Disclaimer: Rowling owns the Defense Against the Dark Arts post. Tolkien owns the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher.
A/N: Finally, the chapter you've all been waiting for...we rejoin Aragorn and Snape! Why is Snape angry? What will happen? Will Aragorn ever figure out what the heck is going on? This should answer these questions as well as is humanly possible! I don't seem to be getting much response on my "feedback" questions, so I'll keep repeating them until someone responds. If anyone has a good suggestion for the story title, please include it in your review. I would greatly appreciate ideas. Might not use them, but I'd appreciate them.
kippinator: Thanks for the review! I was horrified by the errors you pointed out to me in the last chapter, and I assure you that such horrors will never again befall this story. If you hadn't pointed it out...*shudder* It would have been horrible.
Birds of a Feather
Aragorn was somewhat surprised by the sudden attack, since he had hardly been expecting one, but regained his composure in a matter of milliseconds as any good Ranger would—luckily, Ranger reflexes didn't require much in the way of brains. Snape's face was roughly two inches from his own, livid with rage, and Aragorn thought that he might well be the most fearsome opponent he had ever come up against. Hopefully, this wouldn't come to blows...
"Excuse me," Aragorn said with as much dignity and oxygen as he could muster, his back stinging with fresh scrapes from the stone wall. "You seem to have accidentally grabbed hold of my trachea..."
"No accident, I assure you," Snape sneered, his cold black eyes flashing menacingly at the Ranger. "I have a question for you, Mister Aragorn son of Arathorn." Aragorn opened his mouth to explain that the title "mister" was not necessary, but Snape tightened his grip slightly and Aragorn decided that the customs of Middle-earth could wait for another time.
Leaning in even closer so that Aragorn could see every strand of greasy hair on his head, Snape hissed softly, "I couldn't help noticing that your little...conference...with Dumbledore was almost simultaneous with his announcement of a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. Now, did you or did you not apply for the position?"
Aragorn stared at him, taken aback for the second time in forty seconds. Of course, he would have told the truth without hesitation under normal circumstances, but this was hardly normal. The man looked ready to tear out his throat if he answered in the affirmative, and Aragorn was rather attached to his throat. He had had it for a long time, and he felt they worked rather well together.
He decided that the old trick of hemming and hawing was most appropriate and immediately put it into action. "Well, um, actually, you see, it was like this..." he began, trying his level best to think. It didn't work, but he decided he probably deserved a B+ for effort.
Most unfortunately, Snape didn't seem fooled by his stalling. If anything, he looked more ominous, threatening, and bat-like than ever, glaring at his victim with an intensity that left no doubt whatsoever in Aragorn's mind that he was in for it now. The Potions master's voice was deceptively soft, reminding Aragorn unpleasantly of Lord Elrond on a bad decade.
"I asked you a question. Perhaps you misunderstood. I was not asking for a detailed explanation of your life story. I was asking," here he raised his voice slightly, "for a simple yes or no. Now, let's try this again. Did you take the Defense Against the Dark Arts position?" Snape asked very slowly to make sure that Aragorn would understand.
Aragorn didn't know what to do. Of course he could use his superior battle skills to escape at any moment—he had no doubt of that—but he would prefer not to make trouble. On the other hand, it struck him that Snape was making trouble. And if he had learned one thing from his years of experience roaming all over Middle-earth, it was that once trouble troubles you, all caution is best thrown to the winds.
"Yes," he said quite clearly and distinctly. "Yes, as a matter of fact I did." Holding his breath, he waited to see what Snape would do.
As he had expected, the result was well worth seeing—the best description he could come up with afterwards was a cross between Lady Galadriel when she got within two feet of the Ring and an Orc having a bad hair day. "You WHAT?" Snape shrieked in fury, his eyes wild. "You took the job?" He looked ready to pull out large handfuls of his long, greasy hair.
