Harry was staring at his reflection again, an unhappy expression on his face. He wasn't usually one to primp himself up in the mornings, but today he couldn't stop trying to mess up his hair, just to feel more like himself. The stupid haircut was just too perfect to look natural, it didn't lie flat exactly, oh no, it was messyish, just in that clever way that obviously was contrived. He hated how well it looked on his head, he was so looking forward to giving Snape grief about messing him up, but now he wouldn't be able to.
He gritted his teeth, eyes blazing, still barely able to believe he had let himself be bullied into getting a haircut. He'd just been so desperate to escape the relentless nattering of a gaggle of female patrons at the hairdresser, all clamouring to advise him on hairstyles that he'd capitulated. Snape didn't even have to say anything, only smirking obnoxiously from the stool as his own hair was trimmed. Harry supposed he would have felt much better about the whole miserable incident if he'd been threatened with bodily harm, rather than just getting tired of all the cooing and mothering, and demanding a haircut just to get away from the women.
It was entirely Snape's fault all the same, why did he have to have his stupid trim with Harry tagging along? He swept his hair from one side to the other one last time, but it settled back perfectly into the spiky style that Master Pearson laboured to produce for well over an hour. The boy couldn't wrap his head around how the muggle had managed it so flawlessly with the glamour in force, but Snape explained that the enchantment only messed up with what people thought they saw on a conscious level, but his appearance wasn't in fact changed. When they returned next year, and there was no more threat of mass murderers lurking about, nobody would be overly surprised to see Harry rather than John. Not that he was reconciled with the idea of coming back next year, there had to be some way to get out of this ridiculous guardianship.
"Potter! Get downstairs, this instant!" the man's yell made him wince, and he shot one last frustrated look at his hair, before turning to go. The thing that he hated most about his new appearance, he was slow to realise, was that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't dislike it. He enjoyed the stupid hairdo, Merlin help him!
He ran down the narrow staircase, skipping every other step in his haste. Just how late was he now? Would he get an extension on his dish washing, or another grisly chore to teach him the value of punctuality? Harry skidded to a halt well out of reach of the glowering form of his teacher, raising a puzzled eyebrow, as if he had no clue what could have made him so mad in the morning.
"Are you trying to break your neck to make me look inept as a guardian?" the man demanded snidely, folding his arms and tapping the fingers of one hand on the opposite arm. "You should know that spinal cord regeneration is quite a bit more painful and lengthy than a simple bone regrowth you underwent last year," he narrowed his eyes. "Nor would it save your hide from the consequences of your reckless stupidity."
"I see," the boy said gravely, nodding in seeming unconcern, even as a shiver ran down his spine. "I will have to think of a better way then, thank you for the advice, Professor Snape."
The Potions Master snorted in derision, before turning back to the frying pan he'd been tending.
"Get the plates out, Potter, before I change my mind and wallop your sorry behind," he muttered.
Harry did, sniffing appreciatively at the air, and grinning like a lunatic. Snape was making a fry-up, so it probably meant that his culinary punishment was at an end. He toasted some bread for the both of them, his stomach growling angrily at the wait. He followed Snape and the pan to the table, his foot tapping an impatient rhythm on the floor as the man dumped half of the pan's content's on each plate. In his eagerness to satisfy his ravenous hunger, he quite forgot to lower himself into the chair gently, and his bum gave a twinge of protest, but it was so negligible that Harry barely noticed. That gave him pause, he'd been so sure it would hurt for days, or even weeks, but it really… didn't. He raised surprised eyes to Snape, only to notice the man giving him a disgusted look.
"What?" he demanded, swallowing his mouthful of eggs.
"Must you inhale your food like you hadn't seen any before?" the man grumbled distastefully.
Harry blushed in embarrassment.
"I just really like fry-up," he mumbled defensively. "That's not a crime."
Snape grunted, but mercifully abstained from further conversation, and they ate in blessed silence. The boy had to grudgingly admit that his teacher was a decent cook, and his meals were efficient and quickly put together, at least when he wasn't messing about with the most detestable ingredients on Earth just to make a point. Certainly, they were nothing as elaborate as some of his aunt Petunia's dinners, but as he was rarely allowed to eat any of them, Harry didn't care all that much. For now, he simply enjoyed the opportunity to fill his stomach with as much food as it could comfortably hold, without worrying about the man's strange generosity.
