cxciv. the morning post

She sat in the belly of a plush chair, turned away from the fire guttering in the soot-encrusted grate.

"How is his progress?" she asked of the shadowed figure in the doorway. It was an ugly room that may have been nice in the past but had fallen into disrepair. Mold gathered and dripped along the top of the walls, and the wainscoting had buckled, chewed by insects and rodents. A noisy draft came whistling in from a window she could not see.

"Middling," the figure replied. "But Dumbledore suspects nothing."

Harriet leaned from one side to the other and felt the weight of her skin shift with her. It hung, ponderous, pulling at her bones.

Something reeked like old, rotting meat.

"Old fool," she spat with obvious glee. "They should have put him out of his misery years ago." The dry scrape of scales upon wood reached her ears, and a large serpentine head rose above the chair's arm. The creature inspected her, dark tongue flickering in and out.

"Your body is failing you," the snake told her.

A heavy sigh left Harriet, and though she tried to move her hand, it remained stubbornly settled against her lap, out of her vision. "I suppose you're right," she agreed lightly. "Muggles have such little use these days."

Harriet felt herself falling farther into the chair, sinking, the room bleeding away as she plunged deeper and deeper into the dark. It swelled over her head like thick, sticky tar, and Harriet gasped, kicking, trying to keep herself above it.

"Harriet."

The thick liquid slid through her fingers, her breath coming in short, broken inhales, stuttering—.

"Harriet."

She plunged under the surface and pressed her hands over her ears, curling her knees toward her chest.

"You can't ignore me, girl!"

Cold, frigid fingers encircled her wrists, and Harriet refused to open her eyes, refused to listen. Go away, she thought. Go away, go away!

The fingers tugged, tightened. "Let me in!"

"Harriet—."

"LET ME IN!"

"Harriet—!"

Harriet woke with a start, the book open on her lap slipping through her knees to thump upon the rug. She blinked, eyes blurry, as the all-consuming dark of her dreams peeled back in favor of the common room's fuzzy light. It looked aquamarine in the morning glow and glistened like polished gems on the silver lanterns.

Hermione leaned closer to her, placing Harriet's fallen glasses in her hand. "Did you sleep out here all night?"

Harriet blinked again, the edges of her nightmare still clinging to the peripheries of her mind, and she thought back. She remembered Grimmauld, then the end of their holiday and getting back on the train bound for Hogwarts. She recalled snagging one of the comfortable chairs in the common room, intent on reading just a bit more of the book Mr. Flamel gave her after her friends went to bed, but her eyes had gotten heavy, and Harriet didn't recollect anything else.

"I guess," she said, shifting. Someone had covered her with a blanket, and Harriet stared at it, puzzled, before tossing it aside with a shake of her head. "Err…what time is it?"

"Almost time for breakfast. Are you feeling well?"

"Mhm." Harriet yawned and put on her glasses, looking around. Spotting her book on the floor, she leaned forward to pick it up. What was that dream? she wondered. Like most of her nightmares, the details had dissolved as soon as she woke, and every passing second took a bit more of the image away. The feeling, however, lingered. It irritated her, like an itch she couldn't reach, a nagging anxiety she could not comprehend.

"You know you can talk to us about whatever is bothering you, right?"

"I said I'm fine!" Harriet snapped, and the moment the words crossed her mouth, she regretted them, smothering the sudden, inexplicable burst of anger in her chest. Why did Hermione and Elara have to keep asking, though? She was fine. Everything was fine. "I'm sorry, Hermione."

Hermione straightened, a clear flash of hurt in her eyes before it disappeared. "Fine. Well, if you want to make it in time for breakfast, we need to leave soon."

Feeling like the worst kind of friend, Harriet got up and took her book to the dorm, having just enough time to wash her face and change her clothes before she had to grab her satchel and follow Elara and Hermione out of the common room. Elara was thoroughly unimpressed with her sleeping arrangements.

"I bet Hermione five Sickles you'd been kidnapped again," she said, deadpan.

"And you didn't come looking?"

"I decided you would either show up by morning or Snape would have a coronary. Either option suited me fine."

Harriet kicked her shoe.

"Get kidnapped at a decent hour, will you?"

"I wasn't kidnapped! I was sleeping in the common room!"

"That Slytherin has regular access to. Ugh."

