"Are you a rabbit?" The question came out of nowhere. The sharp asking ringing through his mind.
Harry brought his attention to the professors cool face, there was no expression in the black eyes.
"What?"
Snape smirked and leaned forward to where he was sitting in the desk, arms bracing his robed body.
"I asked, Potter, if you were a rabbit. A hare. Classified Leporidae."
Confusion must have been evident on his face for Snape went back to towering over him with a long-suffering sigh.
"I am questioning you on this topic Potter, because I am wondering if you have fallen into the rabbit hole? Gone into that dark place in your mind where you have to squint to see the light of knowledge."
The Potions Master turned and reached for his wand, ignoring Harry's tensing at the action as he began writing in the air, with diagrams.
"Look here Potter," He pointed to a scruffy, rather crudely drawn rabbit. "This is you. Now, this is the rabbit hole, the little rabbit's home." Once again, he pointed to where there was now a tunnel, a straight line with tufts of grass and a tube spiraling down.
"That home represents your mind, the part where you reside when you want to hide, want to escape the fox, the predator, myself." He now drew a shape of a fox, behind the rabbit who was near the hole.
"When the rabbit feels the predator getting too close, doing something it's scared of, like teaching it something that might get to it's little brain. It will then precede to run into the warmth of the rabbit hole, become cloaked in it. Where the fox cannot go."
He animated the drawing so that the rabbit crawled into it's hole, down the spiral with the fox standing confused beside it.
"When you don't pay attention, you're going into your rabbit hole, and you won't come out until the danger of the fox is passed. Because you see, the hole is too small for the fox."
Then Snape smirked, an expression that sent shivers down his spine. He didn't like that look. Snape leaned in a little, not so much as before, but enough so he could feel the breath on his face.
"Except those are muggle creatures, Potter. They don't have magic. They can't shrink." He turned swiftly, waving his wand so that the drawing fox shrank to the size of the rabbit, crawling down into the hole where it the began to chew on the innocent, squealing creature.
Snape was really find too much pleasure in this act as when he turned back with a swish of the black robes, there was a gleam in his eyes.
"So you see Potter? We are out of the muggle world, you and I, and there is nothing stopping me from going in and pulling you out of the rabbit hole. And you see, rather unfortunate things could happen then."
The drawing now had little bunnies that were living in the hole, in alcoves that looked like some sort of half egg shape in the tube. The fox started snatching them up one by one.
"All the little bunnies that are usually hidden could be found by the fox and discovered just because said rabbit friend did not want to pay attention. The good of the one over the good of the many, is that what you think, Potter? That just because you didn't want to sacrifice yourself to learning, all your little rabbits were now discovered."
With a vindictive smile he turned to the front of the class, passing many bewildered faces as he did so.
"I suggest you drag yourself out of that familiar rabbit hole Mister Potter, or all the little bunnies just might come out, and we wouldn't want that now, would we?"
Harry frowned, the rest of the class seemed to dismiss the barmy and seemingly inane conversation, though Hermione looked like she might have a thought of what it was really about.
Snape was sitting as his desk, face once more expressionless while Harry was simply staring at his cauldron in thought of the talk.
Before the bell rung, his voice ran out through the classroom.
"Professor. Who were the parents?"