***
She was short, and thick. Not terribly thick, but not slender, like Narcissa, or even shapely. And she was a Hufflepuff of all things, a Hufflepuff who seemed not to have too many friends in her house. A few of the Gryffindor girls chatted with her: he vaguely recalled having seen her with Lily once or twice, and masses of the boys, although she didn’t seem to be dating anyone. There was a rumour about some fellow at Durmstrang.
“And what is this favour, Lily? He looked at her with narrowed eyes in the alcove she’d pulled him into mere minutes before time he should be back in his common room. That Hufflepuff was waiting at the end of the hall, pretending to look at a picture of several trolls in odd suits.
“Not much. She needs help with Potions, that’s all.”
“And you can’t help her?” he growled, although his answer was a foregone conclusion.
“I did, last year, but between her schedule and mine it’s not working “ it’s just too much. So would you? She’s no idiot.”
He glared at her, his frostiest glare, and stalked off to tap her on the shoulder.
“I’m told you want a word?”
She cast her eyes down and then began. “I know you’re best in the year at Potions, no matter what Slughorn says, just like you’re best at Defense. So two things. I am impossible at brewing - impossible. I’ve got by these years by just copying exactly what the person next to me does, and cleaning up for group projects. And the second is that I’m really awful at Potions in general “ the maths get me. And my mother and father will be heartbroken if I don’t do well. They don’t care if I’m not as good as the best in the class; they just want me to do well. And I need help. So I can pay a tutor, if you’ll take the job. No one will know.”
It seemed like a trick of some sort, but none of the crowd she was seen with had ever tricked him before. He asked, with some suspicion, “You do well enough everywhere else. Aren’t you top of the year at History of Magic?”
He only remembered this about her because the entire concept of anyone being tops at History of Magic had been so startling when Avery had brought it up in the common room, talking of various classes. “There’s a Hufflepuff tops with Binns, of course, who else would bother? Dumpy little thing.”
She probably was dumpy; she certainly was compared to Lily. She shrugged nervously, her freckles moving over her nose as she wrinkled it. “History? History is a story; I can perfectly well remember stories, who can’t do that? But the precision, the measuring, the numbers “ I really do try and I just can’t. No one believes me, either, but I can’t.” Her fingers were twisting nervously in her bag strap. She looked up at him. “I know I’m not part of the pure-blood elite or anything, but I’m not a troll, and my money is as good as anyone else’s.”
None of the Slytherins he’d dragged through this or that patch in this or that subject had ever offered to pay him for this privilege. “How much?” he asked.
She named a price, and his eyebrows went up. It wasn’t much but then, now that he looked at her, he noticed that she was dressed neatly, but in the very bottom of the line school robes. And she didn’t have a fancy wand case, which seemed to be the latest thing the girls were bringing back from Hogsmeade. He was bitterly familiar with not having what the others had.
“That’s fine. Cash, and you keep your mouth shut. We’ll use an empty classroom on the third floor. And if you need to practice, you’ll have to pay for the ingredients.” He was brusque, and slung his bag over his shoulder as he said it.
She nodded. “That’s fair. Tomorrow morning, then? Before breakfast? I’ve noticed most of the boys in your house aren’t up early.”
Most of them weren’t. Most of them had money to spend, had hidden bottles of alcohol, or accommodating girls, or both, and were frequently out of the common room till well after hours on Friday and Saturday nights. Where exactly they went was one of those things they shared with each other, but not with him.
“Tomorrow morning.”
Now that she had invaded his personal space, it seemed he was seeing her everywhere, although he could hardly recall noticing her before. The crowd of boys who were friends with her was beginning to resolve itself into names and faces, but none of them were what he would call school leaders. There were two Hufflepuffs, one rather short and muscular, the other tall and weedy. There was a red headed Scotsman of a Gryffindor who played beater on the Quidditch team but didn’t seem to say much except when he was joking with her or his little sidekick, and there was the girl in Ravenclaw most likely to compete with Lily at anything. That rounded out the crowd he saw her with.
“So, are you going to tutor her?” Lily asked over the potion they were brewing on Sunday.
“You set me up.” He was proud, in a sense, that she had, but annoyed nonetheless, “Now I’ve got two women I’m meeting on the sly.”
She laughed her buoyant laugh, pointing out, “No one in your house would believe it, would they? But at least she’s a pure-blood. And she pays every lesson “ she’s had me help her a few times. I suppose she figures with OWLs coming up…” She shrugged, and went back to measuring. Her fingers were longer, and suppler, but staring at them he still could not figure out why his pupil’s couldn’t do the same job. Then he shrugged it off and went back to the intense concentration that was brewing with Lily, and forgot his student for the rest of the morning.
