Chapter Two: Odd Stuff Happens

"Dare I even inquire what is so funny, Miss Granger?" Snape asked coldly, opening the door of his classroom for her. Poor Hermione was still stifling giggles as she entered.

"I- I'm sorry, Professor."

"As disruptive and annoying as laughter is, I believe my question warrented an answer and not an apology."

"I- well, you see, -er,"

"Now, Miss Granger." Snape moved swiftly, batlike, to behind his desk, leaving her near the door. She answered.

"The Gryffindors sort of played a joke on me."

"Oh, really?" Snape inquired sarcastically. "Just astonishing to see a know-it-all like you laughing at that kind of-"

"What sort of potion did you have in mind to start, Professor?" Hermione interrupted crisply. Severus snarled.

"Two points from Gryffindor for interrupting. I believe you were expected to have prepared an interest list outline before arriving. If you have not come prepared, I can only-"

"Done it."

Hermione honestly didn't mean to come off as bitchily as she was. Going from enjoyable laughter to her professor's accursed snarkiness was having a nasty effect on her, and she tossed the thick, tightly wound roll of parchment at him, just a little harder than Fred and George usually sent Bludgers. It hit him in the chest with the kind of satisfying thump made by a rolled-up newspaper striking a front door. Over the holiday, Hermione had paid for a few Muggle summer classes by taking a paper route, and in addition to the added muscle from bicycling contouring her legs nicely, the throwing had given her a fairly good arm.

She had no idea Severus noticed both side effects when he staggered to catch the roll. He made a mental note to ask Albus if those little pleated skirts couldn't be made mandatorily ankle-length. He gave her a withering glare and wordlessly undid the seal holding the roll closed. Like a freed watchspring, it spindled free, and with some pleasant surprise Severus realized that it was at least fifteen feet of her compulsively neat and rather tiny script. He read the first three or so and looked up at the nervous sixth-year.

She returned his calculating look with an apologetic one for throwing the roll so hard, and he decided not to take points off.

"Miss Granger, as much as I would like to provide you with instruction in what resembles an entire potions curriculum, I do fear this –epic is unsatisfactory."

"Oh, I've already done a pretty good amount of it, sir," Hermione clarified, stepping over to his desk and standing a little to his left to indicate the outline she had prepared. She tapped it with her wand and suddenly it became as intensely colorful as if a kindergartner had attacked it with highlighters.  "See, everything marked in red I completed over the holidays between first and second year, orange between second and third, and so on through the visible spectrum to blue. Anything in violet I only had time to research sparingly, and unmarked entries I only have definitions of."

Severus felt the corners of his mouth go into a bizarre spasm, but he repressed the uncharacteristic reaction and glanced over the long outline to find errors.

"There seems to be a disproportionate amount less orange."

"Yes, that's true." Hermione bit her lip as if this disappointed her as well. "I spent the summer holidays in France that year and didn't have as much time as I wanted to work."

"You seem to show an uncharacteristic interest in potions...so suddenly." Snape gave her what he hoped was an intimidating leer.

She had the nerve to smile –and oh, Merlin, her teeth were normal! He again had to repress a smile by biting down on the very tip of his tongue.

"Professor, if you think this is interest, I suggest you ask Professor McGonagall to see the outline I turned in to her yesterday. I chose Potions because it presents a challenge."

"So I was told." Snape had no choice but to relax a little. "That seems to me just a little bit less than a good reason."

"Well, sir," Hermione stammered, anxious he would refuse to supervise her project. "Actually, I always have been interested in the subject of potions, more so than several others." He looked stern. "Divination comes to mind," she added hopefully, knowing his apparent shared dislike of Sybil Trelawney.

Merlin's ears, did he actually...yes, he'd smiled. Hermione thought her first school play audition in third grade had made her heart pound. She was certain half of Slytherin dormitory wondered what the banging was.

"And what do you presume to like about it?" Severus asked more gently than he usually asked favorite Slytherin students. Hermione blushed slightly.

"It's the exactness, and the anticipation of knowing how it turned out." He seemed to nod, and she went on. "I mean, with transfiguration the effects are instantaneous. There's no suspense. And so much of magic lacks subtlety...like feeding a hippogriff or watering mandrake plants. Arithmancy has some of the exactitude, but none of the introspect. You either have the answer or you don't with that, none of the theories about adding such-and-such ingredient having a desired effect. It's just...I like it."

'Could I have sounded more like a second-year?' she speculated in disgust.

'Could she have sounded more like a tenured Potions mistress?' Severus wondered.

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"Cassandra Alcott and John Tyler," Alastor Moody greeted. They were grinning, friendly-looking Americans, and even the normally suspicious Moody couldn't resist returning the smile.

"Mr and Mrs. John Tyler, actually," the female pointed out, kissing her new husband on the cheek. "You must be Mr. Moody."

"Call me Mad-Eye," the grizzled old Auror laughed.

Cassandra was only about five and a half feet tall, with long, wild hair and flashing blue-gray eyes. She had the sort of abnormally pale skin caused by consumption in earlier centuries, and her nose might have at one point been grievously broken. Her infectious smile and air of absolute capability belied the faint dark circles under her eyes and red inner lip as if she had trouble breathing.

