Valley of the Shadow: Act III

Letting instinct move him, Severus surged calmly up and back, melting into the shadows by the mantle. He cast no spells to conceal himself; he didn’t have to. The stones were all hard angles, but so was he. With a perfect fit, who needed mortar? He belonged to these walls, he was part of them, and there was no reason for anyone to look in his direction and see anything but wall.

He probably couldn’t have done it in one of Evan’s waistcoats. Or with paler hair. But then, he told himself, someone who routinely let themselves stand out brightly wouldn’t have been, by nature, a part of these walls.

It was more of a surprise that he’d had this long to greet the old place in peace than it was to hear the elephantine horde approach. Still, it wasn’t merely due to his shortcut. The prefects would have taken them the front way, the formal way, so as to point out where the Potions classroom and Slughorn’s office were.

Also to watch them talk to each other and start to get a read on what had happened over the summer and what the firsties were like, if this year’s prefects were any good. But officially to show them Sluggy’s office. There would have been questions slowing them down, Severus supposed; he might not have noticed the delay as a student, being either engaged in it himself or in too much pain to count time.

“Well!” Slughorn beamed, rubbing his hands in front of the fire, when the common room was packed full of fifty or sixty pointy black hats.

He’d only started to escort the incoming students personally to the common room in Severus’s sixth year. Severus didn’t know whether it had been his own idea or not; he knew Narcissa had been busy that summer with more things than securing Lucius Malfoy. Even with more than the high drama of her cousin’s slow and noisy exit from their family, and trying to keep Regulus in one piece during the painful process.

Severus hadn’t been on good enough terms with Lily to ask whether McGonagall had made any similar changes after that. Or even to ask her to pass the beetle eyes. He could ask her now.  

Come to think of it, he could probably ask the Tartan.

If he felt especially suicidal.

“Well well well,” Slughorn repeated, looking over the fresh (and, in many cases, saucy) little faces with an air of proud satisfaction. “Home sweet home! I’m most extraordinarily pleased to welcome all of you to Slytherin. I, of course, am Horace Slughorn, and I shall be your Potions Master as well as your Head of House. You older students will remember the young gentleman who’ll be assisting me, this year, both in looking after you all and in class, a very promising—bless me, where has he got to. Any of you lot seen Severus?” he asked the older years, who all shook their heads.

Severus took note of the ones who actually turned their heads from side to side and either needed postural tutoring or were being, for some reason, overly dramatic on purpose. He didn’t hold his breath as people looked around to look for him. Walls might not breathe much, but they certainly didn’t stop breathing.

“Dear me,” Slughorn sighed. “I expect he’s back finishing the inventory. My fault, I should have been more explicit. Ah well.” Some of the older students exchanged quietly amused glances. Severus interpreted these to mean of course Snape ran off after supper to stick his head in a cauldron instead of saying hello to anyone, what did Walrusface expect?

Slughorn shook his head, like a sea lion sloughing off water. He went on with his pretty little speech about tradition, ambition, house unity, and looking forward to inviting some, perhaps many or even all of them to a few little parties throughout the year where they might meet shining stars of the Wizarding World such as Flibbertywhoozit and Severuswasn’tlistening and Severusdidn’tcare, because Slytherin was the house that most helped its eager young thingies to rise very high despite the fact that snakes didn’t have bloody feet, let alone wings.

Except for occamies and quetzalcoatls. And maybe even wyverns and dragons, if your taxonomy was more traditional than accurate, although Severus was fairly sure that having even one set of feet excluded a reptile (but never a primate) from snakedom, if not serpenthood. Nobody thought millipedes were snakes, and their feet were so small the things just looked furry. For that matter, slugs had only one foot, unpaired and only queasily symmetric, and that kept them from even being wyrms.

Severus caught himself getting bored and impatient, and reminded himself that walls did not experience those feelings. There was a second heartbeat in the right side of his chest, slow and steady and even (walls were always unexcitable and stolid). He told himself that it was the heartbeat of Slytherin stones, and sank into it.

(Evan would have eaten his supper too, by now—alone. This was completely unacceptable. No wonder his pulse was so bored Severus could mistake it for the slow atomic breath of centuries-old rocks. And Severus was supposed to sit at the High Table during all the meals. They were definitely going to have to talk about this. Some other time, when Severus was a wizard and not a stretch of shadowed marble.)