Harriet paused, wondering again who'd thought to cover her with a blanket. Definitely not Slytherin. "Thoughtful" and "Slytherin" did not exist in similar spheres.

They continued to gibe one another on their way to the table, urging a bunch of first years at the end to budge up and make room. Harriet dragged a platter of toast closer to her and sighed as she picked out what she wanted to eat. Someone had thought it clever to stuff a bunch of sausages in the jam pot, and Harriet's eye twitched as she ate her toast dry.

"Which of you idiots made a mess of the food?" Elara snapped at the first years. Godfrid, Baddock, and Pritchard looked suitably frightened, and the three boys pointed fingers at one another, refusing to take the blame.

"I wish they wouldn't waste things like that," Hermione muttered as the greasy mess vanished from the table, along with a tray of kippers someone had poured pumpkin juice into. "The house-elves work to make all this food, and they ruin it."

"Privileged cunts," Harriet said, doctoring her morning tea. Unlike anyone else at that table, she'd brushed against starvation more than once in her life, thrown into her cupboard for 'misbehavior' after being denied supper, then Aunt Petunia would fixate on the latest bit of neighborhood gossip, and Harriet would miss more than one meal in a row. She'd had to make do on scraps or rubbish, and it rubbed her the wrong way when the prats wasted food when it was so plentiful.

"Harriet!" Hermione hissed.

"She's not wrong," Elara told her. "Most of them are from well-off, pure-blood homes who don't care much where their food comes from or who prepares it."

"And you don't see how—vile that is?"

"Of course I do. But we can't very well nanny the whole of Wizarding society, can we?"

The post arrived before Hermione and Elara could have another argument over house-elves. A parliament of owls out of Diagon delivered the morning Prophet across the Great Hall, those who didn't pay a monthly subscription fee rifling through their pockets for payment. Harriet took up her copy before the impatient bird dropping it off could knock over her tea.

Printed across the front page was an entire spread by Rita Skeeter covering the Yule Ball—and she'd somehow managed to include photos of each of the champion couples. Harriet's name was neatly typed beneath her rather awkward image dancing with Krum.

"Oh, fucking hell," Harriet muttered as she again heard the steady rise of whispers and felt eyes glancing in her direction. She didn't look farther down the table where the Durmstrang students congregated, taking up room.

"How nice," Elara drawled with her own copy open. "She wrote that you're 'thirteen' and 'obviously hunting for a partner to move up in society.' You're apparently a hussy, Harriet."

"Great." Harriet viciously turned the page—nearly tearing it—and read on. Another Skeeter article entitled "Dumbledore's Giant Mistake" was about Hagrid and included an unflattering picture of him seemingly snapped somewhere in Hogsmeade. Skeeter stated Hagrid was a half-giant—and went on to pontificate and list far too many intimate details about Hagrid's life.

"How could she possibly know this about Hagrid?" Harriet demanded before reading aloud, "'Albus Dumbledore surely has a duty to ensure that the student body is warned about the dangers of associating with part-giants. 'He's just so terrifying and mean," says Pansy Parkinson, a fourth-year student. "We're all terrified to go out on the grounds alone knowing he's out there.' Parkinson!" Harriet shouted at the girl seated several spots down the bench. "What is this absolute nonsense you're spewing to Skeeter?"

Pansy sniffed, picking over a roll. "I'm allowed to give my opinion to whoever I want."

"That's not an opinion—it's a bloody lie!"

Harriet scanned the High Table, but Hagrid wasn't there. He wouldn't actually believe what Pansy had said, would he? No one feared him. Sure, Hagrid was tall and large—but put him next to Professor Slytherin, and Harriet knew exactly which person she found more intimidating.

She looked back to her friends—and Elara had gone white as a ghost, staring slack-jawed and horrified at the open paper in her shaking hands. Harriet knew the bit about Hagrid was outrageous, but not enough to elicit a reaction like that. Confused, she kept reading until she found the small article at the bottom that Elara had seen. It had a photo of her, captured at the trial during the summer.

"THE STRAYING HOUSE OF BLACK

Among the glamorous crowd of the Yule Ball, you might have been able to find Elara Black, fourteen, daughter of former Azkaban inhabitant and general lunatic Sirius Black II, thirty-five. I say you 'might' have been able to find Miss Black, because though she is a pretty girl, Miss Black was escorted to the event by her cousin, a Mr. Draco Malfoy, fourteen, and did not dance with any other participant. She stood to the side with her god-sister and newly minted social climber, Harriet Potter, thirteen, and made no move to accept the invitations of the respectable boys who approached her.

