A/N: Sorry this is really late, final projects and exams have been keeping me pretty busy. Thanks again to everyone that reviewed, it really helps to keep me going :)


Chapter Seven

Mercifully, the rest of the week passed in a blur of late nights spent in the Slytherin common room and the occasional shiver inducing excursion out to the lake shore. The first week of class was characteristically relaxed as far as school work went, the only assignment needing Ridley's attention being Snape's essay, which she had mostly finished by Friday afternoon.

Setting her quill aside, she leaned back in the wooden chair and sighed, relishing the quiet atmosphere of the library. Across from her, Molly was flipping through a thick leather bound tome with one hand and making notes with the other. To Ridley's right sat Calvyn, who was crafting paper cranes and charming them to float with a flap of their wings—the occasional iteration pelting itself at a lone Gryffindor seated at the table beside them. The last member of their misfit study group, Marcus, was scribbling along his parchment, brow furrowed and tongue peeking out from between his lips. Ridley was rather impressed with his determination.

"It's no use," Marcus suddenly groaned, his eyes sharp with his frustration. "Even the passage Snape assigned for this is shorter than the word count!"

Molly sighed, looking at him pointedly, "Well, you could try looking for, oh I don't know, additional references?"

Marcus' mouth gaped open. "Is that...Is that what you guys did?" His head swiveled around to Ridley and Calvyn.

Ridley nodded her head, looking at him evenly while Calvyn answered, "Yup."

He glared down at his essay, before clawing at it with a ferocity Ridley was not prepared for, crumpling it into a tight ball. Reaching for his wand, he brought the tip to the mauled parchment and was about to cast a spell, when Molly grabbed his hand and hissed at him.

"Marcus Yllingsworth, if you set a fire in this library, Merlin help me, I will bind your limbs and toss you in the Black Lake. You'd better pray that the squid is feeling merciful this week."

The boy met the Head Girl's glare, a mixed air of apprehension and perhaps pride swirling about them. Marcus hesitated, looking down at his wand arm, and the slender feminine hand wrapped around it. With a breath of resignation, he moved to put his wand back and Molly withdrew her grip. He seemed to sink in his seat, shoulders slouching as he regarded the balled up parchment with distaste. While the boy looked on at the problematic essay, Molly watched him carefully. Suddenly her eyes softened, and she reached for the parchment. Flattening it out in front of her, she said calmly, "Let me look this over."

Marcus brightened, and straightened up in his seat before moving closer to his blonde neighbour, reading over her shoulder as she made marks of her own on in the margins. Softly she admitted, "I can think of a couple texts that should help support your thesis." Standing up, she motioned for him to come with her and slipped behind the nearest row of shelves. Smiling gratefully, Marcus shot out of his seat and followed the wispy blonde into her domain.

"He worships her," Calvyn stated plainly, beside her. Ridley turned her head to her friend and nodded, catching the far away look in his eyes.

"That he does," Ridley agreed, closing an abandoned book to her right. "I miss being worshipped," she admitted, looking down at her nails.

Calvyn looked at her evenly, his eyes never leaving her own as he said lowly, "Branson Collins did not worship you." Her eyes flitted down and he continued, "He was obsessed with you."

The boy leaned back in his chair, and Ridley looked at him with all the appreciation he'd earned as one of her best friends since she was eleven years old. With another distanced look in his eyes, he pondered, "I think a lot of people tend to misinterpret possessiveness for love,"

He looked back to her, uncharacteristically serious, "And I know that you aren't one of those people, Ridley Clarke."

She shot her friend a tiny smile, secretly proud of this small moment of maturity in him. But the solemnity of this conversation just wouldn't do.

Clearing her throat, she casually leaned back once more in her chair, pinning Calvyn with a mischievous look. "Speaking of young love and romance, perhaps you'd like to tell me about your summer now?"

Calvyn's face betrayed no emotion, and it took a mere second for him to respond. Leaning toward her, he said sweetly, "I don't kiss and tell, love." And the bastard bopped her on the nose.

Slapping his hand away she narrowed her eyes at the boy and hissed, "Well, love, seeing as you were an intruder in my home I think that—"

"Oi, Brinn!" He suddenly shouted, waving his hand in the air and looking past Ridley's venomous face. In the distance Madam Pince shushed the boy across the room with an ironically loud "Shhh." Ridley pinched the bridge of her nose and smothered a shriek of exasperation. Instead of throttling Calvyn as she so dearly wished to do, however, she turned in her seat and shot her oncoming friend a strained smile.

