The Vain Vine Jinx

James’s entrance might have been a bit more dramatic had Snape actually, you know, caught on to the fact that someone else had entered the lavatory.

Of course, the Slytherin omega hadn’t noticed him in the slightest—not that this made James feel in any way disheartened. On the contrary, the prefect was rather amused to watch as the other boy continued to go about his strange business where he crawled on the floor, unperturbed and wholly unaware of the Gryffindor alpha staring at him with wide eyes and an even wider grin.

A portable potions set with a fully bubbling cauldron stood low to the floor, still smoking pixie blue plumes over a flame that had long turned to ash, and all around it the loose contents of the omega’s satchel—parchments and ink bottles, bits and bobs and what looked like owl feathers, crow’s feet, and a pair of omnioculars—could be seen strewn about, together with the odd piece of rubbish, the bin having either been knocked over outright or vehemently catapulted into the nearest sink.

At least, that’s what the fresh dent in the side of it led James Potter to believe; and although assaulting a rubbish bin seemed an unusually petty sort of vandalism, it nevertheless struck the alpha prefect—in this case at least—as a definitively detention-worthy one.

But all that’s by the by.

For the most curious part of the whole mise-en-scène was Severus Snape himself.

The omega was not, as James had often seen him, day or night, stirring straight-robed and close-nosed at the fizzing pewter pot, his attention fixed on the tedious task—no.

The Slytherin looked, quite plainly put, a right mess, crouched down, shirt untucked, his face half obscured by a long curtain of hair. His movements made James do a doubletake, for somehow Snape managed to appear both lethargic and rushed as he mucked about.

The boy was evidently searching for something, his face nearly pressed flat against the floor in the sea of oddities that spread out around him in all directions, and—oh, yes—for some reason the omega was sopping wet from head to toe, almost as if he had just waded back from a game of deep-water chess with the Giant Squid.

All in all, the sight was peculiar enough that James could not, on the surface, make heads or tails of it.

For several moments, the alpha boggled at the scene, half convinced that he had been hit with a waking dream charm as he watched the usually well-ordered and sly, but priggish Slytherin leave a watery trail in his wake, smudging the meticulously taken notes that neatly lined the sheets of parchment which spilled out of his bag.

The Slytherin omega, meanwhile, didn’t spare James even the slightest glance as the alpha cleared his throat rather pointedly. Nor did he take a whiff and turn up his nose as James’s rich clove and cedar scent thickened in the air, increasing, in turn, with the prefect’s eagerness to figure out just what the other boy was up to so that he could give him as many detentions as the school would allow.

It wasn’t until the omega finally rightened himself up to massage at his neck with one hand and smooth back his dripping wet hair with the other, that James managed to get his attention at all.

‘A bit far from the dungeons, aren’t you Snape?’ the alpha said loudly, and crossed his arms over his chest.

Snape was slow to lift his head and fully meet the other’s eyes; when he did, his face was bereft, for once, of the characteristic scowl he always seemed to have in James’s presence. He blinked at James twice, and the Gryffindor, unsure, on top of everything else, of what to make of the expression, raised an eyebrow at him in response.

‘You,’ was all the omega said.

‘Snivellus,’ James returned.

‘What are you doing here?’

James cocked his head to the side at that. So, that was how they were going to play it...

‘What am I doing here?’ James asked incredulously and tapped at his prefect’s badge without unfolding his arms. ‘I’m only out on patrol. What are you doing here?’

‘What am I doing?’ Snape repeated. The omega stared up at the Gryffindor alpha, his black eyes impossibly wide. Then he glanced at the cauldron besides him and then once around the lav itself, adding, ‘Here... here?’

‘Yes, here, now, brewing Merlin knows what at this hour.’

‘This hour... brewing—’

‘—Then again, I guess it’s never too late for a slimy dungeon bat such as yourself to be sneaking about.’

‘Too late?’ Snape said, and there was a squelching sound as he shifted to sit back more comfortably in his soggy wet robes. The Slytherin let out a short laugh. ‘That’s rich...’

‘Oh, really?’

‘You’ve never made it to Arithmancy in the first ten minutes,’ Snape said with a shrug, unblinking, and James was unable to stop the amused-sounding snort that came out of him at that observation.

‘Well, I guess you’d be one to notice,’ James said bitingly, ‘always keeping tabs on everybody else like the little Slytherin that you—’

But just then, Snape craned his neck to the side, and James was hit with a slightly stronger noseful of the omega’s uncharacteristically muted scent, making him stop mid-sentence, insult interrupted.

The alpha’s nose twitched discerningly.

And his eyes narrowed.

The omega smelled... off. Like his usual inky black were splashed across a mouldering manuscript, the peppermint stripped bare by the early morning frost—faint enough that only the sharpest alpha sense of smell might catch it.

And catch it, James did.

Or rather, it caught him.