"Yep," Aragorn replied, doing his best imitation of nonchalance. "Of course, I don't have much experience teaching, but—" He shrugged. "With all my survival skills, how hard can it be?"
Snape's jaw dropped, and his grip on Aragorn's collar slackened a little. "How...hard...can...it...be?" he echoed slowly, as if to himself. "How...hard?" Shaking his head in something between contempt and pity, he stared at Aragorn, who was starting to feel a little nervous about this sudden reversal in attitude. "You poor, poor thing," Snape murmured, sighing deeply. Then, quite suddenly, he laughed a little hysterically.
"Take my word for it, you don't know what you're getting into," he growled, regaining a little of his composure and bad temper. "And I would suggest very strongly that you reconsider your decision." Not sure what to make of this, Aragorn said the first thing that came into his head.
"Are you threatening me?" he asked innocently, widening his gorgeous blue eyes to their fullest extent in the Helpless Ranger look, which worked without fail when maidens were nearby. Unfortunately, none were. Instead, Snape matched his look with a venomous one of his own and released him disgustedly.
Taking a step backward and beginning to pace up and down the three feet of corridor directly in front of Aragorn, he started muttering to himself in a clearly audible voice. "I give him useful advice when I should've killed him and what does he say? He wants to know whether I'm threatening him!" Aragorn managed to ignore him for a few seconds, much too busy being grateful for his life to notice anything else, but at last he sighed to himself and looked up resignedly at the dangerous lunatic in front of him.
"Um, excuse me?" Snape continued to mutter and pace, and Aragorn was forced to follow him up and down the hallway to carry on the conversation—if the word applied in this case. Why, this was the most one-sided conversation he'd had since the last time he talked to Elrond about his engagement with Arwen! Not to mention hostile...
After a long pause, Aragorn tried again. "Er, Professor Snape..." He stumbled a bit over the unfamiliar title, but at least this time he got a reaction—Snape swung around and fixed him with a glare that would kill Balrogs. "I don't mean to be rude, but...what do you mean?"
Snape ground his teeth audibly and rolled his eyes heavenward. "Why?" he moaned. "Why does this happen to me? Why do I get stuck with all the idiots in the world?" Aragorn was still trying to decide whether he should be insulted by this or not as Snape continued, apparently expressing all those unhealthy pent-up emotions that he had held back for all the years he'd been at Hogwarts.
"First it's Potter and Black at school. Then it's Potter's kid and Weasley. And Longbottom. And Granger. And...oh, why do I even bother?" To Aragorn's great dismay and greater confusion, the Potions master burst into tears.
"Um...there...there?" Aragorn said uncertainly, not quite sure what he should do under the circumstances. Should he try to comfort Snape, ignore him and hope he would recover, or run away screaming?
Utterly oblivious to his halfhearted efforts, Snape continued to sob. "And my hair! It could all have been all right, but the hair...Oh, I've tried everything! Hair care potions and special spells and even..." He gulped before continuing. "Muggle products. But nothing works! I'm doomed..." Snape stared at Aragorn, but his eyes were unseeing, focused on some horror far away.
Aragorn was confused. He had been, by and large, confused for most of his adult life. And he had been confused stupendously and beyond reason for the last twenty-four hours. It was, he decided, time to take the initiative and do something about his confusion once and for all.
"What's wrong with your hair?" he asked ingenuously. "It looks fine. I mean, my hair's like that most of the time."
This had an immediate effect on Snape—his head snapped up at the words "my hair's like that most of the time" and his expression changed rapidly for the third time in five minutes. He gazed at Aragorn with something between incredulity and awe, the look of a lost soul who has just seen the light.
"Is it really?" Snape breathed. "Is your hair really...as greasy...as mine?"
Aragorn shrugged. "Well, yes, I guess so. I mean, most days I don't even notice. I hadn't really washed my hair properly in twenty years until the last time I saw Arwe—" He broke off just before the end of the fateful name, very conscious that he had just committed a stupendous act of betrayal in asking Sibyll Trelawney out for the evening.