***
“Merlin! How can you be such an idiot at this? You’re not an idiot at anything else.!” She flushed, but didn’t pack up and flounce off, as he knew she wouldn’t. She was stubborn, and not a quitter.
He marveled. A month of tutoring her had taught him a great deal. She really was brighter than he’d thought. She understood things, applied them in new ways “ she was always saying, as he explained something to her “Is that like in Arithmancy when…” or “But there were Goblin wars over silver, really, weren’t there?” And then tapping her head, and saying to him “Have you ever tried a silver stirring rod, rather than a wand? Because we do use silver knives, you know, and the silver might make it different?”
He’d given her a trenchant look at that one. “Right. A silver stirring rod. I’ll owl home for one tomorrow.” Not that he had ever said a word to her about his home life. He thought that his things “ his book bag, his used books, the robes he tried to let down and failed miserably at “ told the story clearly enough.
On this day, she had seemed a bit excited. “I hope you don’t mind,” she had started out. “I have something for us to try. Well, for you to try, my trying it won’t tell us anything one way or another.” She’d pulled a long, polished silver stick from her bag and laid it on the bench in front of them.
“Is that a silver stirring rod?” he’d asked, eying it skeptically.
“I don’t know for sure,” she said with good humor. “I had mum send me a silver fork I had at home. Got it at a jumble sale when I was a little kid. Anyway, do a bit of jewellery work, so I did the same on a larger scale and while I had some difficulty, still, it seems to have worked out all right.”
He hefted it in his hand. He didn’t know what to think of it, and he said so. “The balance is off.”
“Well, if you’re talking wands, right, it is. But if all you are ever going to do is stir with it…”
***
“Clever of her. But she’s good with metals. Made these earrings. She was selling them very covertly around Christmas time.” That was very like Lily, buying earrings to help out a girl, but she was actually wearing them? He hadn’t noticed. “You ought to sell potions, Severus. Harmless things that won’t get you in trouble with Dumbledore or Slughorn. You know, a little Pepper-up for those Saturday mornings in the Slytherin common room.”
”My house would expect them for free,” he said.
“Not if you sold them to the rest of us first. Jack up the price a bit and offer them a discount. I’m sure Anna would take them into Hufflepuff for you, and she’s got an excuse “ you are sitting next to her.”
“She doesn’t need to be associated with me publicly,” he said bitterly, perhaps missing the little smile that flitted across Lily’s face.
“Well, she already is. When Potter asked her how it happened that she was actually passing, she told him.”
“She wasn’t supposed to say anything. That was the agreement!” It was all he could do not to storm off and strangle her, right then. If he’d been with anyone else, he would have.
“She was in something of a corner, I think. He sort of came at her “ you know how they do that, and turned on her. She was a bit rattled. Defiant, though. Brassy, even. She just said “Snape!”
His eyebrows went up. “Really? And what did he have to say to that?”
“He said absolutely nothing. Nothing. Remus was really surprised. At least he said he was, when he told me.”
He and Lily had also tried the stirring rod, which seemed somehow to have become his without his paying Anna anything for it, and their results were also inconclusive, although Lily was being very scientific about recording results and hoped they ‘d come to something some day.
***.
“Who the hell are you to tell Potter you’re paying me for help!” he barked at her as soon as the door closed the next Sunday morning.
Her face flushed.
“Who told you that? I didn’t think you were chummy enough with Potter for my mistake to make it all the way to you.”
“Mistake! You admit it was a mistake then!”
“I told you I would keep it quiet, and I should have because I agreed to. Not that I can see any reason to, myself. Oh, no, that’s right, we can’t have any of the sons of Salazar Slytherin sullying himself with a HUFFLEPUFF. Especially not to help her. Not ambitious, helping someone who’s got nothing to offer you, is it? You’ll end up with one of the girls in the Slug Club, I’m sure.”
“What are you on about? He shouted back at her. “I’m not one of Slughorn’s little toadies.”
“So Lily is a Toady then?”
He was suddenly flushed, despite the chill of the classroom they worked in and the normal early Sunday morning chill of a castle, half of whose fireplaces weren’t lit. “What? I never said that! Lily knows better than that!” Flustered, and realizing he may have revealed more than he cared to, he backed off a bit. “How did it happen, anyway?”
“I was walking along in the hallway and Duncan was joking with me about how it had been weeks since I exploded a cauldron. Then James wheeled on us and said ‘That’s right, Lily Evans tutors you…’ and then Remus said ‘where does she find the time’ and then it sort of fell out of my mouth that it wasn’t Lily. So then James sort of snarled at me “ Merlin knows why, and I just blurted out your name”.