He was slowly winding down, when he saw Snape watching him with a very peculiar look on his face.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" he asked, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin self-consciously.
The man raised an expressive eyebrow.
"Was there a 'sir' at the end of that sentence?" he inquired smoothly. "I must have misheard."
Harry rolled his eyes at the bull-headedness of some people.
"Why are you looking at me like that, sir?" he corrected himself, just to get a straight answer for once.
Snape pursed his lips, apparently deep in thought.
"I suppose," he mused slowly. "I became so used to your copy-cat appearance that your distinctive individuality caught me by surprise."
The boy frowned, trying to figure out what exactly had been said.
"I don't look like my dad any longer, you mean?" he asked, suddenly feeling very forlorn, as if he'd been cheated out of his inheritance or something.
"No," Snape shook his head, looking pensive. "Your resemblance to your father is strong, but without his trademark mop, you are no longer the man's clone. Other features… previously obscured… are clearer now."
"Huh," Harry muttered, completely befuddled by the almost melancholy note in the man's quiet voice. "I'll wash the dishes now."
For some unfathomable reason, he felt as though he was running from the strange conversation as he scrambled to collect the empty plates.
"Before you start," Snape said in a more normal sounding voice, before the boy could start the water running. "Fetch me your summer assignments."
Harry turned around, his eyes narrowing in suspicion.
"Why?"
Snape heaved a long breath, his eyebrows forming a displeased V on his forehead.
"Because I requested it, Potter," he scolded sharply. "It would behove you to curb that defiant streak, or I'll do it for you. Now, do as you're told."
Huffing in indignation, Harry stalked out of the kitchen before the urge to punch the supercilious git in the mouth became irresistible. Every time he allowed himself to relax his guard around Snape, the bastard had to remind him what a horrible idea it was to make the man his guardian. He wanted to see his homework, did he? Fine! There wasn't much to it, not with the Dursleys on the anti-magic crusade.
Harry looked through his history book for the draft he'd made to his essay on witch-burning incidents at one time or another, he blew out a breath as he found the creased parchment tucked between the pages. He read through it quickly, biting his bottom lip worriedly. The Dursleys never gave a damn about his schoolwork, so his average marks didn't matter to him that much. He passed his exams, and that was enough, he wasn't like Hermione, someone who needed to be perfect to be satisfied. He never cared about things like that, but what if Snape did? He was a Professor after all, and he'd never been impressed with Harry's homework before.
He dragged his feet returning to the kitchen, clutching his solitary piece of half-finished homework and dreading the man's reaction to it. Snape was waiting, his dark expression stating clearly he had not enjoyed the delay. Cringing, Harry dropped the essay on the table, escaping to the dishes as soon as he could get away with it, but his skin crawled with his back to the man.
"One essay," his teacher spoke after a few minutes of silence, broken only by the sounds of splashing water and furious scrubbing. "Is that all you have to show for yourself after seven weeks of holiday?"
Harry tensed, lifting one shoulder in a shrug, but not looking up from the frying pan he was washing.
"There wasn't much time to get my homework done yet," he mumbled, because what else was he supposed to say? He wasn't going to admit to Snape of all people that his school books were routinely locked away during the summer, and that he rarely had an opportunity to steal one back for a few hours of cramming at night.
"What a busy life you must lead, Potter," the man said in a thoroughly disgruntled voice. "Have you finished with the dishes yet?"
Harry looked at the empty sink with trepidation.
"Yes, sir," he muttered.
"Then, come here," Snape ordered, his voice brooking no argument.
Here we go, the boy thought gloomily, his shoulders slumping dispiritedly as he walked back to the table. An errand hand twitched anxiously towards his rear, but he was able to curtail the movement halfway there, biting his bottom lip at the sudden nervousness in his stomach, making him feel queasy. Snape was watching him closely, black eyes catching the aborted movement, but he didn't say anything about it.
"This piece of homework," he began sternly, when Harry slid into the chair across from him, and reluctantly met his eyes. "Is very poorly researched and sloppily put together, Potter."
"It's not that bad," the boy mumbled, averting his eyes to the side. "It's just history."
"I see," the man said in the most god-awful pseudo-reasonable voice imaginable, picking up the draft and giving it another look. "You postulate here that the witch persecution posed no real threat other than to the muggles themselves, do you not?"
