Chapter Five

Don't look like a tourist, don't look like a tourist, don't look like a tourist… Do not look like a tourist!

The mantra wasn’t helping.

Willow was following behind Minerva, gawking at every talking painting, moving staircase, or inquisitive ghost that crossed their path.

Hogwarts was shaping up to be a serious trip. Willow wasn't sure what she had been expecting, but it certainly wasn't this. There were so many enchantments, layered one on top of the next, creating intricate illusions, powerful wards, and the occasional unexpected side effect. The odd trick steps on the staircases were even impressive, in a funky, kind of irritating way.

It wasn't that any one spell was beyond her abilities, but there was so much here that she had never even dreamed of trying. Most were too incredibly bizarre, too amusingly frivolous, or too wholly unexpected; she never would have anticipated the sheer volume of magic here, or the varied application of it.

However, beneath her awe, there was a thread of discomfort that grew as the minutes ticked by. Wicca was all about working with nature, and while it could be used to create wildly unnatural effects, any transgressions of natural laws had to be undertaken with the utmost care and consideration. Willow had learned that lesson the hard way.

The hardest.

The thought put a pall over the end of her trek from the infirmary to her new quarters. She had once told Giles that she just wanted to be 'Willow' again after her walk on the dark side. To a large extent she was, but some scars never really faded, and some old wounds tended to act up when the winds blew the right way, even if they were of a metaphysical sort and not tied directly to bone, skin, and sinew.

"Professor Rosenberg?" Minerva's voice cut through Willow's melancholy.

The redhead jerked to a stop, only then realizing that they had apparently reached their destination. Minerva was standing next to a largish painting of a gorgon whose serpentine hair was writhing and hissing in a snaky halo around her head. Willow couldn't decide whose stare was more disconcerting: Minerva's slightly exasperated, expectant regard, or the painting's haughty, crimson glare.

"Sorry, what?" Willow asked with a little apologetic smile.

Minerva sighed and Willow got the distinct impression that the other professor had been talking for some time while she had been busy spacing out. "This is Euryale," Minerva said with an introductory hand gesture towards the painting. "Once you have arranged a password with her, she will make sure that no unauthorized people enter your quarters. Your belongings are inside. Do you remember how to get back to the Great Hall?" she asked curtly. When Willow nodded, she continued briskly, "Good, well… yes, good. Dinner will be served in an hour. I'm sure you will be hungry after your, ah, incapacitation."

Incapacitation. That was one way of putting it. Dawn had once called them her cracked-out conjuration comas when she though Willow wasn't listening. This one had lasted a little longer than usual, pushing twenty-four hours, but it had also been a long time since she had been so completely blindsided by that kind of power. Perhaps the duration of her 'incapacitation' had not been all that surprising.

Minerva continued, oblivious to the younger witch's ironic line of thought, "If you will excuse me, then I really should be on my way." She nodded politely and then bustled back in the direction from which they had just arrived.

Willow found herself in a dark hallway that had the kind of wet almost-smell that she associated with being underground. She was feeling overwhelmed and tired, in spite of her inadvertent nap, and very much alone. Well, maybe not technically alone. "So, um, Euryale?" she said tentatively, feeling more than a little awkward talking to a painting. "I'm sure you get this all the time, but are you, you know, the Euryale?"

Red, slitted eyes blinked slowly, inner membranes sliding transversely under scaly outer lids. "Yes," the gorgon hissed, bronze scaled hands planted firmly on her 'hips.' Could legless humanoids really have hips? Whatever, her hands were on something bony that seemed to occur in the lower half of her trunk region. "What is your password?" All of the 's' sounds were drawn out lazily, something like a drawl for the forked tongue set.

"Uh," Willow searched her mind for something familiar enough to remember, but funky enough to not be easily guessed. "How about 'Boca del Inferno?'"

The double lidded eyes blinked again, this time in surprise. "The mouth of hell?" the gorgon asked.

"Yeah, I, uh, used to live there. You speak Spanish?" Willow asked, equally surprised.

The gorgon's face fell into lazy lines again, but each and every snake head in her unruly mane was looking Willow's way with an air of curiosity and surprise. "I used to hang on the east wall of the library," she said, as if that explained everything.

"Oh." Willow paused for a long moment, not knowing how to respond to that. "Why did you get moved?"

The reptilian face altered alarmingly, bronze scales folding into a definite scowl. "There was an incident with a basilisk a few years ago. I will spare you the details, but suffice to say that moving me into a dungeon was apparently easier than dealing with the bigoted assumptions of various hysterical students and their parents."