They stood staring at each other, about ten feet apart, neither quite sure what to say next. Annie broke the silence. “I really should apologize, because I was bragging a bit. You wouldn’t help just anyone. At least, no one knows any other girl you’ve helped”
She was pale, and quiet, and just about as unlike a Hufflepuff as anyone could be, because who expected that sort of strength and dignity from people who were supposed to be hardworking and loyal and, to be truthful, dull and plodding. He looked away. “I’m surprised the whole school isn’t talking about it,” he said, finally. “The Greasy Git actually being nice to a girl…” he winced.
“Well, it was just Duncan and James and Remus. I asked Duncan not to repeat it, and he said he wouldn’t and that he’d talk to Remus about it, but that, you know, James...”
“I’m sure he’s holding it in reserve for some moment when he feels it useful,” he said, bitterly.
She shrugged. “I don’t see what he can make of it. It paints you in a nice light, unless he wants to start slamming me, and he and I are sort of distant cousins. He wouldn’t want me bringing it up over pudding at some family function…”
And then he jerked his head towards the table, and they sat down and went on mostly as if the fight had never happened.
***
“A silver wand, even if it revolutionized potion making, will never make up for being unable to measure ingredients,” he’d mentioned the next time they met.
“You know, you are lucky I pay you to be helpful, rather than charming.” Her hands had started shaking then. She had almost spilled what was left of the aconite all over the desk. He grabbed her hand and steadied it without thinking, and found himself then rather awkwardly holding it, as if it were an object, with no clear idea of what to do with it since, unlike a bowl, he couldn’t put it down on the table. Finally, he had sort of let it drop.
She picked his hand up carefully and examined it. “Hmm…no warts. Doesn’t seem like it hurt you a bit.”
He shook his head. “No, you’re harmless, so long as you aren’t trying to brew a potion.”
She nodded, and then, as if she’d worked herself up to say something and had to say it in one breath or not at all, she burst out with, “If I did pay you to be charming, would you? Because Duncan is getting all touchy-feely, and I just know he’s going to ask me out to Hogsmeade this weekend, but I really, really don’t want to go with him in case he wants to hold my hand or--Merlin hex it-- kiss me.”
He blinked. “You are asking me if I’ll take money to go on a - date with you? To Hogsmeade?” Snape had never been on a date in his life, never mind been asked to work as a bloody escort service.
She nodded, blushing. “I don’t mean to insult you. It’s not like you’d have to kiss me or anything, just sort of walk close to me and pretend you find me interesting and maybe look as if you’d like to shag me, not actually, you know, have to do it.” As an afterthought, she added. “I’d pay the expenses, too, like for the potions brewing.” There was silence for a moment, and then she said, “But after how you reacted to my telling James Potter you were helping me, I’m an idiot to ask.”
He crossed his arms and looked at her, thinking. Finally, he said, “All this ‘hand holding’ and ‘looking like you’d want to shag me’ - You know what you’re talking about, don’t you?”
She blushed. Then she shrugged, and said, with a wry smile, “We’re the only magical family in the village, I think. At any rate, plenty of Muggle boys around, and they are easy.”
He stood looking at her, aghast, and then burst into nervous laughter. “You ‘shag’ Muggles?”
She laughed then, herself. “Well, yes, sometimes, if I feel like it. They don’t seem to mind. But…”
“How many Muggles?” He was curious.
She looked down at the table, obviously a bit embarrassed even though she was joking about it. “Well, one, actually. I liked him a lot. But his family moved away. We were very hot and heavy till they moved. I haven’t heard from him since, though. Not even a postcard. So…I suppose I was just convenient.”
Snape thought he’d had more experience at being inconvenient than convenient and then wondered if this was a case of convenience for her. There were, after all, the rumours. No need to get an entire other wizarding school annoyed at him. “Is he by any chance the boy at Durmstrang?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. “Durmstrang,” he persisted. “Is there a fellow at Durmstrang?”
She shrugged. “A fair few “fellows”, I’d guess, but I don’t know any of them.”
He stood there, then asked “Why me? I’m sure you can get a date if you try hard enough -- an actual date.”
She bit her lip, and sighed, and blurted it out then. “Idiots. I mean, the blokes I’m friends with are nice, don’t get me wrong, and possibly I could get one of them to go with me, but I’d have to listen to them all day, and while listening to endless recitals of chess and Gobstone tactics, and then the rules for some game they’re making up that seems to involve both at once - really, I’d rather not.
“No, but you could get a date with some other boy, one who wasn’t a friend already. You know, drop your books and wait for him to pick them up and then do the whole sickening ‘My hero’ act.”
She shook her head. “No. I couldn’t. I’ll just deal with Duncan.”
He took a look at her - not overly shapely, no, but nicely put together enough, and with a very real smile. “I’m not taking your money. You can pay the expenses of whatever you need them to see, and I’ll be there. And I will hold your hand, since neither of us got warts.”
“Fine then. Thank you very much.”
