Chapter 7: Dark Burden Snape (Patreon)

The night wind had blown across the Black Lake all night long.

When the first light of morning slanted through the narrow arched windows high in the tower and fell across the deep crimson velvet bed curtains, Yuzo's quiet, freshly colorful school life at Hogwarts officially began.

It was something of a marvel, really.

Before he crossed that bizarre car-crash scene into this magical continent, Yuzo's grades in his past life had been scraping-by at best. He was a poor student who got dizzy at every dry math and science formula.

But now the lessons were about waving a wand and guiding the magic inside his body to pry at the rules of reality. That sense of exploring unknown game mechanics sent his enthusiasm for studying soaring to heights it had never reached.

In just a few days, Yuzo's performance in every subject already ranked among the more outstanding of the first-years.

His fastest progress by far was in Transfiguration, taught by the girl deputy headmistress with the pair of silver tabby cat ears, Minerva McGonagall.

On Tuesday morning in the Transfiguration classroom, sunlight streamed through the tall glass windows and cast bright patches across the neat rows of wooden desks.

Professor McGonagall, in her well-tailored dark green velvet robes, patrolled the aisles with her hands clasped behind her back.

Her wide-brimmed witch's hat sat perfectly straight on her head. Two fluffy cat ears occasionally poked their tips out from the shadow under the brim, twitching gently in time with the chanting that filled the room.

"...Your wrist movements must be crisp and clean. Don't draw extra circles in the air, meow."

Professor McGonagall stopped beside Ron's desk and looked at the matchstick in front of her, which hadn't reacted at all. Her delicate brows drew slightly together. "Focus your intent. Imagine the texture and luster of metal, meow."

Ron's face flushed red. Gripping her old wand, patched together with clear tape, she jabbed it furiously at the matchstick twice and mumbled the incantation. Apart from rolling a couple of turns across the desktop, the matchstick did nothing.

Beside her, Yuzo drew a deep breath.

He pictured in vivid detail the shape of a long, hard, slender metal skewer, then flicked his wrist steadily forward.

The rough little wooden stick on the desk trembled faintly, wrapped in his magic. Its wood fibers shrank and recombined, and in the blink of an eye it had become a gleaming silver skewer.

Diagonally behind him, two aisles over, Draco Malfoy was pinching her wand, trying to erase the wood grain from the tip of her matchstick.

When her sidelong glance caught the fully formed silver skewer on Yuzo's desk, the blonde girl's hand froze.

She turned and stared at the skewer for two seconds, then looked up at Yuzo's calm face. Quickly she looked away and spoke to Pansy beside her, several beats faster than usual. "...It's nothing special. Anyone who's read the upper years' theory notes in advance could do this in five minutes.

"My father taught me far more complicated Transfiguration techniques at home ages ago."

By now Professor McGonagall had been drawn over by the ripple of magic.

The girl deputy headmistress stepped forward, pinched the silver skewer between two pale fingers, and studied it carefully against the light from the window.

A clear look of approval appeared on her sixteen-year-old face, and the cat ears under her brim perked happily upward.

"A perfect material transformation, Mr. Yuzo. Five points to Gryffindor, meow."

Professor McGonagall set the skewer back on the desk, her emerald eyes full of satisfaction. "It seems you prepared quite thoroughly before class. Keep up that level of focus, meow."

Yuzo nodded politely in thanks.

The real reason he poured so much effort into Transfiguration, even practicing on feathers and blocks of wood every night in his single dorm room, was very practical. It all came down to the [Permanent Youthful Appearance] effect that came with the advanced Transfiguration art of [Animagus] in this world.

In Yuzo's hazy memories of his previous life, Animagus was supposed to be an obscure art: tedious to master, dangerous, and strictly registered and controlled by the Ministry of Magic. The whole British wizarding world might not produce more than a handful of successes in a hundred years.

In this all-girls parallel universe, however, everything had been turned upside down.

Honestly, how many girls in the world could resist the allure of the words "eternal youth"?

Master Animagus while young, and your body and looks would stay forever fixed at the peak of your mental age.

Driven by that heaven-defying perk, nearly every beauty-loving girl at Hogwarts treated Animagus training as the ultimate required course of her life, starting from the day she walked through the school gates.

Upper-year girls gathered in the corridors to discuss how to sense their true animal forms, and under which moonlight it worked best to hold a mandrake leaf in your mouth.

As for how common the art was among wizarding families, Yuzo had picked up plenty of vivid gossip in his spare time over the past few days from Ron and her two house-hopping twin older sisters, Georgina and Fredrica.

Then, after class on Thursday noon, the four of them sat on the sunlit courtyard steps eating sandwiches.

