Thanks to auroraziazan and Blackpenny, who, among innumerable other fine qualities I'm sure (such as their taste in fanfic? their penetrating critiques? their dulcet praises?), have some of the niftiest pennames on ff . net.

II – Advanced Potions

NEWT level classes almost took Snape's mind off the lake incident, and they most certainly did any other minds that had spared it any thought. After Advanced Ancient Runes even his usually quick head had been buzzing. Advanced Herbology left him frankly exhausted.

But Advanced Potions he was sure he didn't have to worry about at all. He had brewed his first Draught of Living Death at eight years of age. Eileen Snape never did have much of a sense for age-appropriateness. Before he reached the double-digits she had been teaching him about the Dark Arts. After he had hit the double-digits she had thought better of it and backtracked into making him biscuits in the shape of chickens and trains. He had been carrying around a copy of Advanced Potion-Making for years, mainly to show off.

The only thing he had worried about was the prospect of having his chance to shine ruined. For one thing, his two obvious nemeses. He had heard Black was fairly clever at potion-making and if he had rejoined the class Potter was bound to as well – though it sounded as though his idea of a good Potions class was one where something exploded or made suggestive noises. As it turned out, however, Black was there alone. Snape had to do a double take, but no matter which way he looked at it, Potter wasn't there. He had never imagined the two would split up. One of their especial hangers-on, Pettigrew, accompanied him, but it wasn't the same thing. Anyway, Black didn't look especially thrilled with Pettigrew's companionship. Snape breathed easier. Pettigrew had obviously gotten into the advanced class by the skin of his rather prominent teeth, and with any luck Black would be so busy with him that he, Snape, would go unbothered. And if Black did try something, Snape had managed to help Avery scrape an 'E' on his OWL – and even Avery was probably much better backup than Pettigrew.

Snape had also heard a lot about Lily Evans, the redheaded Gryffindor who was supposed to be just as good at Potions as he. This made him feel even more threatened than the prospect of sharing one of his favourite classes with Potter and Black had. Well, they would see. He'd had a stirrer in his hand before he could walk, and he was bound to outperform a Mudblood.

He kept an eye on her while waiting for class to start. They had been pointed out to each other before by Professor Slughorn. She was chatting and laughing at a pretty fast clip with the one Hufflepuff girl in the class. In fact, she appeared to be a total airhead. You could tell she was an ignorant Muggle a mile off.

Roll-call, an introductory lecture that was more oratory than any real information, a Strengthening Solution assigned. A Strengthening Solution? thought Snape in scorn. Damned if this wasn't going to be as pointless as the OWL-level course had been! The class dispersed to get the proper ingredients from the supply cupboard and Snape desultorily followed, thinking some rather sharp things about Slughorn.

Who, as it turned out, was coming his way.

"Now, you two," he said happily, turning to Snape and, as he immediately realised with no small dread, the Mudblood. "I'm sure neither of you would have any trouble whipping up a class-C potion on the first try, so I thought I'd let the two of you share a little challenge today! I've just received my order for Alihotsy roots, so for once I have all the ingredients on hand for a Blood-Replenishing Potion. Thought the two of you might try your hands at that!"

"Really, sir," the Mudblood said smirkily, "are you planning on paying us for taking on your infirmary-stocking duties?"

So help him, he had just been thinking of saying the same thing.

He hadn't, of course, because it was hopelessly disrespectful. For one moment – a very sweet moment to Snape – Slughorn, unused to this after a two-month holiday, looked stunned at being caught in his ulterior motive (and how very Slytherin of him, to be ashamed of ulterior motives! Severus thought in scorn), with the shock that comes before the rage. But instead of rage, the shock yielded to laughter. He waved a chubby finger at her. "Ah, easy now, Lily! You wouldn't want me to take points from Gryffindor for insolence!"

"I'd win them all back," the Mudblood said musically. So it was true as people said, that she had him on a leash. Conniving wily bit of skirt that she was.

