AN: This is my first crack at writing fanfiction, so any feedback is greatly appreciated :) AU premise where the trio undertake their 7th year, and Snape is alive
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Hermione Granger fell into her seat with a barely muffled groan. It was the last class of the day, a double potions with Slytherin. Normally a double potions would earn the title of "Worst Class of the Day" by default, given the ingrained and almost permeable hatred Professor Snape had for any Gryffindor student, but apparently Hermione had woken up in the wrong side of the bed this morning. Every class so far had ended up a disaster. In Transfiguration the unlucky witch had managed to half-transfigure her allocated chair into the back end of a donkey, which wouldn't have been so bad in of itself if said chair-donkey hadn't used its new found legs to kick her squarely in the stomach. After the toast and juice she had consumed at breakfast made their reappearance all over her table and books, Hermione had watched shame faced as Professor McGonagall put things right. Talk about making an arse of herself. Next had come Charms, usually her best subject, which had resulted in an explosion followed by a visit to the hospital wing. Bizarre, considering they had only been practising turning vinegar into wine, something she was quite adapt at. She had missed her Arithmancy class, despite avid protesting against Madam Pomfrey, and so now would have to catch up in her spare time. Suffice to say, her day was God damned awful, and the only silver lining to being in Potions was the knowledge that it was the last class of the week.
Hermione had no idea what was causing her new found clumsiness and inability to function as a normally competent 17 year old witch. All she knew was that when she had awoken this morning, something had felt off. It was as if her conscience was a step to the left of her actual body. Everything she looked at felt like it was silently screaming at her, or talking in all capital letters. How a door knob can scream at you she had no idea. Not to mention the tremors, her foot wouldn't stop jittering about, and it felt as though every move was made in fast jagged movements. She had a nearly uncontrollable urge to run to the library and gather any medical books in sight, in the bid to determine what was going on, but the fear of missing another class quelled the compulsion. When she could focus her mind properly on her current environment, Hermione had to admit to herself that potions was probably the worst thing she could be doing right now, especially under the scrutinising view of one Professor Snape.
Snape stalked into the classroom, preceded by the ominously loud bang of the dungeon door slamming against the wall behind it. Hermione buried her head in her hands, feeling as if the noise was bouncing around the walls of her fragile skull. 'What the hell is wrong with me?. Snape swept to the front of the room, turning to pierce them all with his rather withering gaze as his robes settled around him gracefully. 'Gracefully? Can anything be considered graceful when it comes to Professor Snape? Although he does glide when he walks/(stalks). And his movements seem very fluid. Did something just move in the floor?. She leant to the side of her desk in an attempt to see the stone floor through the feet, table, and chair legs, completely oblivious to the instructions Professor Snape was giving.
"You will be brewing the Elixir to Induce Euphoria." With a flick of his wand, the instructions appeared on the board behind him. "When brewed correctly, it can produce a sense of irrational happiness, and has been known to cure depression."
"Maybe we should slip some into the greasy gits coffee." Muttered Ron obnoxiously, leaning towards Harry. "-might make him more bearable."
"Ten points from Gryffindor, Weasley" Snape drawled. "And detention I think, Saturday morning." Ron looked outraged, a splotchy red flush spreading to his ears.
"But that's the day Gryffindor play Ravenclaw!"
Snape's eyes glittered rather evilly as he replied. "Is it? Then hopefully missing it might cause you to think before you speak in future, though I won't hold my breath. It wouldn't do to die of asphyxiation. Now be silent Weasley, I would hate to deduct further points." As it was clearly evident deducting further points is exactly what Snape wanted to do, Ron audibly swallowed his next words and kept quiet.
"Bad luck mate." She heard Harry whisper.
Throughout this encounter Hermione continued to surreptitiously inspect the floor, certain she had seen something move. So engrossed in her search as she was, the hapless witch failed to notice she had gained the Professors attention.
"I would hope that as seventh year students, I will not have to stress the importance of remaining focused on your preparation. If you require a refresher on rudimentary safety precautions, Miss Granger, I am sure it can be arranged. Through an afternoon detention, perhaps?"
Shit. "No sir, sorry sir, I'll pay attention sir." 'Three sirs? Shut up Hermione!' Snape sneered at her disdainfully as she snapped upright, straightening her cauldron unnecessarily. He stopped short of deducting any points. The Granger had always been an acceptable student, gaining mainly O's and E's in his class. He grudgingly admitted that, despite being a Gryffindor and an insufferable know-it-all, she was one of the more bearable students he currently had to teach.
"Then ensure you pay attention Miss Granger, my leniency only stretches so far." Her breath left her chest in whoosh of relief. Gaining detention would be the icing on the proverbial shit cake of a day she was having. "You may begin." He commanded the rest of the class.
