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Harry looked down to see a pale-faced Prof... no, into the blanched face of Snape, a fifth year student.
To be honest, Severus Snape hadn't been on his mind when he came to this timeline.
After the man's death in 1998, the adult Harry Potter came to understand some part of the nasty-tempered Potions professor who had tormented and terrified him for six years of schooling, and was able to overcome and laugh off his deeply ingrained boyhood dislike and fear of him.
Once he had gotten over that, by the time he was in his mid-twenties, he had spent seven years without a functional portrait to converse with, and Snape had been naturally fading from his memory.
Harry chose the position of Potions Professor at Hogwarts, partly because of the sneaky entrapment by Slughorn, but mostly for the purpose of perfecting the Wolfsbane potion. As a Potions professor, he had the freedom to use the Hogwarts potions lab as well as whatever ingredients he needed.
His choice of the Slytherin Deputy Headship was not due to any ulterior motive; it was purely to avoid the Gryffindor Deputy Head post : he didn't want to be faced with the extremely awkward situation of having to spank his father, James, and his Marauder friends.
(Given the Marauders' reputation, he had zero hope of they avoiding the detention office even for half a term.)
He didn't have any naïve ambition that he would deliberately join the Slytherin to actively indoctrinate its students against pureblood supremacy, or that as the Slytherin Deputy Head he would fiercely protect poor muggleborn students from evil Slytherins.
Thus, when he first met Severus Snape in the Hogwarts train in this era a month or so ago, he was stunned to actually realize that, yes, Snape was a student, the same year as his parents, at this time. It was a bit of a shame not to think about him until he ran into him, but his presence in Harry's mind had been much less than that of James and Lily in the same school.
And the Severus Snape he had met in this time was much different from the one he had imagined as a student.
The image of the grouchy Professor Snape twenty years later, unwaveringly confident in his two specialties, the Potions and the Dark Arts, unafraid to use (and sometimes abuse) his power and to cause conflicts with those around him, was clear in Harry's mind, but in front of him was the sight of a fifteen-year-old boy, clutching his swollen hands and fighting back tears.
The boy was trying to suppress his emotions as if to hide his weakness, but the effort itself was obvious to an adult's eye.
Snape's disciplinary record, which he'd flipped through earlier, showed that for all the time till his fifth year, his greatest accomplishment was : [Arguing with students in other houses and attempting to duel(unsuccessfully); 10 points deducted].
Even Neville's record would have been more spectacular.
Occasional awards of two or three points, sometimes five were recorded; the point deductions also ranged from one to five. It was not uncommon to go more than two weeks without any point recorded, let alone every day. Snape's points tally at the end of the term had never been in the negative, but it never exceeded 20 points either.
If he were to excel in academics, he may have been at least noticed by his professors, but contrary to Harry's expectations, Snape's average grade was barely in the upper-middle of his 160 classmates.
He maintained O's in Potions and DADA, but the rest of his subjects showed generally E's or A's. The grades that a student of average talent would earn by diligent work, or what a brilliant student would earn by half-hearted, uninterested work.
His grades in Potions and Defense were consistently good enough to warrant the attention of a Potions professor, but Associate Professor Rowle, who taught the lower years, was a bureaucratic character with no real interest in teaching. And Harry already knew that Snape's Head of House, Slughorn, paid little attention to students below fifth year unless they had some sort of distinction, such as a kinship with a celebrity, or a charming personality, or a handsome look.
Defense Against the Dark Arts? The professor for that subject changed every year, and it'd be lucky if they could connect the faces, names, and grades of over a thousand students before the end of the term.
As a result, what stood before Harry's eyes was a scrawny boy of average height with a look that by all objective accounts, had no place in the schoolboys' hierarchy except as a geeky doormat.
Of course, Snape was a Slytherin by default, and Harry hadn't judged him to be just a meek, unremarkable nerd as his record might suggest. Surely there must be something, either in character or ability, that this many-layered boy is hiding.
But for now...
Harry took a deep breath, putting a stop to his train of thought.
"...Snape."
At the mild warning, the boy who had stood stone-faced in front of his desk was pulled out of his trance, and took off his robes with a mechanical motion. He folded the robe and laid it on the table, slowly as his hands were sore from the ruler, and then moved his hands to his waist.
Stripped of his loose robes and clad only in shirts and trousers, Snape's thorny thinness was clearly visible.
Harry didn't bother to press further. He raised an eyebrow, saying nothing. To a boy whose jet-black eyes were shuttered and whose cheeks were barely dry, the professor's authority was absolute.
Snape hesitated, pulling his trousers down to his knees with a stiff hand. The boy's pale, lean thighs were exposed.
"Shorts down, Snape."
Snape's face flushed, his lips shaky at Harry's harsh instructions. His dark eyes involuntarily lifted to meet the professor's, then quickly dropped off their expression and looked down.
Snape pushed his underwear down. And placed his palms on the desk and leaned forward.
Harry tapped the boy's lower thighs with the senior cane he was holding. Snape's trousers and underwear, which had fallen to his knees, quickly slid down to his ankles, and his shirt, which half-covered his buttocks, folded upward.
The boy's small, round buttocks and skinny legs were exposed to his calves, and he was bent over, awaiting his punishment.
Harry looked down at Snape, bent over the disciplinary desk, gritting his teeth and trying to hide it, and frowned at his clumsiness.
Does he have no experience having his bottom beaten at all?
Snape had no records of being physically punished at Hogwarts, but in this day and age, surely he had been spanked at home at least, right?
