Emma Moore, professor in Healing at Hogwarts, has to suppress her feelings for her old best friend and now colleague Severus Snape, who she hasn't seen in ten years, while figuring out who killed her aunt.
...
They sat on a log, staring across the Black Lake. Emma had wrapped her arms around her legs. It lay still, the water barely even rippling. Darkness enshrouded them. It was gone midnight. They weren't supposed to be out here anymore, but with the Hogwarts Express leaving for London for the last time the next morning, neither of them could bring themselves to go back inside.
"This sucks," said Emma eventually, unable to keep a tremor out of her voice.
"Yeah," Severus agreed. "I don't want to go home yet."
"We'll stay friends, though... Won't we?"
"Of course we will!" Severus immediately exclaimed. "I'll visit you every day, until you're so sick of me that you'll kick me out."
She chuckled and nudged him. "I'll never get sick of you."
He lifted one leg over the log to face her and pulled her into a hug. "I'll miss you, Emma."
She swallowed, but the lump in her throat wouldn't budge. Grabbing hold of his robes, she whispered, "I'll miss you too."
"Thank you. For everything," he muttered. "Always being there for me."
She wanted to respond, but couldn't find her voice.
"I know I don't say it enough, but you mean everything to me. You're all I have."
She nodded into his shoulder, the lump in her throat making it impossible to speak. All she could do was sit there and enjoy the feeling of his arms around her back.
For a few moments she considered telling him. In seven years' time she'd never managed to tell him how she really felt about him. Was it finally time?
Before she could find the courage, however, he let go of her. "We should go and find Lily in the morning. Say goodbye to her, too. She'll want to sit with Potter on the train, so..." He trailed off.
"Mhm." The hole deep inside her grew and she knew she couldn't tell him. Even now, with Lily steadily dating Potter, she was still all he could think about.
It would never change. She knew that. But if it ever did, she would be right there by his side.
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A wave of adrenaline surged through her as realisation hit. "Go to your dorms," she urged Harry and his friends. "I believe you. Go to your dorms and leave it to me."
Without waiting for an answer, she sprinted up the stairs, racing up to the seventh floor to the headmaster's office. I have to tell Dumbledore! That stone wasn't just priceless. In the wrong hands, it could be incredibly dangerous, giving an evil man power.
She'd just made it to the seventh floor, heaving and panting as she bounded around a corner, when she quite literally bumped into Minerva McGonagall, head of Gryffindor and deputy headmistress of Hogwarts. Both women scantily caught their balance.