Eventually Slughorn allowed that while he knew they’d be anxious to unpack and settle in, he might take one or two questions, and one of the sixth years stepped forwards.

“If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, we missed you on the train,” said Morcant Selwyn. He’d been an obsequious little tit as a second-year, Severus recalled, and no evidence of improvement was yet forthcoming. He was frankly astonished Selwyn hadn’t been made a prefect, even if he wasn’t from the main branch of the Selwyns, what with all the fawning.

Was that unfair? Maybe that was unfair. Slughorn liked to be flattered, but he not the way he liked to eat disgusting candied fruit. He liked it the way Narcissa liked dancing: as often as possible, but only with people who were good at it, darling, and not mechanically-competent rusty-jointed puppets irrationally afraid of my slippers, so why don’t you go let Rodolphus enthuse at you about that Irish swamp stuffed with mummified kings he found last week before he starts unnerving a Ministry Hufflepuff, there’s a pet.

So Severus was probably being unfair; Selwyn was an incompetent flatterer and Slughorn wouldn’t have encouraged him. There’d been a set of twins in his year from a Nottingham family that could compete in status with a lesser scion of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, at least one of whom had seemed sensible, but Severus was never that lucky and the sensible one was the girl, anyway.

It occurred to him that the only students whose snake-names he knew were Cleo Blakeney, a few of Selwyn’s contemporaries, and about half of the seventh-year; it took an Effort Of Personality to get dubbed before fourteenish. Blast. As if learning their given names wasn’t going to be enough of a nuisance.

“Alas, alas,” Slughorn smiled. “Other duties, m’boy, though I was sorry to miss it! Still, I shall get to know all you young fellows in good time,” he addressed the firsties. “Yes, Corban, m’boy.”

“Sir,” said Yaxley, not fawningly, “what exactly do you mean, Snape will be your assistant?”

“Master Snape, Corban,” Slughorn corrected him lightly, taking no notice of all the pureblood brows darkening.

Severus reminded himself that walls neither rolled their eyes nor sighed heavily in frustration. Muggles thought they had it bad, drawing no linguistic line between medical doctors and the other sorts. They thought it was confusing to know that the same word had, at different points, been applied to married gentlewomen, professional witches of good repute, and female pimps.

They ought to try using the same word for nearly-feudal overlords as close enough to Roman patrons as made no difference, learned craftsmen, social-climbing shopkeepers who didn’t see why they shouldn’t get a grand-sounding title when their witch peers did, specialized schoolteachers, and unfashionably posh little boys in short pants. Concurrently. While, due to the presumed-powerful futures of said nasty little boys and the solitary splendor of the usual school in question, liberally mixing connotations as well as paving the road for deadly insults and worse puns.

Although, as far as this sort of thing went, English still would have had to wake up five thousand years earlier in the morning to be as bad as Chinese. Severus would be forever grateful to Míngyùe’s grandmother for enabling him to converse with the best herbalists on the planet on their own terms, but his entire NEWT year hadn’t given him as many headaches as his first summer under Madam Chang’s tutelage.

Of course, he’d also been studying under Luke’s dueling tutor and critiquing other people’s wares. The fumes from the Unblending Potion and the rain of concussions probably hadn’t helped.

“Severus,” Slughorn scolded lightly on, “has attained his mastery with the Most Extraordinary Society of Potioneers, and you must use his title just as you would with any of your professors.”

“But what’s he doing here, sir?” Yaxley persisted. The wall under discussion didn’t miss that he hadn’t agreed.

“Master Snape will be assisting me in various ways,” Slughorn said vaguely, “while finishing his research for his M.B.”

“I thought you said he had his mastery,” said Linnet Stinchcombe suspiciously. “Er, sir.”

“Ah-ha,” Slughorn waggled his finger at her, “clever girl! Yes, a witch from a potioneering family will want to know this; a Mastery in Potions, as bestowed by the Society, is quite sufficient for youngsters like yourselves to get work brewing for St. Mungo’s, or anywhere else on these isles. But if you want credentials that will bring you recognition overseas, it’s best to also take a Mastery in Brewery from the International Association of Master-Brewers. Well, I say best,” he amended, wrinkling his nose a bit. “They do take themselves awfully seriously over there, and it’s a great deal of trouble. Still, most of the serious experimenters do at least consider making the attempt.”

