Severus woke early the next morning, wanting to be gone before he had to deal with his new dormmates. He packed all the books he might need and then made sure to lock his trunk both physically and magically before he left. Despite the feast the night before, he was starving again, and excited to see what was provided for breakfast. Unfortunately, it seemed as though the castle had other ideas: the castle had rearranged itself in the night, just as Hogwarts: A History had promised it would.
He remembered emerging from a corridor next to a giant suite of armor holding a flail, but taking the same turn this morning took him to an unexpected junction. Severus hesitated, not recognising any of the corridors, before choosing one at random. He walked for what felt like miles, and he kept passing things he was sure he would remember if he'd ever seen them before- a wall hanging of two wizards duelling, a painting of two men cutting a bezoar out of a goat, an alcove holding an enormous suit of armour that might have belonged to a dragon. He was beginning to worry now- he'd thought he was done with hunger once he left Spinner's End, but what if he never managed to find the breakfast room again? What if he never found his lessons, and got expelled?
He turned another corner, and his mouth dropped open. He'd found the library.
The room was enormous- bigger than a house, even Lily's house. Shelves stretched from the richly carpeted floor to the arched ceiling high above, and they were all filled with books. There were more books than Severus had seen in his entire life, and for a moment Severus even forgot his hunger. The things he could learn here!
"Can I help you?"
Severus spun to find a witch with a pinched face staring at him from behind the front desk.
"I'm looking for the Great Hall," Severus said.
She scowled. "You've come the wrong way." Obviously, Severus thought. "You need to go back down the corridor, then turn right by the big picture of a man on a horse."
"Thanks." Severus swallowed. "Are all of these books available for students?" He gestured at the shelves.
"All except the Restricted Section." She gave him a suspicious look. "But be careful with them."
"I'll be careful!" Severus said, hurriedly.
Apparently that had warmed her to him slightly, because she said, "Watch out for the missing stair on the second floor."
The directions worked, and the breakfast was almost as incredible as the feast the night before: fruit, pastries, toast, yoghurt, sausages, bacon and eggs. It was still early enough that the hall was almost empty, so he ate to his heart's content without embarrassment, and then snuck a pair of apples into his bag just in case.
Their first lesson was Transfiguration. Severus found his way to the classroom just before the bell, causing Mulciber and Avery to elbow each other and smirk. He took a seat at the back, just in time for Professor McGonagall to turn herself into a cat. The entire class gasped, and even Rosier looked impressed. Severus had read about Animagi, of course, but it was different to see it in practice.
The rest of the lesson was more mundane. She gave a long lecture about the principles of object-to-object transfiguration, which Severus mostly ignored: it was basic stuff, and he'd read it all already. Then she set them to work transfiguring a match into a needle. This was more challenging, but by the end of the class Severus had managed to make his matchstick grey and pointy. McGonagall was impressed enough to show it as an example to the rest of the class.
Her praise was enough to enrage Rosier. "You still shouldn't be here," he hissed to Severus, as they walked towards History of Magic. "Mudblood." Avery cracked his knuckles threateningly.
Over the next few days, he got to try all of the seven core subjects that the first years studied.
History of Magic turned out to be rather boring. Professor Binns was a ghost, so Severus would have expected him to have an interesting first-hand perspective of events. But instead, he droned on flatly while some students took notes and some simply fidgeted or napped.
Severus had expected Defence Against the Dark Arts to be his favourite, but it turned out to be much more basic than he expected. Professor Bampton was a bouncy witch who announced that they would be learning to defend themselves against simple curses and hexes to begin with. "Plenty of real world application for this sort of thing, at Hogwarts!" she said, with a tinkly laugh.
Charms was similar. Professor Flitwick was the shortest man Severus had ever seen, and he too began with extremely simple spells. Their first week of lessons focused on making pins slightly smaller with the Reducio charm. Severus managed it in his first lesson, having memorised The Standard Book of Spells before school began, and then spent the remaining classes pretending to work on it and hoping that Flitwick wouldn't ask him to help his classmates. Avery seemed to be having particular difficulty, and on one memorable occasion actually managed to make his pin disappear. (Avery claimed this was a magical disappearance, although Severus suspected that he had simply knocked it off his desk with his sleeve.)
