Chapter 2: For God’s Sake, Collect Your Marbles!
It was a lovely Thursday morning. For a winter day, it wasn’t too cold and snow lay everywhere around the castle, hiding the Great Lake under a smooth layer of ice. A gentle breeze wafted the leafless trees.
Severus scowled.
Advanced Potions with the seventh years this morning was the reason for his scowling. He wondered, as he rolled out of bed, why Albus always scheduled them for the morning. It was so much more fun to awaken early in the morning, have a proper breakfast (preferably on your favourite shadowy end of the staff table) and then go and scare some first or second years. But no, the Headmaster had put the seventh years first and thus ruined what would otherwise have been a perfect morning.
An hour later, Severus was heading for his Potions classroom. As always, he could already hear the students from a large distance. Merlin, they were supposed to be seventh years! Couldn’t they manage to keep their mouths shut?
He arrived there to find Hermione looking for him, proudly pointing at her tongue, which was dangling back and forth from her mouth, magically enlarged to more than twice its normal size.
“Look, Prothessor,” she lisped happily. “I maith my thongue crow.”
“Stop your silly little show, Miss Granger,” Severus barked, making her twitch uncomfortably. “You can play your games with other people, but not with me. Five points from Gryffindor. Shrink your tongue.”
At these words, she looked like she would burst into tears, but he prevented himself from having to endure a sobbing Hermione by quickly ushering the students into the classroom.
Severus had chosen a difficult potion for this class. He always did, mind you. The students frowned when they saw the instructions for the Certa Fides Potion on the board and immediately hurried to get the ingredients, as the potion would take the entire lesson and Severus wanted a sample flask from each student before they left.
While the students were busy brewing the potion, he went around and criticized their work. Well, the work of the Gryffindors, mostly.
“Potter, what’s this?” he spat, pointing at Harry’s cauldron, which emitted a fair light green as opposed to the intense green it should be.
“Er… the Certa Fides Potion?” Harry said uncertainly.
“Are you sure?” Severus mocked. “It looks like bleach to me. Do you want to imitate Mr. Malfoy’s look or did I miss something?” he sneered.
Harry muttered something incomprehensible under his breath and Severus went on to Hermione’s cauldron. Though surprisingly, her potion wasn’t green either. It was red. The day had finally come on which Hermione screwed up a potion. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad day after all.
“Miss Granger, what colour is your potion?” he asked, approaching her.
“It’s red,” she said with an air of infinite happiness. “Red, the colour of love.”
Severus snorted. It seemed Hermione Granger was competing for who was crazier with the bizarre, misty-voiced Sybill Trelawney. Just what he needed, another one of that sort. As if one of them wasn’t enough.
“And what colour is the Certa Fides Potion supposed to be?” Severus asked, as though speaking to a four-year-old.
Hermione squinted at the board, skimming the instructions. “Green. But I don’t like that colour. Red is sooo much more fun, don’t you think?”
“That is enough!” Severus whispered dangerously. He was aware of the entire classroom turned toward them with utmost attention. “You will stop behaving like a moron in my class. Is that clear, Miss Granger?” Hermione nodded sheepishly. “Twenty more points from Gryffindor and a detention with Filch.” Merlin, that felt good.
Hermione now looked as though he had just elbowed her in the stomach. Severus glared at her, realizing she almost always looked as though he had jilted her when he met her these days. Which thoroughly annoyed him.
Luckily, she was silent and he continued to make rounds through the classroom. The ensuing half hour passed without any further incident. After he had given another detention to Seamus because he had caught him red-handed, passing a note from Lavender on to Dean, Severus went into his office to drink a cup of coffee. He really had to do something about his coffee addiction, especially since he latterly had to leave the classroom in order to indulge in it. It wouldn’t be healthy to let his students know of this weakness.
When he came back into his classroom, he found Hermione sitting on the desk in front of Draco, talking to him.
“Dinner yesterday was abysmal, don’t you think?” she asked him, grimacing. “That pumpkin juice tasted like chewed car tyres. I have no idea what those shrivelled fairies down in the kitchens did, but they definitely need a cooking lesson, don’t you think?”
“Er …” Draco muttered unintelligibly, attempting to stand up from his chair to get out of Hermione’s reach. Apparently, Hermione had taken precautions to ensure herself of the undivided attention of her audience. She had glued Draco to his chair.
“Now, Draco,” she continued, oblivious to Draco’s futile attempts to escape, “your hair is really cool, haven’t I told you?” She reached a hand out and stroked his hair. “Mmmmmh, it’s really soft. I bet you are using some sort of fancy lotion.”