Severus didn’t think that IAMB people were anywhere near as stultifyingly self-important as the brewers he’d met at the MESoP conference who’d never stepped outside of Britain except, perhaps, on holiday from their tedious jobs brewing the same four commercial potions week-in and week-out. Walls, he reminded himself, did not have opinions.

Not even about Slytherin role models who derided ambition out of the professional equivalent of nationalism. Walls had no words they wished to have with humans, and certainly did not spring off their floors to bite said humans in the face for arrant smallmindedness.

He got the feeling that the bits-of-wall that were bigger and older than himself felt they did have opinions, thank you. He also got the feeling that once he stopped being a nice, calm, stone-blooded wall, he might have to shriek and run in circles for a while over that.

Outside.

“But what will he be doing?” demanded Yaxley. “Teaching classes? Telling us all what’s wrong with our spelling?” This got a bit of a laugh from the older years, but Yaxley just went on, reddening. “He can’t take points or give detentions, can he, sir?”

“As to teaching classes, we may consider that in the future,” Sluggy said, starting to look a bit uncomfortable. Walls didn’t thunk their heads into the stones behind them, so Severus didn’t, but he could see control slipping away from those pudgy fingers. “Tutoring, certainly. As to points and detentions, we shall have to see how things go! I think you all ought to consider him, yes, let me see, a sort of over-prefect, as my teaching assistant.”

“Excuse me,” said Najwa Shafiq, rather chilly. “I don’t recall being told there would be a new House position ascendant over the lead prefects. Did anyone inform you, Yaxley?”

Her fellow-prefect wasn’t listening. He was too busy being appalled and blurting out, “You can’t put a mudblood over us all!”

At least, he started to shout that. It ended up in just a shout, and a muffled one at that. Enunciation, as Yaxley and so many other rebellious firsties who’d thought Evan could be walked over and Narcissa was an unprotected porcelain princess had learned years ago, was awfully difficult while plastered face-first to the ceiling with shadowy cobwebs.

Severus stepped away from the fireplace, his wand loosely at the ready in the hand. “Who else can’t bear not to be set above all Slytherin?” he inquired softly, combing his eyes over them all. He didn’t challenge Najwa specifically. There was no capital in making a cold-blooded witch lose face. Besides, her problem wasn’t necessarily with him personally; no sense in changing that.

“Good Merlin, Severus,” Slughorn half-gasped and half-glowered, as annoyed with Severus as he was surprised (nothing new there), “when o—that is, please don’t overreact, m’boy.”

“Certainly not, Professor,” Severus agreed, nodding cordially at him without taking his eyes from the students.

Up on the ceiling, Yaxley mumbled something, loudly and angrily.

“The rattlesnake who strikes in silence and cares for the young,” Severus told the otherwise silent room, very quietly, like the prefect he’d never been, “is the mountain diamond-back, Crotalus oreganus cerberus. These rattlers are not temperamental, but their strike reaches far and is lethal, and they don’t always choose to give warning. When they have lost their patience, their victims may never know until it’s too late.”

He smiled, except for his eyes, and his voice hardened. “You will address your Housemaster with respect, whether or not you yet understand why it is deserved. You will represent him, and your families, with distinction and decorum.”

“I think that means ‘watch your language, Yaxley,’” Linnet Stinchcombe posited innocently at the ceiling.

“Interrupting is also discouraged, Miss Stinchcombe,” Severus shot her down so Yaxley wouldn’t feel obliged later. He didn’t, however, make his tone as chilly as he might have. Dry, mainly, which all the students who knew anything would just take as Snape being Snape, no special reprimand. Which they would further take to understand that she was by-Salazar right they should watch their language.

He studied them all, eyes hooded. No one looked inclined to hex him, so he went on, what the hell. “My name, as many of you know, is Severus Snape, and anyone who calls me either Mister or Master will become intimately acquainted with the insides of several cauldrons.”

A number of pureblood foreheads relaxed at being told they didn’t have to call him Master, so Severus also relaxed, at least a little. At the same time, a lot of less-proud older students bright enough to realize he wasn’t inviting them to address him informally were wincing at the thought of all the scrubbing that might be in their futures due to lack of an acceptable choice. Meanwhile, the firsties were blanching under the assumption that he meant to chop them up to simmer.