Herbology was better than Severus expected. He'd learnt all the plants in One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi, but it was good to see the illustrations transformed into real plants. Peering into one of the greenhouses, Severus thought he even saw a young mandrake poking out of the soil.
On Wednesday nights, they went up to one of the towers to learn about Astronomy. All four houses shared this lesson, and so Severus got to share a telescope with Lily. He could barely suppress a grin as he watched her peering through the telescope, hair pulled back. It was so good to see her again, even if Sirius Black did try to push him into a missing staircase on the way back to their dormitories.
The consequence of a midnight Astronomy lesson was that Severus was exhausted for his first Potions class- a double length class on Thursday morning. They arrived to find that large, bubbling cauldrons had been staged around the class. Severus had an inkling of what most of them were, although they wouldn't be attempting any of them yet. The ones he recognised all came from Advanced Potion Making, a more advanced text than the Draughts and Potions assigned to first years. He was confused as to why they were there.
The potions teacher, Professor Slughorn, arrived a few moments later. He was a portly man, wearing a velvet waistcoat with large gold buttons. "Good morning, class." He cast his eyes around the class, giving Rosier a smile and nod of recognition. "Welcome to your first Potions class. Now, I've prepared a few of the more famous brews for you all to take a look at, to set the mood, you might say. These are the kind of thing you'll be capable of by the end of your schooling, should you work hard."
He strode to the first cauldron and took a theatrical sniff, closing his eyes as if in bliss. "Candied pineapple, Geranium bubble bath and… well, I don't need to tell you about that!" He winked and took a few steps back. Severus stared into the potion- it had Mother-of-Pearl sheen and pinkish steam gently spiralled above it. It didn't smell of candied pineapple to him. It smelt of Lily's house. "Who can tell me what this might be?"
Severus put his hand up immediately, and Slughorn pointed to him.
"It's Amortenia. A love potion."
"Correct!" Slughorn said. He began to explain that love potions didn't produce love, only infatuation, but Severus wasn't listening. Now that he knew there was to be a quiz, he was staring around the other cauldrons. A thick matt-black one, the surface not even stirring a little bit with bubbles- Draught of Living Death. A tiny cauldron of perfectly clear liquid- Veritaserum. A bright red one, the colour of blood, with the sharp smell of disinfectant- Lenimentum, the cure for almost all the blood and tissue diseases that killed muggles so regularly.
Slughorn processed around the room, pausing at each potion to examine it theatrically before asking the class what it could be. Severus got the next answer right, but on the third- Veritaserum- Clarence Wilkes' hand shot up first. Slughorn hesitated for a moment, before pointing to Wilkes.
"It's Veritaserum, Sir," he said, shooting a triumphant look at Severus. "Truth Potion."
On the last potion, the Draught of Living Death, Severus again provided the correct answer.
"Well done!" Slughorn said. "Snape, was it?"
"Yes, sir."
He gave Severus a thoughtful look. "Not a name I know." Severus tried to avoid looking across the dungeon, to where Rosier and Wilkes smirked at each other. "But a very impressive performance for a first year. Five points to Slytherin." Severus glowed.
He enjoyed the rest of the class less, as they followed a recipe for a simple potion to cure nausea. The recipe seemed to work well enough- his potion changed colour when the recipe said it should, from murky grey to a deep sky blue, and by the end of the class it was emitting the thin white steam expected. But the recipe was just a list of steps, with no explanation of why they had to do things. Severus found it frustrating.
He was in the Slytherin Common Room that evening, working through an essay McGonagall had set on the Five Laws of Transmutation, when Rosier grabbed his book and snapped it shut. As usual, Wilkes, Mulciber and Avery stood behind him.
"Hey!" Severus said, rising to his feet. The action had caught him by surprise- he'd been so absorbed in his essay that he hadn't even heard them approach. "Give that back!"
"I don't think I will." Rosier smirked around to his friends. "Only wizards get wizard books. Anyway, it's falling apart." He held the book by the cover and shook it. A few pages came loose and fluttered to the floor.
