommend the best place to kill yourself? The castle plans were finalized by me, and I think I can give you a little professional guidance. You can go big or quiet if you want."
Aurora, with a roll of her eyes, knew she could not hear anything nice from a standard Slytherin. She added, "I think I really need to find a way to get my homework not to step on the line so precisely."
"That's not easy. Next time you hand in a blank paper, I promise you won't step on the line in a minute." Salazar smiles, and the words in his dazzling handwriting make you want to vomit blood.
"Yes, Sir, because that would put me straight at the bottom." Aurora strained, almost puncturing the parchment. "Couldn't you be more positive about your suggestions and opinions?"
"The way I see it is, it's very difficult to make up for what you were born with, and the advice is to start over in your next life."
"... Thank you for your willingness to recognize my efforts."
"I'm denying your innate brain condition."
"..."
Aurora gave the corners of her mouth a twitch, then quickly and calmly dipped her quill back into the ink and began to write vigorously on the page. "Dear Sir, have you ever heard of a game called Snake?"
Salazar cocked his head keenly, hissed the letter, and stared warily at the little girl with his brilliant golden snake eyes.
Then Aurora began to put pen to paper again, scribbling randomly all over the page, quickly destroying the blank space around Salazar.
The serpent froze for a moment, followed by the rising anger caused by the OCD being triggered. He cleaned the pages faster than ever, with the look of a perverted murderer who had just killed someone and was trying to get rid of them.
Aurora took her time and spilled more ink on the page, reflecting that this was probably the most exciting snake game in the world.
As she thought about it, and watched Salazar's deft, sophisticated manner in his diary, Aurora burst out laughing.
"Is what I'm saying so funny? Field. ' The deep voice of a true snake, cold and unmistakably warning, fell into the girl's ear, the all-too-familiar splendour of a tone that almost made Aurora's scalp tingle.
She reflexively closed the diary, looked up at Snape, who was standing at the front of the room, and answered as flatly as she could, "No, Sir. You did it perfectly."
"Then what are you laughing at?" Snape raised his eyebrows, raised his chin a little in his habit, and the cold gaze fell oppressively over him, reminiscent of a cobra that had raised its head.
Aurora considered this for a moment, and then answered, with serious nonsense, "From the joy of acquiring new knowledge?"
One of the Slytherins in the front row, who was drinking, had predictably sprayed his deskmate in the face. For the first time since the deathly silence in the room, the Snakes and Badgers laughed together.
Snape's facial muscles twitched and his eyes darted at all the students. "Silence!"
Then, with quick strides, he stepped down from the podium and stood in front of Aurora, blocking the only light source. Aurora looked up at him, and her vision fell into a vast expanse of dark gray, clearly reflecting the shape of the other. The Potions Professor looked down at her, too. There seemed to be magic in his dark eyes, so that no one's shadow could make a mark in them.
Snape reached out, thrust his long, dark birch wand behind the post, pointed it over the cover of the diary and pulled it out. "What are you writing?"
"... Write poetry?" Aurora unconsciously bit her lip, her eyes falling to the journal in a panic, her mind racing with Salazar's name.
What happened to being invisible to the touch? ! Why are you here at a time like this? !
Snape frowned at the diary for a moment; he could feel the faint ripples of dark magic in it. But he wasn't sure, because the wave was so vague, like an illusion, that it disappeared in a flash, impossible to grasp.
Almost unconsciously, he used a spell to test the dark arts, but the diary did not respond, as a normal diary should.
He glanced up at Aurora and continued to pick open the upside down shell of the diary with his wand without expression, turning the pages of parchment with the tip of his wand. The crisp clattering of the pages fell on Aurora's auditory nerve, sharp as a dagger slicing through the silk, as if Snape were not turning over a diary but prying open her pale bones one by one.
Finally, a large number of beautiful fonts appeared, bustling as a group of blooming summer flowers. Snape looked darkly up at the pale girl and commanded, "Read!"
Aurora followed Snape's direction with bewilderment, her eyes wandering over the page. The words passed through her eyes but were rejected out of her mind. She had no idea what she was reading, but repeated them mechanically, filled with the shock and horror of the discovery of Salazar's diary.
How is she going to explain the diary? And why does this guy Salazar's handwriting seem to be changing again? It became like a woman's handwriting, unlike any of his previous styles, too soft and delicate.
Has he spent over a thousand years studying how to make his handwriting look so versatile?
"You are the tsunami of clouds, tearing me apart on all sides.
You are a blade that cuts through my chest and heart.
I run and fall, fear and desire.
You could just say yes and make me give my life away.
I was on the ropes, and you smiled.
-- Here, S.S."
Aurora finished dreamily, then looked up blankly at Snape, whose face was as hard as a carefully crafted mask. The whole room gaped at her, Aurora turned her head to meet Cecilia's face as if struck by lightning, and her logical nerves finally began to tremble and resume their work.
She looked down at the words again, then stayed for three seconds, suddenly wanting to die with the diary.
"Would you believe me if I told you that S.S. is actually Salazar Slytherin?" Aurora looked earnestly at Snape. They didn't even bother to give them their usual smirk.
It will catch fire on its own. Aurora was sure.
I don't know if it's too late to drop out.