Most of him flinched at how he’d semi-inadvertently painted himself, but a corner of his soul he didn’t really want to discuss with Evan or Reggie or Lily (Narcissa would understand it instinctively, and would need no telling) was rather cheered by their horrified little faces.

He told himself that he was pleased because it meant they’d give him less trouble than they might otherwise have done. He didn’t quite manage to convince himself. The huge eyes and dropped jaws under the big pointy hats were hilarious, he wanted a picture to savor forever, and an honest person would have admitted that was all there was to it.

“Apothecary,” he went on, looking seriously at the more blood-conscious older students, the ones who didn’t personally hate him but had, a moment ago, Had A Problem, “might be somewhat old-fashioned, but I can live with it if you can.”

He eyed Slughorn, half droll and half sour. “My position here is intended primarily to enable my own research, and yet I have no doubt that an incipient acquaintance with Madam Pomfrey’s inventory will make the title relatively appropriate.”

While Severus checked to see which of the first and second years didn’t look confused by the long words, and which of the third and fourth years did, Slughorn widened his eyes innocently. “Why, I’m sure Madam Pomfrey and I shall greatly appreciate the assistance, Severus, although it is a bit cumbersome to say, isn’t it?”

Severus shrugged. “Madam Chang tells me I may introduce myself as Yīyàozhé without embarrassment, if not Zhōngyīshī, but I’ve no pressing desire to hear the title clumsily butchered, and I’m not an herbalist in the English sense of the word. Braumeister would be technically accurate, as I have my Society of Potioneers mastery, but since IAMB has adopted the title as their own to bestow and I do count what they offer worth the trouble, I’m willing to accede to their sensibilities in the matter. It’s the best of a distinctly limited set of options.”

“Not to worry, not to worry,” Slughorn assured him, but actually he was looking at a few of the third and fourth-years, rather sternly for him. “I’m sure that the respect I expect every member of our House to show every member of the staff will do in most circumstances.”

Ah, Severus noted resignedly. There’d been another wave of Filch-baiting. Lovely.

“But indeed,” Slughron added meaningfully, allowing a flash of the morning’s annoyance to show again as he turned back to Severus, “I’m sure Madam Pomfrey will appreciate your offer, as I do. After all, anything we don’t have to buy commercially is a great saving for the budget.”

Severus considered his options briefly, decided he wasn’t going to make it to morning without one of the older students telling everyone he was a galumphing battering-ram of a cobra anyway, and said bluntly, “Quite. Regardless, I’m not sorry.”

Some hopeful soul said er? in a doomed effort to provoke an explanation.

Severus continued to lock eyes uncompromisingly with his Housemaster who, eventually, sighed and warned him, “You will be when the first cauldron melts.”

“I won’t be,” he said stubbornly, “when Lovegood solves the side effect problems, or makes it cost-effective.”

“I never took you for an optimist, Severus,” Slughorn tutted fondly, shaking his head.

“I’m not an optimist,” Severus corrected, revolted, “I’m merely keenly aware that, in our project, Safety in the person of myself has left, and Sanity in the person of Patil is sleep-deprived with newborn twins. Which leaves our remaining labmate, who is as mad as a spun-sugar cauldron, with no one to restrain her inspiration.”

After a moment, Shafiq cleared her throat. In a holding-on-to-sanity-by-the-fingernails tone, she said, “Welcome back to Slytherin, Apothecary Snape.”

He smiled an only moderately cool and scaly little smile at her, and commented, “When you have graduated, Lead-Prefect Shafiq, you will find that, just as Slytherin never leaves you, neither will you ever leave it.”

He didn’t have a real cobra’s hood, of course, and unlike that pompous ox Scrimgeour’s, his hair was unworthy to serve. Sometimes, though, he felt that the muscles around his neck and temples might be, separately from himself, a bit delusional in this regard. They occasionally, without his conscious direction, tried very hard.

More than half the time he ended up with a headache from that, but you couldn’t argue with results. Ev said it didn’t give him a hood-flare so much as do something glittery to his eyes. Which looked ludicrous when Ev tried to do it to show him, but that was because Evan made sure to look like a fluffy-Puff.

Admittedly, the hood-flaring thing had been known to hurtle Severus headlong into fist and wand-fights with people looking for an excuse, but a taipan like Najwa Shafiq could be relied upon to withdraw her challenge and sit back for a while to observe while stupider children tried him. He’d been careful not to make her lose face; or at, least, not so much that she was obliged to bite it back from him right away. He’d give it to her freely, if she let him. She was clever enough to know he’d want her alliance, with Yaxley frothing in the wings.

