Ballet Shoes

Chapter 24

After finishing her homework at exactly half past four, Lilleth put on a far more comfortable and warm woolly jumper, a thicker pair of socks – she dreaded the dungeons in the evening – and her old, ratty trainers, and left the dormitory with a wave to the other girls. She skipped down through the common room and strolled down the hallway through the basement, up the stairs to the main floor, and down the back stairs to the dungeons. Ice crept up the walls as she went further down into the bottom of the castle, forming little crystals in the corners where two walls met. Lilleth shivered.

She knocked on the door to the potions classroom. There was silence for a moment, and then Professor Snape's oily voice called out, 'come in', and she slowly pushed open the heavy door with a loud creak. Professor Snape was sat at his desk, scrawling away at a piece of parchment, his long, greasy hair hung by the side of his black eyes and long, hooked nose. Each desk in the classroom had a small black cauldron on it – some of them were dripping with oozing pastes.

"Miss Black-Lupin." he drawled, spitting each syllable of her last name as if it filled him with fury and hatred. "Your task for the next hour will be cleaning the cauldrons from my sixth year class. No magic – not that your intellect has the capacity for any kind of cleaning spells – but given the concoctions they were brewing, I advise you to wear gloves. You will find everything you need in the storage cupboard. And I don't want to hear noise from you."

"Yes Professor." said Lilleth calmly.

Professor Snape didn't say another word and simply turned back to his paper. He waved his hand towards the cupboard.

She scuttled across the floor as quietly as she could to the cupboard and pulled open the old wooden door with the metal ring. Shelves upon shelves upon shelves of jars, filled with the strangest things, from odd fish to slimy plants in murky water.

The buckets of water and soap and scrubbing brushes and were scattered across the bottom shelf. She quickly picked up a bucket, a brush and a bar of rough soap and dragged them out into the classroom to the first desk and the first cauldron. It didn't look terribly dirty, so she sighed quietly, dipped the brush into the water, covered it in soap and then began scrubbing hard against the metal side of the cauldron.

"Gloves."

She looked up at Professor Snape. He was still working on his paper and didn't even glance at her, but he had reminded her that she wasn't wearing any of the rubber gloves that were tucked away at the back of the shelf in the cupboard. She didn't really fancy finding out what was on those cauldrons, so she made sure to find herself a pair without holes in them before going back to scrubbing at the metal.

"There's still specks of dirt! Do it again!"

"No dinner until you finish cleaning."

"Just shut up."

The voice of Aunt Petunia echoed through her head as she worked at the disgusting cauldrons, and Lilleth gritted her teeth and tried to block her out, but the shrill voice somehow worked its way through her ears and wormed into her brain, reverberating off the walls of her skull. She shivered; whether from the cold or the memories, she couldn't tell.

Just as she reached the thirteenth cauldron, there was another knock at the door. Professor Snape heaved an irritable sigh and gave the instruction to come in. The door opened, and Lilleth glanced around hastily to see Professor Lupin entering the room with a good-natured smile on his face. In the darkness of the dungeon, his clothes appeared even more ratty than usual. Lilleth suddenly blushed and tried to hide the state of her destroyed trainers.

"Lupin." said Professor Snape boredly. "And why are you interrupting my detention?"

"Professor McGonagall has requested to see you." said Professor Lupin. "Immediately."

"Very well." said Professor Snape crossly, getting to his feet. "Keep an eye on Miss Black-Lupin. She may leave at six."

"Of course, Severus." said Professor Lupin.

Professor Snape glided across the floor without another word as if he didn't even take footsteps, and the door slammed closed behind him. Lilleth sighed and continued scrubbing the cauldron. This one wasn't very dirty – at least, not as dirty as the last ones – and with a quick scrub and a rinse, it was shiny and clean as ever.

"And what did you do to get yourself in detention?" asked Professor Lupin, moving to take a seat at Professor Snape's desk.

"My scarf blew off and I went into the forest." Lilleth lied. "He caught me."

"Ah, yes." said Professor Lupin. "Did you find your scarf?"

"No." said Lilleth. "I – um – I guess I'll have to get another one."

She went back to scrubbing cauldrons and avoided his eyes. Everything Sirius had said to her in the forest was swirling round and round in her head. She was in a room with her dad, scrubbing cauldrons, and either he just didn't care, or he didn't have the guts to talk to her about it. What if he didn't care? Twelve years was a long time. What if he'd moved on and had a new family? He hadn't mentioned it, but maybe he did. She gritted her teeth and pressed harder with the brush, spreading the soapy suds over the already clean metal.

"You're very thorough." Professor Lupin remarked.

"Hm?" Lilleth glanced up, broken out of her trance.

"You're scrubbing a hole through that cauldron."

"Oh." said Lilleth, coming to a sudden halt. "Oops."

"Knut for your thoughts?" asked Professor Lupin with a smile.

"Wha – oh, right, your strange money." she muttered. "I was just thinking about my parents."

She looked up at him. His jaw had tightened slightly, but he was still keeping the smile rigidly on his face, as if it had been put there by the permanent ink Dudley had drawn all over her bedroom walls with, only eight months before.

"I thought you didn't know your parents." he said.

"I don't." Lilleth admitted. "But after my boggart, I've been wondering about my mother. Whether I look like her, why she left me, who found me, why I was at James and Lily's place and... yeah. Especially since they were under the Fidelius Charm, and wouldn't have been able to leave, so it probably would have been one of their friends."

She paused. His smile was dropping slightly.

"Maybe I should ask Harry to look at his photo album." she continued innocently. "I'm sure he has pictures of his parents' friends. Maybe I'll recognise them."

Professor Lupin's smile had almost completely disappeared, but he hastily forced it back onto his face and stood up, putting his hands in his pockets.

"Six o'clock." he said, with a slightly frosty note in his voice. "Well done on those cauldrons. Time for dinner, I think."

Lilleth nodded, put down her scrubbing brush, got to her feet and left the dungeons without another word. She grinned slightly. He knew. And more importantly, he knew she knew. The only thing she wondered now was, what was he going to do next?

A/N

It's Friday where I live, so tada! Happy Christmas (if you celebrate) to you all, hope you have a fantastic day and a fantastic end to the year and a well deserved break. How are y'all celebrating?