It didn't take long at all for Sev to settle into the daily routine of life at Hogwarts. He, naturally enough, excelled in all his lessons, finding a lot of the early exercises painfully simple. However, he was careful to avoid being first to complete things all the time. Generally he would finish second or third - far enough down the list not to get noticed, but not so far down people started thinking he was stupid.

James Potter usually came in first, although he wouldn't have done so if Snape had been working to the best of his ability. His best friend Sirius was also very bright, but the teachers had extreme difficulty getting him to settle down long enough to do anything. He would much rather be poking and prodding things with his wand or setting off Dungbombs.

The one lesson where Sev couldn't disguise his expertise was Potions. He was light-years ahead of the other students, already nearly on a level with their teacher, Professor Fennel.

Saxius Fennel was a handsome, dark-haired man with olive skin. He was a cold, harsh man, slow to offer praise, but that didn't bother Snape.

Other, more sensitive and less brilliant students had a lot of trouble with him. Remus struggled mightily with his Potions, and Lily was just plain hopeless - despite the fact that she had an excellent memory for detail and was always quick to understand. She knew exactly what she was supposed to be doing... she just couldn't make it work.

Lily was one of Lucius Malfoy's favourite targets. Malfoy had a very sharp tongue and an instinct for how to wound, and he wasn't afraid to use them. He and his gang picked on Peter Pettigrew for his nervousness and poor grades in class, but they reserved the worst of their venom for the 'mudbloods'.

All of the Slytherins came from long-established wizarding families. So did most of the others, but since Dumbledore had been made headmaster, there had been more and more students flooding in who had no magic in their family tree whatsoever. Snape had seen first-hand that this had absolutely no bearing on how well they did at school, but Lucius wasn't interested in such trifling little details.

Potions was the class where the worst of the infighting went on, because Fennel seemed completely deaf to such things when it suited him. Slytherin shared Potions with Gryffindor, which gave Malfoy Peter, Lily, and two other mudbloods, Jade Creevy and Jerry James, to pick on.

Not all the Gryffindors were easy targets, however. James Potter was fiercely protective of all his housemates, and Sirius Black would take any excuse for a fight. And Lily herself had little patience for bullying - she seemed like a sweet little thing, but she had a biting wit and a no-nonsense attitude.

Snape himself couldn't care less about the fighting one way or the other. In his opinion, Lily was one of the least objectionable people in the class. She seemed to understand his personality fairly instinctively, knowing that his impassive coolness was completely different from Malfoy's sneering superiority.

Black and Potter had no such powers of distinction. So far as they were concerned, the fact that he was a Slytherin and that he didn't actively speak out against Malfoy made him part of the gang.

If either of them had as much brains as their test scores suggested, they would have realised that to do so, had he wanted to, would have been to make the next seven years of his life hell. Malfoy, however unpleasant to what he considered his 'inferiors', was a born leader. All the Slytherins in their year had coalesced around him, following his lead and becoming his gang. Snape wasn't actively a part of that... but he wasn't stupid enough to try and set himself apart.

Somewhere inside, though, Snape found himself somewhat... disturbed by Lucius Malfoy. Oh, not by his antics and his attitude - that was standard schoolboy bullying in anyone's book. But there was something behind the sneer at times that worried him a little.

"The time is coming," Malfoy had disclosed to him in private once. "The time is coming when we won't have to put up with this rubbish anymore. Mudbloods in our schools, pathetic little weasels like Pettigrew - the true power of wizardry is being diluted. Idiots like Dumbledore are ransoming the future for their 'equality'." He sneered and made obnoxious little quote marks that made it quite clear he considered the likes of Peter and Lily no equal of his.

Then Malfoy had leaned in closer, a knowing light in his eyes. "But that's gonna change," he confided in Snape. "Oh, not this year, and not the next, but soon. We're gonna cleanse this place. We're gonna purify the blood of wizardry, and put our people back where they belong."

Severus was an excellent judge of people. He knew when words were truly spoken, and when they were just bluster. And there was something behind Malfoy's words... He knew something. And this 'cleansing' he was talking of might well be more than just a twisted dream.

Sev might not be the most emotional of boys, but he recognised a bad deal when he heard one. Never mind 'mudbloods' and the magically weak... once something like Malfoy's dream was started, it just kept rolling on and on. The most important thing in Severus Snape's life was the gathering of knowledge - and when elitism came in, freedom of information was the first to go out.

So when Lucius Malfoy seemed to think of him as a kindred spirit, he did nothing to destroy that impression. When the gang of Slytherins made their cruel jokes and cackled at the others, he smiled thinly and said nothing. When James Potter and his friends scowled at Snape and the others, he scowled right back.

And when he was around Malfoy, he watched, and he waited. It was what he did best.


