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Snips and Spirals Fanfic:
"Wand Writing"
Text by Lady Tesser
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DISCLAIMER: I'm not an addict. I can quit any time I want. I control it, it doesn't control me. *drools over Sevvie pics* (Tess: Atana, you have to admit you're a Snape fangirl.) (Atana: I am NOT a fangirl!) (Tess: No, you're Queen of De-Nile.)
"A very simple exercise," Professor Flitwick stated. "Since today everyone is distracted by tonight's Hallowe'en Feast and tomorrow's opening Quidditch game, I decided to give you an easy assignment to work on."
"Wonderful," James Potter commented to the class at large. "Even Snivellus might be able to do it."
Severus Snape growled low in his throat, his nostrils flaring. "Sure," he muttered. "Too bad Saint James only has the wit of a turnip."
"Gentlemen!" Professor Flitwick intimated as much as he could in his gentle voice. "Please!"
"That covers me, what about him?" Potter and Sev said at the same time.
They glared at each other as the class giggled and Professor Flitwick rolled his eyes. "Back to the lesson: we'll be practicing Wand Writing. I'm quite sure you all know how to write, but a wand is different from a quill. The trick is being able to make your Wand Writing legible. Allow me to demonstrate."
He turned his back to the class and brought his wand up over his head, writing in ornate calligraphy with a flowing ribbon: 'Do not cast hexes in my class, Mr. Potter and Mr. Snape.'
He turned to see the two boys hastily put their wands down on their desks across the room from each other. "See?" the Professor added. "Simple. I want you to practice."
Students picked up their wands and ribbons appeared in the air as they wrote messages to each other.
Potter and Sirius Black composed a poem on the spot:
'Snivellus Snape is a miserable git - he's such a sot, he makes me sick - Dragged around by Spirals Vox - who needs a spat of chicken pox.'
Several students snickered while Sev wrote his response in fiery letters:
'Potty and Sneerius are a sorry lot - both wear boxing gloves in their cots - Both are forms of dysentery - and, I've heard, the Kings of Fairy.'
The class broke into hard laughter while Sev smirked coldly.
Black sneered and wrote: 'At least my nose isn't a separate entitty.'
Sev: 'You misspelled "entity".'
Black: 'Bite me.'
Sev: 'That's your fetish, not mine.'
Potter: 'Just crawl back under your rock, Snivelly.'
Sev: 'Piggy-grew's under there, not enough room.'
Peter Pettigrew joined the insults: 'Greasy snot.'
Sev: 'Hadron-Head.'
"Gentlemen - PLEASE!" Professor Flitwick exclaimed.
The glares between the Marauders and Sev made the airborne bacteria between them die off with little screams.
* * *
The Hallowe'en Feast was magnificent.
The hovering candles had been replaced by candlelit jack-o-lanterns, which floated over the students' heads and cast an even deeper orange glow onto the while linen tablecloths below. Orange streamers mingled with scores of swooping bats, while the enchanted ceiling thundered and flashed with lightning. Students wore masks, some actual costumes, others in fancy robes. Most remained in their uniforms.
Serving platters appeared - piled high with stuffed pumpkins and squash, potatoes baked in their jackets, corn, breads, tomato salads, colcannon, baked apples, fried buns, ginger-cookies and candy-studded cakes. Cranberry juice (a gift from the Salem Institute in America), pumpkin juice, and hot apple cider were provided to wash it all down with.
Messages were exchanged in the air with Wand Writing -
'Happy Hallowe'en!'
'Best meal yet this year!'
'Brilliant decorations!'
'Wanna go prank Hogsmeade?'
'NO!'
'Just kidding, Professor!'
Words and sentence ribbons floated and fluttered over the heads of the students, the bats swooping down to dissipate the magic.
Suddenly, James Potter got up and ran down one of the aisles, waving his wand over his head.
Filling up the Great Hall's length above everyone's heads was: 'Snivellus and Spirals wear each other's underwear!'
Several students fell into giggles while the Slytherins glared coldly at the Marauders.
The two slandered in question shrugged. Martis' eyebrows lowered behind her sunglasses while Sev got up and raised his wand.
"Mr. Snape," Professor Penderdandis called. "Please sit back down."
