The air around the Black Lake was still that afternoon, the water glinting silver under a faint sun that couldn't decide if it wanted to shine or hide behind the clouds. The castle loomed in the distance, its towers reflected faintly on the trembling surface. Snape sat by the bank, a solitary figure in his usual gloom, surrounded by the quiet rustle of reeds and the occasional croak from the shallows. He looked oddly peaceful, almost at home in that dark serenity.
Ren had come there with no particular plan except to escape her own thoughts. The forest incident—the red eyes, the sound of something moving fast through the trees, the weight that had pinned her down had been playing on a loop in her mind for days. She needed silence, some air that didn't taste like fear. So she wandered down to the lake, and that's when she saw him.
She crouched behind a crooked birch, curiosity pricking sharper than caution. He was sitting cross-legged, hunched over a patch of wet ground sans snow, muttering under his breath. For a second she thought he was just... sulking, the way he often did, or maybe sketching sigils into the dirt like some brooding poet. But then she noticed the fish.
It floated several feet off the water, suspended upside down, its gills fluttering uselessly as Snape's wand twitched in the air, guiding it like an invisible marionette. His face was all focus, lips tight, eyes drawn thin with concentration. A battered notebook lay beside him, covered in dense scribbles, runes crossed out and rewritten over and over.
Ren watched, intrigued despite herself. It wasn't every day she saw someone experimenting with nonverbal spells strong enough to manipulate living things. She inched closer, her boots trudging the snow.
"What are you doing?" she asked quietly.
He jumped, actually jumped and the spell broke. The fish dropped with a wet slap into the lake, darting away the moment it hit the water. Snape spun around, wand still half-raised, his eyes narrowing.
"What are you doing here?" he shot back, recovering fast, though his tone betrayed that familiar defensiveness that seemed stitched into his voice.
Ren walked over and sat down a few feet away, deliberately casual. "This is my spot to think," she said, crouching at the water's edge.
He studied her for a moment but said nothing, resettling his notebook with a quiet huff. He didn't like her, she could tell but he tolerated her. Mostly because Lily liked her, and Lily's word meant more to him than logic or pride. Ren knew that. And she also knew that her indifference to Lily's friendship, that unbothered distance she maintained, weirdly gave him some sense of safety. She was no competition.
"You seem like you should've been in Slytherin," he said finally, waving his wand again. The fish, or maybe another one, rose trembling from the water.
Ren tilted her head. "What makes you think that?"
"Just a hunch," he muttered. His hair looked even greasier in the sunlight, clinging to his temples in slick strings.
"Well, your hunch is wrong," she replied, pulling a blade of grass from the ground and twirling it idly between her fingers. "I'm a Gryffindor."
"Unfortunate."
She ignored the jab. For a while, there was only the sound of the lake rippling in the hole he had made in the slightly frozen lake, a bird screeching overhead, and Snape's low murmurs. But when she turned her head again, her expression changed.
The fish was bleeding.
He was tracing something in the air, a series of sharp, deliberate flicks. Tiny cuts appeared across the creature's scales, its movements spasming in pain. Then, almost imperceptibly, it stopped moving. The lifeless body hovered for another second before falling limp into the lake.
Ren's jaw tightened. She didn't say anything at first, but her silence wasn't soft, it was edged. Lily had insisted that Severus Snape had a good heart buried somewhere under his bitterness. But this? This was something else entirely.
She finally spoke. "I've heard you call people mudbloods," she said, her tone calm but laced with challenge. She wasn't asking; she was stating a fact she already knew.
He looked up, expression blank. The word didn't seem to sting him the way it should. "So?"
"Lily is a mudblood," she pointed out evenly. "You hang out with her all the time."
That got his attention. His face twisted, and the calm broke. "How dare you?! Lily doesn't deserve that title."
Ren almost laughed, though it came out more like a breath of disbelief. "Well, How about you?"
His mouth opened, then closed again. She could see him calculating, trying to find the right insult or defense. Finally, he straightened his spine, glaring down his nose as if that could make him taller. "I'm a half-blood, you fool."
Ren smirked. "Half mudblood then."
His eyes widened in shock, as if she'd slapped him. No one talked to him like that, not even the Marauders, who preferred hexes over honesty.
"Pure-blood supremacy," she continued, voice low but steady. yet the ones who strive for it are mudbloods themselves."
He said nothing, his lips pressed in a thin, trembling line. The lake rippled again, soft waves catching the dying sunlight, and for a second neither of them moved. Ren pushed herself up, brushing grass off her robe, and gave him one last look.
She didn't wait for an answer. The soft squelch of her boots faded along the lakeside as she walked off, her mind still buzzing. The conversation had left an unpleasant taste behind not just because of Snape's hypocrisy, but because of what it said about the wizarding world itself.
Even without all the obvious cruelty, without the slurs and the hierarchy and the superstition, there was still something deeply wrong about it all. Everyone wanted to feel superior to someone else. Pure-bloods sneered at Muggle-borns. Half-bloods mocked Muggles. And everyone, in their own way, was hiding from their own reflection.
At least in the forest, monsters didn't pretend to be righteous.