Oh, well...as Elrond always said, when in Gondor...As a rule, expressions like this didn't make much sense to Aragorn. He was more of a concrete person—with the physique and brains to match, Legolas always said. Aragorn was never quite sure whether he ought to be insulted by Legolas' little comments...
There was, however, one expression that made great sense to Aragorn—"When life hands you Orcs, make Orc stew." He didn't really care much for Orc stew, but in this case he knew exactly what the phrase meant. It meant, "When stuck in a strange place, forget your betrothed of many years and immediately pick up the first woman who'll have you." And when stuck in a strange place, Aragorn was very good at following his own advice.
"Twenty years?!" gasped Snape, jerking him out of his so-called thoughts. "How do you do that?"
Furrowing his brow in concentration, Aragorn began counting on his fingers. "Hmm...let's see, there was seven years off generally wandering and scaring the wits out of hobbits in Bree, three years in the lands to the south poking around Mordor on a dare from Elladan, a couple months in Mirkwood, um...few more years hanging around Bree and scaring more hobbits—it's really fun, you know," he added, interrupting his list.
"What, not washing your hair for twenty years?" Snape demanded, giving Aragorn a look of mixed respect and horror. Clearly, the man had a one-track mind.
"No, scaring hobbits," Aragorn explained. "See, all you have to do is carry around a broken sword and look really mysterious and wear a cloak and stare out from under it a lot. And order water in bars," he went on. "They're always terrified and think you're unnatural if you only order water. With a lemon. And then sip it slowly and glare at everyone and they'll run like rabbits." He smiled, remembering a very nice little place where, he had been told afterward, half the hobbits present had had to have extensive counseling after he left. It was always a nice feeling to know that one made a difference in others' lives...
The other man said nothing for a minute, watching him with a small frown. "So, basically, you don't even notice that your hair needs washing?" he asked at last.
Aragorn nodded matter-of-factly. "Basically, yes." To be blunt, he didn't really see what all the fuss was about. One of the first things he had learned was that only sissies and Elves cared about minor details like hair and clothes and odor—real Men prided themselves on their greasiness and smelliness. Why else would he have won the Mr. Minas Tirith contest five times running?
Snape was really getting excited now. "So what you're saying," he babbled, starting to grin, "is that you have a much happier and less stressful life if you just don't care whether you're ugly or not?"
Though he didn't understand all the big words, Aragorn got the meaning of the question well enough. "Well, of course!" he said impatiently. "So are you saying that you're just mean and cruel because you constantly worry about your hair?"
This was apparently either the worst or the best thing he could have said under the circumstances, because Snape immediately burst into tears again. Aragorn looked around hopefully, but no help came. Sighing, he put on his most sympathetic smile one more time and threw a comforting arm around Snape's shoulders.
"It's okay," he said consolingly. "Come with me and I will show you the true path to the greasy life." Together, the two men headed down the corridor.
A/N: Oooooookay. I realize that ending was somewhat weird, but it's almost eleven o'clock—give me a break. I have just finished a two-hour orchestra rehearsal and discovered that I have to report at church by seven o'clock on Sunday to play in said orchestra. Meaning I have to leave for church at six-fifteen or thereabouts, so I'm not too incredibly happy about that. But anyway, now that I think I've outlined pretty well who is "allied" with whom in the story, I can really get the conflict rolling. To be honest, I'm not sure how much Ron and Harry will be in the story, but under the circumstances I don't really care. Harry gets enough time in stories already—note that the series is known as "Harry Potter". I have a possible title for the story! And about time too...here it is: "The Grass is Always Greener..." Followed by a summary something like: "Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn wanted to escape from their troubles in Middle-earth—but not this much." If you absolutely cannot stand this and will boycott the story in future if I use this title, please tell me. If you like it, please tell me. If you have another suggestion, please tell me. Hopefully Coming Reasonably Soon: Chapter Ten.