"Request to defend my friend's honor," he asked.
"Request denied," Penderdandis stated. "Do not stoop to their level."
"Yeah, Snips," Martis added. "You can't scrape your belly like they do. Or eat excrement."
"Excellent points, Spirals." He sat back down, snarling in the direction of James Potter who was grinning like an idiot and high-fiving his friends.
"Really," Martis said. "They have the collective intellectual wit of a toadstool stem."
"From which all their problems stem?" Sev finished.
"Or so I'm toad."
"And their problems will mushroom from there."
She laughed and poked his shoulder. "Bother!"
He poked her shoulder. "Bother!"
"Bother!"
"Bother!"
"Bother!"
Narcissa Black slammed her fist down on the table. "Will you two goits cut that out?!"
"Most disgraceful!" Lucius Malfoy added.
"Never!" Martis declared.
"Nevah!" Sev added, his snootiest accent rolling the '-er' into an '-ah'.
Martis blinked. "Wow, I could see the calligraphy in that, Snips!"
As the Malfoy/Black Alliance retreated, Sev looked at his partner with a smirk. "I thought you hated puns, Spirals."
"I do - but I hate those two worse."
As Lucius walked off with Narcissa, he commented, "Can you imagine what a hideous little git their child would be?"
Narcissa clenched her teeth. "Oh, do shut up, Malfoy!"
Martis remarked to Sev, "Can you imagine how horrid THEIR child would be?"
Sev nodded. "Probably be a hermaphrodite from all that inbreeding."
* * *
The Quidditch match between Slytherin and Gryffindor was on a blustery cold day, the sky filled with a blanket of nearly white clouds outlined with silver clouds scurrying below.
Martis and Sev were seated at the back of the stands; Martis huddled under a blanket and Sev with his green and silver scarf around his face.
"Madame Hooch is crazy," Martis complained. "I don't want to be zooming around at fifty-miles-per-hour in the cold! My nose would freeze!"
Sev pulled the scarf from his mouth. "Believe me, Spirals, you don't think about the cold when you're playing."
She poked a gloved finger out from under the blanket, shaking it in his face. "Give me one good reason why I should even watch this game!"
"Because I'm going to."
The finger retreated and the opening showed her face, her olive complexion reddened with cold. "All right, but you're sharing the blanket with me."
"Can't; Miss Price thinks we're sitting too close together anyway."
Martis rolled her eyes behind her sunglasses. "We're only friends, people," she sang to no one in particular. "He's thirteen and I'm twelve, big whooping deal."
He scooted away and she raised one hand up, making obscene gestures toward Gryffindor's stands. "Hope those two unathletic drips saw that."
Sev peered across the pitch through their own team's players warming up and nodded. "Yeah. Porky-grew is giving us the Two-Finger Salute in return and Loopy is trying to ignore us."
Martis snorted. "Those two are such pansies - one's a brainless minion and the other's a cowardly outcast that won't admit he's more like us than he realizes."
"Prongs, Padfoot, Wormtail, and Moony."
"Huh?" Martis asked.
"Nicknames I heard them call each other. You don't know they're animagi, do you?"
She dropped the blanket from her head. "No way! Really? HA!" She giggled, seeing Black and Potter appear out of the Gryffindor team's entrance. "Who's who?"
"The two jocks are Prongs and Padfoot. Black turns into a dog - that's why I've been making canine jokes at him. Potter turns into a stag."
"What about the other two?"
"Pettigrew's a rat."
"I know, but what can he change into?"
Sev snickered. "Same thing."
"Gee, I just called him 'Rat-Boy' because he looked like one. What about Lupin?"
"I haven't found out yet. I think it has to do with his nickname of 'Moony'."
"A wolf, maybe?"
"Nah, not that obvious."
James Potter swooped by, cackling. "So sorry we can't play against you, Snivelly!"
He took off before the duo could comment on his personal habits involving the local wildlife.
"And another thing!" Martis called. "Your mama was a hampster and your papa smelled of elderberries!"
The Slytherins around her broke into laughter.
"Where in the world did you come up with that one?" Sev asked.
"I dunno. Sounded funny." She gripped his wrist. "Great Mother! I thought of something great!"