Gathering the required ingredients, Hermione read through the instructions on the board. 'Slice shrivelfig. Can't be that hard.' Concentrating on preparing her ingredients, Hermione tuned out the chatter and noise from the students around her. Glancing at the board again she read to the end, noting that when complete the potion should resemble a sunshine yellow. 'Yellow. Sunshine yellow. Why does yellow smell like jasmine?' In her current state, the fact that a colour had a smell did not appear to be irregular. As she sliced the shrivelfig she glanced to her right. Ron was attacking his potion preparation with a fever, tongue poking slightly out between his teeth as he added ingredients somewhat haphazardly. Under normal circumstances Hermione would be supervising Ron's work. Potions was definitely not his strong suite, and experience showed he quite easily brew something dangerous by accident. As it was, she left the task to Harry. She was in no state of mind to be helping others.
Snape was making his rounds of the classroom, stalking between desks and peering into cauldrons, making scathing remarks where required, and keeping silent otherwise. Despite losing sight of him, Hermione practically felt a physical force when he paused behind her, leaning forward to glance into her cauldron. "Miss Granger, your sopophorous beans should be crushed, not diced. It amazes me how you are able to ignore clear instructions after spending seven years undertaking my class." The words practically dripped from his mouth and onto the table before her, landing there accusingly. A distinctive smell of herbs, wood smoke, and a hint of aftershave washed over her senses, causing her mind to blank as the air between his chest and her back fairly pressed against her. A shiver ran through her as gooseflesh broke out. Her breath hitched as the hair on her arms stood on end. 'What the fuck? What is this?. In her short seventeen years of life, it was safe to say Hermione had yet to have this reaction to another person. The fact that it was Professor Snape that caused it was absolutely baffling.
"I'm sorry sir," she whispered, "I can't help it. There was a donkey in Transfiguration and an explosion in Charms, and now yellow smells like jasmine and I keep slicing the stupid shrivelfig in squares. My potion feels like a cylinder and everything keeps shouting at me and there's something in the god damned floor." 'Good Lord Hermione, would you shut up? You're making it worse!' She felt Snape pause behind her, as if momentarily unsure. Snape drew breath to speak again, and Hermione was certain she was about to find herself with at least a detention. She was therefore thoroughly shocked when the professor suddenly snatched her arm, pulling her off her seat and throwing her behind him. Utterly stunned, Hermione looked up (and up, good lord just how tall was Professor Snape?), trying to decide whether she should be outraged or not when she caught sight of Ron's cauldron. Unbeknownst to her, and evidently to Professor Snape, Ron's overzealous administrations to his potion had gone horrible wrong.
Her eyes widened as she saw a thick, oily smog roll from the tip of the cauldron, quickly oozing its way across the desk and down to the floor. The repugnant smell near about choked her, causing her to gasp and draw a dreadful lungful of the gas into her chest. Her eyes watered and her nose ran as she hacked and coughed, trying to draw in clean air. It felt as though the noxious smog coated everything it touched, from her mouth to her lungs. There was a tremendous roaring sound engulfing her ears, pounding through her skull, her chest was beginning to compress like the air was being crushed from her lungs. She felt her grasp on reality slipping away, dimly aware of the rest of the students hastily beating a path from classroom, and heard Snape spit out words that caused the gas to vanish. Closing her eyes, Hermione sucked in a great lungful of clean, crisp, air with relief.
Shortly after she felt cool fingers prying an eyelid open. It appeared she was on the dungeon floor, lying flat on her back. The blurry vision of Professor Snape slowly swam into focus. His hair falling forward like a curtain around his face, eyes slit with fury. Behind him bobbed distinctive black and read blobs that could only be her friends. "Miss Granger, are you injured?" 'Would it hurt him to sound concerned at all?' She mused.
"I must be a giraffe."
"Granger, this is not the time or the place for riddles. Are. You. Injured."
"You don't understand, I have to be a giraffe. How else could I fit all this pain into one neck?" 'That made sense, right? That was something plausible to say in this situation, surely.' She heard Snape sigh in frustration. If he strangled her it would probably hurt worse, maybe she should just keep quiet.
"It appears I will have to levitate you to the medical wing, Miss Granger. Do not move. I will not be responsible for any further damage you inflict upon yourself." With a flick of his wand she gently rose into the air and began to trail after him to the door. As she floated in mid-air, Hermione caught sight of the dungeon floor once more, and let out an exclamation of surprise. That's what she had been seeing!
"Oh do be careful Professor, there's sharks in the carpet!"
*
Severus Snape heard the insufferable Weasley boy snort with laughter. "Sharks in the carpet? She's gone bloody bonkers, the dungeons don't even have carpet." His irritation grew as he snapped at the dunderhead.
