Chapter Eighteen: Who was left?

Day Three Hundred Forty-Two

Severus had a headache. He hadn't ever had a genuine headache this morning before, and he wasn't quite sure what to do about it. He'd toyed briefly with the idea of trying to drink it into submission, but Merlin forbid if Hermione ran across him in such a state. God and Satan only knew what she would do, and he'd be damned if he did either.

Moreover, he did not know what he would do, and that was far worse than anything else he could envision.

The brandy stayed in its bottle, then, and Severus skulked off to his classroom, knowing he was skulking and not caring. She might be at breakfast, she might even be in his office, but she wouldn't dare interrupt one of his classes.

He was fairly sure, at any rate.

At least, if she did, he was halfway justified if he hexed her forty ways to Sunday.

It would serve her right, too, he thought, a surly expression crossing his face as he began writing the fourth years' assignment on the chalkboard. In fact, he found himself perversely hoping that she'd walk in. He'd either hex her or kiss her, and hexing her was sounding like a delicious option.

This was why he couldn't be alone with her. This was exactly why.

Gritting his teeth and shoving all thoughts of Hermione out of his mind as best as he could, Severus finished the last line of the potion for his students. His actions caused the pounding in his temples to intensify, but it helped him clear his brain of her. Besides, he needed to focus on his students. They would be coming in shortly.

This was Graham Pritchard's class, to boot. Severus didn't know what, if anything, he was going to try today.

Nothing he tried seemed to work, either, much like with someone else who he was studiously not thinking about. And he'd put so much consideration into his prior attempts, too. But no matter the contortions he put himself or pitiful, obsessive Pritchard through, the vial would still be broken before the end of the class. Again, like with her, he probably ought to just give up. Admit defeat.

But there was some stupidly Gryffindor voice in the back of his head that sounded suspiciously like Albus Dumbledore telling him that giving up was somehow wrong. That it couldn't end like this. That there was something he could do.

And so, Severus racked his brain, trying to come up with something he hadn't tried before. Automatically, he went over to the potions stores, preparing a set of supplies for Pritchard, mirroring the exact contents of the boy's table from memory almost without thought.

Students began trickling into the classroom as he worked, seating themselves fairly quietly and arranging their cauldrons on their workbenches. By this point in the year, he had them very well trained, indeed, and they required little disciplinary intervention.

Life did always have its little exceptions, though. Take Malfoy and Potter, for example. Both in their seventh year, each more than capable of sitting still and leaving the other alone for an hour, but both equally constitutionally unable to do so.

And the fourth-year Slytherin Thomas Ashcroft, now casually striding into the classroom, carefully knocking Pritchard's cauldron to the floor as he slipped himself into the seat beside the smaller boy. "Good morning, Gra-ham," Ashcroft said cheerfully as Pritchard scrabbled around on the ground.

Severus almost dropped the vial he was holding — ironically brimming full of armadillo bile.

Of course Ashcroft was in this class. Potions was required of all fourth year students. And as a Slytherin, he would certainly be in this class in particular.

But somehow, impossibly, Severus hadn't ever noticed him here before.

Feeling even more like a dismal failure as a teacher and a housemaster, he finished assembling the supplies he was planning to give Pritchard, leaving them on one of the tables by the stores closet, and made his way back to the chalkboard, temples fairly singing with pain.

"The potion for today's brewing is childishly simple," Severus told the class without preamble. "I fully expect more than half of you to fail. Now, clearly, I have written the instructions already, but who can tell me the function of the arrowroot in this mixture?"

Silence, of course. The little idiots couldn't be bothered with something as trivial as homework, apparently. Pritchard's eyes focused steadily downward as Ashcroft flicked a wet bit of parchment at him.

Severus grit his teeth and his headache instantly became nearly unbearable. "The lure of House points is obviously not enough to incite you to prepare your assignments as asked. I suppose that no one knows why it is of greatest import that the shrivelfigs were collected during a new moon, either."

Glaring down his nose at the entire class, he folded his arms as the silence continued. This was ludicrous. Didn't they know that ignorant potions students were effectively dead men walking? Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ashcroft make a face at Pritchard, and he had an idea.