"What?" Sev asked.
Martis bounced up and down on the bench, chortling. "Oh, bloody brilliant - bloody BRILLIANT, Snips!" She leaned close, whispering in his ear.
Sev's grin matched hers. "That is rude, vulgar, hard to do, possibly dangerous, and will certainly get us in trouble - LET'S DO IT!"
Madame Hooch threw the Quaffle in the air and the match began in earnest. Slytherin's 'big dumb jocks' against Gryffindor's strategy-minded players ... oh, and Chasers Sirius Black and James Potter.
Potter snatched the Quaffle and tossed it to Black as they dodged Slytherin Chasers. Black threw it back to Potter who slammed it into a goal.
Martis and Sev slipped down to the floor of the stands, laying on their backs and looking up at the sky over the pitch. She handed her wand to him and he pulled out his own, both going into his grip and pointing up at the cloudy sky. Slowly, he began to spell out a message.
"The Gryffies are going to freak!" Martis chuckled.
"We are going to get our House in so much trouble!" Sev reminded her, even though his own grin was threatening to split his face open. "There, done."
The game had stopped as everyone looked up at the sky to see written in flaming blue script:
'JAMES POTTER IS A DOE'
A Bludger took out three players while nearly a thousand Hogwarts students were convulsed with laughter.
Professor Penderdandis was immediately over the guffawing Britomartis Vox and Severus Snape, grabbing both by the scruffs of their necks and pulling them up to their feet. "You two - my office - march now."
* * *
Professor Gallo Penderdandis folded his hands together before him, surveying the two students standing before his desk.
Martis always respected her House Master. He was a tall, painfully thin man with rapidly receding black hair that he combed back to expose a large, wide forehead and beady eyes behind pince-nez glasses that painfully pinched his hawklike nose. His complexion would best be described as 'pasty' while his lips were unnaturally purple in color, and always in a thin straight line. Little shook his icy persona, even when faced with these two.
"I must congratulate you on using such an advanced form of a Wand Writing spell," he commented. "However, I am displeased at your childish behavior in employing it and for such a lowly prank."
"Yes," Martis agreed. "We should have thought it through. Perhaps implied his intimate relationships with hedgehogs?"
Sev kicked Martis' shin for her to shut up.
"Do you two have any idea the commotion this caused? The game was canceled, due to your prank. Three Quidditch players - including our own Beater Markham Dearling - are in the infirmary, due to your prank. Professor McGonagall is demanding I suspend you for the rest of the semester, due to your prank."
"Didn't know it would cause that much trouble," Martis commented.
"And since I know this was YOUR brainchild, Miss Vox, I have some exquisite punishment in mind for you."
Sev was surprised to feel Martis slipping her hand into his and squeezing him in fear.
"Since Mr. Dearling will be out, this means our chance at winning the Quidditch Cup is shot this year," Penderdandis informed her with sufficient coldness overlaying anger that it made her neck hair stand on end. "That is why YOU are going to replace him this season."
Sev opened his mouth but Martis smashed his instep with her heel. "Sir, I've never even seen a Quidditch match, let alone played - "
"And that is why you're going to be on the team, so you'll gain a little humility in the process. Accept your punishment or you'll be expelled."
"SIR!" She set her jaw, making her muscles stand out. "All right."
He leaned back, tenting his fingers. "Now that your punishment is taken care of ... Mr. Snape, your turn."
Sev lowered his head and allowed his hair to cover his face.
"You are going to wash the common room windows."
Sev looked up. "Yes, sir."
"Good. Dismissed."
Sev and Martis left their House Master's office, then stared at each other.
"Quidditch Beater??" Sev exclaimed.
Martis shrugged. "The Great Mother works in mysterious ways - evidently, she wants me to play Quidditch."
Sev grinned and picked her up under her knees and back, spinning around. He ran into the common room where many of the Slytherins were still feeling sore about missing the game. "Listen up - Penderdandis just told Spirals to be our team's Beater!"
Both ran out of the common room as many of their fellow housemates broke into a riot and chased them with wands drawn, ready to hex, and screaming about losing the Quidditch Cup for sure.
"What'd I say??" Sev asked.