Harry gave a careful nod, bracing himself for the criticisms and insults to his mental capabilities that were sure to follow.
"What actual proof do you have to support that claim?" his teacher demanded. "Do you have the statistics of uninjured versus dead? How many of them were magical, and how many were muggle casualties?"
The boy gaped open-mouthed at the barrage of questions he had no clue how to go about answering.
"The b-book," he stammered hesitantly. "It said they were able to escape, the witches and wizards, they pretended to burn, and then they would apparate away."
"Is that so?" Snape pressed snidely, black eyes glittering with ire. "How many cases like that have you come across in your research, Potter?"
"Wendelyn the Weird-," Harry tried to explain, but was interrupted again.
"She is one, very anecdotal example in support of your thesis," the man said remorselessly. "Do you know of any others?"
He opened his mouth to retort, but there wasn't anything he could think of saying, other than 'What's it to you?', and he wasn't reckless enough to invite retaliation like that. Feeling like an idiot, Harry dropped his eyes and shook his head.
"One case, no matter how interesting or colourful," Snape lectured in his best 'you're such a dunderhead that I should chop you up for potions ingredients and save humanity the embarrassment' voice, reminding the boy vividly how much he despised lessons with the stuck-up git. "Cannot be the basis to form general conclusions about a malpractice that spun across several decades and involved some two thousand people in the British Isles alone."
"Right," Harry muttered dully, wishing Hermione was there to summarise to him the Potions Master's lecture, as he'd stopped listening a few words in. "So, what now?"
Snape snorted derisively, his nostrils flaring with irritation until the boy could see the hairs growing up his impossibly large nasal cavity.
"Now, Potter," he practically snarled. "You're going to do proper research, cross-referencing several sources, and draw conclusions based on actual evidence you gathered, rather than making up facts to suit you!"
Harry looked at the man in something akin to horror, before reality kicked back in and he scowled. It was just like Snape to demand something impossible, and then make him feel stupid when he couldn't meet his expectations.
"I'm not writing a dissertation for a Mastery, Professor," he complained, rolling his eyes at the absurdity of it all. "It's just a history essay, half my year will hand in similar ones!"
Snape pinched the bridge of his nose between the thumb and forefinger, obviously at the end of some rope, and he wondered if it was wicked of him to enjoy frustrating the man so thoroughly.
"I understand that you are satisfied with your mediocrity," he growled, his eyes flashing. "As long as it is shared by the mindless masses, is that it?"
"Yeah, pretty much," Harry said insolently, grinning openly now.
"Hilarious," Snape scoffed, his glare intensifying. "How fortunate for your future career prospects that this cavalier attitude towards your education will no longer be tolerated, boy."
Harry was getting really annoyed, despite his determination to be the annoying one. Couldn't the man just leave him be?
"I don't need all O's to get a job," he retorted, folding his arms. "Otherwise everyone 'cept Hermione would be on the dole!"
"The magical world doesn't give benefits to incompetent layabouts, Potter," his teacher snorted, his voice dripping with scorn and disgust. "If you're so determined to indulge in your mediocrity, by all means, live off your grandfather's millions, your dear sire probably didn't have enough time to burn through it all. You will, however, do so with your feet firmly on the ground."
The finality of that last sentence made him flinch, when he should be boiling with rage at the slight to his father. With narrowed eyes, Harry watched the man stand up from the table, apparently giving up on the conversation, except… That was Snape, and he never knew the man to miss the opportunity to humiliate and make life more difficult for him. Something was off here.
"Wait," he called before the man could leave the kitchen. "What's that supposed to mean?!"
Snape turned, giving the boy a cold appraisal, arms crossed.
"Are you talking to me, Potter?"
Harry gritted his teeth, jumping to his feet, balling his hands into fists and stalking closer to face the greasy git head on.
"What do you mean about the ground?" he practically shouted. "Sir!"
A lazy eyebrow twitched upwards ever so slightly, making the man look utterly unimpressed.
"Aren't you cranky this morning, maybe you should take a nap, Potter," he drawled. "I need to inform Professor McGonagall that I withhold my consent for your participation in extracurricular activities. Excuse me."