John, by contrast, was healthy and a little past six feet tall, with lustrous gunmetal colored eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. His hair was reddish-brown and only seven inches or so shorter than his wife's, covering the back of his collar and long sideburns. When he showed his teeth, which was rarely, there was the faint sense that they somehow weren't right; since the incisors were so straight and the canines so pointed by comparison.

There was a strangeness in both of the newlyweds' gestures that Mad-Eye took note of quite hurriedly, like the way Cassandra scratched rapidly at an itch with a stiff hand or the way John's tongue went over his frontmost teeth when he yawned. In the three hours it took for him to give the newcomers the tour of the Auror Office and brief them on the strategy of their first assignment, Moody had pretty much written off Americans in general as a quirky lot.

"So we search the Macnair residence...that's not hard." Cass did most of the talking for the pair. John took her coat and hung it on the rack in the office they shared. He then removed his own and rolled up his sleeves. Moody blinked in surprise at the small, barely noticeable star on the American's arm.

"But you –you're a-?"

"A werewolf? Of course. I was born that way."

"I was bitten almost eleven months ago," Cass explained.

"I would never have known...you're search and forensics specialists."

"Ever heard of bloodhounds?" John inquired with a mischievous smile. "Cass, dear?"

The young woman walked over to the dignified Auror who could easily have been her grandfather and cheerfully sniffed his lapel.

"Fried eggs and oatmeal, toast with strawberry jam, Ogden's Old Firewhiskey, roast beef sandwich with brown mustard on a (sniff,) kaiser bun, more Firewhisky, two cognacs for tea, and for supper...you haven't eaten yet."

"That's incredible."

Looking charming as ever and pleased with herself, Cass went over and put an arm around her husband.

"You should see what John can do. He'd know the vintages of the liquor and whether or not the eggs were over-easy or sunny side-up."

Moody let out a resounding, raspy laugh.

"Shall we adjourn to the Leaky Cauldron then for dinner? My treat."

"Alright...we can go over the portraits then."

"Er...a little too public there, even the private rooms. Constant vigilance." Moody took out a locked album and began to show them pictures of allies and Death Eaters, which the American Aurors duly memorized. "Albus Dumbledore," Moody said, pointing to one picture. "You know who he is. This is Minerva McGonagall." He turned the page to show a dark-eyed, scowling professor in black. "This one's listed under the Hogwarts faculty for confidentiality reasons...not even Crouch knows of this. Severus Snape is undercover in Voldemort's inner circle...you may be doing some search work with him later...he knows how to get into those snakes' mansions."

"He's dishy," Cass pointed out bluntly.

Moody tactfully chose to ignore that remark.

"Here, of course, is Harry Potter," he gestured to the students' section. "His best friends are likely also endangered...This is Ronald Weasley, Arthur and Molly's sixth, and his younger sister Virginia...'Ginny,' I believe they call her, you may need to know that, and Hermione Granger is said to be close to him."

"I like her hair," John observed.

"They seem so young to be snared up in all of this," Cass sighed. Moody chortled dryly:

"You're one to talk. How old are you, twenty-nine?"

"Twenty-two," Cass admitted quietly. John was likely not much older.

"Merlin's arse," Moody whispered, surprised, before returning to his businesslike manner. "Actually, Potter and Weasley are sixteen, Virginia's fifteen, and the odd thing about Hermione Granger, she's..." Moody went and opened a file from a cabinet. "Eighteen in November, she-"

"Used a Time-Turner?" Cass and John asked in unison.

"How did you-?"

"I was born about the same time Voldemort rose, Mad-Eye," Cass announced. "You could say I'm familiar with the practice."

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At last Snape agreed to let Hermione focus on the type of potions she was most interested in, namely transfigurative and counter-syndromic elixirs. Included as her ultimate goal in that category was, of course, the Wolfsbane Potion, not to mention a fascinating one that countered seasonal allergies. Her mother was certain to be pleased by that.

For the first frustrating month, however, Snape had her working on such elementary things as the vetrinary tonic Hagrid gave the giant squid for its heart murmur. Several times she arrived at Gryffindor Tower only to go to her dorm and beat pillows for a half hour. Harry and Ron were sympathetically amused and mentioned her problem to Fred and George. The week before Halloween the ever-prankish twins sent her a clever dartboard with a Snape that flew around like in old Muggle duck-shooting arcade games and squealed like a schoolgirl whenever she scored a hit.

"We got the squeals from Percy...turned his Ministry card into a snail while he was holding it."

For awhile her dreams were haunted by the image of Snape in a frilly pink dress, being shot at by Elmer Fudd. Hermione was at the point of swearing off Bugs Bunny forever when a chance occurence in class changed her dreams a bit.

She was stirring the first interesting potion so far in the project, a moderately complicated remedy for dandruff, when suddenly Snape swept up behind her like the overgrown bat he seemed. Hermione felt his long fingers close over hers to stir in the opposite direction.

"Slower, more even strokes," the velvet voice informed her. She could smell sandalwood and asphodel on his robes, feel his warm breath at her neck, and the touch of his hand on hers made her feel dizzy. "Excellent, Miss Granger."

The dreams from then on were much different.

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