Chapter 2: Anger
Severus confronts Quirrell about the Stone in late November. He's not exactly thrilled to be playing the spy again, but he can't deny it's good to keep those skills sharp, especially given that his Mark has been twinging lately.
He dons his signature sneer and storms into Quirrell's office unannounced.
"Quirrell," he says. He used to call the man Quirinus, back when he was an unremarkable professor of Muggle Studies. Now, though, between his plot for the Stone and his attempts on Potter's life and his offensively fake stutter, he doesn't merit a first-name basis. "I know you're after the Stone. If you know what's good for you, you'll share your notes."
Quirrell is more inclined to deny everything than to question Severus' motives. He gives nothing away about possible attempts on Potter's life, and Severus doesn't dare push him on that topic: those are motives he absolutely cannot risk being questioned. Not by some relatively unknown, historically neutral, and suddenly power-hungry wizard like Quirrell. That kind of combination is always volatile, dangerous, and prone to deception.
But it's enough that Quirrell knows he's onto him; even if he doesn't accept Severus' involvement in his plans, then he will have to be more cautious, and therefore make slower progress.
...
Severus sits in a leather wingback chair in his study and stares unseeing at the parchment on his desk. It's the final list of Slytherin students staying on over the holidays and it's exactly one name long.
He'll admit he's unnerved a bit that Potter doesn't want to be with his family. It doesn't make sense. It's rare for any first-year to choose to stay at school over their first break, and Potter, especially, has not had an easy term. He's already nearly died twice! And he must have been lonely: due to his enmity with Draco, he was rather ostracized by his housemates until the first quidditch match, and Severus knows personally how draining it can be for a lone Slytherin to maintain close friendships with Gryffindors. Shouldn't he be longing for the comforts of home?
He's curious enough to investigate: a few days later, he arrives early to the staff meeting- a rare occurrence- to slide into a seat next to Minerva.
"Potter has signed up to stay on over the holidays," he murmurs with no forewarning.
Minerva is not at all fazed by his lack of small talk. "Ah," is all she says. "So have the Weasleys."
Severus scowls at the inevitable mischief Potter is sure to get embroiled in, but at least he has found a reasonable explanation.
...
He watches the group carefully come Christmas dinner. Potter looks bedraggled, with wet hair and horrendous, overlarge muggle clothes for casualwear. Severus is displeased to see him outfitted in a manner that would shame any self-respecting Slytherin, especially when Potter, unlike Severus in his youth, can actually afford better clothing. But he'll not ruin his holiday peace by talking to Potter about it- or talking to Potter at all. As much as he wants to win the boy over, he still hasn't quite figured out how to make Potter like him- nor how to make himself like Potter.
The Weasleys are as obnoxiously boisterous as ever in saccharinely matching sweaters. Weasley the youngest wedges himself firmly between Potter and the Ravenclaw fourth-year he'd been sitting next to and immediately starts both plying his plate with food and interrogating Potter.
"Hey, Harry, good Christmas? Why aren't you wearing your jumper? Is it too small? Only Mum had Percy guess your size, it was that or let Fred and George knick your clothes to check the tags, but I figured she'd make it a bit big just in case. Or, oh no, is it an ugly color? Mum sent me maroon, again," he gestures at his sweater with a grimace.
"Er," says Potter when Weasley finally stops talking long enough to shovel potatoes into his mouth. "What jumper?"
Weasley chokes; not an altogether surprising outcome of stuffing that much root vegetable into one eleven-year-old mouth. "Your Weasley Jumper!" He says once he's cleared his airways back out, waving again at his own sweater, and then at his various assorted brothers'. "Mum said in her letter that she made you one and to make sure it fit alright."
"Your mum made me a jumper?" Potter says, so quietly Severus almost can't hear it, fork poised, forgotten, halfway between the table and his mouth.
"Of course she did! Wait…" Weasley looks from Harry to Severus and then immediately back again when he sees Severus watching him. "You didn't get it?" he asks in a low voice, but not low enough to be inaudible.
Potter shrugs, looking dazed.
"How d'you mean, you didn't get your Christmas present!" Weasley almost yells, his earlier attempt at discretion immediately forgotten. "If that greasy git hid your-"
"I can hear you, Weasley," Severus cuts in, tempted though he is to allow Weasley to dig himself even further into the hole of his own baseless accusations.