Because the upper-level politics couldn’t be his first concern. Not until he knew whether the Potter-Black poison was still brewing in that stuffy migraine of a Common Room, waiting to attack even the smallest of the drakelets.

Who were extremely tiny. Intellectually he knew he’d once been not only that young but too poorly fed to be even the right size for his age (which he probably still was; he’d given up on reaching Da’s height years ago) but good grief. They were shorter than Flitwick. That was understandable in infants and cats, but these people were Flitwick-sized and were going to be, like Flitwick, expected to look after themselves, but they were underpowered and uneducated. And some of them, dear god, probably thought themselves strong and brilliant and up for anything.

Letting his attention widen to take in all the students, especially the quite-possibly-deluded midget-monsters, he said sharply, “If you are to be Slytherin, that means more than parties, or even what those parties may help you achieve.”

He didn’t so much see Slughorn raise his eyebrows as feel it through the side of his head.

“Ambition is a fundamental cornerstone to our House,” he continued, trying to sound casual and unhurried and as though he’d always meant to say it, “but no house has only one corner.”

He could tell the Slughornian eyebrows were unfooled by his back-scrabbling, but the phantom tail-rattling the back of his neck had been very loudly imagining seemed mollified.

On firmer ground, he rapped out, “It also means you do not leave each other alone. Whatever fights you may have amongst yourselves, whatever disagreements you have with me or with Professor Slughorn, they are private. If a student from another House offends you, you react quietly. You let any behavior that will draw disapproval and punishment come from that boor, and not from yourself. This is the House of dignity and tradition. You will uphold it and do it honor, and you will help each other, and we,” he gestured to Slughorn, not feeling any of the certainty ringing in his voice, “will help you. Are we clear?”

“Crystal, Naj,” smiled Cleo Blakeney, who’d never been backwards in picking her ground and coiling up on it. Severus sighed to himself as the instant burst of excited, nervous wittering from the second and third years at the name told him someone had been telling tales.

He hoped they’d told more tales about him kicking Lockhart through windows than getting hung upside down in no trousers and grey-with-age pants that weren’t hiding quite so much as usual.

He ignored all that (as best he could while internally cringing and rather wishing he’d ever had a habit of prayer to fall back on for comfort), and carefully lowered Yaxley to the floor. Or nearly. Leaving the boy’s dangling toes a few centimeters over the carpet, he asked, more softly still, “Are we in accord, Lead-Prefect Yaxley?”

He thought for a minute that the lout was going to try something stupid and Gryffish, perhaps thinking that being three inches taller and two hands wider than Severus would let him get away with it.   The longer their eyes drilled together, though, the less keen Yaxley looked. Eventually, the boy said, “Yes.” He even followed it up with a reluctant, “sir,” as Slughorn had hinted was appropriate, although not before Severus had continued to stare levelly at him for a further eight seconds without blinking.

Obviously the word meant nothing but a very temporary retreat, but Severus was satisfied for the moment. Yaxley was going to be a colossal pain in the neck, but he wasn’t going to scream mutiny in any mob-frothing way that had to be handled with brute force. Not soon, at any rate. Severus therefore lowered the boy’s heels to the floor, and let the magic go.

Yaxley would just have to wash the cobwebs off for himself.

“Your prefects will show you to your rooms,” Severus said when all Slughorn seemed to want to do was favor him with a hairy eyeball from behind a placidly smiling face and hairier moustache. “Do not allow your roommates to miss breakfast; you’ll receive your schedules there. If you are not presentable, you will be sent back again and again until you are, and will have to make do whether or not there’s a solitary scrap of burnt toast left. You may also have difficulties if you must try to find your classrooms alone; this castle’s doors and stairs are not entirely reliable. Yes?”

“Excuse me, Apothefairy,” oozed Selwyn, “but if you don’t mind my asking, we’ve all been shown Professor Slughorn’s office, but where should we go to find you? When we need your help, I mean.”

Severus eyed him flatly, letting every line of his body scream, to any Slytherin worth their salt, do not imagine either your choosing of sides or your threat has gone unnoticed, that was stupid of you. Slughorn had certainly noticed, but he was largely watching to see whether Severus, put into the familiar position of having had a snide name slipped in at him, was going to lose his temper.