"Hey Brinn," she said in a clipped voice, "Have you come to work on your potions essay too?"

Ignorance was bliss, Ridley supposed, as the dark haired girl smiled happily at the pair, completely oblivious to the tense atmosphere. Coming around to Ridley's side of the table, she plopped into Molly's vacant seat and cheerily said, "No, I just wanted to make sure you guys were still up for an adventure tonight?"

"Well, I don't know about you, Rid," Calvyn nudged her with his elbow, making Ridley roll her eyes, "but I'm always up for some well mannered frivolity."

"Excellent," Brinn beamed, before looking to Ridley, "And you Ridley?"

Ridley considered, her options for a moment. Her essay was nearly finished, just needing a bit of proofreading and a conclusion. It wouldn't hurt to take the weekend off, she surmised. And, she thought with an inward smirk, Calvyn wouldn't be quite so tight lipped about his scandalous summer affair after she got a bit of firewhiskey in his system.

"I think that I too, would be most inclined to partake in a respectable soiree," she replied, poshly.

"Who's sorry?" Marcus piped, appearing from the shadows of the book shelves. Beside him Molly rolled her eyes. In front of him, Brinn was glowing.

"She said 'soiree', Marcus. It's like a party," Molly corrected him, passing the generous stack of books into his thick arms. He took them graciously, still beaming at the Head Girl despite, her correcting him. Noticing Brinn, he chirped, "Oh hey, Brinn. What are you up to?"

Molly noticed Brinn too, sitting in her seat. Standing, she looked down at the shorter girl and blinked slowly, while Marcus made his way around to his seat beside Brinn and dropped the collection of books to the surface. Oblivious to Molly's distaste, Brinn almost sang, "Oh not much. I'm just making sure everyone's still committed to partying tonight. I've arranged for a few bottles of firewhiskey, and I'm going to go fetch them once it gets dark."

"Sound's great Brinn. I don't know about you lot," Marcus intoned, gathering up his parchment and books, "but I think the beginning of this year deserves even more celebration than the others!"

"The beginning of the end!" Calvyn nearly shouted.

"Will you stop your wailing," Molly reprimanded the boy, smacking him on the head with a rolled up bit of parchment. "You're going to get us thrown out."

Calvyn smiled back up to the Head Girl cheekily, "Well I suppose it's a good thing I'm leaving then."

Gathering up their sheets and books, the group followed Calvyn's lead and made their way out of the library. Ridley had to grab Calvyn's arm and herd him out with rest of their friends as he launched a final crane at the lone Gryffindor he'd been terrorizing a short while before; the Gryffindor flipped him a bird of a different sort.

Calvyn erupted into laughter, and snaked an arm around Ridley's shoulder as they finally made it out of the library. Loathe to admit it, she couldn't help but smile.


Ridley was not smiling.

Her back was aching, her neck suffering from the mother of all kinks, and she felt as though a small army was marching through her head. Was it just her or was her bed a hell of a lot harder than usual? Did she fall onto the floor in the middle of the night? With a groan, she peeled her eyes open, wincing as the light aggravated her already splitting headache.

"Bollocks," she moaned, her voice groggy despite her short slumber. As her eyes adjusted, she came to realise that she was not in her dormitory. With a jolt, she sat up straight, her head swimming in protest, and came to see that she was in fact in the prefects' bathroom. And her makeshift bed was an empty tub.

She took a moment to breathe, casting a worried look about the blessedly empty room. It was dimly lit, only a few candles burning away on the farthest wall. It must've been really early, she deduced. At the least, she thought, no one will be awake to witness my shame.

Any happy thoughts were chased away by another throbbing ache of her head. Moving her hands up to massage her temples, she gave a yelp when two rather cold and solid objects hit her skull.

"What in the—" she started, before she growled in frustration. In her right hand was an empty bottle of Ogden's Finest, and her left an ornate silver flask. Tight lipped, she glared at the offending objects; the glass bottle glinted at her snarkily, while the finely written engravement, C. A. Neering, seemed to smirk. She tried to open her hands and drop the containers, but they wouldn't budge. She violently shook her hands, fruitlessly trying to dislodge the flask and incriminating bottle, but to no avail. A sticking charm, Ridley surmised. That bastard.