The twin sisters hung off Ron's shoulders, one on each side, and grinned as they showed Yuzo the photo album they'd brought from home.

"...See that, Yuzo? Those are our mum and dad." Georgina pointed at a photo of a young man and woman who looked barely past twenty, arm in arm and smiling in front of the vegetable garden at the Burrow. She sounded rather proud. "They both mastered Animagus back when they were at Hogwarts.

"Our dad Arthur spends all day tinkering with Muggle plugs and car parts, and he's as simple-minded as a boy fresh out of school. Our mum Molly's got a loud voice, but all she ever thinks about is baking pies and knitting jumpers."

"So there you go," Fredrica picked up, chewing a slice of ham and gesturing with her hand. "Their mental ages have stayed locked in their golden early twenties, and now they look only a few years older than Georgina and me.

"Every time the whole family goes shopping in Diagon Alley, passersby think they're the big brother and sister taking a bunch of little sisters on an outing."

Beside them, Ron bit off half her sandwich in one go, a dab of salad cream on the corner of her mouth.

She wiped it off with the back of her hand, rubbed it on the hem of her old robe, and added offhandedly, "But in some families, it's a completely different picture.

"I've heard my dad say that Mr. Lucius Malfoy is another wizard who's mastered Animagus."

Ron wore a gloating grin. "But that guy spends all day in the Ministry of Magic's rat race, scheming against this one and sucking up to that one. His spirit's been completely hollowed out by all that grubby political nonsense.

"Even with Transfiguration propping him up, he looks like a pale, paunchy, greasy middle-aged man in his forties.

"And Malfoy's mum, Lady Narcissa, lounges around the manor in luxury with a much simpler mind, so she still looks like a girl in her early twenties.

"My dad says that when the two of them go to a Muggle theater, the clueless Muggles around them stare as if they're some scandalous old-husband-young-wife couple. It drives Lucius up the wall."

Yuzo listened to these amusing high-society secrets and silently gave them a thumbs-up.

He was determined to keep his handsome youthful looks until the day he died. He refused to end up like Lucius, who, though he hadn't had his lower half snipped off in this feminized world, was still battered by years and petty troubles. In his heart, Yuzo had long since moved Transfiguration to the top of his priority list.

"Speaking of the animals people turn into as Animagi..."

Harriet, who had been sitting quietly nearby sipping pumpkin juice, suddenly set down her cup. She pushed up the round glasses on her nose, and a hint of confusion showed in her emerald eyes. "Yuzo, Hermione, do you know what habits bats in the Scottish Highlands usually have?"

Hermione had a thick copy of A Beginner's Guide to Transfiguration open on her knees. She looked up at the question. "Most bats are active at night and hunt insects by echolocation. But the wind's too strong at the height of the tower, so ordinary bats rarely fly up to our dorm level..."

"What's wrong, Harriet?"

"I think it's strange too."

Harriet reached up and brushed aside the black wisps of hair on her forehead, revealing the lightning scar. She looked troubled. "It's these past few nights. Every time I'm about to turn out the light and sleep, I see a really big black bat crouching on the stone ledge outside my window.

"It doesn't squeak, and it doesn't go after bugs. It just clings to the window frame without moving and stares at my bed through the glass.

"Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, it's still hanging there. It only flaps away when it's nearly dawn."

Ron shivered and rubbed her arms. "That sounds really creepy... It can't be some kind of dark creature, can it?

"Next time it comes, I'll chase it off with my wand!"

Harriet gave a slightly embarrassed smile. "No... Apart from the gloomy look in its eyes, it hasn't done anything bad. Last night I even tried leaving a little biscuit on the ledge outside, but it seems to have kicked it off in disgust."

Yuzo, sitting at the edge of the steps, heard the key phrases "really big black bat," "stares at Harriet's bed all night," and "gloomy eyes," and the corner of his mouth twitched on its own.

In under a second, he had pieced together the strange bat's true identity.

Aside from that Potions professor, who wore black robes all day and nursed a deep obsession with Harriet's mother, who else in all of Hogwarts Castle could pull off such stalker behavior as turning into a bat in the dead of night and keeping watch outside a young girl's dorm window until dawn?!

Harriet herself was too oblivious to realize that the bat was none other than the head of Slytherin. But Yuzo didn't dare tear that paper window open in broad daylight. All he could do was laugh awkwardly and advise Harriet to draw her curtains tight before bed.

Yuzo soon discovered, however, that the gloomy older-sister professor with the bat Animagus form didn't keep her lurking gaze on Harriet alone.

When Friday morning came, the first-years followed the cold, damp stone steps all the way down into the Potions classroom deep in the castle dungeons. There, Yuzo got a thorough lesson in what an undeserved calamity felt like.

The dungeon was several degrees colder than the main castle.