If he couldn't disguise his expertise in Potions, Defence Against the Dark Arts was nearly as bad. Their teacher was Professor Malachite, a very well-spoken wizard with icy white hair and a goatee beard. He was head of house Slytherin, and as well-liked as most of his students were reviled. He was always very warm and understanding with the students, aiding them whenever they needed help and seldom handing out any kind of punishment.

He paid special attention to Sev, and it was clear that his usual defence of pretending to be less sharp than he was would be hard to pull off. Malachite couldn't see through him - nobody Snape had ever met could do that - but it was clear he knew Sev wasn't pulling his full weight.

He pulled the young Slytherin aside after one lesson when Snape had refused to raise his hand to questions they both knew he could answer in a heartbeat.

"Now, young Severus," said Professor Malachite warmly. "I notice a certain reluctance to join in the class discussion, hmm? Nervous, perhaps? Shy about public speaking?"

There was no point in pretending to that. "No sir."

"Bored, then? Are we not stretching you enough?"

For perhaps the first time, Sev was genuinely torn. On the one hand, he didn't want to tip his hand and reveal the full extent of his ability... and on the other, Malachite's words hinted at the possibilities of more knowledge.

The professor appeared to take his silence as assent. "I'll tell you what, Snape. I'll give you permission to get books from my private library. And if you want to do a little extra reading on your own time, well... it can be our little secret." He tapped the side of his nose and smiled.

Snape took the permission slip, and said nothing. But soon after, he started to borrow books from the Dark Arts office.

And quite a collection Professor Malachite had. It was more extensive by far than the selection available in the main library, even in the restricted section. He wondered to himself what Professor Dumbledore might think if he knew that one of his professors was allowing an eleven-year-old free, unmonitored access to such material.

But then, Dumbledore was a law unto himself. Malfoy, and by extension his followers, regarded him as near-senile, taking his weird pronouncements and love for silly things as proof he was more than half mad. Snape, as always, saw deeper.

And he had the uncomfortable feeling that Dumbledore did too. Sometimes there was a glint in those warm blue eyes that he had only ever seen before in a mirror. Perhaps the craziness was all for show - or perhaps it was truly part of his personality. But if it was, it was a long way from being all of it.

Yes, Dumbledore might hide behind an entirely different set of shields than Snape, but underneath they were two of a kind. Sev made a mental note to never try to stare the headmaster down. He had the feeling that it might just be the first time in his life he didn't succeed.

Time passed quickly, as it always did when he was learning. And he was learning, although not in lessons. The Hogwarts library held a great many books his uncle had never had the chance to get a copy of, and of course there was Professor Malachite's private bookshelf.

Malachite never asked Snape what he was studying. Sev found that strange, and a little worrisome; it went against every piece of the friendly instructor aura he projected. He wondered if the Professor wasn't planning on using him in some way to bring house Slytherin glory - but if so, why did he not monitor what he was reading?

Another possibility that occurred to him was that this was some kind of experiment... Malachite was watching him, secretly, determining what a bright boy with a free pass would choose to study on his own time. Sev didn't care for that idea much at all; he was the observer, not the observed.

He resolved to watch Professor Malachite as carefully as he watched Lucius Malfoy.

But, like it or not, observation was a two way street. Malfoy might be bigoted, but he was sharp as a knife, and it didn't take him long to notice that the books Severus studied were never the ones on the set list.

He was most interested in Sev's Dark Arts books. A lot of the technicalities went over his head when he tried to flick through them himself, but he was a quick study when Sev explained it for him.

Sev weighed up the wisdom of giving Lucius Malfoy access to high-level Dark curses, and decided to keep the majority of his knowledge to himself. However, he stockpiled showy, harmless but humiliating curses for whenever his roommates got too curious. The gang of Slytherins became extremely proficient at tossing off wicked little enchantments at their enemies.

Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff students tended to flee before them, but the Gryffindors were made of sterner stuff. Potter and Black masterminded the resistance, learning curses of their own until it was quite common for minor disturbances in lessons to explode into magical war zones.

Potions lessons were the worst, under Professor Fennel's lax eye, but Slytherins and Gryffindors also learned flying together - and the opportunities for magical sabotage in mid-flight were so much greater.

James Potter flew with a flair that had the older students muttering excitedly about Quidditch. Snape himself was extremely proficient, but few realised it since he never showed off. With Black, Potter, Snape and Malfoy in the air together, the students were ducking and dodging curses every time the teacher turned her back.

Snape seldom participated in the magical duels if he could help it, but the knowledge that most of the nastier curses were his discoveries had somehow leaked out. As the gulf between the houses widened, his seeming alliance with Malfoy grew ever more cemented.

Most of the Slytherins were poor company, but since Sev preferred solitude it hardly mattered. Malfoy was really the only one with much of a mind to speak of, but his conversation was flooded with vitriolic attacks on mudbloods and Muggle-lovers, which Sev found deadly boring. It wasn't so much the prejudice that frustrated him as the complete lack of imagination.