Draco shook his head feebly, still looking utterly confused.
“No? I don’t believe it! You just have to use something. Nobody is born with such soft hair. Come on, you can tell me. I promise I won’t tell anyone! Oh please, please tell me,” Hermione pleaded hopefully.
“Have you ever thought of plaiting it, your hair, I mean?” she went on, now stepping behind him and fumbling with his hair as though there was a prize for whoever could arrange it in the wildest possible way. “I think it would look good on you. But it would look even better on Professor Snape, you know. He really has the face for it,” she announced lightly, causing Harry to snort into his cauldron in order to avoid laughing in their approaching Potions Professor’s face.
“MISS GRANGER!” Severus bellowed, making Hermione jump. “Why are you preventing model students from completing the assignment, instead of at your cauldron, trying to save that sorry excuse for a potion?”
The nerve of her! How dare she disrupt his class? But as if that wasn’t enough, she refused to get back to her seat. It was clearly visible to everyone in the room (except, apparently Hermione) that Severus was about to explode.
Hermione still failed to see why she should go back to her cauldron, and Severus’ tiny thread of patience finally tore. He seized her at the collar and literally dragged her to the door, dumping her down outside of the classroom.
“For heaven’s sake, girl, collect your marbles and put them back where they belong!” he growled fiercely, banging the door shut behind him.
***
Friday dawned brightly, just as Thursday had. For a change, it even dawned brightly for Hogwarts’ infamous Potions Professor. He was sitting at the breakfast table and despite the constant naggings of Minerva (“Oh, Severus, do us all a favour and replace your scowl with something more friendly!”), which he had tuned out again, he was enjoying his meal. He had charmed his pumpkin juice to be an ever-refilling cup of coffee and was presently marvelling at the soothing warmth it spread through his mouth and stomach.
He let his gaze wander through the Great Hall and was satisfied with what he saw there. Everyone was quiet, nobody was dancing on a table (he remembered vividly the morning when he had looked up from his French toast to find Hermione table-dancing), and nobody was even looking as though they planned something terrible to disrupt his meal. What a perfect morning.
Except for the fact that Albus, once again, was offering him a lemon drop.
“Albus,” Severus answered, groaning inwardly. “You know I still have loads of them.”
It was true, Severus had a lot of them. Albus Dumbledore seemed to take immense pleasure in slipping him lemon drops. After breakfast the day before yesterday Severus had wondered why his shoes had, all of a sudden, started to pinch him. When he had stumblingly arrived in his office and taken his right shoe off, he had found three lemon drops. And the day before that, he had extracted another two drops from below the ring on his left ring finger.
He had endured several such lemon drop attacks before and a significant pile had started to develop in his quarters. The lemon drops had viciously refused to be thrown away. So Severus had to resort to offering the Headmaster lemon drops whenever he came to visit him, because he would not eat those damned things himself, come hell or high water.
“You can never have enough,” Albus said, eyes twinkling.
“I can,” Severus growled darkly.
Before Albus could launch into another lemon drop conversation, something in the Hall caught their attention. Of course, Severus thought faintly “ the one person to rescue him from the Headmaster’s babble was the Gryffindor Clown of Late, Hermione Granger.
The girl in question was enjoying the unusual appearance of her neighbour, Ron, whom she had doused in pumpkin juice, much to his irritation.
Ron lifted his arms in disgust and Severus saw drops of pumpkin juice trickle to the floor. “Ugh! Blast, Hermione! What was that for?” Ron screamed at the top of his voice.
Hermione giggled madly (something she seemed to do a lot lately) and looked approvingly at her achievement. “I suits your hair better than those dull black robes,” she informed him matter“of“factly.
Severus didn’t quite agree with her, but he wasn’t going to let her know. A demented Hermione wasn’t his problem, after all.
“Did you see that, Severus?” Dumbledore asked him silently.
“As I am in full possession of all the functions of my eyes and ears, there is no way I couldn’t have noticed it,” Severus replied grimly, taking a swig of his elderberry wine.
“You might want to monitor this situation a bit more closely,” Albus said.
Severus choked on his coffee. “I should? Why me?”
Albus grinned. “Because I think she fancies you.” Seeing the raised eyebrow from Severus, he continued, “or how am I to explain the heart-shaped cushion and the note ‘Happy Birthday to Severus from Hermione’ that I found in the dungeons yesterday?”