And then, he left the boy quivering with indignation as his mind listed all the clubs and activities offered at Hogwarts. Somehow, quidditch was such a large part of his Hogwarts experience that he never considered it was something Snape could take away, until it became sort of obvious. He chased the man into the living room, catching him on one knee in front of the hearth, with the fire already burning and the box of floo powder in one hand.
"Stop!" he ordered breathlessly. "You can't ban me from quidditch!"
Snape looked up, a ferocious frown and a glare firmly set on his face.
"Why wouldn't I?" he demanded sharply. "An insolent brat who barely manages to pass his classes hardly seems deserving of a reward."
Harry opened his mouth to argue, the man was blowing the situation out of proportion, he wasn't even close to failing any of his classes, not even Potions. The bastard was using the excuse to blast Gryffindor's chances of winning the Quidditch Cup this year out of the window!
"I'm not such a bad student, Professor," he insisted desperately, Oliver was going to skin him alive if he couldn't fix this. "I'll do proper research, like you wanted. Please, I was just winding you up."
The man snorted at the awkward apology, but he did get up, shaking some dust off his trousers with one hand. He returned the floo powder to the mantle, extinguishing the flames with a click of his fingers, and the boy could scarcely believe it had been so easy.
"You are capable of learning, very well, Potter," Snape declared airily, walking to sit on the couch, putting one leg over the other and fixing his ward with a piercing stare. "Are you ready to hear my terms now?"
The boy gave a jerky nod, his insides squirming in discomfort at the nasty gleam in his teacher's eyes.
"You will only be allowed back on the quidditch team, if you score at least E's on your summer essays," the man intoned sternly. "And if you drop below that threshold on any of your half-term competency tests, you will be benched for the six weeks until the next batch. Do you follow me this far, Potter?"
Harry understood all right, and he didn't like the sound of those conditions at all. They may seem possible at the surface, but he knew better. No matter how hard he tried to improve his marks, Snape would never give him an E, he hadn't yet. Not once.
"You're going to fail me anyway, just for spite," he accused, realising that this was his only objection. It would be incredibly hard, but with Hermione helping, Harry knew he could manage the other subjects, but Potions was impossible.
The man's eyebrows shot up.
"Would I really do that?" he asked, his voice so blatantly falsely innocent that the boy almost choked on his incredulity.
"Yes!" he shouted, throwing his arms in the air in frustration. "Why do you even care about my marks all of a sudden?!"
Snape's face twisted angrily at the question, his eyes narrowing into furious slits.
"I care for the same reason I care that you have clothes on your back, and food in your belly, you ungrateful little brat," he snapped, running angry eyes over the boy's Gryffindor red shirt pointedly. "Anything else would be neglecting my duties as your guardian. Take the deal or leave it, Potter, but be aware that my next strategy will be of the stick rather than the carrot variety."
So, in other words, Harry would get better marks and a chance to fly, flimsy as it was, or he would get another thrashing. At least that was his understanding of the options offered to him by the man, which basically came to doing as he was told and not being an embarrassment and an annoyance. The gist of it was so similar to what the Dursleys always told him that he felt sickened.
"I'll take the quidditch deal, sir," he muttered despondently, glaring at his new trainers as if they were somehow responsible for the situation.
"Good choice, Mr. Potter," Snape said snidely, his cold eyes gleaming with cynical light. "It would be a pity to crush Gryffindor unopposed, wouldn't it?"
That comment brought Harry's head up, and his glare to the man's smirking face.
"We're going to win the Quidditch Cup this year!" he declared recklessly, probably shooting any chance of a required grade to hell, and he promised himself he wouldn't rest until he found a decent reserve in case he was screwed.
"And with that happy delusion," Snape drawled, seating himself more comfortably on the couch. "We may move on to the spanking you're due. Come, Potter, over my knee."
"What?!" the boy exclaimed, taking a few resolute steps in the opposite direction. "I haven't even done anything!"
His guardian rolled his eyes, not seeming particularly pissed off or anything, just kind of impatient to get on with things.
"Have you already forgotten that pesky little fact of shouting at me?" Snape inquired dryly. "I believe I made clear to you what would happen if you spoke to me this way again, did I not?"
Crap, the boy thought morosely, able to vividly remember the man's threats delivered to him the first night. He stared at Snape's lap in dismayed horror, he couldn't possibly…
"Couldn't we go to your study instead, sir?" Harry asked faintly, his face so hot with mortification that it was likely to melt off.