"If you're such a great wizard, why haven't I ever seen you use magic outside of class?" Severus nearly made a grab for the book but restrained himself. He was a wizard now- he wasn't going to prove Rosier right by snatching at things like some idiot muggle. Instead, he pulled his wand out of his pocket and tried a spell. "Accio book." The book pulled towards him weakly, and a few more pages managed to pull themselves loosely free.
Rosier and his friends laughed. "Not much of a spell, Snape."
Their laughter and the loose pages made him see red. Severus had outperformed Rosier in every single class so far, and yet he was the one with frayed robes and now half his Transfiguration book missing. "Aculeo," he snapped, waving his wand at Rosier's hand.
Roser yelped, as a large red welt sprung up on his wrist. "How dare you." His face was red, snarling. He had raised his own wand now, as had Wilkes.
"Go on then," Severus snarled back. "Show me some of that incredible wandwork you've been hiding from the teachers all week."
But before either of them could do anything, Lucius Malfoy appeared. "What is going on here? Snape, Evan, Clarence- people are trying to study, you know."
"Snape hexed me," Rosier whined, putting on his best innocent face. "Unprovoked. I was helping with his Transfiguration book. It's falling apart." He shook the book, shaking loose a few more pages. Severus wanted to hit him.
Malfoy examined the welt for a few moments. Then he turned to Severus. "Anything to say to that, Snape?"
Severus cast Rosier a venomous look. Of course there was more to say, but he couldn't see much point in saying it. It would be four against one. "No."
Malfoy let the silence hang for a moment, but if he doubted Rosier's story he gave no sign of it. "Fine. Detention, all next week. I don't know what they do in the muggle world, but we can't have fighting in the Common Room. Evan, give him his book back. With all the pages."
Rosier handed the book back with a scowl, and the five of them moved away to take seats nearer the fire. Severus glared at their retreating backs, wishing he had used a stronger hex on Rosier. Wishing he could hex all of them. His concentration broken, he packed up his stuff and went to finish his essay in the library.
Their first week had been hard work, but Severus was still disappointed when the last class of the week (double Herbology in the greenhouses) came to an end. They had plenty of homework to keep them occupied, but it wasn't the same as practising in every class. But at least he had a Saturday morning session with Lily in the library to look forward to.
As always, he felt his heart lift to see her. Her smile was always enchanting, but Hogwarts seemed to suit her: her pale skin positively glowed. "Sev! How are you doing?"
Severus thought of all the things he could tell her- his week of detentions, the pages missing from his transfiguration book, Snape's not a wizard name. But instead, he forced a smile. "I'm OK. Did Slughorn set up four potions and ask you to name them all?"
"He did! I got two of them right. Amortentia and Veritaserum. He's a sort of odd teacher, isn't he? It was almost like he was trying to test us in our first class."
Severus thought about that. "Yes, I suppose so. But I liked it. It was interesting to see all the famous potions we've read about. I knew all of them."
"Oh yes, it was!" she agreed. "We sat at a table with Amortentia, and it was quite interesting. All of us could smell different things, and then Professor Slughorn smelt something different again." Severus tried to suppress his jealousy at the thought of Lily sitting in Potions with friends other than him, discussing Amortentia.
"Yes," he agreed. "What did you smell?"
"New books, and the smell of rain in summer, and pumpkin pasties," Lily said. "What about you?"
"Oh, I didn't get a chance to smell it," Severus said, although he flushed slightly. "Anyway, what homework did you want to work on?"
"Let's finish our star charts," Lily said, pulling out her astronomy book. "It's going to be a lot of maths, I think." She flipped through it and pointed at a page that explained that the position of venus could be calculated, but the textbook would only approximate itt. "See? I want to calculate it properly."
Severus pulled out his more battered astronomy book, and then they went for a wander around the library to see what else they could find. They spent a few companionable hours working on their charts, going back and forth and cross-referencing different books, until Severus was sure that their star charts were going to be the best in the class.
And then it was lunchtime, and Lily disappeared to eat lunch with her Gryffindor friends while Severus sat at the Slytherin table. He was alone, but he propped a book open on a jug of pumpkin juice and tried not to look over at her.