Though an heiress to a pure-blood House, Miss Black spent her formative years in a religious Muggle children's home, a St. Gile's Institute, before her emancipation occurred in 91'. This reporter braved the facility to interview the Muggles there and came to learn several new facts about Miss Black.

'Her father is a maniac,' says Father Phillips, fifty-five. 'I don't know how they came into contact or started to correspond, but I imagine that's where Elara got her wildness from. That man took that girl illegally and you should say that to your superiors. Reporting him to authorities has done nothing for me. They can't find his name in the registries.'

'The girl has the devil in her,' says Matron Fitzgerald, seventy-two. 'There's something unholy about her.'

What might that unholiness be, dear reader? I became privy to information during the Yule Ball, in which Miss Black impersonated a wall flower for much of the evening. This was, in fact, because Miss Black spent the night watching and lusting after Fleur Delacour, eighteen, the Beauxbatons' champion and starlet of the school. Delacour danced with her date, Roger Davies, eighteen, utterly unaware she was the victim of someone's peeping perversions.

A worrying trend has begun at Hogwarts, more and more children expressing interest in same-sex partners, much to the dread of their parents and families. 'We're already so small in number,' cries Huldah Burke, forty-five, wife of Silas Burke, member of the Wizengamot. 'It's terrible! What kind of agenda is Dumbledore allowing to be taught at that school? Between the Muggles and the homosexuals, magic will cease to exist!'

Whether or not you share Mrs. Burke's sensible fears, dear reader, this reporter has to wonder what will happen to our storied families if even the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black can begin to stray? What will happen to our society if we have no heirs?"

Harriet couldn't believe the rubbish she was reading. Worst of all, she could not comprehend where Rita had obtained her information. She and Hermione knew Elara liked witches in that way—but only Harriet had seen how Elara watched Fleur, and she didn't say one bloody word to anyone!

How could the Prophet let her write about someone like this? An underage someone, no less. Did Skeeter really have no oversight whatsoever?

Elara looked as if she might vomit, and given her tendency to sick up whenever she got upset or overly stressed, Harriet thought it likely she might make a mess right on the table. Katherine Runcorn folded back the edge of her own paper and sneered at her. "You're disgusting, Black."

Harriet's temper flared. "Shut your fucking mouth, Runcorn."

In an instant, the candles overhead went out, and half the glasses in the Great Hall shattered, people shrieking as hot beverages or cold juice burst over their arms or poured into their laps. Harriet herself cursed as her scalding tea sloshed over the table's edge and ran down her thighs.

Elara rose and bolted from the room, stone-faced and wringing her hands until Harriet worried she might break bones. She made to follow her, but Hermione laid a hand on Harriet's shoulder. "I'll go. You've got a letter."

Harriet did have a letter, one from a shrieking owl she didn't know who'd not appreciated Elara breaking glass while he swept in. Hermione departed, rushing after Elara, and Harriet took the note off the owl just as another came—followed by another, and another.

"What in the world…?"

It wasn't an odd occurrence for Harriet to receive post. She liked to write others—liked to read stories from people about their lives, and though she'd spent much of her childhood afraid to ask "stupid questions," she didn't hesitate to reach out when she had questions about an author's book or someone's field of study. Sometimes they didn't answer, though usually they did and sounded happy someone had taken an interest. Sometimes the letters even came from birds other than owls—most notably Mr. Flamel's raven. Lockhart once sent a pair of twittering, blue-feathered parakeets who had to nap in Harriet's hood before they could fly all the way home.

However, Harriet had never experienced such an influx of letters from so many unfamiliar—and frankly mean—post carriers before. She avoided having her fingers snapped by the first owl as she tore open the envelope and found only a brief note inside.

What could Viktor Krum possibly see in an ugly girl like you? Leave him alone!

The next contained a similar line, and the one after that added, "You're a wretched girl for using him!"

"Talk sense into your god-sister! That kind of behavior is catching—!"

"Don't think yourself better than a simple alley tart for using that boy—!"

"Viktor could never be interested in someone like you—!"

Logically, Harriet knew Hogwarts got the Prophet later than other parts of the country—namely London—but she couldn't imagine what kind of sycophant read Skeeter's work and immediately decided to write a supposedly "thirteen-year-old" girl ruddy hate mail! She had a dozen letters already!

