NOTES: I had the title (lifted from the children's book by Judith Viorst). My sister, the Mad Wanton Overlord, had the plot, and my other sister Tsa the Incomparable, helped me write this. Just for fun. Even my mom liked it.
***
Harry let his head fall to the desk with a resounding thud. Detention. Again. With Snape. He groaned at the sheer misery of it all.
Without even bothering to turn from the potion he was brewing, Snape said, "Five points from Gryffindor, Mr. Potter, for unnecessary dramatics." Harry seethed ill will in the general direction of his professor. "Silent assassinations of my character will only cost you further points," Snape threatened smoothly. As Harry considered sticking his tongue out at the man's back, Snape added in a hard voice, "As will infantile face-making."
Harry gritted his teeth, and vowed, some way, some day, to discover how Snape always knew what he was up to. He hunkered down in his desk and returned to recopying his potions notes. It was hopeless. Even if he could decipher his own handwriting, he still wouldn't understand what the notes said.
He sighed quietly, but with great feeling. It was all Ron's fault he had detention anyway. The only upside was that Ron had detention too- with Filch. Harry hoped they were de-cobwebbing a basement. A large, damp one. With glowing mold. He pondered this idly for a moment, doodling a stick figure with freckles being savaged by a mutant arachnid.
A small movement caught his attention; the door to Snape's private quarters was inching its way open. Harry's jaw dropped to the floor. Something was escaping! What was it? An enslaved house-elf? A Gryffindor-devouring hibiscus? An enchanted tea set that waltzed as it poured Earl Grey? He leaned over the desk as far as he could, craning his neck to see.
A small pink nose appeared, followed by stiff whiskers and golden eyes. A cat! Harry gaped in delighted amazement. Snape had a cat!
The animal sauntered through the doorway with tremendous aplomb. It was in obvious good health, so at least Snape wasn't testing potions on it or anything disturbingly Slytherin like that. It headed towards Harry's desk in search of attention, and jumped to the top gracefully. The thing was huge; longhaired and plume-tailed. And black, of course. Harry snickered. He couldn't see Snape with a pet that would shed contrasting hairs onto his immaculate black robes.
The cat bumped its head into Harry's hand, demanding a scratch behind the ears.
Harry obliged, cooing under his breath as he did so. "Such a handsome lad, you are. What's your name, then? Dread? Famine? Lester?" The cat's purr rumbled to life, like the engine of the Weasley's decrepit Anglia.
Harry heard the ominous clang of a spoon colliding with the side of a cauldron. Snape whirled around, eyes narrowing.
"What do you think you are doing, Potter?"
"Nothing, sir!" He protested. "Your cat just jumped up here, and I was petting him." The cat batted his hand with a paw. With a smile, Harry resumed his attentions. "I think he likes me."
Snape swept over and grabbed the cat from the desk. "Nonsense. No cat of mine would ever like a Gryffindor." He tucked the cat under his arm like a Keeper with a quaffle, and stomped off in the direction from which the cat had come. The cat looked peeved, and squirmed in his grasp.
Harry leapt up after him. Was Snape talking to the cat? It sure sounded like it-although Harry's ears perked at something that sounded alarmingly like a curse. Snape halted, and Harry took the opportunity to pet the soft fur again.
"I like cats. I always wanted one, but Aunt Petunia…" He cut himself off. "What's his name?" he asked instead.
The request was met with silence. Harry looked up, to see Snape staring down at
him, his face as hard as ever. Harry dropped his eyes, and pulled back his hand.
"His name is Solzhenitsyn." Snape said finally. "But he is a rogue, and answers best to Damn It."
Harry smiled brilliantly as the cat curled up comfortably in Snape's arms and began to purr.
Snape glared at the cat. "Traitor." He aimed the glare at Harry. "Back to work, Potter. Show and tell is over."
Trying to keep from sulking, Harry let Snape continue on past him. Instead of returning to his seat, however, he lingered within sight of the door, hoping to catch a glimpse of what was behind it. He tried to picture Snape's personal quarters. The very idea of so much personal space was fantastic. Sometimes sharing a room with three other teenage boys made him think fondly of life under the stairs.
The door abruptly slammed in his face. His hair flew back off his face in the resulting gust.
Curses. Foiled again. Reluctant to return to his homework, Harry stood in front of the door, waiting to see if anything else interesting would come sneaking around it.
When nothing was forthcoming, Harry pressed his ear to the door. He was dying to know what Snape was doing in there. He tried to picture the flagstone floor littered with fluffy mice and balls of yarn, but couldn't quite make it work. Did the cat sleep on the bed with Snape? Or did it have its own little green and sliver Slytherin kitty-bed?
All of a sudden, the door burst open; faster than it had slammed shut. Wide eyed with panic, Harry was frozen to the spot. Snape towered over him. His normally smooth hair was slightly disarrayed, and he had a bloody scratch across one hand. He almost fell over Harry's stiff form as he tried to sweep through the doorway.
"Damn it! Curiosity killed the Gryffindor, Potter." Snape growled at him.
"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."
Properly summoned, the cat appeared in the doorway as well, waving its tail in greeting at Harry.
Snape sighed, and curled his lip in distaste. "Well, don't just stand there like some sort of cheap red and gold doorstop, get in here."
He was too busy trying to get the cat to come within ear-rubbing range. "Huh?"