"Mister Weasley, twenty points from Gryffindor for reckless endangerment of a student, and detention for the rest of the month. You will both remove yourselves from my sight before I deduct any further points for general idiotic behaviour." Severus stalked from the room, smirking at the indignant splutter emitted behind him. The Granger girl floated along obediently as if pulled by an invisible rope. Snape was decidedly unimpressed with his day. His morning had started unpleasantly, and his afternoon was ending unequivocally worse. He had awoken from an uneasy sleep to a feeling of wrongness in the air. Severus was well acquainted with feeling large magic's, it came hand in hand with being a powerful wizard. What he was less acquainted to was feeling large magic's that were distinctly unbalanced. Usually when a staff member was working on something that required a lot of power they would advise the rest of the professors out of courtesy. Projects that required that much energy could be very volatile, and easily influenced by other magic's used within the vicinity of it. In any case, Snape was certain the feeling couldn't be attributed to a fellow professor's project; they were generally only undertaken during school holidays when students were less likely to cause unwanted results. Probing a little further into the feeling, he had come to the conclusion that it couldn't a project; the sense of wrongness felt more like a single concentration of chaos.
Pushing his thoughts to a side, Snape had gone about his day. He had succeeded in ignoring the anomaly for the remainder of the morning, only to have it hit him in the face like a troll swinging a club after entering the dungeon classroom for his seventh year double class. He surreptitiously scanned the students as he laid out the instructions for the day's potion, happily deducting points from Gryffindor as he did so (a not so secret guilty pleasure of his). He was almost certain he had pinpointed the source of the disruptive magic the moment he saw Miss Granger leaning sideways out of her seat, looking oddly at the floor. He began his rounds of the classroom, slowly making his way over to Granger. Snape finally positioned himself behind her, bushy brown hair nearly obscuring his view of the entire cauldron. Leaning slightly forward under the pretence of inspecting her potion, the probed the aurora of magic crackling around her. It was definitely her. 'Interesting.' He mused. He insulted her potion to garner a response, and was slightly confused when she visibly shuddered, 'Am I really that repulsive? Engrossed as he was in confirming his suspicion, Severus failed to notice the disaster being concocted besides him until it was well and truly too late.
When all was said and done, Gryffindor were down a further twenty points, and a Ronald Weasley had a months' worth of detentions to look forward to. After hearing Hermione Grangers' rather unhelpful warning about carpet-sharks, Severus had also confirmed his theory on why the young witch was exuding such an aura of confusing magic. Stalking through the hallways and leaving a wake of scattered students behind him, he thought over what this would mean. While it pleased him that Severus had discovered what had been bothering him so intently this morning, it by no means pleased him that it would likely fall to his hands to fix the problem. That was the problem with being the only professor, other than Dumbledore, proficient in the art of Legilimency. With a resigned sigh, Severus directed the floating body through the doors of the hospital wing and onto an empty bed. It appeared his weekend was going to be a long one.
Hermione fought her way towards consciousness, batting away clouds of muffled confusion to dredge her eyes open and take in her surroundings. 'White, everything's so white. Oh, Madam Pomfrey, must be the medical ward.' "Hello Madam Pomfrey." The words clawed their way from her throat and came out awkwardly. Merlin did her throat hurt. Madam Pomfrey looked up from the potion she had been measuring out and gave a warm smile.
"Good afternoon Miss Granger." Hermione frowned as the medi-witch spoke. The words curled from her mouth and unfurled, like they had been written on ticker-tape. "Severus, your student has awoken." The healer called over her shoulder. Again, the speech came from her mouth as if written on paper, and drifted down behind her back. 'Well that can't be normal,' Hermione rationalised, 'I wonder if I could collect the words and keep them for later?'
"Miss Granger, how do you feel?" Severus watched her as he spoke, noticing the way her eyes focused first on his mouth, and then drifted away, as if following something only she could see.
"Oh Professor, I'm sure I would be feeling just fine, if everyone wasn't sub-titled. Is this a side effect from Ron's potion? I shouldn't complain, I really do love reading, but it's hurting my brain a little, trying to listen and read at the same time." As she spoke her cupped hands moved about the space before her, as if she were trying to catch a trickle of water.
Madam Pomfrey turned to the Potions Master, looking slightly confused. "Could the potion have caused this Severus? It's not something I can say I've come across before."
A look of resignation and irritation flittered across Severus's face before it smoothed out once more. "If you run a diagnostics spell on Miss Granger here, I'm almost certain you will find she has very recently started the maturation process. From what I can gather, something has caused it to deviate from its normal process. It appears as though her senses are bleeding into each other, causing visual and audial hallucinations. I will need to see her once she has recovered from Weasley's unintentional poisoning. She will require the walls around her senses to be rebuilt, to stop the leak."
Hermione listened to this distractedly, as she was more concerned with the amount of paper the words spoken required. 'Oh dear, this could be a problem. Imagine being in the great hall with all the chatter, I'm fairly convinced I would drown!' She also took note that the writing on Professor Snape's tape appeared written in an elegant and thin cursive. Madam Pomfrey's on the other hand was bolder.
"Miss Granger, you will report to my office 7pm tomorrow night. Do not be late." With this, Snape swept from the room, leaving Pomfrey to deal the confused look the young girl threw her way.
With a sigh she moved forward. "Open up Miss Granger, this will help."
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AN: whelp! First chapter down. I'll try and get the second one up over the weekend.