CHAPTER 2
(edit: formatting doesn't translate from openoffice, duh! Have now put Snape's first draft in bold, Snape's pen-pal messages in italics and his pen-pal's messages are normal. If you find this confusing or have a better suggestion then feel free to drop me a message)
It was three days later that he joined the breakfast table and found a small square of parchment placed neatly over his plate. He frowned, flicking it out of the way with his fork.
He didn't have a message planned, because he wasn't going to send one.
He spent breakfast carefully watching the hall, cataloguing reactions. He was surprised by the enthusiastic uptake even in his own house, with many choosing to write as soon as the parchments appeared. There were next to no first years left, and very few second years. Traitors.
Severus' parchment stayed still and silent, thankfully.
The other professors chose to leave their messages for later, though Sybil received one. He could only imagine how she would reply.
He excused himself early from the meal, as was usual for him, and made sure to leave his parchment next to his plate. Just as he reached the end of the table, a delicate but purposeful cough made him pause and turn. Minerva, doing her best impression of that awful Umbridge woman, smiled and plucked the parchment from the table, holding it out to him.
He scowled in return, snatching it from her fingers and thrusting it unceremoniously into his robe.
He twirled away, holding his elbows out a little to make his robes billow. Fine. If they were so adamant that he would take part, then he would show them all.
He stormed through the corridors, swept into his empty classroom, summoned a plain parchment and quill, and wrote the first draft. He hoped to initiate contact – after all, who would think that Snape would write the first message, or any at all?
"Good morning, imbecile. For the next month, you will be the unfortunate recipient of a carefully crafted persona designed to humiliate you to the highest degree, whilst causing myself the least amount of pain possible."
Satisfied, he translated the note onto the enchanted parchment after a little filtering: "Hey."
He waited exactly sixty seconds for a reply before stuffing both parchments into the pocket of his waistcoat. He would not be so careless as to leave any trace.
Twenty minutes later, he was back to teaching and taking off points with gleeful discrimination. Through the morning lessons, his animosity toward the parchments grew steadily until he was ready to curse the next child stupid enough to think he would not notice their scribbling and whispering. Lunch could not come soon enough.
His reply didn't come until halfway through his first lesson after the break, which annoyed him somewhat but increased the chances of his pen-pal being in Slitherin or Ravenclaw. Someone perhaps a little tolerable, who would think before writing.
He barked at Crowley to keep his eyes on his cauldron before taking the gently vibrating parchment out.
It read "Hello, how are you?"
Tch, mundane.
The children piled out quickly after the lesson's end, and he replied before the next lot of imbeciles could invade.
"I am peeved that you're so terribly boring so far, as this does not bode well for my patience in the coming month. Please please please be a little more interesting or I'm going to Avada us both."
"Let's skip intros, tell me something cool about you!"
The next reply came as he was marking first year essays that evening. He had skipped dinner in favour of brewing, and it was now gone seven.
"I can make ice sculptures?" read the parchment.
Oh goody, Severus thought. He rolled his eyes and fetched his draft parchment.
"Your ability to cast simple transfiguration spells is about as outstanding as your poor attempt at humour, but at least you're not likely to be a first year. The question mark on the end is also worrying – can you, or can you not in reality make ice sculptures?"
"Me too. That makes you at least fourth year, right?"
The reply was quick. "You said no intros. Tell me something cool about you, too."
Something cool? Well, he should have been prepared for that. Students without imagination were bound to send his questions back at him. He made a mental note not to ask anything he wouldn't want to answer again.
"I have no qualities a teenager at Hogwarts could possibly find 'cool', unless they are stupid enough to count the number of people I have been able to wound or kill in my lifetime, admittedly with a flair not many could achieve."
"I don't think I'm very cool..."
It could do no harm to sound a little shy, could it?
The reply was even swifter than before. "No way! I'm sure you are. There's something cool in everyone, that's how I see it."
Merlin, so it was a Hufflepuff after all.
"You're an idiot."
He spent nearly half an hour trying to think of a way to translate that, but there really wasn't anything else he could say so he copied it across as it was.