"I… oh. I'm sorry?" This conversation was seriously getting off the beaten path, and Willow was too busy focusing on the word 'dungeon,' which when applied to her new quarters wasn't all that reassuring, to come up with a better response. Euryale only shrugged, her hair writhing once again. "So, um, Boca del Inferno?" Willow finally said weakly. The gorgon gestured with a bronze hand, and her canvas swung inwards smoothly, revealing a well-concealed doorway. Willow stepped through the portal, calling back a quick, "Thank you!" when she realized that the door was closing behind her.

She walked cautiously down the arched stone hallway until it opened into a large round room that certainly didn't look like any dungeon Willow had ever heard of. It was too clean and brightly lit for one. It also kind of looked like Tim Burton had decorated it while trying to channel Walt Disney. Eccentric didn't even begin to cover it. There was a definite water theme going on with the ornate furniture and various pieces of art, and it didn't take long for her to figure out why. The ceiling was dominated by a huge, round window providing a view of what appeared to either be one of the most elaborate illusions Willow had ever seen, or the real, live bottom of a lake. Once again, Willow's mouth dropped open in unabashed awe.

"Toto, I think we left Kansas about three dimensions back," she whispered to herself, turning around slowly under the unusual skylight.

Sunlight filtered through the water overhead, casting rippling patterns of light and shadow across the floor. There were fish swimming lazily overhead, and above them, Willow could just make out the feathered underbellies and churning webbed feet of a few ducks. There was a cluster of brightly colored snails collected to one side of the window, and some kind of freshwater kelp was drifting over them. She thought she saw a few crayfish as well, until she realized that the tiny arthropods had two sets of pinchers and a scorpion-like tail. Come to think of it, some of the fish looked pretty odd too, and did that one have another set of eyes growing down its belly?

She could, and probably would, have spent the next few hours gawking at the ceiling had she not bumped into an ornate end table and been forced to hurriedly rescue a Tiffany lamp, if Tiffany had done a bunch of LSD and started seeing fanged and flying sea turtles, from smashing on the stone floor. After that she didn't stop looking at the glass window overhead, but she did try to split her time between ogling at it and exploring the rooms.

There was a study, round again and nicely appointed with tons of empty shelves for books and whatever other teaching stuff she accumulated over the course of the semester. There was also a bedroom, of course, with closets and drawers cleverly hidden in the curving walls and a huge bed, flanked by simple wooden end tables. Another skylight was in this room, but it was made of stained glass. It portrayed a few koi swimming in a pond, quite literally, since the glass and lead had been enchanted to allow the images to move around the window, darting behind plants or watching her with their fishy glass eyes.

It was here that she found her luggage, safe, sound, and apparently unsearched, since the cantrips she had placed on the zippers were undisturbed. Seeing as how the hands on the funky un-clock in her living room were sneaking towards the word 'dinner,' she decided to be a little more proactive about exploring the bathroom. She was still in the clothes she had arrived in and although the school's nurse, Poppy, had given her the equivalent of a magical cat bath while she was passed out on an infirmary cot, she still felt kind of funky. Willow was determined to do everything in her power to make a good first, well maybe second, impression, and that included fresh clothes and good hygiene.

New outfit and toiletries bag in hand, she made her way to the bathroom. It was as impressive (and round) as the other rooms, with a large sink and vanity across from the door and a huge freestanding bathtub sitting in the middle of the room, supported by metalwork designed to look like coral formations. For once, it wasn't the decidedly decadent, if odd, décor that grabbed her attention. It was the array of spouts lining the far side of the tub. There were ten, all identical in appearance and all sporting various knobs, toggles, and catches, but no labels.

"Okay, this might be a little more exciting than I was expecting," Willow muttered bemusedly, although even she wasn't certain if she was referring to her impending bath or the entirety of the situation in which she found herself.

~*~*~*~

Willow did manage to find the Great Hall. Eventually. Dumbledore had found her wandering around some winding, seemingly endless corridor, trying to follow the directions a rather alarming ghost named Peeves had given her once she had finally admitted to herself that she was lost and had gone seeking help.

Having been rescued from the circular path she had been taking, Willow was advised that following any instructions provided by Peeves should only be undertaken under extreme duress, or in the event that she had many days' spare time to waste as well as an overdeveloped sense of masochistic humor. Navigating their way to the Great Hall had been basically uneventful after that, but once they arrived and the headmaster introduced her to the rest of the staff, Willow rapidly determined that Peeves wasn't the school's only owner of a conniving sense of whimsy.

