Disclaimer: the characters all belong to JKR, and I've taken them as they were somewhere between the end of Order of the Phoenix and the end of Half-Blood Prince, and let them run in a different direction from there.

Chapter 5: A Victory

(All I Really Want to Do)

No, and I ain't lookin' to fight with you,
Frighten you or uptighten you,
Drag you down or drain you down,
Chain you down or bring you down.
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you.

- Bob Dylan

It was still dark when Hermione woke, abruptly and completely. One thing about going to bed before dinner, she thought ruefully, was that you tended to wake up fully rested, but with no one else to talk to but bats and owls. The idea of owls gave her a guilty start – she had promised to write to Ron after her first day of lessons to let him know how it had gone.

Hermione pulled on her robes and hurried up to the owlery, attempting to crystallize the events of yesterday in some form she could write down. The hallways of the castle were emptier than she had ever seen them, and she realized that Filch must have the summers off. It was still hard to shake the habits of glancing over her shoulder occasionally and quieting her steps when approaching a corner or the outlet of a secret passage.

By the time Hermione reached the owlery she had composed Ron's letter in her head, and it only took her a few moments to write it down and pick out a frenetic pygmy owl that looked like it might get on well with Pig. As she watched the tiny bird fly into the faint stripe of grey at the horizon, Hermione thought over what she had written, hoping it didn't come off as desperate as she felt:

Dear Ron,

I hope this owl didn't wake you – I don't guess that he will have reached you in any sort of record time, but then it IS about nine hours before you're accustomed to waking up. Don't think I got up this early just to study, I just collapsed before dinner last night after spending ten solid hours standing behind a cauldron. Remember when you and Harry thought double potions was bad? Imagine quintuple potions. And imagine being Snape's only student. But I did make some progress, I think – I had some new ideas that I stumbled upon on my own, so maybe Snape's just doing what you and Harry tried for seven years to do: stop me getting my answers out of a book. Before you both start praising him (just kidding, Harry! Please don't send over a howler for that! Also, hello Ginny.), let me point out that the potions he's been assigning me are the foulest-smelling ones – think a hundred times worse than polyjuice – so you might just end up sending me away again when I come visit at the weekend.
Be good, don't worry about me, and keep me up to date on all the job situations!
Love,
Hermione

By the time the owl had disappeared completely, Hermione knew what she was going to do. She hurried back to her room, and rifled through her trunks as her mind worked furiously. It was just after 4am when Hermione entered the potions classroom. She stood for a moment in the doorway, then nodded in satisfaction and began to get to work. She would have a clear three hours before Snape expected her there. She might even have time to pop round to breakfast, if she worked fast.

When Severus Snape arrived in his classroom at ten minutes to seven that morning, the first thing he did not see was the array of cauldrons and potions he had set out on his desk the night before. He also failed to smell any of the odors associated with the list of potions he had written out for his second day of lessons. What he did smell seemed to be the same thing that kept him from seeing much of anything else: a faintly glistening haze of pale blue and turquoise droplets. Snape coughed violently as he inhaled some of the fresh-scented fog, and started as a small figure emerged from it.

"Good morning, Professor Snape," Hermione said brightly. "Evanesco!"

The haze diluted somewhat, so that Snape could see cauldrons scattered across each of the student desktops. Some of them were bubbling merrily, others seemed to be at various stages of cooling, and two at the far corners of the room were still emitting columns of the sparkling fog that had now disappeared from everywhere in the room but where it had settled on Hermione's hair and robes.

"Miss Granger, once you are a professor I of course cannot dictate your uses of school potion ingredients, but while you remain under my tutelage I will have to demand that you refrain from wasting your resources and my time on some... frivolous potion that I can only assume was invented by the type of ... teenage girl who thinks that adorning oneself for a formal dance requires an attempt to blind one's date with variations on the idea of… glitter."

"Professor Snape, I appreciate your concern for proper use of school resources, though I must say that as I concocted the potions in question before you got here and out of my own personal ingredients, my efforts can hardly be a burden to you or the school." Hermione smiled sweetly at the glowering man in front of her and continued. "And I must say I never thought of the cosmetics market when I came up with the recipe, although now you mention it, maybe I should start bottling it to sell to young witches. It does seem to stick quite fiercely to hair and fabric. Here, you've got some on your eyelashes."

Hermione had hardly begun raising her wand toward Snape's face when his hand fastened around her wrist, twisting it down and behind her back. She gasped more in surprise than in pain, and as quickly as he had grabbed her Snape let her arm go and stepped back.

"Never point a wand at a former Death Eater," Snape growled. At the look of shock on her face he turned away suddenly, but his voice was softer when he continued. "I can clean my eyelashes myself. Just as you can remove the beads from your own hair."

Hermione did so silently, and Snape, bent over the reflecting surface of a silver potion, didn't see her eyes go from hurt to hard. When he looked up she was zooming cauldron lids across the room to cover the perfumed potions.

"I'm going to breakfast," Hermione announced.

"Excuse me?"