Weasley pales and then colors into a gruesome shade of magenta. "I just meant, er-"
"I know what you meant, Weasley."
Weasley gulps and finally finds the sense to remain silent.
"Professor Snape, do you think the Weasleys' owl might have gotten confused because he's only ever delivered to Gryffindors?" Potter asks.
Severus sighs. "All of your presents should be under the tree, Potter."
Potter furrows his eyebrows in confusion. Severus realizes he is not getting out of this insipid conversation easily; he refills his eggnog and spikes it heavily with honeybourbon from his personal stores. Thank Merlin for nonverbal filling charms.
"The tree, sir?"
"The Christmas tree in the common room, Potter. Do you need your eyes checked?"
"Probably," Weasley sniggers. Then he looks up at Severus' unamused glare, remembers who he's speaking with, and shuts back up.
"Oh," Potter breathes. "I didn't realize…"
Merlin, but the boy's thick.
Weasley just shrugs. "Try it on before tea then, yeah? Let me know how it fits."
Their conversation moves onto even more inane topics then, which Severus duly tunes out. He takes another deep swig from his eggnog and waits for Potter to finish eating.
As soon as he leaves the Great Hall, Severus follows him. He can't quite justify why he does it, except that he has never known an eleven year-old to forget to look for his Christmas presents, and he's never been able to not investigate a Potter doing something suspicious.
The boy appears too excited about his Weasley jumper of all things to notice he is being tailed all the way to the dungeons, where Severus ducks into his office to watch Potter through the portrait spyhole.
The tree in the corner of the common room is enormous and lavishly decorated, so perhaps in comparison, the six packages and one envelope waiting under it are somewhat less eye-catching. Potter checks all the tags with an expression bordering on disbelief, then just stands there and gapes at them, looking both ecstatic and deeply shocked.
Did the boy just whisper "I've got presents" to himself?
Eventually, though, he does get around to opening them: the Weasley sweater, all present and accounted for, in Slytherin green and silver; a box of wizarding sweets; a crudely carved flute; a century-old guide to wizarding culture that's been popular in the pre-Hogwarts tutoring of lesser pureblood families who are too reliant on a working income to teach their children themselves; a homework planner; and a muggle-looking note in the muggle-looking envelope that Potter seems dubiously surprised by. Lastly, he opens the final present and pulls out—
Potter's entire left forearm vanishes under a shimmering swatch of fabric and he yelps, tearing the cloth away. After a few more moments of confusion, the boy goes running off, presumably in search of a mirror. Severus doesn't need to follow; he's seen very few invisibility cloaks in his lifetime, but he still knows one when he sees one. The real question is, who in Salazar's stone dungeons sent that to an eleven-year-old?!
With Potter occupied off in his dorm, Severus taps a brick below the portrait and slips through a doorway into the common room. He walks quickly over to the tree and picks up the card that came with the cloak.
It's not signed, but he recognizes the handwriting in an instant: Dumbledore.
Sweet Salazar, it's like he's trying to make Severus' life miserable.
He returns the note to its place on the floor and leaves. Just because he knows Potter's bound to use it for trouble doesn't mean he has grounds to confiscate that cloak without proof of wrongdoing. He has seven hours before Potter's curfew during which to brew up and boil down a Footprint Finder solution, and the reduction into a powder is time-consuming if you want to do it properly.
...
By nightfall, though, Severus has helped himself to maybe a bit more eggnog than was advisable and can't be arsed to go creeping around the castle after Potter all night. He scatters the Footprint Finder dust in the corridor, sets a silent alarm charm on the common room entrance, and is asleep by ten.
The next morning, Severus wakes to an alert that Potter did, indeed, leave the common room- at ten to midnight no less- and follows his spell-activated footprints to the library, of all places. Well, he'd be more impressed with Potter's sudden bout of studiousness if he wasn't sneaking into the Restricted Section at the first opportunity. But a quick chat with Irma Pince reveals that no books were removed last night, so Severus sets the issue aside for now.
More interestingly, the footprints don't return directly to the dungeons, but instead veer off and eventually enter a dusty unused classroom. They cluster strangely around a mirror in the middle of the room.