And Slughorn went off still chuckling good-naturedly to himself. Snape felt a certain shame on behalf of proper Slytherins everywhere. He didn't see Evans roll her eyes, as good-naturedly as Slughorn had chortled, but definitely a roll of the eyes. It's doubtful he would have liked her any the better for it.

She turned to him, and – clearly recognising him – gave him a small smile, with hard eyes. "Well then. Shall we get started?"

Snape did not deign to answer. He dignifiedly began to roll up his sleeves, which Evans did as well, but with a certain relish; her polite little smile transforming into a genuine grin at the complicated-looking procedure laid before them.

"Excellent," she said, not deterred by his haughtily taking the pestle and beginning the first step. "I'll take the fruit flies, then. Between us it should only take five or so minutes for prep."

"In that case," he said, "you had better put the cauldron on boil straight away."

There was a command in his voice, but the Mudblood took it – she very briskly did set the cauldron to boil with a free-and-easy air that rendered his attempt to subordinate her useless. Snape, who had grit, kept forgetting just how useless it was and kept it up intermittently, but no dice no matter when he sprung it on her.

---

Cosmic unfairness.

The Mudblood whore had a positive fetish for bare feet and leaving buttons out of their holes. Always some damnably innocuous bit was left unfastened. She always looked like she was lounging and snuggling in her robes. She admitted so herself, talking of course to someone else, one of the girls, or Pettigrew, or sometimes even Avery. He was always standing stupidly by while she was chatting with someone else. "I always liked skirts when I was little. Now I can wear them all the time." The nose. The eyes. The hair. She thought he was "quiet." Of course he was. Did she have to keep her feet exposed in those little brown sandals right up until Hallowe'en? Couldn't she keep her whatsit tightened so her knockers didn't bob around so merrily?

How the bloody hell was he supposed to concentrate?

---

Yet when Slughorn had them working alone, which was more often than not, Snape never appreciated that he could keep his mind on his work and not have Evans's Distractions making him put in fluxweed for juniper or for leaving his flame on too long.

Worse yet was when he had them paired up, but not with each other. Slughorn called this "having my star students pass on some of that expertise." Evans called it "being unpaid teacher's assistants." Snape privately called it "torture."

And if it was "torture" when she was just innocuously pointing out to another, lesser specimen of girl that, strictly speaking, you're not supposed to just toss in your ingredients in any old order, then was there a word for when she was working with another boy? Especially when she was chatting up a storm with him?

Snape couldn't figure out which was worse – Black or Avery.

It certainly hadn't been pleasant the day she and Black had arrived late and set up shop at the same table. At one point he made her laugh. Was she mad? The ignorant hussy! Black! Sirius Black! She was better than that! Black made it his business to bestow his wonderful self only on girls who weren't pureblood. Evans was probably the only Mudblood who hadn't snuck off to some shadowy corner with him. Black had been known to suffer cheerfully through Puddifoot dates just so word would get back home about his latest unsuitable. That miserably lucky bastard, who had everything Snape would have killed for and spat on it.

And then Avery. Avery! That was not on. If Evans was taking the high moral ground against Slytherins than she had no right snubbing him and smiling at Avery's pathetic antics.

In his rational moods Snape knew that he was steaming over nothing. Evans hobnobbed with everyone. It usually didn't mean much. Snape didn't think of these as his "rational" moods, however; he was always perfectly in control, always in the right. He blamed it on the fumes from their current intensive work with anacardian potions, which by definition contain rhous. They addled his head. He was probably even allergic. Having grown up Muggle, he of course wasn't as used to it as everybody else.

---

Although as he discovered he wasn't the only one having problems with the anacardian potions.

Snape spent a disproportionate amount of time in the Potions dungeons, though hardly anyone else ever showed up for Slughorn's open lab sessions. But, damn it all, he had to figure out how to perfect his stirring techniques; Evans was showing him up. He was rummaging in the storage cupboards when he heard people coming down, and cringed. He could never concentrate with other people in the classroom.