"I think not," Snape refused, eyes flashing with ire. "Don't make me ask you again, Potter."
Some twenty minutes later, Harry was shut in his room and trying to nurse his bruised dignity, whatever was left of it after the humiliation downstairs. He was curled on the lumpy bed, rubbing his smarting backside, and ruminating on the world gone mad, in which it was acceptable to be made to bend over Severus Snape's bony knees like a naughty four-year-old, and endure the worst punishment of his entire life. The boy had been sure that nothing could be worse than the thrashing he'd suffered through the day before, but the almost parental way his teacher went about administering the smacking was easily worse.
It made him cringe to associate the man with a parental role of any kind, but that was exactly what the childish chastisement made him think of. It was disturbing, and Harry was certain he would never raise his voice to Snape again, if the sheer embarrassment was the price to pay for the brief satisfaction. The only saving grace in the whole awful ordeal was that his trousers stayed up, and that the man didn't acknowledge his extreme mortification, going right to the matter of homework after his five minutes of 'seat warming' was over [that was Snape's ridiculous term].
Harry gave the three books on his desk a disgruntled glare, not in the mood to be appreciative of Snape's unheard of helpfulness. What was he supposed to think when the man walloped his arse one moment, only to go plucking books off his vast shelves to aid in his history research? It was just too ridiculous to be real, maybe he was brain-damaged from the basilisk's bite and was hallucinating it all!
He let himself sulk for another ten minutes, before dragging himself up to look at the books. Much as he didn't feel like studying right now, he had the responsibility to his quidditch teammates, and he owed them more than to screw them up without even trying to meet Snape's conditions first. The boy eyed the desk chair doubtfully, his bum wasn't all that sore anymore, but he didn't relish sitting at a desk for hours, wading through the man's boring tommes. With a put upon sigh, Harry carried the books and his writing supplies to the bed and made himself a nest of sorts among the pillows. Now, he was ready to study history!
Snape's books were depressingly massive volumes, and he dithered about which he should tackle first, and he ended up choosing one at random. The Darker Ages seemed like it would contain the information from the time frame he needed, but the miniscule writing and the archaic language were immediately discouraging. He scanned the table of contents, realising that it wasn't a general history book, but a wizarding genealogy, spanning from the 4th to the 14th century. The chapter titles actually were family names, his curiosity was peaked when he recognised some names of his classmates and teachers from Hogwarts.
He eagerly dove into the mediaeval intrigues of his classmates' ancestors, but he didn't find what he was looking for until he reluctantly checked out the entry for the Malfoys. Draconis Malfoy [1325-1384] had been madly in love with one Euphemia Prince [1356-1471], unfortunately for him, the feeling was completely unrequited and she spurned his attentions publically and with a large dose of scorn. As a revenge, Draconis reported Euphemia to the muggle clergy, claiming she had bewitched him with love potions. She was arrested during an engagement banquet to another man. Long story cut short, she was rescued from her execution by a Portkey smuggled to her by her fiance, and proceeded to poison her accuser the next day.
Harry found two other similar sordid stories; in one, a wizard, indebted to another, got his benefactor accused of witchcraft and devilish connections to avoid paying his debts. In another, one witch accused another in order to win over a man whose affections they were competing for. None of the 'executions' did any harm to the witch or wizard concerned, which gave credence to his original conclusions. It was like a game to them, using muggle superstition as a way to inconvenience their social or political opponents, not giving a care to the muggle victims that were dying in droves.
He frowned, wondering if all the muggle persecution was like that, a manipulation by powerful wizards using the muggles' fear of the unknown in their power struggles. He took copious notes on the incidents, all the while getting angrier at the callousness of wizards long ago [and somehow more invested in understanding their motivations].
The boy pulled open the second book Snape gave him, it had the morbid title Magical Blood Spilled. It only took a few pages to figure out that this book was more like what he thought this assignment would require, it was about the persecution that magic users faced from the muggles.
There was a story of Greta Green, who lived her whole life in a tiny hamlet near Brixton, she sold herbs and herbal teas, as her mother had before her, and her miraculous remedies were well-known and appreciated. One year, however, there was an outbreak of smallpox in the area, and her remedies no longer worked as expected. Her godly neighbours captured Greta and stoned her in the village square, for conspiring with the devil against them. There was no miraculous rescue for Greta Green. She was killed, even though she was a witch.
