THE SUBSTITUTE, Chapter Four
**
She had no doubt that the students – particularly her Gryffindors – would love him. That thought, however, was small consolation at the moment.
Dripping wet, muddy from head to foot, and bleeding from a long scratch down one of his arms from where a merperson – understandably disgruntled at being accosted by this strange, curious human – had flung a rock at him, he had emerged happily from the lake fifteen minutes into the dinner hour and fallen into step beside the fuming Minerva.
"Blimey, but they're skittish," he reported, flashing that slightly-insane adventurer's grin. "Odd little screechers, eh? Took a piece out of me arm, they did. Came after me with big forks. Brilliant." He scratched his nose, transferring another blob of mud to his face in the process. "And that squid – what a beauty! Tame as soap, that one. Gorgeous."
Snape, who had been lurking just off the path, opened his mouth and then closed it again; apparently, even his considerable gifts for extemporaneous sarcasm weren't equal to the momentous opportunities of this occasion. Minerva, however – all-too-familiar with that malevolently gleeful I'm-about-to-be-terribly-witty-at-some-other-poor-sap's-expense look on his face – shot him a quelling look.
"Professor Irwin," she said, "allow me to introduce Professor Severus Snape, Head of Slytherin House and Hogwarts Potions Master." She narrowed her eyes at Snape. "Professor Snape, this is Professor Irwin – he'll be taking over Care of Magical Creatures for Hagrid."
"Call me Steve," Irwin said cheerfully, wringing Snape's hand. Snape extricated himself with alacrity and sneered meaningfully at the layer of pond ooze now clinging to his palm.
"Charmed."
Minerva rushed to run psychic interception – Irwin was about to take a mental Bludger to the brain and didn't even know it. "We're late for dinner," she said hastily, and put herself in between the two of them, managing to twitch the hem of her robes out of the path of more loose mud while simultaneously elbowing Snape sharply in the ribs. "I think a Cleaning Charm is in order, no? And you'll want some robes …"
"Robes?" Irwin glanced sideways at Snape's sweeping black cloak and raised a dubious eyebrow. "Sort of restrictive, aren't they? And not so practical, either. I'll stick to me own clothes, if you don't mind."
"As you wish," Minerva said tightly, trying not to wince at the thought of him walking bare-legged into the Great Hall, and raised her wand before they could ascend the steps to the front door of the castle. "Purgare!"
She would have added a Drying Charm, but Irwin was already in the door. With an admiring glance around the Entrance Hall, he crossed to the staircase, gently set down the python's carrying case, and began to unzip it. Minerva's eyes widened.
"Professor? We're expected in the Great Hall." Twenty minutes ago.
"Only be a tick," he said, reaching into the case. "Just let me get Bondo out – he's not such a happy fellow when he's cooped up too long." The snake's gleaming fire-hose midsection appeared, followed closely by its head and … a bit later … its tail. Minerva had the satisfaction of hearing Severus draw a sharp breath – whether it was admiring or wary, she couldn't be quite certain, but she preferred to imagine the latter.
"Your … familiar, I presume," he drawled, recovering himself. Irwin grinned at him.
"Had 'im since he was a little tyke – I guess he's about as familiar as a snake can be." He stroked Bondo's snout affectionately. "Ready for dinner, mate?"
Dinner?
Minerva's lips tightened.
Oh, no. Oh, no no no no NO.
Over her dead body was he walking into the Great Hall with that … thing … around his neck.
**
"Professor …" she started, but Irwin was already moving toward the sound of voices, behind the door to the Great Hall.
"This the way to the tucker, then?" His eyes were alight with expectation. "Can't say I'm sorry to see it coming – if I had it to do over again, those little chocolate blighters I met on the train wouldn't have gotten off so lightly. I'm hollow to the toes."
"Wait!" Minerva yelped, but it was too late – Severus, with a malevolent smirk, had already thrown open the door. Four double rows of students twisted curiously in their seats at its distinctive heavy scrape – their inevitable, near-Pavlovian response to a sound that usually heralded High Drama of one kind or another – and, at sight of him, kept staring, mouths open, food forgotten. A gasp went up, and immediately following it, a fast low surge of whispered conversation began to wind its way down the tables. The wizard-born students looked puzzled and a bit nervous – probably because of the snake; the Muggle-borns, Minerva noticed, simply looked stunned.
"I know that guy," she heard one of the Hufflepuffs whisper behind his hand. "He's on the telly every afternoon during the summer. My mum thinks he's funny – I say he's a raving lunatic. He picks up crocodiles with his bare hands." A momentary pause. "Christ, look at the bloody snake, will you? It's as tall as Ernie."
"Is he a wizard?" This, a bit doubtfully, from his dinner companion. "I didn't know he was a wizard."
"Dunno. Must be – why else'd he be here?"
"Who knows?"
"Who cares?"