"Shut up and run!" Martis replied.
-End-
DISCLAIMER: I'm not an addict. I can quit any time I want. I control it, it doesn't control me. *drools over Sevvie pics* (Tess: Atana, you have to admit you're a Snape fangirl.) (Atana: I am NOT a fangirl!) (Tess: No, you're Queen of De-Nile.)
"A very simple exercise," Professor Flitwick stated. "Since today everyone is distracted by tonight's Hallowe'en Feast and tomorrow's opening Quidditch game, I decided to give you an easy assignment to work on."
"Wonderful," James Potter commented to the class at large. "Even Snivellus might be able to do it."
Severus Snape growled low in his throat, his nostrils flaring. "Sure," he muttered. "Too bad Saint James only has the wit of a turnip."
"Gentlemen!" Professor Flitwick intimated as much as he could in his gentle voice. "Please!"
"That covers me, what about him?" Potter and Sev said at the same time.
They glared at each other as the class giggled and Professor Flitwick rolled his eyes. "Back to the lesson: we'll be practicing Wand Writing. I'm quite sure you all know how to write, but a wand is different from a quill. The trick is being able to make your Wand Writing legible. Allow me to demonstrate."
He turned his back to the class and brought his wand up over his head, writing in ornate calligraphy with a flowing ribbon: 'Do not cast hexes in my class, Mr. Potter and Mr. Snape.'
He turned to see the two boys hastily put their wands down on their desks across the room from each other. "See?" the Professor added. "Simple. I want you to practice."
Students picked up their wands and ribbons appeared in the air as they wrote messages to each other.
Potter and Sirius Black composed a poem on the spot:
'Snivellus Snape is a miserable git - he's such a sot, he makes me sick - Dragged around by Spirals Vox - who needs a spat of chicken pox.'
Several students snickered while Sev wrote his response in fiery letters:
'Potty and Sneerius are a sorry lot - both wear boxing gloves in their cots - Both are forms of dysentery - and, I've heard, the Kings of Fairy.'
The class broke into hard laughter while Sev smirked coldly.
Black sneered and wrote: 'At least my nose isn't a separate entitty.'
Sev: 'You misspelled "entity".'
Black: 'Bite me.'
Sev: 'That's your fetish, not mine.'
Potter: 'Just crawl back under your rock, Snivelly.'
Sev: 'Piggy-grew's under there, not enough room.'
Peter Pettigrew joined the insults: 'Greasy snot.'
Sev: 'Hadron-Head.'
"Gentlemen - PLEASE!" Professor Flitwick exclaimed.
The glares between the Marauders and Sev made the airborne bacteria between them die off with little screams.
* * *
The Hallowe'en Feast was magnificent.
The hovering candles had been replaced by candlelit jack-o-lanterns, which floated over the students' heads and cast an even deeper orange glow onto the while linen tablecloths below. Orange streamers mingled with scores of swooping bats, while the enchanted ceiling thundered and flashed with lightning. Students wore masks, some actual costumes, others in fancy robes. Most remained in their uniforms.
Serving platters appeared - piled high with stuffed pumpkins and squash, potatoes baked in their jackets, corn, breads, tomato salads, colcannon, baked apples, fried buns, ginger-cookies and candy-studded cakes. Cranberry juice (a gift from the Salem Institute in America), pumpkin juice, and hot apple cider were provided to wash it all down with.
Messages were exchanged in the air with Wand Writing -
'Happy Hallowe'en!'
'Best meal yet this year!'
'Brilliant decorations!'
'Wanna go prank Hogsmeade?'
'NO!'
'Just kidding, Professor!'
Words and sentence ribbons floated and fluttered over the heads of the students, the bats swooping down to dissipate the magic.
Suddenly, James Potter got up and ran down one of the aisles, waving his wand over his head.
Filling up the Great Hall's length above everyone's heads was: 'Snivellus and Spirals wear each other's underwear!'
Several students fell into giggles while the Slytherins glared coldly at the Marauders.
The two slandered in question shrugged. Martis' eyebrows lowered behind her sunglasses while Sev got up and raised his wand.
"Mr. Snape," Professor Penderdandis called. "Please sit back down."