Frustrated, Harriet gripped one of the unopened envelopes too tightly, and the material dissolved under her fingers as whatever glutinous, snot-like substance inside bubbled and burst. Harriet dropped the post and tried to wipe the gunk off with her napkin, but it clung to her skin and transferred to her other hand. Then, it began to burn.

"Ow!" Harriet hissed, breathless. She grabbed the nearest metal goblet of water and dumped it over her hand, adding to the mess on the table—but the substance on her skin lingered and resisted the liquid. "Ouch!"

"What is that, Potter?" Malfoy demanded. Most of her House had turned to watch what was happening, all of them eying the stinking, pus-filled envelope with revulsion.

"I—I don't know," she stammered.

"Don't just sit there! Go to the hospital wing!"

Harriet stumbled to her feet—clumsy without the use of her hands—and made for the door. Her skin began to swell and sting in earnest, taking on a tomato-red hue that probably matched the color of her cheeks. She only made it halfway across the entrance hall toward the main stair vault when a familiar baritone shouted her name.

"What are you into now, girl?" Snape demanded as he swept closer from the side corridor. He must have seen her leave the hall and followed through the staff exit.

Fighting the tears in her eyes, Harriet held up her hands and all but snarled, "Some nutter sent this—this rubbish to me! Because of that stupid Skeeter article about the stupid dance!"

Snape wrapped his fingers around one of Harriet's wrists and yanked the hand closer to his face, giving the substance a slight sniff. His eyes narrowed. "Bubotuber Pus," he said with a sneer, letting her go. "Come." He gestured her toward the dungeons.

"I'm going to the hospital wing!"

"If it hasn't escaped your notice, a great number of people left for the hospital wing to get treated for burns after Black's little temper tantrum."

"Don't—."

"Pomfrey will be busy, and your hands need tending now. Follow me, Potter."

Harriet would have done about anything to abate the burning in her skin, so she hurried after the Potions Master without further question. He brought her farther past his office to the portrait of a laconic fletcher that guarded his quarters, giving the password before they both stepped inside.

"Stay there," Snape ordered, jabbing a finger at one of the armchairs near the hearth. Harriet sat, hands still held up, and Snape disappeared into an attached room. Despite the pain in her limbs, Harriet took the chance to glance about the space, taking in the rather woebegone furnishings and the sheer number of tomes crammed into the shelves. Honestly, it was a wonder the man hadn't been buried under an avalanche by one of the bookcases giving out.

Harriet had never thought much about where her professors slept or what their quarters might resemble. She imagined McGonagall had a lot of tartans, and Slytherin probably slumbered in a crypt like the soul-sucking monstrosity he was. For Snape…well. He had very little permanence to him, and if he'd ever admitted to enjoying anything in his entire life, Harriet would eat her shoes. His sitting room was tidy enough—but dusty, the hearth blackened, books and scrolls and journals left forgotten on the lopsided coffee table.

The strangest thing in the room had to be the simple record player in the corner with a modest collection of vinyl sleeves stacked underneath. That was a weird thought, Snape liking music. Maybe it wasn't music. Maybe it was just the recorded wails of his students being tortured by his exams.

The wizard returned a moment later, carrying several items in his pale hands. The door that led to what Harriet guessed was probably his bedroom and the loo snapped shut so quickly, it nearly caught the hem of his robes. Snape crouched in front of Harriet and dropped a heavy ceramic bowl into her lap without ceremony.

"Hold your hands over that."

Harriet did as instructed—and nearly shrieked when Snape dumped the contents of a light blue bottle over her swollen, agonized skin. A garbled noise left her, and her leg jerked of its own accord as she fought the urge to fling off the substance. She kicked Snape in the shin, earning a grunt and a sharp glare.

"Mind yourself, Potter."

"What is that stuff?"

"It is an agent meant to freeze and kill the cells within the pus before it can eat through your flesh. It will, however, remove a layer of skin. Or two."

"It burns!"

"It will cease in a moment."

Gasping, Harriet swore she'd find whoever sent that bloody envelope and make them eat it—right after she fed Rita Skeeter to something unpleasant, like those giant, chittering spiders in the forest. How dare she out Elara like that! How dare she claim any about her was perverse!