This, from a shining-eyed Dennis Creevey at the Gryffindor table. Clearly, Minerva mused with a resigned sigh, Irwin had already won himself a convert – and not only in young Creevey, either; farther down the Lion's Table, Fred and George Weasley were in a state of High Alert, their carroty hair fairly standing on end with ill-suppressed excitement as they craned to get a better look at the newcomer.
Well, she thought philosophically, it was to be expected – and in the case of the Weasley twins, they'd been brilliant slackers in her class from the beginning; Steve Irwin's presence on the faculty wasn't likely to make much difference one way or the other, during their last few months at Hogwarts.
Her gaze travelled farther down her House table and came to light on three bent-together heads – red, black, chestnut –which housed perhaps the only six eyes in the room that weren't trained disbelievingly on the hairy headlights of Irwin's knees. Their plates were pushed back, and they were whispering together over what appeared to be a library book, oblivious to their surroundings.
Minerva frowned – those three plus a secret generally added up to trouble – then smiled; it was usually Snape who got to both discover and unravel the mess they made, inevitably ending up a bit worse the wear for his pains. Seating herself primly in her accustomed chair at the Head Table, she drew her napkin over her lap and – feeling unaccountably cheered – put on her most supercilious look of smirking hauteur. Some anticipatory sarcasm, she felt, was entirely called for under the circumstances.
It had, however, been a long day. She'd just eat her dinner and wait for the proper moment.
**
The week of classes began and progressed, and Minerva heard Steve Irwin's name invoked at least a dozen times a day, in varying degrees of awestruck disbelief and horrified admiration, from the students who passed through her room. Even the smear campaign being presently spearheaded by the Malfoy brat (that ... spawn, as Hetty Hooch preferred to call him after hours) wasn't having the anticipated effect -- nothing Draco could come up with was nearly as salubrious as the spectacle Irwin himself offered the student body during his classes.
One would think, Minerva thought sourly, that having taken classes with Hagrid would have inured Hogwarts students to mortal peril. The reports trickling in from the gamekeeper's paddocks, however, were anything but jaded: Professor Irwin had dug a Jarvey out of a hole and tried to talk to it, Professor Irwin had had his boot incinerated by a disgruntled Fire Crab, Professor Irwin had hung a snapping Doxy upside down by one leg between his thumb and forefinger and put his face this close to it (here, Gryffindor second-year Andromeda White turned bright pink with the excitement of the retelling and indicated a distance of about half an inch).
Minerva, hopefully assuming a certain amount of storyteller's hyperbole, forced herself not to intervene. It wasn't until a wide-eyed group of normally stoic Ravenclaw seventh-years came clamouring into her room ("He sat on it, Professor! He held it down and sat on it!") that her curiosity got the better of her.
"Sat on what, Mr. Acker?" she inquired, carefully modulating her tone so as not to display unseemly interest. Raymond Acker, his normally pale cheeks flushed with adrenaline, opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, and – apparently struck dumb by the magnitude of the feat's stupidity – resorted to some highly dramatic but disappointingly vague pantomime, seeming to indicate a creature of middle-largish size and a certain ferocity. Minerva, thinking she recognised allusions to stings and suckers amid the confusion of waving arms, raised an eyebrow. "A Skrewt?"
A babble of affirmation broke out – apparently, this educated guess had won her the vacation for two and the new toaster oven. What followed next was an impromptu play-by-play, by which Minerva gathered that the Skrewt had broken free and headed for the Forbidden Forest, and Irwin had gone gallumphing after it, tackling it by its stinger and bearing it bodily to the ground. At that point – judging from the reenactment she was being treated to presently, with Acker as Irwin and his burlier dormitory mate Francis Rivers as the Skrewt – the enraged creature had attempted to blast free, and the resulting series of explosions had sent both Irwin and the Skrewt rocketing around the paddock like a deranged polo player on a mutant pony.
"And?" she asked, biting the inside of her lip to maintain the situation-appropriate poker face. "What happened then? Where are they now?"
Mid-wrangle, Acker and Rivers stopped short and looked guiltily at each other. The small circle of onlookers dropped their eyes.
"Guess we forgot to tell you that part, Professor McGonagall," Rivers said, flushing. "The Skrewt broke through the paddock wall and went straight into the Forbidden Forest. Caught a couple of trees on fire as it went, too."
"And Professor Irwin?" Minerva demanded. The seventh-years shuffled their feet.
"Um. Well, you see," Acker said in a small voice, "he didn't exactly let go, did he?"
Merlin's poodle pajamas. This was the last thing she needed.
"Get the Headmaster, Acker," she snapped, her wand already in her hand. "Miss Adams" – this to one of the girls who stood gawking at the edge of the circle – "kindly alert Professor Snape to the situation, then go up to the infirmary and inform Madam Pomfrey that her services may be required shortly. The rest of you may prepare a six-inch summary of Chapter Seventeen, due to me by our next session. Class dismissed."
By the time she got to the door, she was running.
**