a/n: hey, so, none of this belongs to me, blablabla. Thanks for the great feedback to those who have reviewed, and to any who haven't, please tell me what you think! Enjoy :)

Severus woke up the next morning on very very far edge of his bed. Upon realizing that, he flailed about, attempting to untangle his sheets and shift to the middle once more, but his alarm went off and made him jump about a mile, so that is how Severus ended up on the dungeon floor, thrashing to the Leprechaun Shuffle, the top hit on the billboards that week.

From the angle he'd fallen into, Severus could see a piece of lint and two tic tacs under his bed, which was weird since he'd never bought tic tacs in his life. He'd read in Witch Weekly once that they gave you breast cancer, and he was so not risking that. Plus, sometimes students cracked the orange kind open in class, giving Severus a blaring headache.

Speaking of blaring headaches, Severus had one that morning. He crawled around his bed to his nightstand, pretending he had a serious impairment and couldn't get up, and kerfuffled around for his Advil jar. Didn't kerfuffling have to do with commotion?

Severus took three Advil stuck together, which almost lodged in his throat, and he had to make cack sounds to dislodge it. We wondered what gives, since the dungeons had absolutely no moisture content in the air the last time he checked.

Since he had nothing else to do that morning, he went to talk dehumidifiers with Dumbledore, who had five in his office. He'd seen them last time he was there, curiously all arranged around Fawke's perch. He wondered if that was so Fawkes could make phoenix fire, and thought it was a whole lot of grief to go through for one dumb pet. Dumbledore must have heard his thoughts though, since he got real scary after that and harped about lesson plans and how Severus never filled out the "hopes for the children" part. Severus had always assumed that was optional, since hello, this school was not called Kids Kare. What was this school called? He thought on it as he left the office.

Severus had had some Bob the Builder types install a new gargoyle sink over the summer, since the old one was leaking and smelled like sewage. He'd ordered a gargoyle with a scarier face than the one before, and when he went to look at it he nearly got a heart attack from that thing. There was a puddle of sewage on the floor next to the new heart attack gargoyle. Severus frowned at it, swore a few times, and then pretended the water was a lake he needed to pass through to make it to his desk. Only in retrospect, he wished he hadn't done that, since his shoes had a million holes in them and his feet smelled weird for roughly forever after.

Severus romped around the classroom like mad, straightening desks and screaming a weird sister's tune. The dungeon door made a creak sound and he jumped about a foot, falling into a desk before glaring like mad at the intruder.

"Hello!" screamed the Macaroni Head, very unaware of the danger he was in. He thrust some books Severus didn't remember asking for onto a desk as he strode into the classroom, and sat on a chair Severus had just pushed in. Severus glared at him stormily, but the Macaroni Head was taking a vacation in lala land.

"Those books are for free, you know," he said, smiling way too big at Severus, who said nothing. The Macaroni Head got up and twirled around on the seat, raising one foot into the air and pointing his toes.

"THAT'S ballet!" he exclaimed, winking at Severus and sitting back down as suddenly as he'd gotten up. Severus stared at the guy. His lips were getting very tight feeling.

"I was thinking about a dueling club," the Macaroni Head began, completely changing the subject.

"GET. OUT," Severus said through his tight lips. His voice sounded dull and mufflish to him which made him almost crack up, so he pressed his lips harder together and peered at the Macaroni Head through squinted eyes. The Macaroni Head made a good decision for once and decided to skedaddle. Severus let out a choked cackle after he left and then shut the door and glue gunned the thing shut. The books the Macaroni Head had left on his desk were all vandalized with about a billion signatures. The top one had the Macaroni Head's grinning face on it, which kept moving and winking at him. It said MAGICAL ME! in big letters. Severus flipped through the books quickly. The last one was called YEAR WITH A YETI! which made Severus have a silent laugh attack. He threw them in his We Recycle Because We Care bag, which Professor Sprout had mistakenly left in his office when she was videotaping him to try and make a case for firing him three years ago. Severus thought that was a bunch of foolishness, since one of the first steps of being a successful spy was to cover up one's tracks, so maybe he deserved that recycle bag.

Severus belted out the rest of the weird sister tune and walked around the dungeon stapling diagrams of disgusting potions ingredients to the walls. He stapled his finger and abruptly stopped singing. His eyes got teary for a minute and his finger throbbed throbbingly. Severus limped to Madame Pomfrey's office when he found he couldn't dislodge the magically inserted staple and had to wait behind a serene Flitwick who said he thought he had the common cold.

"Only you should not be in the hospital wing for that," Severus scoffed at him, "Everyone gets the cold. What do you need, for Poppy to confirm that you have it?"