"I said I'm going to breakfast."

"I was under the impression that I am still the teacher in this classroom, even if it is not for much longer," Snape said very deliberately, "and as long as I am the teacher I will tell you when the breaks are."

Hermione stared him straight in the face. "Well I was under the impression that it would take you at least twenty minutes to check over the potions I've started earlier today. There are about thirty of them, and about ten of those might be new even to you. The other ones I've just changed a bit from the originals. I think you'll find that, on the whole, they are at least as effective and only about half as foul-smelling as the recipes you taught us."

"If you think it will impress me that you added periwinkle shells or lavender to an array of basic potions in order to make them smell better –" Snape began, but Hermione cut him off.

"I didn't do it to impress you, I did it so that my students won't have to suffer a potions master who smells like a bomb in a barnyard. And I didn't use lavender. I expect you will be impressed by the potions I've managed to improve. I'll admit I made a mistake, though – there's one potion that didn't take my changes well, and I think the fumes may be poisonous now. Hope you figure out which one it is before you breathe it in!" And Hermione turned on her heel and left the room.

Hermione was trembling slightly as she entered the Great Hall. A steaming plate of food appeared at the Gryffindor table, and she carried it up to the teacher's table and sat down in her new seat, taking stock of her plan's effectiveness up to this point. The actual potions-making part of it had gone better than she could have hoped. She decided that maybe half of her success had been due to the re-kindling of her desire to prove Snape wrong in every way, and the rest was because she could work much better without him intentionally giving her awkward or impossible assignments, or distracting her at crucial junctures.

She had been prepared for his reaction to her potions, knew he would balk at the idea of her setting her own times to come and go. But she hadn't anticipated the look on his face when she had pointed the wand at him. It had been a stupid thing to do, pointing a wand into the face of a man who had dueled for his life more times in the past decade than he had laughed. She had meant to provoke him with the potions and the sass, not with a reminder of his violent past. Hermione tried and failed to shake from her head the memory of his expression when he had grabbed her. It hadn't been the anger or hatred she had seen so many times when Snape looked at Harry or Malfoy. It had been a fleeting look of fear and betrayal.

Hermione downed her glass of pumpkin juice and steeled herself for the unpleasantness she knew lay before her. She pushed the wand incident to the back of her mind, and marched back toward the potions classroom with a blazing mix of cheer and self confidence.

"So I see you've decided to come back to class."

"So I see you're not even halfway through checking my potions."

"Miss Granger, I will accept nothing less than a certain level of respect from those around me, even from newly minted professors who wrongly think they are deserving of special treatment."

"Well perhaps I would respect you more if you had noticed that the potion behind you is about two minutes from eating its way through the cauldron unless some powdered beetle wing is added."

"No, you insolent, self-righteous child, you will show me the respect I deserve. I can't force you to appreciate what I went through for the Order, I can't make you see how much I did for your proud, reckless friend Potter. But if you are even thinking of demanding that I treat you as an equal professor, you had better realize that to disrespect me is to waive your right to any reciprocal esteem."

Hermione stood across the desk from Snape, her arms crossed, refusing to rise to his bait, even if he was a teeny bit right in this case.

"You are never again to challenge my authority in my classroom or my knowledge of the subject I have studied and taught for longer than you have been alive. I added the powdered beetle antennae to that potion three minutes before you came waltzing back into my classroom, and I also corrected four mistakes you made on four other potions. And may I also express how flimsy a bluff that bit about the poison fumes was? Nothing in this room is remotely dangerous, other than the uncontrollable jumping that would be inflicted on the drinker of –"

"The improved pepperup potion? You're right, it needs a couple more clockwise stirs, but then it should be fine. I'm glad you noticed, though. I assume the other three mistakes were the extra berba pod in the potion of dreamless sleep, the wrong color of Jabberknoll feather in the short-term memory potion, aaand… hmm, was that powdered unicorn or bicorn horn I put in the polyjuice potion? Sometimes I do have a hard time getting something exactly right when I'm doing it for the first time."

Snape's eyes narrowed, and his voice seemed lower than before. "It seems the mutual respect idea is off the table, then, if you are determined to add lying and blundering attempts to test me to the list of ways you are determined to insult me."

Hermione opened her eyes wide, and cocked her head a little to one side. "Then I was right about the other mistakes?"

"Of course you were right about them, if you only committed them in some childish attempt to trip me up. Rest assured, Miss Granger, that if you insist on taking this attitude you'll get nothing but the same rudeness in return."

"But Professor Snape, I already have been using you as a model all this time. I guess I was just under the impression that to be a proper potions teacher, one has to be a rude, horrid git." Hermione knew she was going to far when she said it, and for a moment she stood frozen in fear that Snape would actually hurt her this time. Instead, he leveled a hard gaze at her for several seconds, then turned and swept out of the room.

Hermione collapsed onto a stool and let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. Finally she'd gotten some sort of victory, though she quailed a bit at the thought of what it might cost her tomorrow. She surveyed the room, thinking of ways to make the next day even better.