Dumbledore's concept of the ideal seating arrangement for dinner defined 'trial by fire’.

~*~*~*~

Willow knew that as a representative from the Council of Watchers, she needed to keep an open mind about the situation here at Hogwarts until she had all of the facts. She was here as a Watcher; she needed to be calm, collected, and professional.

And Goddess if the woman sitting next to her wasn't making all of that very, very hard.

"Cornelius has asked me to help you in any way I can while you are here." Dolores Umbridge's tone, in its cloyingly sweet way, made it very clear that she thought that Willow would need a great deal of help during her stay at the school. "I know that your organization, in your own mugglish way, deals with half-breeds and the like on a regular basis, but this must be horribly confusing."

Truth be told, Willow was discovering that being treated like a particularly slow, semi-civilized troll seemed to help her maintain an amazing amount of focus on the important things in life. Like not strangling the Ministry's agent to death with her bare hands or transmuting the woman's pumpkin juice into sulfuric acid. In fact, Willow was so focused on Professor Umbridge that she hadn't even looked at the amazing illusion that covered the Hall's ceiling once since Dumbledore had introduced the people sitting around the staff table and shown her to her new seat, right between the darkly robed and darkly scowling wizard from the day before and this beastly woman.

Willow twisted her face into what she hoped was a polite smile. Either she was successful, or the frog-faced witch was simply too clueless to figure out that Willow was in serious danger of chipping a tooth under the force of her clenched jaw.

"Yes, this must all be positively terrifying for a wandless witch such as yourself," Professor Umbridge said with one of her grating, girlish giggles, as if the idea of Willow quaking in fear was the funniest thing in the world.

The words were out of Willow's mouth before she could stop them. "You know, come to think of it, I am pretty horrified right now."

An inelegant snort drew Willow's attention to the man on her right. Dumbledore had finally put a full name, rank, and serial number, well not exactly, to that face: Professor Severus Snape, potions master and her soon to be co-teacher in Applied Defense Against the Dark Arts. She glanced at him, vaguely hoping that he might rescue her from this conversational torture, but he appeared for all intents and purposes to be single-mindedly cutting his serving of roast beef into precise bite-sized pieces.

Professor Umbridge's spoke again, making it more than plain that Willow's dry sarcasm had been totally lost on the woman. "Well of course you are, but don't worry, I will make sure to keep a close watch over you until we can send you back where you belong."

Back where she belonged. Amazing. Willow had never realized that it was in fact possible to make a simper both condescending and degrading.

And thanks for the warning, frog-face.

If Dolores Umbridge thought that it was going to be easy to 'keep a close watch' on Willow Rosenberg, she had another thing coming.

The redhead smiled again in a pinched mimicry of gratitude before turning away to hide the fact that she was trying not to laugh… or gag… or perhaps both.

She poked at the food on her own plate with her fork. It did look pretty appetizing, even though her stomach was still roiling. What was it that Dumbledore had said? Oh yeah, 'Tuck in.' Willow knew that as a California girl, especially one who had developed most of her conversation skills alongside Buffy and Xander, she really wasn't in the best of positions to cast stones, but some of these British-isms took some getting used to.

She stole a few glances down the table while she pushed her food around her plate and was uncomfortable, if unsurprised, to find that basically every other member of the staff was doing the same thing. Most of the looks were curious, some were even a little hostile. The Divination professor, what was her name, Treelawny, Trueloany, whatever, was just unabashedly staring at her through her thick glasses. Hagrid kept giving her what he seemed to think passed for discrete, encouraging looks while Dumbledore was just casting benevolent-looking smiles indiscriminately around the table.

Come to think of it, the only person who wasn't inspecting her, unless it was extremely covertly, was Professor Snape.

Willow distracted herself with the food, which was really good once she got past the fact it was being served on gold plates. Sometime between her second helping of vegetables and the dessert's abrupt appearance, Professor Umbridge interrupted their dinner with an attention grabbing faux-cough before excusing herself from the table rather wordily.

Willow half expected the conversation at the table to pick up with the pink-clad she-demon's disappearance, but it didn't take her long to realize that there was still an interloper at the table: Willow herself. For some reason, it hadn't occurred to her how her official cover story might look to the rest of the staff, which in retrospect, was kind of silly. The Scoobies hadn't responded well to the Council sicking watchdogs on them either. Somehow, Willow had become the Wesley Wyndham-Pryce of Hogwarts.

This was turning into a weird inverted revisiting of her high school days in too many ways. In addition to being a temporary teacher and fashion reject, it was looking like she was going to get to add social leper to her resume once again. Joy. If the pattern held, there'd be a pack of Cordettes on the faculty and Dumbledore would get eaten by the end of the year.

