When the Circle Burns

The library at Hogwarts was not often empty, especially not on cold nights when students huddled near the fireplaces with scrolls and parchment. But Elara Thorne knew its quietest corners. She'd known them within a week of arriving. She moved like someone bred for silence, and the castle seemed to respect it.

It was late when Minerva McGonagall found her there.

The older witch didn't speak until she was seated beside her, a faint shimmer of disillusionment fading from her form. Elara didn't look up from her book, but she closed it slowly and set it down on the table between them.

They didn't speak for a while.

It was a rule between them: no need for immediate words.

"You've handled Severus better than most," Minerva finally said, her voice a low murmur, more amused than concerned.

Elara's mouth curled ever so faintly. "He's persistent. But not unkind. Not yet."

"He's growing frustrated."

"I know."

Another silence. Comfortable. Then Minerva looked over her glasses, expression softening.

"You're certain this is what you want?"

Elara's gaze dropped to her hands folded neatly on the table. "Yes."

Minerva didn't press further. She never did.

Only those who had earned Elara's trust knew the truth—and even then, it was parceled out like rare elixirs. McGonagall knew more than most. But even she had never seen Elara without the glamour.

Still, there was an understanding between them. A quiet truce. One forged in late-night tea, long walks beyond the wards, and the occasional chess match that Elara almost never won.

Snape noticed.

Of course he noticed.

The castle might be vast, but the network of its occupants was tighter than a wand's core. He'd seen them once in the astronomy tower just past curfew—Minerva's silhouette faint in the distance, Elara's head bowed toward her, both women walking slowly toward the inner stairwell.

No words had reached him.

But he knew the look of alliance when he saw it.

He didn't like it.

Not because he trusted Minerva less—she was loyal to the bone—but because the very idea that someone, anyone, had access to Elara Thorne's inner life before he could decode even a fraction of it...

It burned.

A week later, he staged his inquiry.

It was at dinner, casual as candlelight could make it, when he turned to Elara—who, as always, sat with perfect posture, her plate half-finished—and said:

"Tell me, did you enjoy your time in Northern Europe?"

Her fork paused for half a second too long.

"I've enjoyed many things in many places," she said without turning to him.

A beat.

"You speak Durmstrang's dialect well."

That got her.

She turned just slightly—barely enough to mark her attention—and met his eyes with a flatness that bordered on warning.

"So do you."

He didn't blink. "I was never invited."

"I never invited myself."

Her gaze lingered a moment more, then drifted back to her meal.

A lesser man might've called it a dead end.

Snape felt his pulse in his throat.

That night, his dreams were sharp.

He didn't remember the details, but he woke with his body wound tight, the heat under his skin unreasonable for the chill of his dungeon quarters. He threw off the covers and stood, pacing in the dark, barefoot and unsteady.

This is ridiculous.

He pulled a potion from his nightstand—one to calm nerves, if not minds—and drank half of it.

But it wasn't anxiety he felt.

It was... distraction.

The kind that dug into the chest, knotted itself under the skin, and refused to dislodge.

And it always came back to her.

He hated that.

He hated how he thought of her—too often. In pieces. Her silence. Her eyes. The way she never stumbled over words, yet never offered them freely.

He found himself thinking of the way her fingers looked when she turned the pages of a book. How her silver hair never seemed out of place. How she moved without effort but always with intention.

The unyielding beauty of her was maddening—but it wasn't the beauty itself that captured him.

It was the barrier around it.

What kind of magic did it take to build such walls?

And what would it take to break them?

He sat down heavily at his desk, quill in hand, and began to write.

Lucius—
She attended Durmstrang. That much is confirmed. I need more. She is speaking to McGonagall often, but only in private. The Headmistress knows something.
Why is she here, Lucius?
Why is she hiding?

He paused.

Then wrote what he hadn't yet admitted.

I cannot think clearly around her.

He stared at the words.

Then, as if shamed by his own honesty, he scratched the last line out with aggressive strokes of ink until it was illegible.

Elara felt the change.

Not in words. Never in words. But in the atmosphere.

Snape looked at her differently now.

More covert. More calculating. And—something else.

Something... quieter. Hungrier.

She saw it in the way he glanced her way when he thought she wasn't looking. The way his fingers curled tighter around his goblet. The way he didn't ask questions anymore, but simply stood closer—just close enough to disrupt her concentration.

She did not speak of it.

She didn't need to.

But when he passed her in the corridor one evening and their sleeves brushed—only barely—she caught the flicker of heat in his expression.

And that shook her.

Because it wasn't curiosity anymore.

It was longing.

Furious, unspoken, unwanted longing.

And she had no idea how long she could ignore it.

The castle creaked that night with the wind of the gathering storm.

Both of them stood at their windows in separate wings of the castle, staring out into the darkness, their faces lit only by the flicker of fire.

He thought of her.

She felt it.

And somewhere in the twisting halls between them, something had begun to shift again—neither of them willing to acknowledge it.

But neither of them could stop it, either.