Actually Severus was wondering whether the little git had enough muggle exposure to have meant something besides comparing Severus to insignificant, ill-tempered garden pests that people liked to paralyze for decoration at holidays.

Unlikely from a Selwyn, which was too bad. That sort of insult would have, by inference, outraged any number of his peers, once it was explained to them. Considering that his usual eeling-up manner implied a certain degree of intimacy, it would also have lain him open to charges of hypocrisy. Spurious or otherwise.

For the moment, Severus just bent the poker of his lips into a wintery smile and assured him, “You shan’t have to. As I shall be right here, doing my own work alongside of you all, so very often. Easily available, for your assistance and education. As in such matters as your pronunciation. Yes?”

“’Scuse me.” The very small boy whose robes and hair looked to have been stiffened by a sub-par drying charm lowered his hand. His accent squeezed at Severus’s chest with memories of tiny Lily before she’d even learned to slow down, let alone to talk public-school. “Only, you made that bloke fly and someone pulled a girl on me boat out of the water when we went over and she tried to hit the octopus, was that you?”

Fortunately for everyone, he was rattling on in such typically break-neck Liverpudlian that Severus seriously doubted anyone who hadn’t grown up with a tiny, chatty Lily had picked up even one word. At least, no one at Hogwarts had ever seemed to understand her, although he supposed they might have been pretending as an excuse not to talk to a Muggleborn Gryff.

He’d learned it wasn’t surprising, though. Wizards lived all over Britain, but apparition let them do it in a scattered sort of way. Isolated places with plenty of land where the kids could practice flying and do their homework and no one had to be careful around Muggle neighbors were popular, and there were safe areas in a handful of cities for those who needed or wanted to be near the stores or their jobs.

Liverpool been one of those cities once, but never again since Cromwell. It didn’t need to be, in any case. There wasn’t anywhere that a decent apparitioner could get to from Liverpool that they couldn’t also reach from Appleby, Holyhead, Nottingham, or Manchester.

Matching the boy jibber for jabber to ease the sting (which no one had bloody well done for him; Luke had given him flippers for talking too Northerly), Severus informed him, “You’d be well advised to tune your tongue, or Scouse won’t be the worst word you hear, take it from me.” Switching back to standard-Hogwarts before anyone had even finished blinking, he ordered, “What’s your name.”

The first sentence might have taken him a second or two longer to say. But no more than that. He was really, really looking forward to telling Lils about this bit. She might actually throw something at him for mimicking her in front of his fellow scalefaces, even if they didn’t know. He was planning to laugh right in her face, gleefully, using the actual words ‘ha’ and ‘ha,’ while her jackass husband blew a gasket from not understanding anything at all.

He wondered if he could still pull off droning Only A Northern Song while she tried gamely to pull off Imagine at the top of her lungs with her fingers in her ears and scowling at him. He was willing to wager one of his lesser teapots that she couldn’t keep scowling if she burst out laughing over Potter’s most horrified face. It might warp the infant for life, of course, but he was doomed anyway in that household.

Besides, the junior Potter-fiend had it coming. It wasn’t merely an unwitting threat to Lily’s life because of its horrible timing in being born, but actually and currently a nightmare child. The little demon hadn’t cried at Severus’s handfasting, which would have been both an excusable disruption due to age and traditional for the occasion, oh no.

He’d vomited. Projectile vomited. A la Linda Blair.[1]

On Perenelle Flamel’s face.

This was arguably Dumbledore’s fault, but it was down to no one but the mini-demon that he had, on an earlier occasion, very nearly succeeded at weeing in Severus’s own face. And Severus had been instructed not to take it personally, because he apparently did that while being changed all the time.

Severus had handled Narcissa’s baby dozens of times. It was a fact that Draco was as liable to drool gas, whining, unpleasant bodily fluids, and mashed foodstuffs as any other pre-toddler. However, he did not expel them forcefully from his orifices as aimed mouth-seeking projectiles.

Severus might have thought Lily and Black had got one past Potter, if he’d ever seen Lily’s eyes dilate around that-other-bastard once, because the little troll was unquestionably a future Beater.