That Hogsmeade weekend had become every Hogsmeade weekend. She had turned a corner in Potions; something had finally clicked, and he’d stopped taking her money for lessons. Now they studied together, but they looked at each other covertly while they did it, and on the final Hogsmeade weekend of the year, he thought he might…
Mulciber approached him early in the week. “Do you want to come along? Malfoy is going to meet us in the village, and we’re all Apparating to his place.” It seemed like an opportunity, and yet…
“No. No I’m busy.”
“With what? That Hufflepuff you…’”
“Just busy.” He didn’t want her in their sights, although it occurred to him that the horse was well out of the barn, and he was just beginning to think of closing the door.
“All right, then. Just busy. That’s what I’ll tell Malfoy.”
He said it as if ominously, and Snape heard the implied threat.
“Do you think she’s really in danger? I can get Gryffindor to watch her back.” Lily being Lily, as she perfectly sliced the root into paper-thin slices that Anna could not ever quite get even.
“What excuse would you use for that?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. Anna spoke with him if she ran into him in the hallways, and perhaps as a result, so did her friends. Surprisingly, Duncan had never seemed the least perturbed, a fact he had conveniently not mentioned to Anna, since he liked walking around Hogsmeade holding her hand, and sometimes even sitting at the table with her in the library, where her friends would join them and not say anything nasty to him.
“I don’t need an excuse. Potter was asking in the common room the other day why you hadn’t been jinxing the hell out of us, and Duncan said he thought it was probably Anna’s influence. Everyone knows you two are dating.”
Everyone but him. He wondered if Anna knew. Perhaps Saturday wouldn’t surprise her much. But then, perhaps she’d be prepared to fend off his kiss.
“Gryffindor thinks we’re going out with each other,” he said to her that Saturday as they walked down the lane towards the Shrieking Shack, far enough from other students not to be heard, but certainly not alone.
She coughed nervously. “I, um, knew that. Duncan asked me about it. I didn’t deny it.” They walked a few more paces, and she blurted out, “Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw do too. I didn’t tell my friends otherwise.”
He absorbed that for a few more steps, and then she said, “I sold a few pair of earrings. Lily has a sister and mother she wanted to give them to. So I finally got you a birthday present.”
He had no idea she’d known when his birthday was “ he had no idea of hers. She pulled a bag out of her pocket, a good-sized lunch bag. “It’s a terrible present, very self-serving. I thought you might come visit me sometime this summer.”
She looked at the ground and kept walking as she pushed the bag into his hands, and he felt the distinctive crunch through the brown paper. He smiled despite himself.
“Floo powder?” She nodded, and he stopped her dead in the street.
Out of nowhere, he blurted, “Mulciber and the rest of them went to Malfoys’ this weekend. It’s going to be a problem.”
“So why didn’t you go, then?” she asked him.
“Because I planned to do this.”
He was nervous, realizing that she must have done a great deal of kissing more than he had, and yet “ there she was, and when he put his arms around her, she melted against him, and when they bumped noses, she only giggled and said, “Tilt your head,” and then they were kissing, which was very nice and far more exciting, sexually, than he’d been expecting, so that it became rather obvious, and he pulled away from her, red-faced. “Sorry,” he said, looking anywhere but at her.
“For kissing me, or for liking it?” she asked him.
He looked down at her, and she seemed about to cry. “Well, for liking it so obviously. Seems a bit crude.”
She nodded. “It’s just not as obvious with me, I suppose. But that kiss was marvelous.”
He stared at her. She must be joking. But no, she wasn’t even smiling. She looked as nervous as he felt. “It can’t have been. I’ve no idea what I’m doing,” he blurted out, turning red, and she just shook her head.
“I like you. I thought I might, and then I got to know you, and I did. Duncan…”
She sighed.
“I lied. Duncan was getting touchy feely, but it wasn’t with me. It was with Steven. And Steven doesn’t mind one bit. So…”
He blinked. “You offered to pay me to go out with you because you wanted to date me?” he finally said.
“Yes. I did. I didn’t know how else to manage it. I’m pure-blood, but we’re not especially well off or well known, not like Narcissa and people like that, people in your house.
“Girls, you mean,” he said, succinctly.
“Right, girls. And you’re so smart, and so interesting, and you have such deep, deep eyes…”
H pulled her close and kissed her again. And again, and then, again…
Some moment by ProfPosky
Story Notes:
Of course I don't own Snape, the Potterverse, etc, etc and I appreciate those who do letting me mess around with it.
I wildly, wildly appreciate my beta, Ravensgryff, and my Brit and Canon picker, EquinoxChick. Thanks so much, you two!
Chapter Endnotes: Dear reader, some moments change everything. This particular kiss in Hogsmeade was one of those . But for now, at least, I will leave you all to figure out exactly how.