With a snarl, she awkwardly braced her wrists against the edges of the basin and shifted onto her knees. Where was her wand? She hoped she hadn't sat on it. Casting a worried gaze around the large bathtub, and was relieved to find it at the far end. With the hand encasing the flask, she pawed at the wand and clumsily rolled it toward her. With a determined look, she tried to pick up the length of wood, sandwiching it between her new drink carrying limbs. It was useless. The containers merely scraped against the bottom of the tub, unable to grip the inconveniently thin circumference of her wand. With a sigh of resignation, she sat back on her haunches and and glared at her useless hands. This was embarrassing.

Once again appreciative of her solitude, she leaned forward and brought her mouth to the porcelain surface of the bottom of the basin. She felt the cool wood of her wand brush against her nose, and adjusted accordingly, grasping it between her teeth. Sitting back upright, wand in mouth, she cocked her head to the side and considered her next step. If she were curvier, she'd probably maneuver the instrument into her cleavage, simple as that. As it was, her willowy figure was not so well endowed, and anything she tried to hide next to her chest just slipped out of her shirt.

As luck would have it, she remembered that she was wearing knee socks, and so plopped back onto her bottom. In a mastery of flexibility she didn't know she possessed, she awkwardly bend over her legs and shoved the wooden length as far into her left sock as she could. By the time she managed to place the wand, far enough that only the tip of the handle poked out from the navy garment, her head was spinning. Bringing her head between her knees, she recovered her breath, and waited for the whirling in her head to stop.

A faucet was leaking somewhere in the bathroom, the rhythmic dripping sound commanding in the empty silence. She gave herself until the count of thirty-four drips to rest, but after that she started to rise. Vaulting the edge of the tub shakily, she looked around for her shoes on the stone floor. Spotting them a about a yard away, she clumsily paced over to them, her feet cold even clad in her socks. She nudged her feet into the trainers, almost falling over in the process, before turning for the door.

The hallway was gloriously empty, moonlight glinting through the stained glass windows and painting the ground in a myriad of muted colours. She was wide awake by now, and realized that she had no chance of sleeping off her headache. On the other hand, she was grateful for her wakefulness; she was more aware of her surroundings than she usually was this late (or perhaps early) hour, and she wasn't keen on running into Filch or his hateful bitch of a cat. She peeked around every corner she came to, and jumped into the shadows at the slightest noise.

Ridley had almost reached the dungeons—was only one flight of stairs away in fact—when she heard the swish of cloak behind her, and soft footsteps. With reflexes that impressed even herself, she threw her body to behind the nearest object—in this case a suit of armour—and crouched, making herself as small as possible. Her knees complained, and her back was already messed up from her makeshift-bathtub-bed, but she forced herself to stay as still as she could. The footsteps were growing louder as the figure approached, and Ridley crossed her fingers in the folds of her robes. The figure slid into Ridley's view, dark and tall from what she could see. They abruptly halted in front of the suit of armour, and Ridley stopped breathing. If she could stop her heart she would, as it was beating hard enough that the individual before her could probably hear it.

A long, painful moment passed, before Ridley had to breathe, or she'd pass out. Suddenly, a blinding light shot out from in front of her, and she recoiled violently from it. With an embarrassing yelp, she fell back on her bottom, her head hitting the wall and her bottle-hands hitting the floor with a clang as she tried to catch herself.

"Well, what do we—" the familiar baritone voice caught itself in the middle of the snarl, "Oh, it's you."

"It's me," she agreed snarkily, clumsily getting to her feet. Professor Snape lowered his wand from her pinched face, and sent her a measuring look. She made to rub the back of her head, but stopped herself as she remembered how useless her hands were at present. The professor's realization of this however, was fresh. She caught his glinting, dark eyes trained on the empty bottle of alcohol, and knew she was done for.

"Uh," she started, frowning at his raised eyebrows, "I don't know how that got there."

"Really?" His eyes flitted over to her other hand, which held her dear friend's flask. "And what, pray, is that?"

"Pumpkin juice."

At that, he simply rolled his eyes. "Go to bed, Miss Clarke. And you'd best dispose of those, before you find someone less tolerant of your...habits."

She wanted to groan, and laugh, and scream as his implication that she was an alcoholic, all at the same time. But rather she replied, "Sorry sir, but I can't. See, I'm rather attached to them." She put her arms out to the side and shook them, demonstrating the magical grip between her hands and the containers. "Literally."