"Request to defend my friend's honor," he asked.
"Request denied," Penderdandis stated. "Do not stoop to their level."
"Yeah, Snips," Martis added. "You can't scrape your belly like they do. Or eat excrement."
"Excellent points, Spirals." He sat back down, snarling in the direction of James Potter who was grinning like an idiot and high-fiving his friends.
"Really," Martis said. "They have the collective intellectual wit of a toadstool stem."
"From which all their problems stem?" Sev finished.
"Or so I'm toad."
"And their problems will mushroom from there."
She laughed and poked his shoulder. "Bother!"
He poked her shoulder. "Bother!"
"Bother!"
"Bother!"
"Bother!"
Narcissa Black slammed her fist down on the table. "Will you two goits cut that out?!"
"Most disgraceful!" Lucius Malfoy added.
"Never!" Martis declared.
"Nevah!" Sev added, his snootiest accent rolling the '-er' into an '-ah'.
Martis blinked. "Wow, I could see the calligraphy in that, Snips!"
As the Malfoy/Black Alliance retreated, Sev looked at his partner with a smirk. "I thought you hated puns, Spirals."
"I do - but I hate those two worse."
As Lucius walked off with Narcissa, he commented, "Can you imagine what a hideous little git their child would be?"
Narcissa clenched her teeth. "Oh, do shut up, Malfoy!"
Martis remarked to Sev, "Can you imagine how horrid THEIR child would be?"
Sev nodded. "Probably be a hermaphrodite from all that inbreeding."
* * *
The Quidditch match between Slytherin and Gryffindor was on a blustery cold day, the sky filled with a blanket of nearly white clouds outlined with silver clouds scurrying below.
Martis and Sev were seated at the back of the stands; Martis huddled under a blanket and Sev with his green and silver scarf around his face.
"Madame Hooch is crazy," Martis complained. "I don't want to be zooming around at fifty-miles-per-hour in the cold! My nose would freeze!"
Sev pulled the scarf from his mouth. "Believe me, Spirals, you don't think about the cold when you're playing."
She poked a gloved finger out from under the blanket, shaking it in his face. "Give me one good reason why I should even watch this game!"
"Because I'm going to."
The finger retreated and the opening showed her face, her olive complexion reddened with cold. "All right, but you're sharing the blanket with me."
"Can't; Miss Price thinks we're sitting too close together anyway."
Martis rolled her eyes behind her sunglasses. "We're only friends, people," she sang to no one in particular. "He's thirteen and I'm twelve, big whooping deal."
He scooted away and she raised one hand up, making obscene gestures toward Gryffindor's stands. "Hope those two unathletic drips saw that."
Sev peered across the pitch through their own team's players warming up and nodded. "Yeah. Porky-grew is giving us the Two-Finger Salute in return and Loopy is trying to ignore us."
Martis snorted. "Those two are such pansies - one's a brainless minion and the other's a cowardly outcast that won't admit he's more like us than he realizes."
"Prongs, Padfoot, Wormtail, and Moony."
"Huh?" Martis asked.
"Nicknames I heard them call each other. You don't know they're animagi, do you?"
She dropped the blanket from her head. "No way! Really? HA!" She giggled, seeing Black and Potter appear out of the Gryffindor team's entrance. "Who's who?"
"The two jocks are Prongs and Padfoot. Black turns into a dog - that's why I've been making canine jokes at him. Potter turns into a stag."
"What about the other two?"
"Pettigrew's a rat."
"I know, but what can he change into?"
Sev snickered. "Same thing."
"Gee, I just called him 'Rat-Boy' because he looked like one. What about Lupin?"
"I haven't found out yet. I think it has to do with his nickname of 'Moony'."
"A wolf, maybe?"
"Nah, not that obvious."
James Potter swooped by, cackling. "So sorry we can't play against you, Snivelly!"
He took off before the duo could comment on his personal habits involving the local wildlife.
"And another thing!" Martis called. "Your mama was a hampster and your papa smelled of elderberries!"
The Slytherins around her broke into laughter.
"Where in the world did you come up with that one?" Sev asked.
"I dunno. Sounded funny." She gripped his wrist. "Great Mother! I thought of something great!"
"What?" Sev asked.