Snape inspected her hands, dark hair falling forward as he bowed his head. "What possessed you to open post from an unknown sender?"

"I didn't. It ate through the parchment." Harriet neglected to mention her squeezing it had caused the rupture. "Isn't Hogwarts supposed to be warded against that kind of stuff?!"

"The post is warded against Dark magic. If every item that could possibly do harm were prohibited from the premises, I couldn't very well have these potions to fix your hands, now could I?"

Harriet glowered at the snide edge in his tone. "It's all that ruddy bint's fault—Skeeter! How can she write that tripe and get away with it? She basically called for Hagrid to be canned, and what she said about Elara—."

Harriet's building rant cut itself short when Snape peeled off a large hunk of the hardened Bubotuber Pus and dropped it into the bowl. It did, indeed, rip a layer of skin off with it, leaving one patch of Harriet's hand raw and slightly bloody. Harriet dug her shoulders into the deflated padding on the chair behind her and tried not to flinch.

"Skeeter is a leech, and simply a symptom of a greater issue," Snape commented without looking up, continuing his task. He found a patch of gunk still spongy to the touch and poured more of the frigid potion over it. Harriet would feel more embarrassed about having her hands covered in plant bogeys if it didn't hurt so much. "She panders to her audience. Today she's traditional, and tomorrow she'll be progressive. Today she'll paint Black as a heathen, and tomorrow praise her for being brave. It does not matter to the media. Skeeter is not alone in that."

"It should matter because it's not progressive, it's what's right—and it's not Skeeter's business! It's private!"

"Don't shout at me, Potter. It's called freedom of the press. She's done a lot worse than nettle school girls in her ignominious career."

Harriet clamped her mouth shut, and Snape continued to peel off the pus until her left hand was mercifully clean—if swollen to twice its usual size and covered in weeping sores. Snape uncapped a bottle of Deflating Draft and poured it into his palm before rubbing it into Harriet's skin.

She watched him work in silence until she managed to get her temper under control. "She shouldn't have known that about Elara," she told him, voice quieter. She flexed her fingers at Snape's bidding, and he dribbled Essence of Dittany over the raw spots. When it fizzled, nothing remained but a slight soreness in her muscles. "Only I knew about…about Fleur. And she wasn't—lusting after her, or whatever rot Skeeter wrote, like a lecher." Her cheeks tinged pink, mortified to be discussing this with Snape. "She just likes her and thinks she's pretty. And you know Elara, she's not…demonstrative."

Snape raised a brow at her word choice as he commenced cleaning her other hand, and Harriet huffed. "I read!"

"I am aware. Perhaps you should spend less time speaking like a foul-mouthed guttersnipe and people wouldn't be so surprised when something more than two syllables crosses your teeth."

"Arsehole," Harriet muttered. Snape pulled a patch of skin off a bit rougher than needed. "Ow, ow, ow—."

"Stop complaining, you twit. It will be gone in a moment."

Another splash of potion chilled a burning patch on her left palm, Harriet exhaling through her nose, reaching up to tentatively adjust her glasses with her healed hand. To distract herself, she questioned why Snape kept these potions in his rooms as opposed to his office. The blue bottle with the cold liquid that Harriet didn't have a name for had been about half-empty when he brought it out.

Well, I guess Bubotuber Pus is a potion ingredient. We had to squeeze it out of those slippery pods in Herbology for Sprout, but at least we got dragonhide gloves then. Harriet flexed her fingers again at Snape's command. Snape probably gets all sorts of nasty gunk on his hands when he's working and needs the potions regularly.

She studied the crown of his head still bent close to her hands, the black hair as dark as her own falling like a gloomy curtain around his face. The scars around his left eye looked worse at this proximity as the thin white lines scattered about his lids came into focus. The eye itself looked normal, indistinguishable from the other. Not for the first time, Harriet pondered what had happened to him.

She hadn't realized she'd been staring until Snape's eyes flicked to her face, and Harriet blinked.

"A house-elf will screen your post until your new-found…celebrity fades."

"They won't get hurt like me, will they?" she asked as Snape stood and vanished the bowl from her lap.

"No. They're not so foolish as to open potentially dangerous post from strangers without testing it first."

Harriet grumbled at his attitude but nonetheless said, "Thank you, Professor." Her hands felt tender and smelled strongly of Dittany, but he hadn't left a single scar behind.

