It was easy, teaching again. Easy and unbearable. Severus knew the textbook backwards and forwards. His notes were thorough, and he knew those too. It was all so familiar, even the furtive, surly looks and the whispers. He knew what they were saying, but even if he'd been somehow ignorant, he had overtaken a group of excitable second years as he walked toward the greenhouses to collect brewing supplies. They hadn't seen him, coming behind them, and of course he paid them no mind at all until he heard his own name and slowed.
"-don't care what they say about Snape now," a freckly boy was saying "There's something fishy about him. The way he looks at you." He lifted his nose in imitation of a haughty stare and his companions giggled.
"My parents say we should be nice to him, Tony!" said a dark haired girl, who walked beside him. "They say we owe him for what he did. And anyway, Harry Potter says he's good! I think he'd know, wouldn't he?"
The boy Tony shrugged rather slowly and impressively as if to say "who really knows?"
"My da says, he says," chirped another little boy, "Snape might have only fought against You Know Who because he wanted to be the next dark lord and needed to clear the way. Working for himself, yeah?"
"But Harry Potter said-" began the girl again.
"My da says that if Snape really was bit by that snake like Potter said he was, he'd be dead for sure. Potter said he watched him die! Da says only dark magic could have brought him back to life."
"Maybe he did die," said Tony, sounding half-serious but willing to convince himself. "Maybe he came back as a zombie!"
"I've seen a zombie in a book once about Hoodoo magic," the girl said stubbornly. It didn't look anything like Snape!"
"A vampire then," said Tony, easily changing direction. "He's pale enough. Snake bites won't do for a vampire, you know. It's got to be a stake to the heart!" He mimed stabbing at the other boy, and they all laughed again.
They reminded Severus so powerfully of three other students, gossiping and nosing, that he took this opportunity to sweep by them, quite suddenly. He didn't look down, but heard the satisfyingly abrupt cessation of mirth. This, versions of this, would be what they were saying all over the school. Well, so be it. He'd heard worse. It grated at him though to hear Potter's name used in evidence for him, as though Potter's word could absolve him of any suspicion. He was almost glad to hear that it hadn't quite done the job. Almost glad.
The greenhouses came into view and he felt a wave of something like nervousness. The last time he was here, he had been shut out of the upper greenhouses, an act of passive resistance to his headmastership on Pomona's part. He had sent the Carrows to her to collect on his behalf whenever he'd needed ingredients. He could have insisted she rekey the wards to his wand but sending them to face her had seemed infinitely easier. Now as he approached the door of Greenhouse 5, all the feelings he had bitten down made themselves felt in the back of his throat like heartburn. He didn't break his stride, but waved his wand once and walked easily through the wards. His breath escaped him. Of course. What else had he expected? To be shut out still? He shook himself mentally.
All around him were the new acquisitions made possible by Shaklebolt's educational grants. He saw a cobra lily, well away from Pomona's treasured fanged geranium lest they quarrel, an asterberry bush, the fruit of which would bear different properties depending on which stars it grew under. There were many things he recognized and even several he did not. It was a wonderland of rare and temperamental potions ingredients, but he turned, decidedly incurious. Methodically he helped himself to cuttings of far more common ingredients that were best to use fresh: fluxweed and goosegrass, vervain and more snowdrops. He had wasted a good number of them on spoiled potion the other day. It seemed Pomoma had moved the trays of knotgrass, and he was forced to wander a bit in search of them. At one end of a verdant alleyway, he spied a shining glass case, behind which was a patch of striking blooms, all black as darkness itself. He approached them slowly, but he knew what they were and why they must be growing here. Black lobelia. Before the blossoms showed their faces for the first time, it was an ordinary lobelia plant. But it was grown in soil treated with a very precise and tricky combination of magical fertilizers and spells. If nurtured correctly, the purple buds would deepen in color until they bloomed black. It was lobelia so powerful, waves of magic emanated off the flowers, and it had to be kept behind glass, lest a gardener walk by and fall into an interminable sleep. Reaper's Blossom, it was sometimes called, among those very few who knew of its existence and properties. The effects could be tempered and harnessed, of course. A single black petal could be brewed in combination with other potions, some sedative, some restorative, some psychotropic to form a small but extremely powerful measure of potion. A kind of Dreamless Sleep that wasn't recommended by healers at St. Mungo's or manufactured at any apothecary in Britain. Any potioneer wishing to brew it had to apply for a special license and then open his workspace to a safety inspection. And then it was a dangerous and confounding potion to brew. But Horace Slughorn had brewed it. And he had sent it along to Severus by special owl delivery or by the hand of Minerva McGonagall when it suited her purposes. It was called Somnus Oblivionis in the books, but the old potioneers called it Reaper's Cordial.