With a loud, obvious sigh, he stalked through the tables, back toward his stores. "Raise your hand when you are in need of boomslang skin," he said, injecting disgust into his tone. "Get to work!" As Severus barked at the students, he surreptitiously pointed his wand at Ashcroft's workbench and used the coinciding clatter of cauldrons and textbooks to mask his quietly muttered incantation.

He deliberately rattled a few nearby bottles as he watched Ashcroft, hoping that the boy wouldn't notice he was being observed. After a few long moments, during which Ashcroft intentionally splattered ink from his quill into the face of a nearby Ravenclaw girl and slipped something out of the bag belonging to the Slytherin girl sitting on his other side, the boy finally opened his potions kit in preparation, ostensibly, of beginning the assignment. Severus grit his teeth but kept still, the first stirrings of doubt in his mind. Was Ashcroft actually the little bastard he'd suspected he was?

Indeed, however, he saw Ashcroft's face wrinkle as he looked down into his kit — the charm Severus cast earlier had broken every jar and shredded every bag in the thing. Severus caught himself mentally urging the horrible little cretin on as the child's eyes narrowed and flickered back and forth between the pathetic remains of his potions supplies and Pritchard's workbench. Come on, come on… Severus thought viciously at the boy.

And then Ashcroft's eyes darted toward Severus himself, and, startled, he made a great show of pushing himself deeper into the supply closet, trying to appear as oblivious as possible. A sudden, loud scraping noise, coupled with Pritchard's soft exclamation, told him that Ashcroft had taken the bait.

Counting off at least thirty seconds, he turned around and surveyed the results of his work. As he'd intended, Ashcroft had taken each and every one of Pritchard's ingredients and was now spreading them over his own workspace with a satisfied look on his face.

Pritchard himself looked as if someone had just hexed him with his own wand. "Professor?" he called sharply, anger and fear and confusion warring on his features.

Merlin, please don't, boy, Severus thought as he took a step forward. "Is there a problem, Mr. Pritchard?"

"My supplies, sir," he began, anger apparently winning for the moment. "He–"

"Yes?" Severus prompted, careful not to look directly over at Ashcroft, who was now watching the exchange with an entirely-too-innocent expression on his face.

Shoulders slumping, the nervous child relented and allowed fear to have the ultimate victory. "I left my supplies, Professor Snape," he mumbled. "I can't complete the assignment." He heard Ashcroft grunt with approval and fought an abrupt, overwhelming impulse to hex the little miscreant.

"Never mind, Pritchard," Severus replied smoothly. "Take what you need from the stores in the back. There are some ingredients that were left in the classroom last period sitting on one of the tables, I believe."

Some of the fear left Pritchard's gaze as he seemed to realize that Severus wasn't going to deduct points or berate him. "Thank you, sir," he said, avoiding Ashcroft's eyes as he scuttled down the aisle to the stores cabinets.

He tried to ignore the boy after that. He paced the aisles, conferring with a few students, berating more of them, glancing at Pritchard or Ashcroft only to assure himself that neither of them were going to set fire to the classroom. It was, then, no surprise that it took him more than an hour of the double period to catch on.

Pritchard gave Ashcroft a dirty look every now and again, but that was nothing that Severus took to be out of the ordinary — if he'd been in Ashcroft's shoes, dirty looks would have progressed into hexes literal years before they reached this point. And Ashcroft would occasionally smirk at Pritchard; again, an action that wasn't unexpected in the slightest.

Secretly, if Severus had been tortured under Veritaserum, perhaps, he would have admitted that he was disappointed in Ashcroft. Pritchard's passive-aggressive coping mechanisms with Ashcroft's behavior had at least slight Slytherin overtones — the boy was young yet, and it would take time to develop the proper social skills necessary for true manipulation — but Ashcroft's bullying had all the subtlety of a Gryffindor, now that Severus came to notice it. How had the boy come to have been Sorted into his House? By all appearances, he was far better suited for Minerva's. His apparent method of dealing with friction with Draco Malfoy was not, as Severus would have expected of any of his Slytherins, to either enlist Malfoy or to defeat him through some covert action. Instead, he kept himself out of Malfoy's line of sight. A perfect illustration of a Gryffindor solution to a Slytherin problem.

