It didn't take long for the teachers to gang up on Sev. Within his first few days of being Headmaster, they had already met in secret to hatch a plan. Even if they couldn't drive him out of the school for fear of reprisal from the Death Eaters, they could make his life a living Hell while he was there. They banded together to make normal life as impossible for him as they could, coming up with creative ways to keep him on his toes.
He adamantly refused to let anyone, even Hazel, know that they were bothering him. The swarm of owls outside his window was annoying, but she shrugged it off as the usual start-of-term rush. Hazel wrote off the stares that the other professors gave them when they were together. She even disregarded the nasty graffiti she would pass in the halls, cleaning it off with a wave of her wand before he could see. But there were some things she just couldn't ignore.
The start-of-term feast went well, but things only went downhill from there. The morning of the first day of classes, Sev sat down for breakfast, Hazel on his left as usual. Four or five bites into his food, he turned to look at her. "Sev, is something wrong? You look awfully green."
"I think I'm going to be sick. I'll see you later," he managed, getting up and very nearly running out of the room.
Though Hazel worried, she had to go up to Ghoul Studies and usher in her first class of the term right after breakfast. Only later did she find out that he spent the whole morning violently sick. She was too busy to go down to the Great hall for lunch, but she soon heard that he still wasn't feeling well. The whole act repeated itself during dinner that night.
Three days in, both of them were wondering if something was wrong. None of the other professors had fallen ill. Perhaps it was just the stress. So on Friday morning after another failed breakfast, Sev went to see Madam Pomfrey while Hazel went to class. They met up again at lunch, where he told her that Madam Pomfrey had just shrugged, saying it must have been the stress of being Headmaster and starting a new year.
Hazel got incredibly busy, eating more meals in her classroom. When she made it to the Great Hall, half of the time Sev was locked away in his office, in a meeting or busily working. It was only when he laid down next to her one night a couple weeks into the term that she noticed something was wrong. His normally thin frame had grown even thinner. "Sev, when was the last time you ate anything?" she asked, sitting up in bed. "Anything substantial, I mean."
Shrugging, he took a second to think. "Yesterday? The day before? I don't know."
"You've got to eat, Sev." She reached for her wand on the nightstand, summoning a tray of biscuits and cups of tea for them both.
"I'm nearly certain that one of the professors paid off most of the House Elves to slip poison into my food. That's why I've been getting so sick," he explained, gingerly taking a bite of a biscuit.
Hazel lowered her teacup, her eyes full of concern. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"I'm fine. It's not that bad."
"Sev, they're poisoning you," she stressed. "I… I'm going down to the kitchens tomorrow morning before breakfast to see what's up. Maybe one of the House Elves will tell me who did it. It's got to be Horace, no one else would know what would make you sick but not hurt you too much. Or Poppy. I… I'll cook everything myself if I have to."
Anger flared in her eyes, but Sev tried his best to assuage it. "It's nothing you need to worry about."
"Of course I need to worry about it, Sev, I care about you. I can't let them starve you to death or poison you or... I'm going to figure this out." She set her cup down, coming over to give him a hug. "We're going to sort this out."
Unfortunately Hazel's investigation into the kitchen nightmare didn't do much to keep the professors from harassing him. Madam Pince enchanted the library books so they would chase after him if he entered the library. The Potions Storeroom would zap him with a nasty jolt of electricity if he tried to enter. It was an easy enough hex to break, but he had no idea when it would be a trap and when it would be fine. He would try to pick up a quill in the staff room to leave Hazel a note and it would explode. The owls in the Owlery would attack him any time he got near.
The students were even more creative. At first they started with things they could find at Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes - setting up a swamp in front of his office, setting fireworks off next to his window in the middle of the night, swapping his normal teacups for the nose-biting varieties. After a group of students tried to attack him in the corridor, Sev was on guard wherever he went. A few more students tried, but they were always captured. Most of them were handed over to the Carrows or Filch for punishment. The teachers never directly attacked him, but the students were a different story. They even recruited some of the ghosts. Peeves was the biggest problem, hurling dungbombs at him as he walked or trying to drop glass vials on his head. Peeves only settled down when Hazel threatened to get rid of him for good. She knew how to, after all.
Sev became completely paranoid. He felt almost as unsafe as he did as a student, back when he was evading the Marauders, trying not to end up suspended by his ankles over the lake. He had to look around every corner. He avoided eating in the Great Hall. The only safe places were his office and his private quarters. Even there, he was plagued by paranoia and nightmares about all sorts of things.
There was one thing that offered him protection in the halls, though. Whenever he was with Hazel, the attacks seemed to stop. The students were afraid of accidentally hitting her with their curses. Peeves was afraid of her banishing him. And the professors genuinely liked her, though they disapproved of her staying with him. Some of them thought it was a case of what the Muggles called "Stockholm Syndrome", when someone became so infatuated with their captor that they refused to leave no matter what atrocities they committed. Others thought she'd been placed under the Imperius Curse. A small fraction thought she was involved with the Death Eaters herself. But all of them liked her, so they wouldn't try to attack when she was around.
She offered him some sense of safety. There were no pixies trying to rip out his hair when they took a walk around the school together. If she requested something to eat from the kitchens, it was never poisoned, even when the House Elves started to suspect that she was feeding Sev too. None of her owls were ever intercepted, even if they were flying towards the Headmaster's office.