It was always "mudbloods this" and "mudbloods that". If any of them bested Malfoy in a test - as Lily frequently did - Sev had to endure hours of ranting about how they'd cheated, how Dumbledore weighted the tests so they scored better, how the teachers were all Muggle-lovers...

Snape's reasons for looking forward to Christmas, then, were not quite the same as everybody else's. The vast majority of the students would be going home to be with their families. Snape, owing to his orphan status, was the only first year Slytherin to remain. He'd politely declined an invitation to winter with the Malfoys - he couldn't imagine Lucius' parents having anything more interesting to say than their son. All that mindless bigotry had to have come from somewhere.

Not only would he be free of his fellow Slytherins, but his self-declared enemies would also be away for Christmas. Both Potter and Sirius had other plans, and the holiday season would be blissfully quiet. Snape intended to spend most of it shut up in the library.

That was the plan, anyway. However, he couldn't completely avoid the festivities, and with so few students remaining he could hardly skip out on Christmas dinner.

He was one of only three first years to remain. There was also a Hufflepuff girl who had older sisters who were also staying... and then there was Lily.

Lily and Lupin were, of the Gryffindors, the least antagonistic towards Snape. Both of them, he thought, had a touch of his personality in them, and understood him better than their fiery companions. They were, however, firm friends of James and Sirius, and lines of battle had to be drawn.

At Christmas, the lines were blurred. With so few students, they shared a table with the teachers and house divisions were forgotten. The Hufflepuff girl sat with her sisters, and for lack of a more familiar face, Lily sat with Snape.

Aside from polite chit-chat with the staff, they ate in silence. It was not necessarily awkward, though; silence was Sev's natural state.

It wasn't Lily's. Finally, as if coming to a decision, she seized one of the magical crackers and held it out to him. He regarded it with just the slightest hint of a smirk.

"What's that supposed to be?" he said, rolling his eyes.

Lily rolled hers right back, and prodded him with the end of the cracker. "Think of it as peace offering." He continued to regard her in faint amusement. "Oh, for God's sake, just pull the damn thing, will you?"

He took the end of the cracker and, as apathetically as possible, held onto it while she pulled. There was an explosion of sparks, and a hat with an enormous orange feather fell out. He blinked at it for a minute, then pushed it over towards her. "Yours, I suspect."

"Oh, you're no fun," she retorted. Before he could do anything, she snatched off his wizard's hat and dropped the offending thing on his head.

Snape reached up and removed it cautiously. "I don't think it's really my colour," he said dryly.

"Why not? It's better than green." Green was the colour of house Slytherin, and Snape had to admit the emerald green Quidditch robes his house team wore were really not his colour. But then, he'd never looked very good in anything other than black.

"Aren't you fraternising with the enemy?" he reminded her mildly.

Lily punched her palm in frustration. "Enemy? What enemy? Since when was this a war?"

"Slytherin and Gryffindor have always been at war. Fact of life," he reminded her. He'd read about the rivalry in all the histories; it stretched all the way back to the original Salazar Slytherin and Godric Gryffindor, two clashing personalities if ever there were.

"I've been watching you," Lily pronounced suddenly. "You're no Slytherin."

"No?" Sev was caught out by her sudden change of tone, but his face didn't show it. "Then you can't have been watching very closely."

"Oh, I know you're a Slytherin, but you're not really a Slytherin."

"Ah, well, that cleared it right up."

The corners of her mouth quirked, and to his surprise, his own threatened to do the same. It was surprisingly refreshing to talk to somebody whose sense of humour extended beyond sniggering when someone tripped over.

"I see you," Lily insisted. "You never join in. You're not the same as them. Why do you hang out with them?" she demanded.

Snape shrugged. "Why hang out with anybody? Because they're there."

"You don't have to," she pointed out.

"I don't care," he replied with another shrug.


On Boxing Day, he was sitting in the library, carrying out his original plan of reading the holiday away. Suddenly, something thwacked him across the back of the head. He looked up from his books to see it was Lily.

"You," she said without preamble, "are gonna do me a big favour."

"I am?" he asked dryly.

"You are."

"I just decided this of my own free will?"

"You did. Very generous of you, too."

"That doesn't sound like the me I know."

"You were possessed by the Christmas spirit."

He quirked an eyebrow at her. "I was clearly possessed by something."

She grinned infectiously. "Anyway, the point is, you're gonna do me this really big favour. You... are gonna help me out with my Potions tution."

"Now, why would I want to do that?" She pulled a face at him. "Christmas spirit notwithstanding," he added.

"Because you're the best," she said with a shrug.

He gave her a cool look. "You think flattery works on me?"

"I think honesty will," she said, her flashing green eyes daring him to argue.

Before he could start to do so, she grinned again and started to walk away. "Anyway, thanks a lot. Tomorrow, ten o'clock in lab four. I'll try not to be late."

"Thoughful of you," he called wryly after her.

"I'm cool like that," she agreed.