Severus wasn't sure whether he was more disgusted with Ashcroft's bullying itself, or the way in which he went about it. It was, perhaps, six of one and half-dozen of the other, and for better or worse, it was Severus's problem to deal with, now that he was aware of its existence.

Not, of course, that he was prepared to admit this awareness to anyone. It would demonstrate that he hadn't been aware of it previously.

On his seventh trip past Pritchard's cauldron, he heard the boy hiss, "Stop it," under his breath but did not comment, not wanting either of them to be aware that he was watching them even a bit. His interest was piqued, however, and he made his eighth trip much sooner than he would have if Pritchard had not spoken.

As he passed by again, he heard Ashcroft giggle softly, which sent a chill down his spine, and the sound of breaking glass, which reminded him of a shattering Time Turner and very nearly inspired him to rush from the room and make sure that Hermione was safe.

Severus forced himself to look at his watch, which was not reading 2:34, of course, and kept walking.

But on the eleventh trip, he actually saw it. Ashcroft took one of Pritchard's jars, seemingly at random, and idly dropped it on the floor, grinning as it shattered and grinding one of the larger shards into ceramic dust with the heel of his shoe. Pritchard's jaw tightened, but he did not speak, and Severus made himself walk by as if he hadn't seen anything.

This is an experiment, he reminded himself whenever he felt the urge to intervene, to hex Ashcroft, or, at the very least, send him to Albus. You want to see what happens, don't you?

If he couldn't actively keep Pritchard from breaking his own vial, he wanted to see if someone else could.

He didn't get to make a twelfth trip.

Perhaps Ashcroft dropped another jar. Perhaps he said something to Pritchard, who was obviously seething, if silently. Perhaps he simply blinked in a manner displeasing to Pritchard. Whatever the cause was, the result was that Pritchard had launched himself at Ashcroft, knocking both of them to the ground, and was now hitting him savagely with his ladle, slinging half-completed potion all over the bystanders.

"Gerroff me, you fucking little queer," Ashcroft squalled as the ladle caught his cheekbone.

That seemed to incite Pritchard further — with a hoarse shout, he flung the ladle away and plunged both of his hands into Ashcroft's hair and smashed his head into the floor.

Blinking with surprise, Severus practically vaulted over the handful of desks separating him from the fight. "That is enough," he heard himself yell, leaning over the pair.

They continued to struggle with each other, oblivious to his presence as he continued to shout at them — Ashcroft had his hands on one of Pritchard's wrists and was now spitefully twisting it, using his larger size to flip them and straddle Pritchard, pulling his wrist up between his shoulder blades. Pritchard's scream was high pitched and pain filled.

"You will stop this, right now," Severus bellowed, finally ducking in and grabbing both boys by the scruffs of their necks, pulling them apart physically. "Ashcroft, Pritchard, this instant!"

Flailing in an effort to get at Ashcroft, Pritchard's limbs thrashed in the air. Severus gave him a good shake, but to no avail.

In fact, one of Pritchard's arms knocked into the kit sitting on Ashcroft's workbench, sending the contents all over the floor of the classroom.

The throbbing in Severus's head intensified, echoed by the dull aching in his arms as he continued to hold the struggling pair at arms' length from each other. As he saw the armadillo bile puddle on the ground, he didn't know which one of them he was going to hurt, but he knew that, for the first time in a long time, he was glad he wouldn't see tomorrow, because that meant Albus would have no memory of firing him for deliberately injuring a student or two.

Day Three Hundred Forty-Four

"At least," Severus said snidely, only half in jest, "your particular brand of insanity is of a more novel sort. If I was of a mind to, I could appreciate your penchant for variety."

Hermione did not even bother to look up at him. "I thought I was not to speak to you," she said, slightly muffled. "And what do you mean by that, anyway?"

"We are in a public hallway," he said in response to her first statement. "I simply said that I would not speak to you alone."

"I don't see anyone else here." She sounded defensive.

He bit back a more vicious retort. "You've been looking at the floor for the last half-hour, at least," he replied instead. "Clearly, you have no idea how many people have passed by. As you've been preoccupied with crawling about on your hands and knees. You're going to wind up locked up in the Infirmary if you keep on at this rate."