"… look, Peter, I'll have a shot at it, but I don't see the point, since I haven't even been taking this class. Why don't you ask Sirius?" A pause. Then Snape heard Lupin laugh. "All right. Point taken."

"You have to help me," Pettigrew said, sulkily. "The whole reason I got behind on this is because I was with you last Friday. God forbid anyone else freezes the Willow – "

"All right!" said Lupin hastily. "Hush. Of course I'll take a look at it."

Snape, who had been gearing up for a confrontation, fell quiet at this exchange. There was some distinct blackmail in Pettigrew's voice, and guilt in Lupin's. Highly interesting. He went still, kept to the supplies cupboard, and listened hard.

Unfortunately for him, he was now boxed in his hiding place, and Pettigrew's attitude instantly changed once he had Lupin's compliance. "Thanks so much, Remus," he said, rather cloyingly Snape was inclined to think. "You have no idea how scared I was about facing Slughorn tomorrow without this potion. I knew you would help me."

"Of course I would have," Lupin said, good-naturedly. "You could leave off the guilt trip next time, too. Strictly speaking, when you're breaking international law, you don't go brandying it about. What if someone had been in here?" They were by now actually in the classroom and slinging off their schoolbags. "You know, I had really been looking forward to never setting foot in this classroom again. What's this potion over here?"

Don't you touch it, Snape thought. It was incredibly cramped in the shut cupboard – no wonder Lupin had assumed no one was about – but he hesitated to reveal himself. Breaking international law? It fired his imagination at once.

"Waterfowl oils," said Pettigrew. "It must be one of the seventh-years'." Snape smirked to himself. He never had any problem accepting a compliment.

The smirk soon faded. They took forever. Still, under the spell of those magic words – "freeze the Willow," "breaking international law" – Snape contrived to pay attention and learn as much as he could. He had never really spared much thought for Potter and Black's satellites before. Over the course of their struggles with the anacardiatic, he gathered that Lupin was reasonably clever, though hopeless with potions – Snape, incredulous, had to consider blowing his cover and making a run for it when Lupin casually suggested "throwing in a dash of vervian" – into a solution consisting chiefly of pwdre ser which they hadn't yet negated! – "just to see what happens, because it's not like it can make this thing any worse." Thankfully, Pettigrew vetoed that. Pettigrew wasn't half so stupid as he liked to seem. After Lupin's three failed tries he was the one who worked out the missing step and made the potion after all. But he was extraordinarily lazy. It was because he hadn't bothered to copy down Slughorn's instructions that they were down there wasting their Sunday evening to begin with. And there were at least a dozen points where Snape, personally, would have told Pettigrew to go do something both unpleasant and obscene – or at least have left the whiny little pest to make his potion himself. Snape could only conclude that it was excellent dirt Pettigrew had.

It was also Pettigrew who figured out, after idly poking at it for a bit with a stirrer while Lupin pored over the index of his textbook, that Snape's untouched potion must be either "Snape's or Lily Evans's."

"Oh, no," said Lupin, humourously doomful, folding back a page. "I can't run into Lily today."

"Why?"

"Well, I never exactly reported Padfoot and Prongs circulating those doctored 'staff room' pictures, but she'll have got wind of it by now."

---

Edward Avery didn't see Evans Snape's way at all. Slughorn often had them working close to each other so that Lily could correct Avery if he was getting catastrophically off-track. Mid-October, walking back up from the dungeon Potions classroom, Avery was saying – and not for the first time – how really all right Evans was, for a Mudblood.

Snape said something Snape-ish.

"Hey, I like her," said the unfortunate Avery, in a defencive tone. "She's awfully nice in class, even though I bollockise things on a fairly regular basis."

" 'Bollockise'," Snape repeated tonelessly.