This was obviously the wrong thing to say, Harry thought, as he watched blood rise in Snape's sallow face.
"I suppose I could ask if the cat got your tongue, but I won't. Consider this an addendum to your detention and GET IN HERE!"
Harry scampered past Snape in the nick of time as the door slammed shut once more.
Looking around Snape's quarters, he was slightly unimpressed. It was just a living room; not as ugly as Aunt Petunia's, but not as homey as the Weasley's either. It was rather sparsely furnished, and (disappointingly) there was very little green and silver.
What there was a great deal of however, were animals. It was a veritable zoo. Several large fluffy objects he at first took to be footstools hopped towards the door, and he realized they were rabbits. Harry's eyes were about to pop out of his head when Snape rudely jostled him.
"Pay attention, boy. The environmental wards collapsed, releasing the animals. I have reset everything, but now the whole menagerie is loose in my apartments. You WILL help me retrieve them all. FURTHERMORE you will not say a word about this. EVER." He added, with less than his usual venom, "Or else."
Being Gryffindor, and therefore incapable of mentally processing threats against his life, Harry discounted these last words. Besides, anyone who kept longhaired angora bunnies as pets couldn't be too vindictive. He was slowly absorbing this new side of Snape, and barely registered anything besides the fact that he got to play with all the animals. "OK," he said amiably. "Who first?"
Snape stared suspiciously at him for some moments before muttering, "Just start grabbing. When you catch someone, tell me, and I will direct you."
With a whoop, Harry dove after a tail poking from under the couch. He came up with a good-sized turtle. "Wow," he enthused, "a turtle! Where does this one go?"
"Is it the Red-Ear or the India Star?" Snape asked from across the room.
Harry peered closely at the turtle, which promptly tucked everything into its shell. "Um."
"Smooth or bumpy shell, you dunderhead."
Harry scowled. Like he knew the technical names of the entire turtle family. "Smooth."
"Red-Ear. Third environment on the first shelf."
Environment? Why couldn't he just say cage like everyone else? Under Snape's watchful eye, he deposited the snitch-sized turtle into the cage. After a minute, the tip of its nose peeked out. "What's his name?"
"Must you know the name of every animal? What does it matter?"
Harry eyed Snape, trying to coax a recalcitrant ferret out of the woodpile. The Potions Master still sounded put out, but lacked his usual edge. He figured he could push his luck. "Well, it's only polite. Hagrid introduces me to all of his pets." Harry grabbed a more ambitious turtle ambling past him.
"Fine. Heaven forbid I am forced to compete with the redoubtable Rubeus." Snape muttered. Having conquered the ferret, he stood to return the fuzzy thing to its "environment". "The Red-Ear is Hortense, the Star is Mata Hari, and this wretched flea-bag is Duncan." Snape tickled the ferret under its chin, his gesture at odds with his words.
Harry, having witnessed Aunt Petunia's inexplicable attachment to a truly hideous Jack Russell terrier, rolled his eyes. It was always the snarky ones that fell the hardest.
He deposited Mata Hari into her cage, and returned to the couch, to see what else lurked underneath it. He came up with a fistful of spiny fur. "Aw, a hedgehog."
"Rufus. Large environment with the cedar chips."
Harry considered the hedgehog, as well as the second of approximately three hundred ferrets Snape was trying to catch. There was something odd about them all, and it wasn't just their owner.
"Hey, these are all Muggle pets! How did you get them? Why doesn't Hagrid take them?"
On his hands and knees with a ferret treat, Snape could only manage half a glare from behind his curtain of hair. "Not only would Hagrid's monster's eat them, Mr. Potter, he doesn't have the slightest idea how to care for a creature that doesn't breathe fire or belch sulfurous fumes."
Well, that made sense, and for Snape, that was a fairly civil answer. But Snape? With pets? He scooped up a Lop ("Chelsea"), then an Angora ("Doreen") while he considered this. After a second, he realized Snape had only answered part of his questions.
"But how did you get them?" He persisted, noting the vast amounts of hair his robes had accumulated over the past hour. Snape's must be charmed to stay hair-free.
Thankfully, Snape was encumbered by an armful of happily wriggling ferrets, and couldn't follow through with the I-would-dearly-love-to-strangle-you look he was aiming at Harry. "Maybe I hexed annoying students into creatures that couldn't pester me with useless questions, Mr. Potter."
Harry hid a smile in a chinchilla's ("Tosca, Mr. Potter. That is every pet I have. Happy now?") pelt. Funny, how all of a sudden Snape's bark was worse than his bite. The canine reference made him smile even broader. It didn't take a Ravenclaw to know why Snape had no dogs.
Snape caught him smiling, and scowled down at him, hands on his hips. "This concludes your detention, Mr. Potter. You are dismissed."
The smile fell off Harry's face. He was surprised to find he had actually enjoyed his time with Snape. Slightly crestfallen, nodded, and turned to go.
"Perhaps the next time you receive detention, Mr. Potter, as you most assuredly will, you may clean out the environments as punishment." Snape said in a not quite so nasty voice.
Harry brightened as he turned around, and smiled in the face of Snape's dark look. Cleaning cages wasn't Quidditch, but it would mean he got to see the animals.
"Okay! Uh, I mean, oh no!"
Snape's lips twitched. "Good night, Mr. Potter." He shut the door to his personal quarters, and Harry dashed through the classroom into the hallway, and ran all the way home.