I don't understand why the Harry Potter fandom inspires these odd short non-stories, but it does. I think perhaps because it generally has so much respect for ms. Rowling's text that its fiction has to fit in between scenes. not that this particular drabble works with canon in any way.
No profit is made, no harm is meant. If I thought JK would take one of my kidneys, I'd send her one.
wise as serpents
"Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents."
~ Matthew 10:16The Head of Slytherin House is a short auburn-haired woman named Bella Keller. The night that Severus Snape was Sorted, she took him aside (as, later he learned, she took everyone in her House aside) and asked him his ambitions. Not knowing precisely what to say, but knowing this to be a very important question as well as a moment that would define the rest of his House career, Severus answered that he hoped to learn everything there was to learn and to represent his House and family well. Keller nodded, seeming neither perturbed nor satisfied, nor moved in any way-- she sent him to his dormitory and afterwards spoke to him only occasionally.
Severus was very young then; small, sickly, uncertain; and that was seven years ago.
Today is the first day of seventh year Defense Against the Dark Arts, and now Professor Keller sits behind her desk with a grave expression. She stretches long a scroll and calls roll from it; she calls out the names on the list but doesn’t lift her eyes to see the hands being tentatively raised until she says, “Malfoy, Lucius”-- at which point she glances at him and he nods politely. Moments later she calls, “Snape, Severus,” and spares another glance.
“All right,” she says upon finishing the roll, letting the scroll curl up again in her fist, “welcome to your last year of Dark Arts.” She stands and moves to the front of her desk, leans back against it, her red-brown hair tumbling around her shoulders. “In the past six years we have covered every known manner of harmful creature, every questionable charm, chant, and every curse and counter-curse suitable for young wizards. Now, in your seventh year, it is finally time to get to the heart of the matter.”
Lucius turns his head to Severus, who sits beside him. Severus cocks an eyebrow and a corner of Lucius’ mouth lifts.
“The phrase ‘Dark Arts’ is a misnomer.” Keller speaks while fixing her eyes toward the back of the class, at the back wall, as she often does. “A thing is considered ‘dark’ when the majority of a populace finds the contemplation-- the existence, even-- of that thing to be uncomfortable. It is the officiation of mass fear.” Her gaze sharpens and points at a girl in the front row, and her mouth curves slightly. “One might more accurately title this class ‘Defense Against the Scary Arts.’” The girl, Stacy Cerridwen, a Gryffindor, smiles back.
“I trust that you all have, by this time, mastered practical defense against destruction magicks to a sufficient degree--“ she pauses as her eyes pass over Peter Pettigrew, another Gryffindor, who still has trouble with even the most rudimentary defense charms, as though defense is never his instinct, and over Sirius Black, who isn’t paying attention, “--so for the remainder of your time here, we will be focusing on the philosophical defenses, which are, in my opinion, much more potent.”
“Chambliss,” she says.
Anthony Chambliss straightens in his seat. “Yes, Professor?”
Keller sits farther back on her desk, so that its edge brushes the backs of her knees through the thick black cloth of her robes. She folds her hands in her lap. “Chambliss, what would you say is the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
Chambliss looks around him, then back at Keller, and he says, “umm,” with a sort of squinting look, his strawberry blond eyebrows gathering. “You want to know, like . . ”
Keller smiles softly. “This isn’t an interrogation. You shan’t be called to task for anything.”
Chambliss looks around again before shrugging. “I don’t know . . “ Keller says nothing. He adds, “I guess I . . the time I blew up my mum’s prize-winning aconite crop.”
“I see. Why did you blow up your mother’s crop?”
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Chambliss says quickly, a frown creasing into his face. “I messed up a potion I was working on, and it turned into this thing that got into the garden.” He shrugs again. “I didn’t mean to. She was really upset.”
“Thank you. That’s an excellent beginning.” She lifts her chin, addressing the rest of the class. “Accidental evil.“ She points to a girl in the third row.
“Mavery: tell us what the worst thing is that you’ve ever done.”
Dolores Mavery clears her throat and smiles shyly, then announces that she once stole an enchanted purseful of candies from Honeydukes. When Keller asks why, her face colors a little and she says that she wanted the candy. Some expression crosses briefly over Keller’s face and a corner of her mouth tugs upward.
She goes around the class, asking five more students what they’ve done-- some hesitate and some are smiling broadly with confession when she asks them-- and why they did it; and she largely reserves comment until her roving gaze stops against Lucius and Severus.
“Potter,” she says.
James Potter’s open mouth jerks away from Lily Evans’ ear and closes, and he straightens in his seat. Black, sitting next to him, also looks up. “Yes, Professor?”
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done, Potter?” Keller asks, looking slowly away from the two Slytherins, to the Gryffindor. Lucius flashes a delighted smile at Severus, pale blue eyes glittering, but Severus is watching Potter and his cluster of followers.
“Um, I don’t know,” says Potter, loping a half-formed grin. He glances at Black. “I guess I’ve sneaked out past curfew a few times.”
Black leans close to him, smiling toothily. He says, in what is probably meant to be a whisper but is audible even to Severus, who’s sitting on the other side of the classroom, “hope she doesn’t ask you why.“
“It’s interesting,” says Keller, bringing her hands together to clasp near her knees. “It’s interesting that you rank breaking curfew over taking life.”
Potter’s grin falls away. “What?”
“Well, I only mean, that you choose breaking curfew over, say, the death of Killawog Charlie.”
“That--“ begins Black, loudly, but Potter speaks over him. “That’s completely different, it doesn’t count at all.”