Breaking Severus out of his fit of the gripes, and looking as if he really, really didn’t want to admit his name (Severus Snape sympathized), the new boy from Liverpool admitted, “Myron. Only it’s Ron. Er, Wagtail.”

Severus refused to let a single muscle in his face twitch, or one glint of amusement into his eyes. Others were not so disciplined. As though these disgraces didn’t exist, he said evenly, as he knew Hagrid hadn’t, “You’ll find, Mr. Wagtail, that at Hogwarts even the walls have eyes, and they are always watching… for your health and welfare.”

“And speaking of health,” Slughorn broke in jovially, to Severus’s enormous relief, “off to bed with the lot of you, chop chop! I expect to see every one of your delightful faces nicely scrubbed tomorrow at seven in the Great Hall. And welcome again to Hogwarts! Come along, Severus, let’s leave our young friends to settle in. I have a wonderful pot of darjeeling that I know you’ll simply adore…”

“Oh, thank Christ,” Severus moaned fervently as soon as the door to the Common Room was shut behind him, collapsing limply onto his heels against it.

Not by coincidence, this put his ear right up against the mostly-ornamental keyhole. Faintly through it, he could hear the newly-minted Junior Prefect Blakeney lecturing the others, and very nearly hear her grinning. She was saying, “The elapid that gives two warnings and makes itself a target twice…”

“Not bad, m’boy, not bad,” Slughorn smiled down at him, “but however did you get behind me?”

“Got there first,” Severus admitted, not getting up. “I wanted to say hello to the common room before it got swarmed by rabid lethifolds starved for the blood of the weak.”

Slughorn looked puzzled. It wasn’t exactly the you-are-mental stare, but it was definitely you-are-an-odd-one. Finally, he said, “Locusts.”

“…Sir?”

“Pomona always says ‘before the locusts descend.’”

“Oh.” After a moment, Severus posited, “That’s probably because Professor Sprout actually cares if all the leaves get consumed in a cloud of darkness and flashing dun-colored chitin.” Personally, he’d been more concerned about the new Divi teacher. And himself.

Inside, he heard a squeaky, Wagtaily voice pipe up curiously. Someone, despite being audibly too old to have watched the boats come in, scornfully answered the boy, “Of course it was the Naj!”

Severus thought it might be Blakeney Major, backing up his little sister instead of being a jealous twat about her prefecture as Severus would have suspected. In which case maybe Petunia could grow out of it, too?

However warming, that didn’t sound much like prefects showing firsties where their beds were to him.

“Well,” said Slughorn, more than kindly enough to be very insulting indeed, “all those different species of leaves are quite useful to us as well, Se—”

“You promised me tea,” Severus accused him. It was definitely an accusation and not a wail. Definitely.

“And I’m delighted to oblige,” Slughorn said cheerfully, “in gratitude for the promise you just gave to be at the doors of the common room, smartly put together as an example, at six forty-five for inspection.”

“So I should hope,” grimly agreed Severus, who had in fact understood what he was threatening at the time and was planning to be there at six-thirty.

And yet he somehow also absolutely had to at least have a cup of morning tea with Evan, lest they never find time to eat together again in Severus’s whole life ever. (Or at least for as long as he had this position, but even a single term back in Hogwarts might well feel like the rest of his life.)

So a 5 AM-ish sort of rising was mandated for the lazy tosser who might not be such a complete slug-a-bed as Severus had previously believed, but had quite genuinely had a grudge against every wakeful second before ten for as long as Severus had known him. Even when they’d had Charms first. Even when waking up early was Ev’s own idea because he wanted to catch dawn on the Black Lake or the early clouds behind the crenellations.

What a lovely morning it was going to be.

Weighed down with resignation, he let Slughorn give him a hand up.

[1]Which Severus had gotten to see through use of an actual movie ticket he hadn’t had to steal or pay for, due to a bet with Lily that the flick would be uninformed American Muggle nonsense that would not, in fact, teach them how to give Hogwarts girls one more usable loo.

They had both pretended Lily hadn’t made that bet specifically to get Severus to go see at least three movies a summer with her without outraging her unsneaky, well-fed Gryffindor sensibilities. Come to think of it, since they were talking again he could probably get away with declaring she owed him movies for every summer since ’76, if he could be sure of avoiding the wrong peoples’ notice. It might even be a way to spend an hour in her odious husband’s company without getting into a fight, which would make her happy. Definitely food for thought.