With a sigh, he stepped forward and motioned for her hand. She raised that which encased the empty bottle, and almost shivered as his hand supported hers from the bottom. His fingers were freezing. She waited patiently, watching as he prodded at the appendage with his wand, only slightly uncomfortable with the physical contact. With a frown, he released her hand and announced, "It is not a mere sticking charm there, Miss Clarke. I suspect an adherence balm."

"Oh," she replied dumbly, looking at her hands. That made things a little more complicated. "I don't imagine that it will just wash off with soap and water, will it?"

"It will not." He deadpanned, though Ridley thought he was internally enjoying her distress. He cocked his head to the side slightly in thought however, before adding, "Although I may the remedy in my stores."

"I would very much appreciate the help, Professor."

"Well then, follow me."

He turned briskly, barely waiting for Ridley to follow, and strode down the way she was previously headed. The walk to his office was short, and before she knew it, she was following the potions master through an open door way, and plopped down in the chair in front of his desk. She sat in silence as he walked across the room and disappeared through a doorway that Ridley had noticed with passing curiosity times before. She heard the distant clinking of glass phials and bottles, and her curiosity reemerged. So it must've been his private storeroom, then.

A minute or so later, Snape reemerged with a frosted, glass phial, and came to stand in front of her.

"Your hands," he demanded, unscrewing the cap.

She produced her hands obediently, holding them in front of her without a second thought as to whether the elixir would sting. From the phial, he drew out a glass dropper, and squeezed a drop of the liquid onto the top of her palm, the only exposed part of the hand holding the flask. The liquid was a milky white, viscous mixture, and the drop rolled down her hand and under the flask. She could feel it taking effect immediately, her hand cool where the skin loosened from the silver. She was thankful that there was no potions master peeled the flask from her palm and set in on the desk beside them with a small thud. Snape repeated the same process with her other hand, and within a matter of seconds, she was free.

Wiggling her fingers gratefully, she smiled at the professor, who was screwing the cap back onto the potion. "Thank you, sir."

"I'm sure Mr Neering will be coming to Madame Pomfrey or myself with similar symptoms in the near future," he replied matter of factly.

Ridley shrugged. "I wouldn't count on that," she moved to stand up, "I have something far worse than a sticking balm in mind."

Snape almost smiled at that, a small twitch in the corner of his mouth that Ridley rarely saw on the stony faced man. It made her smile.

"Well, if that is all, Clarke, then you ought to get back to your room. If I catch you out of bed at this hour again, there will be consequences," he reprimanded, though not as serious as she'd heard from in the past. Ridley merely shrugged it off.

"Alright. Thanks again, professor," she said in farewell, making her way to the door. Behind her she heard the creak of leather and a wooden chair being sat in, and fleetingly wondered why Snape was also out of bed at this hour. Brushing the thought off, she was almost at the door when she suddenly remembered something.

Turning quickly, she called, "Oh! Professor, I forgot, but there is something I'd like to ask you."

He looked at her curiously from behind his desk, setting down the quill he'd just picked up. With raised eyebrows he nodded her on.

"See, Professor Frey won't let me join the seventh year Defense class," she started, stepping forward. "And so the Headmaster suggested that I seek a tutor." The words suddenly seemed to get stuck in her throat, and she had to swallow the building flood of anxiety as she said, "I was wondering if you would be willing to help me out?"

Snape was quiet for a long moment, his face betraying no emotion. He leaned forward in his seat with a creak of the chair, and folded his hands together on the desk in front of him.

"And Professor Dumbledore has approved of you seeking me as a tutor?" he asked, skeptically.

"He recommended it."

The potions master drew his eyebrows together in thought for another long moment, absent mindedly steepling his fingers. Ridley chewed her lip, and mentally crossed her fingers. She couldn't survive anymore embarrassment that night.

"I suppose," he finally started, leaning back in his chair with carefully disguised gleam of pride in his eye, "that we could work something out."

Ridley's stomach leaped, and a smile broke out on her face. Atleast something good had come from this wretched night.

"We'll meet in the potions classroom after supper on Monday night to work something out. Don't be late."

"Thank you, professor. I won't be late I promise," she chirped, a stupid smile still tugging at her lips. With a rushed goodnight, she let herself out of the room and nearly skipped back to the common room. With her spirits this high, who knew, maybe she wouldn't murder Calvyn in his sleep.

Maybe.