Keller cocks her head. “It doesn’t count as death?” She speaks slowly and her voice is soft. “A thing was alive, then you touched it and it wasn’t alive anymore. That’s what killing is.” Potter shakes his head.
“No. There are completely different circumstances. Killawog Charlie was--“
“Bad,” Keller says. “He was bad.”
“He was going to kill us,” Potter says, jaw set, eyebrows low.
“Destruction in the name of self-defense.” Keller looks away, at the rest of the class. “Excellent.” She stands up and spreads her hands. Black shakes his head and murmurs something-- sufficiently quiet this time-- and Potter says something back. He looks over and catches Severus’ gaze. Severus looks away, his mouth curling.
“We have plenty to discuss in the terms to come. For next class each of you will prepare a scroll on the worst thing you’ve done and why you did it. Those of you I’ve asked just now are exempt.”
There is a small wave of mutters in the classroom-- some bleary, some excited, as before-- and Lucius chuckles low in his throat.
Keller moves back behind her desk and sits down. “Class dismissed.”*
Lucius Malfoy is one inch taller than Severus, at most, but he carries himself straighter so the difference is pronounced. Even when bending forward, he leads with his chest and his face is always slightly upturned, always a bow and never a crouch. His white-blond hair is long enough to pull into a small ponytail; when unbound it brushes his shoulders and is tucked behind slightly pointed ears. His nose and chin are also slightly pointed. His eyes are a clean pale blue, like the reflection of sky in artic waters. He laughs often, and it leaves the same clean pale blue impression.
He laughs now, at a table in the Slytherin common room, looking past Severus at a girl doing a waddling impression of an overweight Hufflepuff girl. Severus turns his head then looks back.
"You're not listening," he says.
"No, no," says Lucius, smiling, "I am listening. Go on."
Severus doesn't hunch when he walks but he tends to keep his hands in his pockets and his gazes sideways, from beneath his straight black eyebrows. His straight black hair follows his jawbone to just below the chin. It smells faintly of elderberries, from a treatment that Severus uses to combat a sort of oiliness his hair naturally carries-- a hereditary condition which he never thought much about until, during the summer between his fifth and sixth years, Lucius stretched a hand out along the back of the Malfoy Manor sofa, touched a strand of hair and asked if maybe he couldn't do something about that. His eyes are likewise black.
"My grandmother slipped on the residue, shattered her hip, and I was never held accountable."
"Did that actually happen?"
"Something like it."
Lucius leans back in his seat-- a wooden chair with a high cloth-covered back and ruby-eyed snakes carved into the arms and legs-- and smirks. "And that's the worst thing you've ever done."
"Well, no," says Severus, face pinching, "but we're hardly expected to write the actual."
"I believe that was the assignment."
"When the Head of Slytherin House assigns Slytherin students confession, she's probably taking points off for honesty."
Lucius laughs. "Too right."
Severus dips his quill into the inkwell and begins to scritch against his parchment: when I was twelve, and very sorry. After four paragraphs, Lucius puts two tapered fingertips on the top edge of the scroll.
"What would you write?" he asks.
Severus glances up. Lucius is leaned forward, his head tilted to the side.
"Hm?"
"If you were to truthfully write down the worst thing you've done. What would you write?"
Severus blinks. He looks around the common room. Lucius leans farther forward, while still somehow keeping his face upturned, and lowers his voice.
"Would it be Caroline Crathy?"
During his first year, Severus took breakfast at the Slytherin table sitting next to Caroline Crathy, before he met Lucius in Potions. They fell out of familiarity until third year, when she was the only other person in the right place at the right time to have accidentally poisoned half of the Ravenclaw table with an illegal potion. She was expelled and he's heard that her family suffered some disrepute over the incident. Severus doesn't think of it often, and when he finds that he is, he stops.
"I don't care for hypothetical questions," he murmurs. He turns back to his essay, continues his scritching, but Lucius doesn't move his hand from the top.
"It's," Lucius says after a moment, and Severus looks up again, because Lucius so rarely hesitates in the things he says. Lucius' pale eyes are still. He says, "It wouldn't," and stops again.
Severus' mother, Philalethia Snape, died in the November of his fourth year. It was quite expected, as she had been sick for quite some time. Toward the end her mind began to go.
Lucius attended the funeral in finely-tailored black robes. He stood beside Severus in front of the casket. Severus has seen Lucius at funerals since then and before then, and his eyes always contract with empathy while words of comfort tuck sweetly around the mourner; but that day Lucius did not look him in the eyes at all, did not talk to him for a week; it was the closest Severus had ever seen his brow to bowed.
Lucius lifts his hand from the parchment and waves it gracefully in the air. "Nevermind."
Severus lets the scroll roll up and sets his quill aside. "Let's go to dinner."
"Yes." Lucius stands, looks around the room until he spots a large boy in the corner and gestures to him. The boy, Geoffrey Goyle, muddles toward them and, upon Lucius' thrown glance, scoops up Lucius' books. Lucius smiles at Severus. "Can I help with your books?"
"I've got them, thank you."
They make their way out of the dungeons-- Lucius walking with Severus slightly behind him, and Goyle trailing-- and into the main hall. They sit at their usual spot, almost at the head of the table, amongst the other seventh years. The younger Slytherins watch them pass. Severus stares at a gleaming silver dish of ham pudding across from him while Lucius spoons out a healthy helping of pea salad. Sirius Black, over at the Gryffindor table, makes some indistinct animal noise.
"Come on, Severus--" Lucius has a way of saying his name quickly, with no lost syllables, so that it doesn't sound so formal as it does when anyone else says it. He brushes a hand against the sleeve of Severus' robes. "I've got a good feeling about this year. Give us a smile."