The book was full of such horror stories, citing the shocking number of 78 magic users killed in the British Isles in the muggle witch hunts. Harry couldn't conceive of it, there were no amusing stories about Flame-Freezing charms in this book, those people really died in horrific ways, and their magic hadn't saved them.
Harry knew he was missing some important clues or connections that would explain the different outcomes described in the two books, but he couldn't put a finger on it at first. He decided to structure his essay around comparing the two, and work out the reasons for the differences as he went. It would be more interesting than simply stating the facts, and besides he really wanted to know why one group of people got massacred while the other played cat and mouse with the muggles.
He didn't hit on the answer until he skimmed through the third and most gruelling of Snape's books, it was a treatise on the legislation passed by the Wizengamot in the thirteenth century and it was so boring it almost put the boy to sleep. Through sheer stubbornness, he was able to gather that the educational reform of 1247 was largely to blame, it basically stopped Hogwarts from reaching out to muggle-borns, and increasing the tuition for attendance to such exorbitant levels that only the wealthiest and most influential wizarding households could afford to send their offspring to have formal magical education. It only lasted 65 years before the laws were repealed, but it was long enough to create several generations of poorly-educated, hardly aware magic users who had no means to defend themselves against the muggle persecution. Pure blood politics, why wasn't he surprised?
Harry ended up studying for hours, with only a brief break for lunch, which he attended without saying a single word to Snape, still too embarrassed after his unfortunate jaunt over the man's knee a few hours earlier. He escaped upstairs as soon as the dishes were washed, for once glad to have a legitimate excuse to be elsewhere. He wrote, pouring all the frustration he was feeling into a furious denouncement of a long ago wizarding elite, drawing parallels between every horrendous death case and their callous disregard for common decency in their law-making practices.
By the time he was writing the last sentence of his essay, Harry's head was pounding from all the squinting he'd done reading the tiny script, and his hand had the king of all cramps, but he couldn't be more satisfied with the day's toil. He was a bit sick of spending all day in his room, so he dumped his study materials on the desk, snatched his O-worthy essay off the top and ventured out.
His stomach bubbled anxiously at the prospect of facing the man again, but he ignored it. He wouldn't be intimidated into hiding away in his room like a little kid scared of a parent's smacking. No, he was quite looking forward to thrusting his perfect assignment into Snape's supercilious face. His guardian was in the kitchen cooking, not surprising as it was almost dinnertime, and grunted unenthusiastically when the boy walked in.
Harry ignored him, slapping the sheets of parchment on the empty table.
"There," he announced smugly. "My history essay."
Snape's eyebrows rose ever so slightly, indicating his surprise, and he moved to the sink to wash his hands.
"Alright, let's see it," he murmured, abandoning the countertop in favour of the table. "Slice the vegetables, Potter."
Harry made a face, not particularly enthused about being assigned another chore, but as he did want to see the man's jaw crashing to the floor at his brilliance, he didn't argue. He went to look in the pots, it seemed like Snape was making some sort of stew. He scrubbed his hands clean of the ink stains, and started cutting the carrots, cellars and onions laying on the counter, snorting in amusement at the identically shaped chunks already displayed on the cutting board.
"Well, well," Snape mused snarkily. "If I'd known a smarting behind and a threat to your quidditch aspirations would have such a salutary effect on your written work, I would have taken you in hand long ago, boy."
Harry spun about with a glare and a brandished knife, intent on demanding how the greasy git wanted to do that if Sirius Black only just escaped this summer, but the sight of the man filling his essay with red-inked commentary derailed him completely.
"What the fuck are you doing to it?!" he shouted, besides himself with outrage at the thought of writing it all out again.
His outburst brought Snape's head up, his malevolent glower monumental.
"You're shouting at me, Potter?" he asked incredulously. "And cursing?"
The boy blanched, his brief flare of anger gone with the wind, and replaced by a sinking dread. He shook his head so hard that his neck cricked painfully.
"No, I just,-" he denied, licking his lips nervously as he racked his brains for a way to explain his momentary insanity. "Spoke a bit forcefully, sir. I'm sorry."
If he hoped his hastily concocted explanation would appease the man, his murderous expression stated clearly that the effort was an unmitigated failure.