"If I thought it would keep you away, I would make a more active effort," she said, but it lacked any underlying venom.

"How many circles will I have to talk you into for you to tell me what in the nine hells you're doing?" he asked, ignoring her comment.

She did look up at him, then, and he noticed that she looked even more tired than usual. "Don't tell me that you're interested."

"Purely academically," he said, being careful to look away as she scrubbed at one eye with a closed fist and resumed her perusal of the castle floor. "I'm charting your descent into madness, and I'm fairly certain this is a pivotal step."

"Ron's goblet of juice wouldn't stay full this morning," she said abruptly, reaching out with a single finger to scratch at a particular spot on the floor.

He blinked, tried to put the pieces together, and came up with at least half-a-dozen missing. "Are you certain that the final scene of this fascinating tale ends with you crawling about on the floor like an idiot child?"

"Clearly," she said, continuing in that irritating tone she had that suggested Severus was no better than excrement on the bottom of her shoe and subsequently made him physically ache to take points, "the goblet had… holes in it."

"Clearly," he echoed, voice grating with suppressed exasperation.

"But I couldn't see them," she said. "Not at first, at any rate. I had to look at the thing for nearly fifteen minutes before I could find any."

"The floor, Hermione?" he asked, about five seconds away from simply walking off, curiosity be damned.

He could not see her expression, but her voice was full of annoyance. "I knew you were right," she said quietly. "About us not seeing all of the blind spots. But I didn't really know it, you know?"

Severus remained silent — whatever he said would be offensive to her and he wanted her to continue.

"And I just wanted…"

It clicked into place as she hesitated. "You're looking for empty spots?" he asked flatly. "On the castle floor."

Her head jerked in a nod. "It seemed as good a place to start as any."

Almost against his will, Severus knelt down, placing a hand against the stones — they were hatefully warm to the touch and he did not allow himself to consider the implications of that. "And have you found any?"

"They're hard to find," she said, tone almost conversational again. "I don't want to see them, so…" Head lifting, she looked at him again. "It's easier to — here!"

Before he could react, one of her hands wrapped itself around his wrist and pulled him forward. Feeling an utter fool, he allowed Hermione to place his palm flat on the ground. "There. There's one."

"I don't…" he said slowly. "Wait…" His fingers curled into a space in the stone that, by all rights, should not have been there, and something in his stomach twisted. Severus blinked and suddenly he saw it — his fingertip touching the edge of a blinding spot of nothing.

With a shudder, he tore his eyes away from the floor and found himself looking into Hermione's gaze. "I did the same thing to Harry," she said in a voice so soft it was almost a whisper. "I put his hand on one of the spots. But he couldn't see it. He couldn't even feel it."

Again, Severus was silent.

Her nose wrinkled slightly and her hand darted out to curl around his wrist again. "Is this really what you want?" she asked quietly. "Is this really better?"

He tried to pull away, but her grip was insistent and his attempt was half-hearted at best.

"Severus," she whispered, biting her lower lip.

Abruptly, his resolve was back and he tore himself away. "No," he said firmly, standing and walking away from her as quickly as he could manage.

Day Three Hundred Fifty-One

Severus didn't really begin hating people until his father died. He wasn't entirely sure why — Albus would have spouted some psychoanalytic nonsense about Severus reserving all of his hatred for his father, but he was pretty certain that he hadn't hated his father either.

Not that he'd liked the man, really. It was difficult to prefer the company of someone who routinely enjoyed thrashing one within an inch of one's life, all genetic connections aside. Dislike, however, was a far cry from genuine hatred.

He hadn't truly hated anyone until then — until he'd gone home one day and found his father collapsed in his chair, a bottle of whiskey in one hand, not breathing.

It did not help, of course, that two months after he'd put his father in the ground, he found himself standing near the Whomping Willow with a long stick in hand, prodding around the base of the thing until it went still. He'd hated James Potter, then, when he'd come barreling up and knocked him over with an ease that still rankled, to tell the truth. He'd hated all of them. Potter, Black, Lupin. And later, Dumbledore, Malfoy, maybe Voldemort most of all.

It was fairly easy to find people to hate. Certainly, easier to hate people than to like them.