The black lobelia seemed to shiver in the stillness of its glass case, and Severus, to his own surprise, shivered in answer. It was all still here, everything Horace, and Pomona, and probably Poppy as well, he now realized, had worked so hard to procure and propagate.
He could do it himself. He was twice the potioneer Horace was, and he had shiny new facilities in which to brew the Somnus Oblivionis.
But I don't need it, he thought firmly. I took it because Horace sent it. I never asked him to. I never said I needed any help.
He turned his back on the glass case and quickly located the trays of knotgrass. Five minutes later, he was back outside in the September sunshine and prowling back up to the castle.
He had just come in through the oak front doors when he perceived her. The Collymore woman was struggling up the marble staircase laden with a number of bulky packages. She looked like she very much needed help. Even as he watched, she had to take an extra large step to avoid the trick step in the middle, staggered slightly, and one small package that had been perched on top of her load tumbled down and landed at her feet. He saw her look at it. He could almost hear her making a decision. Shaking her head and muttering something darkly, she staggered on. Keeping his distance and making no sound, Severus followed her. On his way up the grand staircase, he looked down at the little package and hesitated a moment before picking it up. It was squarish and rather heavy. Down the corridor and up another flight of stairs, around one corner and then up again, he followed her at a discreet distance. Why did she not use magic? Why huff and puff and drop things when an elementary levitation spell would suffice? For the first time he wondered, could this woman not-but that was impossible, unthinkable. No professor, even one who taught muggle studies, would be hired at Hogwarts without the ability to do magic. Not even Dumbledore, whose staff appointments frequently raised eyebrows, would have-or would he? Severus thought momentarily of Hagrid and his puzzlement grew. He had never yet, he reflected, seen the Collymore woman perform magic of any kind. He was still pondering this when they arrived in view of her little classroom where the door had been propped open with yet another package. She disappeared inside for several moments, and he heard a muffled sort of thump that indicated she had deposited her burden. He hesitated inside an alcove, watching the open door and unsure of why he had come. When she emerged, he disillusioned himself immediately and almost reflexively, fading into the background without a word. She walked past him. Was it his imagination or was her jaw rather set? When she disappeared down the nearest set of stairs, he flowed back into visibility and slipped over to her classroom door. Inside was an explosion of color, halfway complete. There were shelves now lined with muggle books and hooks on which muggle garments hung. A few of the boxes she had carried in, now open, revealed an assortment of paints and dyes and clay. Posters lined the walls or were rolled up on desks, waiting to be hung. They were static, muggle images, mostly of people and places he didn't recognize. Airbrushed teenage celebrities, colorful cars, a large photo of a muggle man floating in zero gravity, near a window from which the earth could be distantly seen. Behind the desk, in place of honor, was a collage of rock and roll concert posters. They didn't look new. He saw The Who, Fleetwood Mac, Cat Stevens. A memory fought for purchase on the slippery climb to the peak of his attention. Sitting on his own dingy bedroom floor, the window open to coax in a summer breeze. A needle moving over the turntable he'd lifted from his father's sitting room while he was at work. The sound of an electric guitar as a girl spun around in exuberant dance, red hair sliding from her shoulder down her back.
He pulled himself away. Back to this bizarre kindergarten classroom, only partially concealing the ancient and dignified stones of Hogwarts castle. He walked toward the front desk, his eyes avoiding the images plastered above it. But on the desk, lying haphazardly open on its face to save the page, was a used paperback copy of The Remains of the Day. He set the package down next to it, and because it bothered him, he placed a loose bit of parchment in the book at her page and closed it. Then he turned and left, going the long way around so as to be sure not to meet her on the stairs.