"Yeah. You know, as in 'bollocks things up,' but I hate having that dangling preposition on the end there."

A pause, and then, "You know, Av'ry, sometimes you surprise me."

Avery bowed deeply, with a flourish. "You're welcome."

But he really didn't care what Avery thought about her – Avery was soft, everybody knew it. What especially annoyed him was the way she had Slughorn wrapped around her little finger. It irked and irked him that he had been so perfectly respectful for years and now here was this Mudblood cajoling him and half-bullying him, and him letting her get away with it, and her name getting up more than his. And what's more he despised how she disapproved of him. It was subtle. She was never rude. But you could tell. What business did she have, judging him? Why was he the only one she didn't bubble up to?

Avery, bless his odd bouncy little heart, brought it up, while waiting on him in the Slytherin common room. "Evans doesn't seem to like you much."

"So?"

"You didn't notice?"

"No," said Snape, mendaciously. It had been a sore point for the past two months now.

"She's still steaming over what you said to her last year."

Snape knocked over his inkstand in agitation. "I never spoke to her last year!"

"By the lake."

"You weren't there," said Snape, warningly. Heaven help Avery if he even starting to bring it up.

"No. But she says you called her a Mudblood."

"Oh. That." Snape picked up his schoolbag again, quite dismissive of such stubborn pettiness. "You know, we're going to be late."

"Aw, Sev. You didn't. Did you really say that to her?"

"Oh, it was nothing," said Snape. "Hand me my gloves, would you? It's nothing anyone normal would have taken any offence over."

"Well, you know," said Avery, swinging his own schoolbag over his shoulder, "the classic response to someone taking offence is to apologise."

---

Apologising proved hard. When he first tried to speak with her she asked him to hold up, she couldn't skin her ubolima roots and listen to him at the same time, and if she did she wouldn't do either of them decently. Snape couldn't argue with that logic, but it gave him several more minutes to get keyed up to levels of nerves he had never felt before. When she gave him their full attention the room wasn't as noisy it had been at his chosen moment and there was a thick fog of olive-grape fumes billowing from the cauldron between them. Besides which, she looked full on at him for the first time. Her eyes were so green. Snape's mouth was traitorously dry. He had carefully planned out his phraseology the night before, but whatever he muttered was much less articulate. She interrupted him and said sorry, but she couldn't hear him. Then he tried speaking a little more loudly. His voice was somewhat higher-pitched than any male adolescent can be comfortable with. Still, he didn't sound like a total idiot until he finished. Then, when she didn't reply in the first nanosecond, he rushed on with some rambling at a nervous gallop.

He had never made such a fool of himself in his life.

And did she care? The effort, the humiliation? She smiled vaguely at him and shrugged it off. She said of course it was okay. She claimed she "hadn't even thought about it since, really." She – ! She was the most irritating girl!

Still, Snape left class feeling strangely cleansed, and her manner toward him was rather warmer.

---

Notwithstanding, he didn't stop thinking about it for a solid week.

"You lied," he said to her their next class together, exasperated.

"What?"

"You lied. You told Avery all about it, so yes you did think about it."

She looked at him a moment, and then dissolved into a beautiful grin.

"Okay, okay," she said, giggling a little and looking away, no saint, no goddess, a regular giggly and embarrassed teenager. "You're right."

There were a few awkward moments, with some vague tittering on Evans's part, while they took turns throwing rat tails into the boiling cauldron.

"I owe you an apology, too," said Evans after she had calmed down. Her colour was high, from her laughter and embarrassment and the heat of the cauldron. She beamed at Snape, who almost fell down on the spot. "I seem to remember saying you were as bad as James Potter. I'm really very sorry." She giggled. "I understand if you can't forgive me that one!"

Snape, who didn't understand much about the uncalculating whims of girls, walked on air for days.

---

Tomorrow (July 7) is my birthday. Do review, on pain of forever knowing you are cold, callous, and "Dursley-ish as it is possible to be." -wink-