The Gryffindor and Slytherin first-years sat quietly at the lab benches on either side of the room.

With a muffled bang, Severa Snape strode in through the door.

She wore a black high-collared robe buttoned right up to her chin, its long hem rolling and surging behind her.

Though the garment was conservative and loose, as she hurried up to the front of the room, it still clearly outlined the figure beneath the black cloth: a tall, full, strikingly curvy mature beauty.

The young professor stood behind the lectern. Her slightly greasy, straight black hair hung down either side of her pale, gaunt face, and two dark smudges of sleeplessness sat beneath her eyes.

Her obsidian eyes, deep and cold, swept slowly across the room. The students who had been murmuring to each other shut their mouths at once, not daring to take a full breath.

Snape picked up the roll book and began calling names in a low voice.

When she reached the name "Harriet Potter," Snape paused for half a second.

Yuzo clearly saw the gloomy older sister lift her eyelids. Her gaze lingered a moment on Harriet's face, which looked quite a lot like James's but had a pair of emerald eyes.

To Yuzo's surprise, Snape didn't sneer the way she had in the original story.

She only pressed her pale lips together slightly. A flicker of complicated softness and struggle crossed the depths of her eyes, and then she looked away as if she had seen nothing.

Then those icy black eyes slid half a foot to the left and pinned themselves to the face of Yuzo, who sat next to Harriet, barely an arm's length away...

A chill ran down Yuzo's back.

He couldn't tell whether it was because being the only boy in school made him far too conspicuous in this dungeon. Or maybe it was because his friendly closeness with Harriet over the past few days, always side by side in corridors, courtyards and the Great Hall, had struck some sensitive, twisted nerve in this stalker-sister who turned into a bat every night to watch Harriet's window.

Whatever the reason, the wrath and malice that the original story reserved for the Savior now landed on him alone, without the slightest deviation.

"Mr. Yuzo."

Snape closed the roll book and braced her hands on the edge of the lectern, her tall frame leaning slightly forward as her black hair slid off her shoulders. "It seems the one boy Hogwarts admitted as an exception this year is already used to basking in the adoration of a crowd of girls...

"Tell me, Yuzo," Snape strode down from behind the lectern on her long legs, one step at a time, her high-heeled leather boots clicking sharply on the cold flagstones, "what would I get if I added powdered asphodel root to an infusion of wormwood?"

It was a ridiculous, out-of-syllabus trick question.

Hermione was practically bursting beside him, her hand stretched high in the air, but Yuzo had never memorized such obscure recipes. All he could do was shake his head honestly. "I don't know, Professor."

A sneer rose at once on Snape's pale face.

"What a pity. It seems being special in gender doesn't grant you the wits to match."

Snape folded her arms and looked down at Yuzo from above. "Then let's try again. If I asked you to find a bezoar, where would you look? And what's the difference between monkshood and wolfsbane?"

"I don't know, Professor... but I think Hermione Granger would know the answer." Yuzo tried to borrow Harry's famous line from the original story as a shield.

The gloomy older sister wasn't buying it at all.

She shot a cold glance at Hermione, who instantly ducked her head back down, then turned away at Yuzo's desk. Her tall, graceful back radiated a chill of low pressure.

"Given Mr. Yuzo's contempt for this class and his laziness in preparing beforehand," Snape turned back around, her black robes cutting a sharp arc through the air, "five points from Gryffindor."

The entire practical lesson that followed became a one-sided torture session for Yuzo.

While they brewed a simple potion to cure boils, Snape planted herself beside Yuzo's bench for almost the whole time, like a black door guardian.

When Harriet chopped her dried nettles into uneven sizes, Snape simply passed over it without lifting an eyelid. When Ron pounded snake fangs too hard and a few drops of strange green slime splattered across her freckled face, Ron didn't care. She wiped it off with the back of her hand and rubbed it on her robe, and Snape didn't spare her so much as a glance.

But the moment Yuzo picked up the scales, or even stirred half a turn too many in the cauldron with the long-handled copper ladle, Snape's merciless venomous tongue came down on his head.

"...Is your wrist made of wood, Yuzo? Three turns counterclockwise. Who gave you permission to stir three and a half?

"...Look at your porcupine quills, so uneven they look like a troll stamped on them. Another five points from Gryffindor."

Only when the bell finally rang above the dungeon did Yuzo feel his tense shoulders loosen a little.

As he gathered the herb scraps from his bench, he watched the back of the black-haired older sister at the lectern, tidying her lesson notes, her figure graceful and her whole body steeped in resentment. His temples throbbed.

Snape was stuffing the last roll of parchment into her leather bag. Those deep eyes with their heavy dark circles passed through the rising potion steam and once again locked coldly onto Yuzo...