Well, there was at least one thing she could do something about. She was no Wesley and Giles was no Travers. Nothing in Dumbledore's brief comments or instructions on their way to dinner had lead Willow to believe that she needed to actively alienate the rest of the faculty.

Especially not the ones who already knew why she was really here.

Professor Snape, for example, who was currently applying his eerily precise cutlery skills to the slice of pie in front of him. All his attention seemed riveted to the actions of his fork and knife, and as far as she could tell, he had made no attempt at conversation with anyone throughout the entirety of the meal. Secure in the fact that he seemed to not be paying her the slightest attention, Willow took the opportunity to add to her initial, albeit somewhat disjointed, impression of him.

He was sitting bolt upright, which was probably all he could do considering the acres of black fabric he was wearing once again. His high, buttoned collar alone looked like it could single-handedly strangle a person into perfect posture. His face was all angles, from his hooked nose to the sharp line of his jaw line. His pale face was blank in repose, but there were lines around his eyes and mouth that she very much doubted had to do with smiles.

He looked forbidding. That was as good a word for him as any, sitting there in concentrated silence, dressed in some kind of wizardy, heretical version of Puritanical preacher sheik. His aura was more of the same, full of shadows, layered and secretive.

However, it was basically impossible to tap into someone else's magic without getting a pretty good 'taste' of them, and the incident the day before had been no exception. There was definitely something else going on beneath the professor's intimidating exterior. So what if he wouldn't turn any heads in the slayers' barracks. Judging a book by its cover was what had landed Kennedy in a dryad's bed.

She was going to be spending a lot of time in the coming months in this man's hip pocket, she couldn't help but be curious about him. He was a mystery wrapped in an enigma. The stray thought made her smile ironically. She wondered what he would think of being compared to Russia.

Maybe it was time to start figuring him out.

Willow determinedly set down her fork, put on her most winning smile, and turned to face her silent neighbor. "So, when's a good time to talk about teaching plans and text books and stuff?"

Professor Snape froze, fork laden with pie pausing half way to his mouth. The woman beyond him, the Herbology professor from what Willow remembered, leaned forward and looked at the redhead, patched and pointed hat doing little to conceal her raised eyebrows. Snape was also looking at her as if she had grown a third eye.

Willow looked back and forth between the two of them, wondering what on earth she had done now. Was there some kind of funky wizard etiquette ritual she had bungled? Should she have asked about the oh-so-visible weather, painted in vivid blues and fluffy whites across the ensorcelled ceiling? What?

She just hoped this wasn't weirdness over last night, and boy could that be taken out of context, but if she was honest with herself, that situation could be probable cause for more than a little wigging…

And now she was babbling internally, which was at least better than externally. And why in the name of the Goddess were they both still staring at her like that?

"I will be in my office after dinner," Professor Snape said after an awkwardly long pause.

Now the Herbology professor was looking at him as if he had sprouted horns. Sprouted. Sprout. That was her name: Professor Sprout. Willow was going to remember all of their names if it killed her. Come to think of it, many of them did lend themselves well to word games, even though there didn't seem to be anything sinister about Professor Sinistra.

Professor Snape was starting to develop the kind of scowl that looked fit to permanently crease his face, and Willow finally realized that she too had been dragging her response out for an uncomfortable amount of time. She gave herself a little shake and firmly stopped trying to conjure up more helpful mnemonic devices. "Tonight sounds good."

To that, the professor nodded abruptly and finally put the hovering bite of pie in his mouth. Willow waited expectantly for some kind of response, figuring that as stilted as it had been thus far, they were still sitting in the middle of a conversation.

Professor Snape seemed to have other plans though. That bite of pie was followed by another in echoing silence. And another, and then, having finished his dessert, the man wiped his hands carefully on his napkin, dropped it next to his plate, and rose from his seat.

Willow was left at the table, trying not to gawk in surprise as Professor Snape swept out of the Great Hall without so much as a nod in her direction. It didn't help matters that the Herbology professor was now nodding to herself, as if all was right again in her world.

Well that went well. Willow pushed the last bit of pie around her plate with her fork, wondering what she was supposed to do now. Then, if possible, an even worse thought occurred to her.

She had no idea where Professor Snape's office was.


A/N: I (rather naively) did not realize that finishing a semester and then immediately closing on a new house would completely eat my time (and my brain). I wanted to apologize for the long delay between chapters and promise to try to do better in the near future. I just hope I haven’t chased you all off with the hiatus.