Harry Potter : Chapter 56: Snowflakes I

The sun shone balefully through the faint cover of clouds of the barely-there spring, casting a lukewarm light over the stone floor and the increasingly filled shelves of the Rùnda: not much had changed since Minerva's addiction to our secret room.

The double doors stood as impressive as ever, a crystallized sequence of changes whose links could be found only in our Gryffindor witch's instinctive understanding of what was and what could be.

The cabinet with my many different brews remained against one wall, while our fireplace blazed happily, quietly warming up the otherwise cold room. My eyes trickled over the orderly bounded notes on the shelves, the chosen tomes that either Tom, Minerva, or I owned and left in place for the other two to use, and the personal large desks that hosted our current projects.

Tom kept a blank stack of parchment on the left of his table, with a single inkwell with quill ready at a slight angle against the edge of the unadorned chair where he sat.

Minerva maintained an order that was almost obsessive among her belongings, with bookmarks placed sequentially in the tomes she kept in a neat stack, ready for consultation, and a precise line containing the three different colors she used to differently underline her notes.

On the other hand, my desk was massive with my notes, books, quills, and inkwells describing a messy half-circle that spanned across topics with a secret logic line linking them together: when studying and researching as I did.

I simply could almost never contain myself to a single subject, because every implication of the effects of Transfiguration should have a similar one in Charms, every stir needed for a potion had an exact cause in the properties derived by ingredients that could be influenced by the stars themselves.

But my attention wasn't on any of my ongoing projects: Minerva was reading quietly in a high-back armchair, and the topic she was getting started on interested me greatly, if only because of its long-reaching possibilities.

"Alchemy, uh?" I asked as I sat next to her, my eyes darting over the open pages before she closed the tome, glancing at me with an exasperated mannerism that I enjoyed being able to cause.

"You could at least have the decency of letting me actually study before badgering me for my understanding of the subject at hand, Rubeus." her green eyes were like shards of glass as she stared at me and the shy sun managed to shine a bit over them.

"As always, my notes and thoughts will appear on the shelves once I'm done, and not a second earlier."

"Oh, come on..."

"Stop pestering me," she scoffed as she opened once more her tome, "clearly you're only looking for something to distract yourself with, but I'm rather busy, find Tom and play with him a little, won't you? If I manage well enough, professor Dumbledore might introduce me to Flamel himself!"

My eyes widened at her revelation and I wisely kept my mouth shut. Flamel, uh? More than his achievements in Alchemy, what interested me was the sheer amount of insanity that he might have witnessed in the centuries he spent alive.

And while I knew nothing of the subject in question, I doubted that it was all that the man ever researched in his long, long life. Nevertheless, I stifled a chuckle at Minerva's snappish reaction while I forcefully stopped myself from thinking about my raid at the Gaunt's home.

I'll have to have a talk with Tom at some point, I've already delivered the punishment, but I should try and make him reconsider his puppeteering ways when they involve me, if only tangentially.

I could resume my analysis of Divination or try and seek a more precise connection between each ingredient and combinations of numbers, hoping to find an unreasonably powerful combination: but while the first option attracted me somewhat.

The latter felt like a waste of time For all of their faults when it came to magical research, wizards and witches had always been intent with tries upon tries, hoping that a large enough number of experiments would support the thesis that at the time they fancied.

Ultimately, I'd have to fish out the oldest tomes that focused on the study of ingredients only, and start compiling a catalog. What wouldn't I give for a file Excel...

I took a deep breath and looked once more out of the circular window of stained glass that dominated the nearest wall, treetops that occasionally still lacked leaves because of the slowly receding winter were like skeletal hands attempting to emerge from the otherwise emerald sea of the pines, while the coat of clouds hid from me the open sky.

Maybe because I felt like I had been remotely successful in my last attempts at curing lycanthropy, maybe because I was simply tired, or maybe it was the relief borne of my last conversation within the Diadem. In any case, for the first time since I could remember I didn't feel like studying mindlessly until inspiration struck me.

And Minerva was such a great sport at offering a distraction: "Have you met Fawkes?"

"Professor Dumbledore mentioned his phoenix companion, but no, I haven't had the pleasure." the Gryffindor witch gave up on her studies and balanced the closed boon on the armrest of her armchair, fixing me with a penetrating gaze as she did so.

Not for the first time, I found myself noticing how apt her Animagus transformation was: there was something predatory about her when she decided to bring the full scope of her attention onto you, and I didn't need to see her play Quidditch to know that the game lent itself well to her chasing instinct.

Still, with the mention of Fawkes I had managed to rouse her from her 'studying' mindset, which turned her from an unresponsive stone wall into something far more reactive and insightful.

As if to confirm my opinion, she spoke before I could needle her about my random encounter with the firebird: "You seem more relaxed, Rubeus... less wound up." her green eyes never left mine, but I spotted the faint twitching of the tendons of her left hand.

Were she in cat form, I didn't doubt that her tail would be moving erratically, as if she was about to spot a prey to chase.

"Maybe I am." I shrugged, deciding to give her what she wanted before she tried to hound it out of me, my mind turning to my last meeting with my other-self into Ravenclaw Diadem.

"What happened?"

Once more, I turned my head from her towards the large window that allowed me to peer over the treetops. How to explain what I had decided without colouring her expectations of Tom?

"I know that I can't control everything, and that I'll simply have to deal with all of the consequences of my choices instead of nitpicking the good and ignoring the bad."

Minerva snorted uncharacteristically as she rose from her seat, her back ramrod-straight as she eyed the rest of the Rùnda.

"Any of my brothers could have told you that, even if they need a bit of ear-tweaking to remember it from time to time... I'd like for them to have access to the Rùnda once they become mature enough to appreciate it."

I blinked slowly while I returned my attention to the witch that was now looking almost wistfully at the bound notes present on the shelves.

"I didn't know you had brothers." My mind, however, was already running along another train of thought: the Rùnda was fantastic to have only for me and my 'chosen ones' but I wouldn't spend all my life in Hogwarts, the world was simply too vast for me to not explore, as I had already been doing. 

But I don't want to turn this into something cheap that everyone can access, or something inherited only by virtue of blood.

"You never asked." Minerva shrugged, mimicking uncaringness while I could hear a slight reproach in her voice, "It's not like our friendship is built around anything but the study of magic, is it?"

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