"Being a celebrity isn't all that it's cracked up to be, now is it Potter?" Snape said snidely, and Harry Potter fought to think about pink elephants rather than strangling the man in a fit of pique.
Harry stood wordlessly, his green eyes levelly meeting the black pits that were this professor's eyes. Or they would have been levelly meeting them, if Harry wasn't eleven, and the Professor wasn't looming over him. It left Harry with a bit of a crick in his neck, looking up like this, and certainly it didn't bespeak composure. Abruptly, the Professor whirled away in a swirl of black robes.
Snape growled out the answers to his (mostly impossible) questions, his eyes firmly trained on Potter's. Harry hadn't dared glance down.
Snape snapped at the rest of the classroom, "Well? Why aren't you copying that down?!" Harry picked up a pen, and began to write, before belatedly realizing he wasn't actually writing on parchment. Feeling a bit more out of sorts than he usually did, he pulled out a bit of foolscap, and hoped that Snape didn't want to take points for ruining the already blackened desk. The desk reminded him of Chemistry class, and he figured that cauldrons had to mean fire in the first place, so unless the ink was flammable... Pink Elephants! Harry thought, as the potions class progressed. Snape had snapped at them to follow the directions on the board, and Harry tried to, he really did. But inbetween thinking about what Ron was doing beside him (which looked to be a degree of incompetence that Harry wouldn't have chanced even if he was trying to be incompetent, which he hadn't really decided yet...), and thinking about pink elephants - and trying to decipher Snape's spiky handwriting (couldn't he have simply printed it?!), Harry knew he had lost track. Possibly more than once.
As Snape demonstrated proper bottling technique, Harry took the time to look at other people's potions. Draco Malfoy's looked nearly perfect, as did Granger's. Other than that, though, Harry's looked nearly correct in consistency, even if the color was more chartreuse than pine green. Neville's potion actually had chunks floating in it, and Harry thought he didn't know anything that could cause that reaction. Certainly none of the ingredients in the potion.
Snape accepted Malfoy's potion with a drawling, "Well done," but simply scowled at Granger, who looked a bit wilted - Harry heard Lavender saying "He's always like that, don't take it so hard" from out in the corridor as the sound drifted toward him. He was the last person to hand in his potion - less from actually needing the time, than from trying to see what Snape's reactions to the other students were going to be. As twisty as the man seemed, Harry Potter had picked up on his dislike for Gryffindors (the twins hadn't been pulling his leg about that one.)
As Harry passed in his potion, Snape's visage turned to a frown, and he said sternly, "Potter, come with me," as he set the potion down on his desk alongside the others in the rack. Glad that he didn't have another class after this, Harry frowned slightly, wondering what was going on. Snape stood and strode out of the classroom, as Potter hurried to catch up - and then hurried some more, in an awkward almost-trot, almost fast-walk. "Sir, can you please slow down?" Harry Potter wheezed out, and - almost as predicted - Snape sped up. Harry shifted speed, into an easy lope that would, no doubt, leave him redfaced by the time he was - where were they going? They seemed to have climbed out of the dungeons, and be heading higher. A thin line of trepidation started to flow through Harry, left to wonder about where they were going, and exactly how much trouble he was in. His potion hadn't been that bad, had it?
[a/n: anyone got any guesses? Leave a review.]