Harry was born in 1980; and even in his own day, while corporal punishment had been banned in state schools, Muggle teachers and students, as well as almost everyone in the wizarding world, took so-called "parental discipline" for granted. He knew that ever the kind wizard, Mr. Arthur Weasley, had also raised his hands a few times in the course of raising his six boys. (Considering that his children included the twins, Mr. Weasley had been a saintly dad indeed in Harry's mind.)
Harry could recall seeing Snape's father in his memory while practicing Occlumency, and he seemed a gruff figure, the sort of man who would have spanked his son for any misbehavior he could find. But Harry's instincts about the boy in front of him told him otherwise about his home environment.
He sighed briefly, and double-checked the thin threads of his mind-magic that he had quietly tied in while in his admonition to Snape. It was an applied Legilimency charm he'd specially developed to use if he ever had to physically punish first or second year students, and he could sense if the punishment was about to be overly traumatizing to the kids.
Safeguards in place, Harry turned his attention back to the boy's prostrate body in front of him. Gauging the angle of the stroke, he flicked the tip of cane lightly upon Snape's bare buttocks, and the boy tensed up with nerves alone. A faint line appeared on the pale white buttocks, devoid of any faint scars or marks from previous punishments.
"Snape. You broke curfew last night, and by more than 30 minutes, so I'm going to give you two strokes for it. Do you have anything to say?"
"N...no... sir."
Bent over the desk, his voice trying to be as nonchalant as possible, but the boy's nervousness was palpable, as if he might burst into tears at any moment. As he stared down at him, Harry felt an odd sense of thrill. The grumpy Potions Master, who'd thrown the threat of expulsion every time he'd seen him, was there before him, twenty years younger, now in the form of a misbehaving fifteen-year-old boy.
Snape, a boy submitting to his first ever caning and was now bent over in front of him, his arse bare, shook with nervousness before he'd even received the punishment.
Harry mentally blocked out the desire to shake his head in wonder, and smoothly raised the cane.
Swoosh-
Smack! He brought the cane down with moderate speed. A single crimson line ran horizontally across Severus' white buttocks.
Snape lay stiff and rigid on his stomach, and after a second or so, with a sharp intake of breath, he shuddered in pain.
Knowing that the pain from the lash of a senior cane increases in intensity over the next several seconds, Harry lowered his tool and waited for a moment.
The pale buttocks jerked as they took the first sting of the punishment, then finally settled down.
Harry drew the cane again and lightly poked his bottom just below the red welt.
...
Am I... am I going to faint or something?
A few light taps of the cane across his buttocks, and for a moment he mistook them for a full-blown caning. His bare bottom was stinging a bit from the raps, about as strong as the striking jinx he and Lily had once exchanged in practice.
But the sentence of two strokes for curfew violation soon left the professor's lips, and within seconds Severus was experiencing the legitimate pain of the standard caning for upper years across his buttocks.
Severus opened his mouth halfway. The taste of the cane on his buttocks was beyond anything he had ever experienced before. He couldn't even gasp as his body stiffened at the shock, which was far beyond his expectations.
The pain didn't abate at all after the cane was removed, but only increased in intensity for 10 to 20 seconds.
There was no respite. Just as the pain was reaching its peak, the professor's arm was slowly raised, and the next moment a grayish afterimage flashed across the corner of his vision once more.
CRACK! The cane cracked a second time, followed by an arse-splitting pain even worse than the first.
"...Urgh..."
A weak gasp escaped his parted lips. His eyes fluttered and burned as he fought to hold back the tears.
Tap, tap, tap, the cane came down lightly on his burning arse again. His unrealistic expectations of it being over with two strokes were quickly dashed as the professor's level voice spoke for the second time.
"For using a discriminatory and abusive word which is specifically prohibited by the school rule to your classmate multiple times, you are hereby given five strokes. It is a much more serious offense than a broken curfew, so the lashes will not be as light as they had been just now."
Five strokes. Objectively it wasn't a large number, but to Severus, who had just tasted the pain of a cane on his buttocks, it sounded just as horrible as fifty strokes. His bottom was still stinging terribly after just two lashes of the cane; he couldn't even imagine how he could take any more, and the professor's calling them as light?
Before Severus could properly prepare himself for the spine-chilling sentence, the thick cane struck the air at a higher angle than before.
THWACK!
There was a heavy sound of air cracking, followed seconds later by the pain like a crocodile with hundreds of teeth biting horizontally into his bare skin. It was agony, nothing like what he had just experienced.
Severus jerked up reflexively, drawing his hands back from the desk and wrapping them around his burning bare bottom.
"Severus Snape."
The professor's stern voice stopped the boy's movement. Stunned, Severus dropped his head. No matter how inexperienced he was, he knew the iron code of corporal punishment from his classmates' chatter.
"On your stomach again."
Lowering the cane, Professor Peverell took a step forward, making Severus grab the end of the desk with both his hands.
The next instant, the punishment desk widened with magic, rising to a higher-than-waist level on his side. The slight space between the desk and his body was gone, and Severus was forced to stand on tiptoe, face-down, deep into the desk.
His face pressed against the surface of the desk, the flesh of his arse pulled taut. His hands clung to the edge of the desk, unable to move an inch, and his swollen hands stung, but he dared not pull them away.
"The stroke you just received will not count, Snape, as you moved out of position. You will remain in this position until your punishment is completed. If you move once more, you will be restrained and receive three extra lashes."
"...Yes, sir."
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