Snape was even on his toes in his office. No one had jinxed it yet, but he'd received his fair share of exploding letters. He was only truly safe in his chambers, since he had cast so many protection charms over the door that it was nearly impenetrable. Only he and Hazel could enter, and it was the only place he knew he could talk freely. He always breathed a sigh of relief when it was time to get ready for bed, when he could step through the door behind his desk and leave the worry back in his office. Hazel would invariably be there, either sitting up by the fire or, more often, already asleep. He liked working late, and she could only stay up for so long. But he would crawl into bed and she would automatically reach out for him, even if she was deep in sleep. They would share a sleepy kiss, and even if Sev wouldn't actually fall asleep for a few hours, he could finally feel safe when he was lying there with her.
Without letting go of her hand, Sev reached out for the staff room door, ready to address the professors. Five minutes until their meeting started. As soon as he touched the doorknob, his hand started bleeding, shallow cuts appearing all over it. "Oh Merlin… here." Hazel pulled her wand from her robes. "Vulnera Sanentur," she mumbled, tracing the pattern of the cuts. "Vulnera Sanentur… This is horrible, Sev."
Out of curiosity, she reached out for the door. Making contact with the cold metal, she realized that the door had been hexed to only injure him. "I should go," he sighed, letting go of her hand. "They don't want me here."
"Who -"
"Minerva or one of the Carrows can run this meeting. I… I think I'll sit this one out. It's been a long enough day already."
Though she hated to see him go, she understood. Sev knew that the professors openly hated him, knew that they would have nothing good to say to him. So they shared a parting kiss, Hazel promising to update him on everything as soon as the meeting was over. She went into the staff room alone, the other professors nodding their hellos.
A few minutes later, McGonagall stood up, taking a roll of parchment from her pocket. "Well, it seems our Headmaster could not be with us this afternoon, so I guess we will begin. Is there any new business anyone would like to raise right away?"
"Yes." All eyes turned to Hazel, who commanded their attention just as well as she commanded attention from her students. No one quite knew what to make of her and Snape, so all they could do was stare. "I know you're all trying to wage war against Sev. I know he's been poisoned," she looked to Slughorn and Professor Sprout, whose gardens had supplied many of the poisons. "Hexed," she looked next to Flitwick and McGonagall. "And had creatures set on him in the Owlery, near the Forbidden Forest…" a final look to Hagrid before she swept over the group again. "This is ridiculous. The stuff you're all doing - I'm not going to point fingers, but some of it takes expertise I know our students don't have yet. You're starving him. You're killing him. It's not just inhumane, it's inhuman."
"You seem to forget he killed Albus Dumbledore," coughed a voice from the back of the room. Slughorn. "A fairly inhuman action, if I do say so myself." The staff murmured its collective agreement.
"I can't ask you to stop, because I know you won't. I can't even ask that you make sure you don't actually kill him, because I know some of you are only restrained… some of you gladly would, but you're afraid of what the Death Eaters or You-Know-Who would do to you or the students. I just ask that you stop hexing his office and the letters that get sent there. There are too many students and staff members that go into that office. It's only a matter of time before someone gets hurt. Someone you don't mean to hurt," she corrected. "It's despicable, but I can't stop you. I've watched him waste away. I've watched the stress, the fear - Do any of you know what it feels like to be afraid of everything, every second of the day? To be afraid of the people you once called your friends -"
"We lived it," Professor Sprout interrupted, crossing her arms. "Every day, for years, we lived it. Back in the First Wizarding War, when Severus Snape was out there killing and torturing people with all the rest of his kind. We all know what he is. We know what he's been all along. Now I don't know what's wrong with you. You were a sweet girl. You're a brilliant woman. You need to save yourself before you get swept up in something that you can't stop."
Hazel was biting back tears, knowing that none of them would stop torturing Sev no matter what she had to say about it. None of them knew, and none of them could know, that he didn't deserve any of this. "Pomona, you're better than this. You all are."
"I watched you grow up to become an Auror, and now this… You stay with him, after everything he's done? He's a murderer! He's leading this... this machine of terrorizing our students! And you stay with him!" Minerva McGonagall rarely raised her voice. She didn't need to. But when the safety of her students was in question, she would rise to the defense. "After everything your parents did, everything they stood for… You despicable girl…"
"You're blind," Flitwick scoffed. "The rest of us have seen Professor Snape for what he is. I'm starting to think he does have you under the Imperius Curse."
Hazel left the meeting even more angry than she had entered it. While some of the others went for tea, she disappeared down the hall, headed for Sev's office. He flinched when he heard the door open, knowing that it could be another owl attack. Relaxing when he saw her, his eyes filled with concern as he noticed the tears streaming down her proud face.
He stood, coming over to embrace her. "I wish they could know," she said, her voice muffled by his shoulder. "I wish they didn't hate you. I hate hearing the way they talk, seeing the way they look at you, knowing they want to hurt you, Sev, I -"
There was no good way for him to respond. So the two of them just stood there, holding on to each other, for what seemed like ages. "Thank you for not hating me," he finally managed. "Having you here... it helps. More than you know."