He'd hated Lily Evans fairly quickly. He'd hated her before she stupidly succumbed to James Potter's idiotic charms. Of course, he'd continued to hate her. He hated her even as she welcomed him into the Order of the Phoenix, with a smile on her face and a baby on her hip. As she'd pressed a kiss to his cheek (causing the moron Black to almost swallow his tongue, which almost made it worth enduring), she'd thanked him, and he had simply hated her.

He did not think much of her any more — she was dead, after all, and there was little need for him to trouble his existence with thoughts of a woman he'd hated twenty years ago. She and her husband did not figure much in his thoughts, even if their son was shoved in his face on more than an occasional basis; he had long since learned to hate Harry Potter on his account alone, leaving the memory of the boy's parents in peace.

And he did not know what had driven him to think of her on today of all days. Whatever the trigger had been, whatever passing fancy, he now found himself sitting at his desk, staring at a piece of string and thinking about Lily Evans.

When they were all children, she'd carried a loop of string in her pocket, and whenever she was bored, she would pull it out and use her fingers to make curious designs with it, marking herself as the Muggleborn she was — the wizarding children fell to wandplay in their leisure time. But not Evans; she'd twist and twiddle her fingers and come up with complex loops of string, curled within her palms, laughing delightedly as someone or another would attempt to meddle with her design. One twirl of her fingers and her creation would fall away, leaving whoever was interfering staring stupidly at the empty space surrounding their hand that had just been filled with strings.

Severus had never tried to ask Evans about her string, and he'd learned to hate her so thoroughly that he stopped even watching her make her designs many years before she died. Perhaps she'd had that loop in her pocket on the day that Voldemort killed her. He didn't know and, up until thirty seconds ago, he would have pleasantly informed whoever asked that he didn't care, either.

His fingers tied the two ends of his string together into a knot — he tugged at it experimentally, assuring himself that it would stay. Awkwardly, he wrapped the string around his hands, struggling to remember at least some of Evans's hand motions from years ago. He didn't stop to question himself; he knew that as soon as his wits recovered themselves, he would realize what a monumentally ridiculous activity this was.

Carefully, he used a finger on his left hand to pull a loop of string away from his right and regarded it thoughtfully.

He was beginning to understand why Evans used to do this — it kept the mind delightfully occupied and away from all forms of meaningful thought. Solitaire was too idle an activity; he could play without thought, and that was not his aim.

It was two o'clock.

It was two o'clock and he was doing his best not to care.

He pulled another loop from his right hand onto his left. His life would be so much easier if he could hate Hermione. Even if he could understand why he didn't hate her.

He ought to, after all. Friend of Harry Potter, studious, brave — all qualities that he would, under usual circumstances, find ample reason to hate. The simple fact that she was able to tolerate the company of the Weasley family, which was the biggest idiot-laden bunch of idealistic fools that he'd ever been forced to endure, should have been enough to guarantee his unequivocal dislike, at the very least.

Left onto right, and then back onto left.

There was something horribly wrong with him, to care this much about her. Unfortunately, Poppy Pomfrey wouldn't be sympathetic in the slightest if he went to her. She'd probably send him to Albus, even, who would cluck over him — 'oh, poor Severus, finally developing a heart' or something equally condescending — and ultimately do nothing.

It wasn't really the emotion he was confused about. It was the target. And there was no way he could make Albus understand that without telling Albus who the target was, and Severus was not in any way interested in hearing that lecture. He didn't need to be warned off from a student.

Or, maybe he did, and that was the problem.

He looped some string over his thumb.

But he was taking care of it, wasn't he?

The clock read quarter past two, and Severus seriously considered breaking it.

Moreover, if Albus knew, Minerva would know in due course, and that was definitely a lecture Severus did not want to hear.

He realized the string apparently wasn't helping as much as he'd thought it would.

Two-seventeen.

The office door opened with a loud slam and Severus forced himself to keep absolutely still.

"I just wanted to tell you," Hermione said, cheeks red and hair more unkempt than usual, "that you're being completely stupid about this."

The door slammed shut and he heard her footsteps fade away. Blinking, Severus tried to extract himself from the string around his fingers, only to realize that he'd managed to tie everything into a single, overly large knot.