Martis bounced up and down on the bench, chortling. "Oh, bloody brilliant - bloody BRILLIANT, Snips!" She leaned close, whispering in his ear.
Sev's grin matched hers. "That is rude, vulgar, hard to do, possibly dangerous, and will certainly get us in trouble - LET'S DO IT!"
Madame Hooch threw the Quaffle in the air and the match began in earnest. Slytherin's 'big dumb jocks' against Gryffindor's strategy-minded players ... oh, and Chasers Sirius Black and James Potter.
Potter snatched the Quaffle and tossed it to Black as they dodged Slytherin Chasers. Black threw it back to Potter who slammed it into a goal.
Martis and Sev slipped down to the floor of the stands, laying on their backs and looking up at the sky over the pitch. She handed her wand to him and he pulled out his own, both going into his grip and pointing up at the cloudy sky. Slowly, he began to spell out a message.
"The Gryffies are going to freak!" Martis chuckled.
"We are going to get our House in so much trouble!" Sev reminded her, even though his own grin was threatening to split his face open. "There, done."
The game had stopped as everyone looked up at the sky to see written in flaming blue script:
'JAMES POTTER IS A DOE'
A Bludger took out three players while nearly a thousand Hogwarts students were convulsed with laughter.
Professor Penderdandis was immediately over the guffawing Britomartis Vox and Severus Snape, grabbing both by the scruffs of their necks and pulling them up to their feet. "You two - my office - march now."
* * *
Professor Gallo Penderdandis folded his hands together before him, surveying the two students standing before his desk.
Martis always respected her House Master. He was a tall, painfully thin man with rapidly receding black hair that he combed back to expose a large, wide forehead and beady eyes behind pince-nez glasses that painfully pinched his hawklike nose. His complexion would best be described as 'pasty' while his lips were unnaturally purple in color, and always in a thin straight line. Little shook his icy persona, even when faced with these two.
"I must congratulate you on using such an advanced form of a Wand Writing spell," he commented. "However, I am displeased at your childish behavior in employing it and for such a lowly prank."
"Yes," Martis agreed. "We should have thought it through. Perhaps implied his intimate relationships with hedgehogs?"
Sev kicked Martis' shin for her to shut up.
"Do you two have any idea the commotion this caused? The game was canceled, due to your prank. Three Quidditch players - including our own Beater Markham Dearling - are in the infirmary, due to your prank. Professor McGonagall is demanding I suspend you for the rest of the semester, due to your prank."
"Didn't know it would cause that much trouble," Martis commented.
"And since I know this was YOUR brainchild, Miss Vox, I have some exquisite punishment in mind for you."
Sev was surprised to feel Martis slipping her hand into his and squeezing him in fear.
"Since Mr. Dearling will be out, this means our chance at winning the Quidditch Cup is shot this year," Penderdandis informed her with sufficient coldness overlaying anger that it made her neck hair stand on end. "That is why YOU are going to replace him this season."
Sev opened his mouth but Martis smashed his instep with her heel. "Sir, I've never even seen a Quidditch match, let alone played - "
"And that is why you're going to be on the team, so you'll gain a little humility in the process. Accept your punishment or you'll be expelled."
"SIR!" She set her jaw, making her muscles stand out. "All right."
He leaned back, tenting his fingers. "Now that your punishment is taken care of ... Mr. Snape, your turn."
Sev lowered his head and allowed his hair to cover his face.
"You are going to wash the common room windows."
Sev looked up. "Yes, sir."
"Good. Dismissed."
Sev and Martis left their House Master's office, then stared at each other.
"Quidditch Beater??" Sev exclaimed.
Martis shrugged. "The Great Mother works in mysterious ways - evidently, she wants me to play Quidditch."
Sev grinned and picked her up under her knees and back, spinning around. He ran into the common room where many of the Slytherins were still feeling sore about missing the game. "Listen up - Penderdandis just told Spirals to be our team's Beater!"
Both ran out of the common room as many of their fellow housemates broke into a riot and chased them with wands drawn, ready to hex, and screaming about losing the Quidditch Cup for sure.
"What'd I say??" Sev asked.
"Shut up and run!" Martis replied.
-End-