"I suggest," Snape snapped venomously. "That you refrain from expressing yourself quite so forcefully in the future, Potter, or I might confuse it with the defiance it resembles, and give you the hiding of your young life. Am I understood?"
Harry swallowed thickly, and nodded.
"Yes, sir," he breathed almost meekly.
The man started gathering the sheets into a neat pile, and rolling them into a scroll, apparently finished correcting it.
"This is better," he said sourly, coming over and holding the scroll out to the boy. "Not good enough to secure your quidditch spot, however. Now, get out of my sight before my patience deserts me completely."
Harry took the scroll and turned to go, only too eager to depart the scene. He was caught completely off guard when Snape's hand landed on his rear in a slap so enormous that he should be excused for the whimper and flinch he couldn't suppress.
"And if I hear such filthy language from you one more time, boy," the man hissed in his ear. "I'll wash out your mouth with a mixture so foul that your taste buds may never recover."
After that nasty altercation, he really shouldn't be blamed for fleeing to the furthest corner of the property, and hunkering there, with his back pressed against the wards. Harry was shaking with anger, fear and humiliation in equal measure, and the assault of different feelings was quite exhausting. God, he hated being here, Snape had a unique ability to put his back up with a single breath, and the boy hadn't figured out an effective defence against it yet. He rubbed his bottom, letting out a forlorn breath, it was lucky he'd gotten away only with that and a threat after cursing at the bastard. He must be developing suicidal tendencies, to explode like that. Why couldn't he have been put with some nice family instead of that nasty, cruel, hateful git? Wasn't foster care supposed to give the child a stable, safe home environment, or something? Ha!
It took some time before the adrenaline stopped coursing through his veins, and his breathing to settle, and with a grimace of foreboding he unrolled the scroll. Predictably, the margins were filled with blood-red insulting commentary in Snape's spidery hand. The sight was so reminiscent of his Potions class that Harry's eyes glided over them without taking anything in, skipping to the bottom of the last page to see his mark.
Acceptable
Harry groaned, of course it was, nothing ever came easily to him, did it? Now, he'd have to go back and wade through the man's mean-spirited remarks to figure out what the bastard wanted him to improve upon. He could skip it, he supposed, hoping that Professor Binns would give it an E after all. Nobody else marked as harshly as Snape did, but dare he risk it? No, obviously he couldn't take the chance the git would announce Harry didn't meet his arbitrary E-standards, and ban him from playing. Damnit!
Before he hyped himself up to reading the art of insult regurgitation his teacher excelled at, Harry caught sight of the last little comment tucked at the very bottom of the page.
If this were an assignment for my class, I wouldn't give it more than Poor. You cannot expect better marks from me, if you insist on forcing me to endure that appalling chicken scratch.
Harry squinted at the comment in late afternoon sunlight, could this really be the cause of his consistently poor marks in Potions class? He remembered feeling bitterly disappointed, even betrayed on the few occasions Snape had given him an Acceptable on an essay, when even Hermione assured him he deserved better. He'd been convinced that the man marked him unfairly out of spite, but if he marked him down every time for his poor penmanship… he supposed there had been similar criticisms on his essays before, he just never paid attention to them.
Suddenly, the boy felt cheered, contemplating himself as a recipient of consistent A's and a rare E in Potions; it somehow made the man's quidditch requirements less impossible. With a bracing breath, Harry went back to the beginning of the essay to read Snape's feedback for meaning. Huh, it seemed his main objections were the length [Have you forgotten how to count, Potter? Twelve inches, and twenty are not mutually interchangeable], and muddling his opinions with the facts in the main body of the essay [Are you running for the Minister of Magic soon? The deceased cannot vote in governmental elections]. Actually, it wasn't as bad as he had been expecting, and he could easily cut a few of the more outraged sentences to bring the length down to the required twelve inches.
Harry was humming contentedly when Snape called him in for dinner, giving him a suspicious glare that the boy promptly ignored. Maybe that was the secret to surviving this summer in one piece, he just needed not to react to the man's overwhelming gitness. His determination to remain calm even in the face of injustice was sorely tried the next morning, however, when Snape dumped a pile of children's calligraphy exercises on the table in front of him, announcing that Harry was to spend two hours on improving his atrocious penmanship. Every fucking day!