3.
There's a War Going On Here
Severus' esteem for the other chemistry teacher continues to fade over the course of the next week. She is terse and irritable with him at every opportunity. Despite his best intentions, they snipe at each other almost constantly. It's a shame, because she's the only member of staff who seems not to be an idiot. But she also seems determined to provoke him, and this is something Severus finds deeply irksome.
One day, nearly two weeks into his tenure, Hecate slips through the storeroom that joins their classrooms and settles herself in an empty seat beside the unsuspecting Brit Parson. Hecate's lip ticks with satisfaction at the way Brit physically recoils from her. Severus' eyes catch on her as he sweeps them over the students and his mouth curls with distaste. She has taken Bianca's comment on his first day, words to the effect of wanting Hecate to keep an eye on him, in a managerial rather than supportive sense, and has been making overtures about it all week.
She clasps her hands in her lap and meets his gaze defiantly. She takes a twisted pleasure in knowing how much she's annoying him. He had been trying to explain the difference between atoms and ions to the third form students when she slunk in. He has drawn two efficient diagrams on the whiteboard to illustrate his point, a neutral sodium and chlorine atom. Hecate has tried precisely this section of the syllabus on year nines past and has found, over her regretful time here, that they need far gentler leading towards the concept. Hecate resents it, of course. At her last school, the students would have absorbed this by rote out of sheer fear of their parents. Here, chemistry is an abstract and pointless pastime to most, except those attempting to manufacture drugs. Hecate has learnt that introducing the purpose of these concepts is critical to students at the BS Comp retaining anything. She ponders interrupting him, showing him up in front of the class, but she worries that might appear helpful. Helping him is never her intention.
Hecate suspects he's objectively less offensive than all other members of the teaching staff, but she still finds him superior and irksome, and Hecate doesn't possess the requisite calmness to let him go on thinking he's better than her. So she needles him, finds little ways to undermine him in the hopes of putting him in his place.
She decides the impact of her criticism will be maximised if she waits until the end of class, makes her assessment while the students are still filing out so they can hear as they pass. Severus knows exactly what she's doing as soon as he hears her heels clicking up the room to his desk at the conclusion of class, and he hates her for it.
He can imagine the laughter of the students as they strut down the hallways, 'did you hear the way HB shredded Snape? Bloody classic.'
"Why do you insist on undermining me?" He hisses at her before she's even started speaking.
"I was intending to make a suggestion to one of my colleagues. I missed when that became a method of undermining."
Severus tosses his hair off his face, irritated at his lack of control. "We both know your suggestions are not intended to help me."
"Do we?" Hecate retorts, eyes flashing as if there's lightening behind them – sudden, fleeting, lethal. He'd appreciate the drama of it, were they were on better terms.
While her intention at the commencement of this class had been to take him down a peg, standing before him Hecate can feel the despair rolling off him. She is painfully reminded of her first weeks in this place. How profoundly alone she had felt here. How much of a failure. The look in his eyes is one she recognises from meeting her own reflection. And the truth is, she is still alone here; she's simply accepted it. Seeing the look in his eyes, such a perfect mirror of her own, Hecate feels like maybe she could have an ally for the first time in longer than she can remember, if only she allows herself to.
Hecate Hardbroom is not ordinarily a woman who takes pity on people, but today she surprises herself by taking pity on Severus Snape. He looks so haggard with the need for nicotine and the force of their warfare that she's worried he'll commit an act of violence. She decides in this moment that he's good enough company to share her secret smoking place.
Hecate begins to walk away from him, pushes the door to the classroom. She turns her head back to him, saying "come with me" and barely pausing before setting off again. Severus isn't sure what to expect if he does. She seems to hate him so much that he's half convinced she's luring him somewhere to kill him. But, nevertheless, soon she feels rather than hears him following her, and then he's gliding beside her, a comfortable dark patch in her peripheral vision.
He hesitates when they reach the door of the second-floor female toilets, murmuring "Miss Hardbroom…"
"Don't be tedious." She snaps, pushing her way through the door without breaking stride. Severus pauses for another beat, then follows her. He catches sight of her slipping into the end stall and hesitates once again. He hears a click, the unmistakeable, delightful click of a lighter, and approaches the door just in time for her to blow a steady stream of smoke out of it. When he eventually enters and locks the door behind himself, Hecate remarks "You aren't always quick to react, are you, Severus?"
He takes the proffered pack of cigarettes from her hand – reading it correctly as a peace offering - and sets about lighting one. Once he's pulled the first intoxicating lungful of nicotine into his body, Severus replies "I prefer to have all possible information before deciding on a course of action."
"A very pure scientific position to take." She acknowledges.
"Do you advocate an alternative approach?" He queries, conscious that this is the first time they've been alone together for longer than it takes her to snipe at him, let alone confined to such a small space. Neither is confident enough in the dynamic between them to push the boundaries in any meaningful way. It is a process of very gentle investigation.
"Not at all. But bathrooms are not laboratories and there is little rational consideration in either of us smoking." Severus wants to protest that some of their students most definitely use bathrooms as a certain kind of laboratory, and that addiction isn't a rational state, but he holds his tongue, unsure how she'll take his contradicting her when they have so recently set foot on the path to comradery.
Hecate, lost somewhere in her memory, saves this situation and reinforces his first instincts about her by noting, "Having said that, at least three of our students have attempted to use toilets for a kind of chemistry…"
Severus' lips bend in a half smile, thinking how rare it is to find an equal in the bathroom of an underperforming comprehensive in Bristol.