Knowing Silence
I know everyone wants more Confectionary Secret, but this just came to me. A drabble about the term Know-It-All, which really doesn't seem so insulting unless you look a little deeper.
Know-it-all. It was a string of words that most wouldn't consider particularly biting, certainly not up to the Potion Master's usual level of vitriol. And yet, Severus Snape was a man much given to the study of the cutting barb, the painful truth said at just the right time to do maximum damage to the ego. What he saw in her eyes when he used the title was as gratifying as when he called Potter on his dangerous tendency to get his friends killed or commented on Weasly's second-hand dress robes. The jibe was made all the more cathartic, because every time he heaped it on her, it was subtracted from his own personal tally. In his school days, it had become sort of an unofficial nickname, more hated even than Snivillus had been. Any chance to level it at her somehow lessened the number of 'know-it-all's' that he was carrying around with him. He chose not to closely examine his own logic.
He alone knew how insulting it truly was to any knowledge connoisseur. Not only was it a contradiction in terms, but it placed learning on the level of blowing one's nose on the tablecloth. The term was a patented refusal to even admit that scholarship had any value whatsoever. It was so much worse than hating or fearing knowledge, this dismissing of it out of hand. The scholar's highest ambition was brought low by careful use of tone and inflection, and by schoolchildren nonetheless! Know-it-all was more than a label, it was a stigma. It screamed 'I am desperate for praise' and 'I am socially retarded' in one breath. It was soul-killing, and no one but the unfortunate recipient even realized it. Severus Snape had been destroyed by it, that word and so many synonyms. At this point, he cared nothing for the pain of others so long as it lessened or distracted him from his own.
…Except sometimes he looked up at her, his sneer firmly in place and his heart desperate to unload some of the wrongs done him in the past, but stopped. Sometimes his mouth would begin to form the word, to be halted by a pair of brown eyes pleading for him to give just a day's more respite. Sometimes she would give just the right answer at just the wrong time, and he would almost shout it at her at the top of his lungs, but didn't. Sometimes, not all the time or even most of the time, he would let Hermione Granger pass by with just a scowl and ignore the relief so obvious on her features. At times like that, he found he could bear the burden of being a know-it-all with just a bit more grace.