Damn Potter and his incessant penchant for trouble! He's already narrowly avoided death twice and now seems to encounter dangerously powerful magical objects at every turn?
And what was Dumbledore thinking, leaving a mirror like that just lying around? Wasn't he testing out special enchantments on it a couple months ago?
With a scowl, Severus sweeps out of the classroom and returns to his quarters. It's not yet ten in the morning but between his mild yet lingering hangover and the constant headache of trying to keep Potter alive, he's already in need of a nap. Not to mention that he won't be getting much sleep tonight.
...
He's awoken by his alarm on the common room door at half midnight. He gives Potter a fifteen-minute head start, the better with which to catch him in the act, and then follows his footsteps up, up, up- to Gryffindor tower.
Ugh.
He drops the disillusionment and waits outside the entrance to the tower. A couple minutes later, the portrait seems to open of its own accord- and then shuts quickly back closed.
"Really!" The Fat Lady huffs. "At this time of night!"
"Apologies," Severus says to the portrait.
He can't be bothered to wait outside and see if Potter and Weasley will try to sneak out again. He leaves them to their anxiety and goes back to bed.
...
The next day finds him grouchy, standing with his hands on his hips and glowering at the last few grams of Footprint Finder powder in a jar on his desk: just enough for one more night of surveillance. Is he really going to follow Potter around the castle at all hours of the night again?
Yes, he decides. He is.
This time, when the alarm goes off, Severus slips out into the hall and waits, disillusioned, for Potter to walk past his chosen alcove. It's disconcerting trying to follow a student who's so entirely invisible, but he's soothed by the knowledge that he has a Footprint Finder trail to fall back on if need be. Potter is walking quietly, with the kind of skill Severus himself only ever developed by sneaking around his childhood home trying not to wake his father, but still not quite silently. It helps that the halls of Hogwarts are hard stone below and high ceilings above, which means even the softest footsteps echo faintly if one pays attention.
Severus pushes aside his desire for punishment temporarily to feed his curiosity: if he's going to catch the scoundrel in the act, he might as well find out what Potter's looking for in the Restricted Section first.
But Potter doesn't bother with the library this time; he heads straight for the Mirror of Erised. For a child so obviously talented at sneaking, he gets incredibly careless once he's entered the room: he rips off his invisibility cloak and sits down in front of the mirror.
"Hi mum," he says. "Hi dad."
Oh.
Severus is suddenly very grateful for his disillusionment, so that nobody, and especially not Potter, can see him drop his brow into his hands or rub at his dry but smarting eyes. After all this time he's spent hating the boy, and even the time he's spent trying to shape him into something his father would hate, he's still refused to think of Potter as anything other than a nuisance, a trickster-in-training like his father, a pint-sized celebrity with a head too large for his body.
It stings, in the hushed, moonlit darkness of the Hogwarts halls, to remember that he's also just a boy who was orphaned too young to remember anything about his parents, to grow up learning of them only second-hand. And whoever ended up with the child must not have known much more about Lily and Potter Senior than the wider wizarding world had known, if Potter still craves his parents enough to see them in the Mirror of Erised.
For the first time, Severus wonders if he should mention to Potter that he was once friends with Lily.
But no; it's just the late hour talking, a fae trick of the witching hour, a natural slip of emotions caused by three consecutive days of sleep deprivation, which is Potter's fault to begin with, for insisting on visiting this accursed mirror in the middle of the bloody night, as if the castle isn't empty enough in the daylight during Christmas break to sneak around in an invisibility cloak, the dunce-
A hand lands on Severus' shoulder and he startles. He whips his head around but sees absolutely nothing- what in Salazar's testicles-
"Severus," says Dumbledore's voice quietly. Bloody Dumbledore. "I will talk to him. Go back to bed."
Severus sneers in the general direction of Dumbledore's voice, but the headmaster doesn't even do him the courtesy of sticking around to allow Severus a biting reply; before he knows it, that quiet voice is emanating from inside the dusty classroom.
"Back again, Harry?"
He could go back to bed, yes, but he won't be getting to sleep any time soon with adrenaline still thumping in his veins, so instead he creeps forward to eavesdrop more effectively.
"So you, like hundreds before you, have discovered the delights of the Mirror of Erised."