Flitwick just gave him a very dirty look and did a fake cough. Severus called him on it. Flitwick said something about Ravenclaw and the house cup, which was completely off the point, and looked like he was going to throw a tantrum, when Madame Pomfrey came out of her office and saw them standing there. She talked to Flitwick and felt his chest and then gave him some fruity medicine. Severus wondered if he got special treatment for being short.

Flitwick gave Severus a look as he left that seemed to suggest he thought Severus should be jealous of him. Severus ignored him and mouthed something in which the only real words were "house cup" at him. He got enraged and sped out of the hospital wing. Severus thought about what the hell this house cup thing could mean.

Madame Pomfrey was making a bed at the moment, and Severus stood there for a while, waiting for her to finish that job up, but as soon as Madame Pomfrey was done with one bed, she went on to the next one.

And the next. And the next. And the next. When Madame Pomfrey started to pull the sheets off of a bed that was already perfectly made, Severus decided enough was enough.

"Ah," he began. Poppy stared up at him through squinted eyes.

"I have a floo call to make, Severus," she said, edging toward her office.

Severus held up his stapled finger, feeling kind of dumb.

"Might you have some—

Poppy sprinted to her office and closed the door. Severus stared after that insane lady for a good minute before trailing over to the door and listening hard. He heard a bunch of things bumping around and what he thought was a toilet flushing, but there wasn't a whole lot of commotion after that. There was definitely no sound of anyone talking, so Severus used deductive reasoning to figure that there was actually no floo meeting so he was effectively wasting his time here. He tried to call angrily to Poppy through the door, but loud music that sounded like techno started blasting every time he started to talk, and he got sick of that real fast. Severus sat there for a while and then tried to rub the staple off of his finger onto the door, but that hurt way too much, so he tried to pull it out with his teeth, but his several snaggle-teeth kept getting in the way of that activity, so he left.

Before Severus swept out of the hospital wing, he decided to leave Poppy a disgruntled note on the door, but it took him a while to find a bent quill in his pocket, and when he started to write, Poppy spontaneously yelled something about the Quidditch cup and he made a scribble about a mile long. Snorting in disgust, Severus felt his staple finger pounding and threw his failed note in the trash before leaving.

He was going to walk down to the Great Hall for some cinnamon toast or something when he remembered he had his first class of the year in exactly .06 minutes.

Severus sprinted so hard upon that realization that he got that feeling in his throat where it was burny and cold. Pretending he was an asthma victim with a war wound, Severus bolted through the halls until he came to a part where there were still students walking around. Severus frowned at that; like, how come they weren't in class, because he was pretty sure the schedules had been printed perfectly clear except for that smudged set Professor Sprout tried to make. That was when Severus realized that everyone in the hall was a Slytherin, and remembered that he actually hadn't given Slytherin House its schedules that morning. Several of the students in the hall turned to stare at him when he entered their sight range, edging towards him and making Severus think of cattle, yammering on about what class should they go to and where did he leave the schedules?

Severus snapped at them to check the notice board in the Slytherin Common room, and then told some particularly persistent sixth years to go to Care of Magical Creatures, since he figured Hagrid wouldn't know the difference. Then he made his way down the dungeon stairs in a cold sweat, feeling like his staple finger was going to drop off, so they better just amputate him here like one of those teenagerish types in war movies.

When Severus got to his classroom door, the fifth year Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws were all gathered around something in the hallway. Severus pushed through them and looked at whatever the hell they were so interested in. Someone had left a Pantene bottle in front of Severus's door. Severus picked it up. Some kids behind him laughed. He gave them all a five hour detention on Saturday. The shampoo blared that it was for "extra oily hair!". There was a note stuck on the bottle that read, "Severus, this should give you the lu(s)ci(o)us locks you've always been looking for!" Severus didn't need a rocket scientist to tell him who sent that.

"Sir, uh, who did you give detention to?" a voice asked from behind him.

Severus didn't want to turn around because he couldn't tell what color his face was at the moment. Instead, he just stormed through the door to his classroom and threw the Pantene bottle in the recycle bag, which was getting quite a workout.

Class that day left Severus with an extreme desire to take Prozac. Lots of people kept giggling and since he didn't know what that suspicious business was about, he decided to give everyone detentions, just to be safe. On the way out, Severus handed everyone an assignment that wasn't actually in the book just to give them a piece of his mind. Some Hufflepuff kid couldn't even look at him without cracking up to his squashed-face friend, and oh please, like Severus couldn't see that. Severus wrote him down in his black book under his People to Get When They're Least Expecting It list, and then went into his private chambers and pulled the staple out of his finger manually, which made him pass out.