Will the Half-Blood Prince discover holistical magical theory, or will Madam Pince throw the tome-defiling little hooligan out on his scruffy arse first? Betting opens in 5... 4... 3...!


Severus lasted about a month in Divination, as compared to the eight Granger would grit her teeth through twenty years later. He realized later he should have stayed to learn the shadows-and-incense tricks: how to see people's tells at a glance, how to throw out bait and notice what widened their eyes. At the time, though, he couldn't stand knowing what rot he was wasting time studying when there were really useful classes he'd dismissed for glitter.

It wasn't just because he was less impressed by teacherly expertise than Granger would be, although he very much was. His professor was less eyebrow-raising, in any case; she didn't look like a frizzy moon-moth or predict so many deaths per week that the continued existence of Wizarding Britain proved her a fraud every year by November. So if teacherly expertise had been the issue, he might have lasted, oh, a fourth as long as Granger would.

The main problem was that Divi had no unifying theory and he had to learn a new set of images for every bloody method. Then there was the way true prophecies were apparently something only one person in two thousand could have, and then not from trying. And then they didn't even remember, so it was up to other people whether they got to interpret them themselves.*

There was the way the centaurs thought human divination was stupid and all the evidence was in their favor. There was how he didn't die the week after he saw a bear-sized black definitely a dog on the grounds (although that week he wouldn't actually have minded not waking up one day, the way Lily was starting to look at him: like he was holding her down and getting her dress dirty by breathing her air and she was determined to be nobly above minding). Worst of all, all omens were subject to interpretation, in effect hugely subjective.

No, the subject made him incandescent with baffled fury on its merits alone, no coke-bottle glasses required. Or sherry glasses.

He had to do a lot of make-up work, and fast, before the professor would let him into Arithmancy after classes had started. Tt was rough going. You couldn't be as good as Severus was at potions without having a solid grasp of algebra on least an intuitive level, but the other maths were not his strong point. To thrive in arithmancy you needed geometry and calculus.

Mam had thought Latin was more important for a young wizard, and the teachers at his primary had mainly given up on life. Or given up, at least, on staying sober enough to be useful on their salaries in a neighborhood with no diversions, whose children had no prospects, whose fathers were jealously contemptuous of wine-drinkers and pipe-smokers and book-lovers and everything else lower-middle-class and up.

A lot of work, and tough work, but Digitalin was willing to give him some time after class. And over Christmas break, with his active tormentors home for the hols, he could relax a little and spread his homework over an entire table without worrying about someone else spilling ink on it or causing someone to vomit in his direction, and that made the hours fly.

He was, one day, staring blearily at two textbooks. His tired eyes had crossed, so that he was seeing an array with neat rows of runes juxtaposed on it, almost medieval style. Something clicked.

The Pince had to drag him, wild-eyed and clutching at a volume of Paracelsus with white knuckles, out of the Restricted Section by the collar (he didn't have a note) and dump him bodily back in his seat. Not a problem; she was quite fit for a librarian at that age, and he was constantly forgetting to eat or too upset for it, a frankly shrimpy nearly-fourteen. He stayed where he was put, but then she had to stand behind him and keep snatching the quill out of his hand before he started scribbling on her books as well as his own, which was sacrilege enough.

Ordinarily this kind of behavior would earn a boy the boot. The vehemently underlined diagrams with all the exclamation points he was scrawling into his potions book were making her curious, though, and there wasn't anyone else around she had to keep an eye on. And it was Christmas, after all.


* He didn't tell Voldemort the prophecy, exactly. He gave him about half of what he'd heard, with historical precedents and competing interpretations, picked apart so thoroughly over ten feet of closely-written parchment that the Dark Lord seriously considered getting glasses, made him learn more legible handwriting, and didn't decide to do anything about it until his horcruxes were scattered and he'd gone completely around the bend.