Delights. Honestly. This child is a few nights away from losing his touch with reality. Still, he keeps his derisive snort inside and keeps listening. Dumbledore walks Potter through the purpose of the Mirror and imparts upon him the most lukewarm warning a professor can give. "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live." Well, Severus doesn't know what he himself has been doing for the last ten years, then, but he'd never admit that aloud anyway.
Dumbledore sends the child off- after unsubtly dodging an impertinently personal question- and doesn't even hand out a single detention for repeatedly being out of bed after hours. But at least he doesn't attempt to talk to Severus again on his way out. Small mercies.
Severus trails Potter down to the dungeons, seething quietly, and feels some vindictive schadenfreude at how high the boy jumps when Severus tears the cloak off his shoulders. He looks around wildly; in the dim underground night, it takes Potter several seconds to locate his invisibility cloak, hanging inert in the air, and only then does Severus remove his disillusionment.
Potter gasps and it is not quite satisfying enough to make up for Severus' long nights tailing him, but he's not done yet.
"In," he says, shuffling Potter into his office.
The boy stands there, looking flushed with guilt and yet also some small defiance, in what Severus in good faith can't even call pyjamas; they're just a ratty t-shirt and sweatpants several sizes too large to be comfortable, even for nightwear. Alas, Severus can't be bothered to criticize his abysmal fashion sense when there are more important matters to discuss.
"Who gave you this invisibility cloak, Potter?"
"I don't know," Potter mumbles. Severus glares expectantly at him. "Sir," he adds after a beat.
"And how did you ascertain that it was safe?" he asks, although he already knows that the boy didn't.
After a moment of quiet confusion, Potter mumbles, "safe?"
"Safe, Potter. It is not uncommon in the wizarding world to send cursed, sentient and vicious, or otherwise dangerous gifts to unsuspecting enemies. There are any number of spells and instruments that may be utilized when checking for malicious intentions."
"Oh," the boy says.
Severus glares harder, the better by which to convey his disdain. "You received an anonymous gift for Christmas- in fact, you received a rare and powerful magical object from an unknown individual when you did not expect to receive any gifts at all- and it did not even occur to you that it was suspicious?"
Potter stares sullenly at his hands, then admits, "No, sir."
"And upon receipt of this gift, without bothering to check for foul play, you not only donned this mysterious cloak, but used it to sneak about the school, alone, after hours, with no concern for the fact that, if the cloak had been embedded with any kind of malignant but slow-acting substance, you could have been killed or disabled and left invisible, in some dark corridor of the castle, in the middle of the night, and not been discovered for hours?"
Potter opens his mouth to argue, shuts it at the glower he sees on Severus' face, and shakes his head.
"And then, you discovered yet another powerful magical artifact, again failed to check it for curses or ascertain its function before use, and saw nothing amiss about the fact that it showed you the very deepest desire of your heart?"
"I didn't know that's what it did at first," the boy mutters.
"Nonetheless, you were immediately presented with an impossible but poignantly appealing image and it did not occur to you, even once, that such an image could easily be used to entice you, ensnare you, entrap you, enslave you, and/or drive you insane?"
"No, sir," Potter mutters into his hands.
"Do you have a death wish, Potter?" Severus snarls. "You might as well come clean about it now, else I will be forced to assume that you are just that stupid."
"No, sir," Potter repeats with a grimace.
"Do you have any idea how many people in this world would dearly love to see you dead, Potter?"
Potter's head snaps up at that, and he squints his eyes at Severus as though assessing whether his professor is one of them. Severus bites back a scoff only because universal suspicion, while disappointingly unsubtle, is at least better than its opposite.
"Detention," Severus decides. "One week. For being out of bounds after hours. You will report to my office every night at seven once term resumes."
He looks like he's about to argue, but just as Potter opens his mouth, his indignant protest comes out as an enormous yawn. It not only underscores Potter's consecutive sleepless nights of vagrancy but renders him even more difficult to take seriously. Potter must realize that too, because he settles for one last eleven-year-old scowl before he tromps out of the office.
Good riddance, Severus thinks, and good grief; that boy has a penchant for trouble that could rival his father's, if not for the fact that it seems to be entirely unplanned and vastly more dangerous to his own person.
At least he feels relatively confident that Potter will not attempt to sneak out again; they are both long overdue for a decent night's sleep.