All at once, James’s instinct compelled him to chase after it, to press his nose up close to the other boy and sniff at his skin and his hair and the crux of his neck, to scent him so that he could—so that he could—

But before the alarm bells could deliver the directive from the baser part of the alpha’s brain to his limbs, before he could even feel the first pulse of protect protect protect surge through his alpha veins for reasons he could not yet understand, James shook his head as if to clear it of all the alpha impulses threatening to consume him.

It still didn’t stop his nose from trying to parse out the scent, though.

Surely the Slytherin had cast some charm in order to hide the odour of whatever questionable potion he was cooking up...

Or he had put on a new soap that clashed with his natural scent...

Then again...

The fact that the potion continued to bubble flameless beside the other boy struck the prefect as... something Slughorn may have warned them against in that year’s first routine presentation on proper potioneering procedures and cauldron safety.

‘Well, get on with it then, whatever you came here for,’ the Slytherin said, and although his tone came out just as drawing and sardonic as it always did, something about it seemed odd to James, a sudden contrast to how the other boy had sounded just moments ago.

‘Snape, do you know what you’re doing in here?’ the alpha asked hesitantly, the words slipping out of him without him consciously forming them.

‘Yes, clearly,’ the omega said, his eyes hardening slightly.

‘Humour me,’ James said through clenched teeth, barely holding back the strange urge to force the omega to answer him directly for the other’s own sake. It wasn’t like him at all.

Snape’s eyes hardened defiantly. He said nothing.

‘Listen up, Snape,’ James said exasperatedly, unable to mask the frustration in this voice. He had to get ahold of himself. ‘Humour me, or I’ll send for McGonagall. I’m sure she’d love to get to the bottom of what’s going on in here.’

‘You listen, Potter,’ Snape said sharply, his wet hair sticking to the side of his face as he tilted his head. ‘As much as I like getting bombarded with questions and harrassed for being late when the quarter chime has only just gone—just because you’re a prefect, doesn’t mean—'

But whatever Snape went on to say next didn’t reach James’s ears. Because what the boy had said threw him off.

You see, it was completely nonsensical.

Because the quarter chime was what students called the six forty-five evening bell. It sounded as the first warning bell before dinner, the second coming at seven on the nose, and the third being the dinner bell itself at seven fifteen. They were the only bells to ring in quarter hour increments apart from the B, R, ACHE or breakfast three, which, apart from weekends when it was two hours later, started bright and early at six thirty—much to the average Hogwarts student’s chagrin.

Almost as if to drive home the point, Snape’s stomach took that moment to rumble rather loudly; frowning, he pressed his knuckles into his abdomen, trying to quelch the sound, before muttering something about whether or not there would be fruit scones under his breath.

James was put off by it, and the feeling wasn’t one he could just brush off.

It was stupid.

He was stupid.

Why even let the thought cross his mind?

But...

Come to think of it, did he even see Snape at dinner? The Gryffindor table had been sparse, half the school—no, more than half—had already gone home for the holiday break, and Sirius hadn’t stopped going on and on about whether or not they should sneak off to Hogsmeade after pudding or wait until the morning, Remus said snow was in the forecast, they wouldn’t make it on foot until after the weekend at least, and...

James wasn’t sure he had ever looked over at the Slytherin table.

When a rather large bubble decided to pop inside the cauldron, drawing both boys’ attention as the potion’s surface began to foam up and change from blue into a brilliant mossy green, James felt a strange, sick-like feeling in his stomach.

Because Snape just blinked at it.

But did nothing to tend the pot.

And it seemed to confirm that some sort of foul play was afoot, something was wrong.

It was then James noticed that Snape didn’t appear to have his wand on hand.

Without realising exactly what was happening, James felt his mouth go dry, leaving his tongue feeling heavy as he said, ‘Snape, I think you need to go to the hos—'

‘What I need is for you to leave me alone, Potter,’ Snape snapped.

And James couldn’t help the growl that came out of him.

Just leave him—it’s not like you owe him anything anyway, James thought to himself, his frustration at the other boy mounting. Besides, Filch will find him soon enough.

To think, the one time he actually thought to offer Snivellus his honest to Merlin help, the other boy had the nerve to—

‘Well, if you suddenly turn into a toad or sprout a second head, you only have yourself to blame,’ James said with a huff.

The stupid git could deal with whatever stupid mess he had gotten himself into on his own.

But don’t say James Potter hadn’t done his part.

With that, the Gryffindor turned on his heel, fully prepared to stalk out of the lavatory, retrieve his cloak, and in all likelihood shift into his stag form so that he could run off of his pent-up irritation in the Forbidden Forest.

However, before he had made it even halfway towards the door, the alpha went rigid.

Because a strange, low cry came to his ears from behind him, and James’s nose was suddenly flooded with the overwhelming scent of a distressed omega.