The next morning, he rubbed that message out and hoped his pen-pal had not seen it. He replaced it with a scribbled "Good morning", his usual spidery scrawl hidden by the cheerful looking round script he had designed just for this purpose. He didn't even connect up the letters, which gave him a bit of a buzz if he was honest - proper writing had been hammered into him early in life, and it felt good to rebel even in the tiny things.
He was overseeing the third year Slitherin-Griffindor class, watching the imbeciles stir their concoctions the wrong way and occasionally remarking on the more dangerous methods of mucking up potions, when the parchment in his pocket next fluttered. He cast a quick look around to check that it was not from any of his students, but they had too much sense to be caught playing games in class by now.
Finding himself impatient to continue with the charade, he strode to his desk and rearranged the parchments there so that he could hide what he was writing in the neat square if necessary.
"Bored in defence class. How is that even possible?" it read.
He felt his facial muscles trying to tug up one side of his mouth, and he rubbed his cheek with a thumb to take away the foreign feeling.
"With Lupin teaching, easily. Bar potions, it is the most interesting subject and it takes an imbecile of the grandest magnitude to make it as dull as one of his tweed jackets. Be grateful it is not Umbridge however." He wrote on his draft parchment, before applying the usual filters.
"Yeah, Lupin is boring isn't he?"
The words quivered, then melted off the page to leave droplets of ink on his desk. Ah, the honesty charm. It was shocking he hadn't activated it on the first day. He stubbornly wrote the message out again, but it was rejected a second time.
Fine, so he didn't find Lupin all that dull, but that was only because he was fascinated by lycanthropy and the potions challenge it gave him.
"Yeah, Professor Lupin's an idiot."
His words became another pool on the desk and he sighed. Not a total idiot then, just more of an idiot than Snape. Which most people were, to be fair.
"Yeah, Lupin's annoying right?"
Again, the words melted away. He scowled. "But I do find him annoying!" He muttered angrily.
After a few more attempts at criticism, he was getting fairly frustrated and the students were beginning to notice.
"Heads down, get on with it!" He barked at them.
Why couldn't he write anything about Lupin without getting ink all over the place? He wanted to write just one thing, to prove that the thoughts he thought he thought were what he really thought! The puddle grew larger and larger as his entire vocabulary was rejected, one word after another.
Lupin is Unpleasant.
Watery.
Imbecilic.
Puerile.
Vexing.
Repugnant.
Humdrum.
A danger to society.
Stale. Stupid. Sapless. Senseless. Spiritless.
Complacent. Cowardly! Weak!
A USELESS, FLOUNDERING, UNREFINED, ARTLESS, ANNOYING PRAT!
Ink spilled over onto his lap, soaking through to chill the skin of his thighs. He breathed heavily through his nose, lips pressed into a tight line, and gripped the quill tightly with trembling fingers.
Finally, with rage verging on temporary insanity, he wrote "Lupin is a sexy beast".
When the letters failed to move, he resisted the sudden urge to throw his head against the desk.
A reply came before he had the chance to wipe out the words, and he let out a groan. How utterly humiliating. His original plan had been to reveal his identity at the end of the thirty days, but how could he do that now? He would have to leave the school, start a new life somewhere overseas. Even Azkaban would be better than having to stay at Hogwarts knowing that there was a student out there who had seen this.
The students tittered and he raised his head sharply. "I wouldn't laugh if I were you," he ground out slowly, "these are your essays I am marking."
That shut them up.
He turned over the parchment to see what had been written on the other side.
"A bit old for students, isn't he?"
Oh merlin, it was just getting worse. But hey, in for a knut, in for a sickle. He had to say something to make sure that his pen-pal never worked out who he was.
"Hey, don't laugh at my teenage crush!"
If he was honest, that's what Lupin had been, once upon a time. And if he still thought that Lupin was an attractive man, then that was just... physical, a base attraction he would do best to ignore. It didn't mean anything at all.
At least his pen-pal was certain to be convinced he was another student now, not that he'd given them reason to think otherwise. It was simply common sense to emphasise the message.
"I'm not laughing."
"Good."
"I'll tell you my crush too, if it would make you feel better."
Augh, he didn't want to know who any of his students fancied, thank you.
"I think I have suffered enough for one lifetime, thank you."
"No thanks."
They were both silent for the rest of the morning, and Snape was glad that the conversation was over with.