Instead of answering, Snape looked down his long nose and studied Harriet, his black eyes flat and immovable, his brow lowered in thought. Harriet shifted, a bit uneasy in his silence, and eyed the exit.

"A moment, Potter."

Without another word, Snape swept back across the lounge and stepped into his bedroom. Harriet heard a trunk thump on the stone floor, the latch rattling as the Potions Master threw it open. He returned a second later bearing a narrow, faded box.

"Take this."

Confused, Harriet stood and wiped what remained of the Dittany on her tea-stained skirt before accepting the box. Snape let it go and immediately folded his arms against his chest, his robes coming around him like the closing wings of a sleeping bat.

Harriet opened the lid to find a pale wand nestled on familiar velvet lining. Her own wand, before Set messed with it, had come into such a box.

"What is this for?"

Snape fidgeted—as much as he ever fidgeted, which meant his shoulder shifted ever so slightly, and the pale fingers curled over his biceps twitched. "It was your mother's."

Harriet nearly dropped both the wand and the box in her shock. "Mum's wand?" It was shorter than hers and thinner toward the tip, the handle inlaid with soft designs. She could see where the wood had weathered ever so slightly from her mum's fingers pressing into it again and again over ten years of use.

She looked at it with appreciation and gently slipped it from the dusty velvet. The magic that prickled in her fingertips felt softer than what she'd come to know, softer and less impatient. Steady and yet bubbly, mischievous.

"But I—well, I thought my parents' wands were lost or destroyed or—locked in the Potter vault or something?"

"I don't know what happened to Potter's and don't especially care. Your mother bequeathed hers to me in her will."

"But why?" Harriet didn't mean to be rude; it genuinely seemed an odd choice on Lily Potter's behalf. She understood Snape and Lily had been friends since childhood and had begun reconciling that friendship before Voldemort came knocking, but why would Lily give Snape her wand?

"She knew if I was alive to receive it, I could ensure it made it into your hands when you came of age."

"Oh." Harriet opened her mouth—then paused, looking up at Snape, the man dimly lit by the candles that had come to life when they entered the room. That was an odd way to word that, she thought. But, then again, Snape could talk in neat little circles when he wanted to. He wasn't a loquacious bloke, but he had a way of skirting answers that made Harriet more than a bit jealous.

"I'm not of age," she pointed out as she gently returned the wand to the box and fit the lid back into place.

"Obviously. Lily would forgive me for thinking practicality more important than tradition." He snorted. "Trouble is always at your beck and call, Potter—whether it be from your boyfriend's lunatic fans or the Dark Lord. Carry a second wand with you."

"He's not my boyfriend." Snape merely rolled his eyes. "I've never heard of someone carrying two wands before."

"Get a brace for your leg. Seeing as our Ministry has deemed them illegal in Britain, you'll have to write to Johannes Jonker in America. His work comes with glamors guarded against casual inspection."

Harriet frowned and peered down at Snape's leg, but he gave her a look that clearly said he'd never tell her if he had a second wand on his person or not. Maybe those buttons on his trousers on the side of his calf served a purpose after all.

Snape cleared his throat.

"If you're done impeding on my time, you have a class you're missing." His chin jerked to the side as he looked at the mantel's battered carriage clock. "Charms. I'm not writing you a pass. Flitwick will have to get over it."

Privately, Harriet didn't think Professor Flitwick would care if she arrived late so long as she apologized. He saved his sternness for students who slacked off, and Harriet and her friends had been favorites of his ever since second year when they discovered the Moon Mirrors.

"But what about Elara?"

"Leave Black to the Headmaster."

"But—."

"Go."

Sighing, Harriet gave up arguing and resolved to find Elara as soon as Charms ended. She hoped Hermione had stayed with her. If one person said a smart-arse comment in her hearing about what Skeeter wrote, Harriet would hex their mouths shut.

She turned to the portrait door and started toward it, stopping only to glance at Snape. "Hey, is this my Yule gift?"

Her question managed to unsettle the Potions Master. He sputtered and glared. "I—no! I do not give gifts!"

Harriet shrugged. "Whatever you say, Professor."

"Potter!"

Too late, Harriet had already stepped through the portal to the corridor beyond, and she hurried away, her mother's wand clasped tight to her chest with her hands fully healed.


A/N:

Harriet: "Is this a belated Yule present?"

Snape: "Absolutely not."

Harriet: "So it isa belated Yule present."