AN: Hey, buds! Now, I need some help. Ships. Who will Harry end up with in all three versions of events? I wanna know! Maybe Hermione? Or Luna? Or Ginny, if we want to be boring. Another thing, Snape's speech in the Ravenclaw bit is ripped straight from PS, so you know, that's good. Unfortunately, I do not yet own the Harry Potter series, all rights go to Warner Bros and Twitter's (Sorry, X's) least favourite person, JK Rowling. Bye.

DavidoDaVinci.

Chapter 4: Snape, Snape, Severus Snape

Harry was to have Potions with the Ravenclaws. Snape, just as Harry had expected, loathed him. Well, he disliked all the houses other than Slytherin, but Harry in particular. The lesson took place in the dungeons. When he reached Harry's name in the register, he paused, but only to give a snarky remark about his fame. His pallid face and black eyes stared into his soul. His mouth curled into an unpleasant smile.

'Thank goodness he wasn't Ron' was the thought at the forefront of his mind, since doing Potions with Malfoy would be even worse than PE with Dudley. Snape went on and made a whole speech about the art of making potions, to the annoyance of everyone else in the room. When he had finished, he rounded on Harry.

"Potter! What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of Wormwood?"

Harry blinked. "Come again?"

It is said that when asked a question you do not know the answer to, wit may get you out of the situation. Nobody knows who says it, and it has been disproven many times, but there are still some idiots out there who believe it.

Snape snarled, and commented on his fame again, but did not seem in much of a mood to continue without any Slytherins jeering and guffawing whenever he made an insult. The lesson was spent attempting to make a 'simple' potion to cure boils, which ended up inflicting more boils than it prevented, and Harry was in an abhorrent mood by the time the lesson was even halfway completed.

…

Harry scratched his forehead, absent-mindedly, as Snape commented on how he had expected him to be wearing red, in a very rude and creative way. It had been a big mistake to arrive first.

He did not quite manage to miss the muttering that people made when they passed him, and he found himself wishing Ron or, heck, maybe even Hermione had been sorted into Ravenclaw, too. Once everyone had sat down, Snape began.

"You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion-making. As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don't expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses… I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death - if you aren't as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach."

He had whispered the whole thing, yet it was easier to hear than the shouting you got from many angry teachers. Harry worried that the two houses who sat patiently before him may be exactly the kind of dunderheads that he was referring to.

Right then, as if some holy deity had heard his thoughts and decided that now would be the right time to do something witty, someone dropped their cauldron. It made a thundering, crashing sound, and rolled its way across the room, and stopped at Snape's feet. While everyone was staring at the cauldron, his eyes alone were fixed on the boy in question.

"Ten points from Hufflepuff." he said, glancing around the room, as though looking for an 'I am also a dunderhead' sign strapped to someone's robes.

…

Draco's eyes darted, worried, around the dungeon, though, Harry noted, he was trying to keep this information away from all the Gryffindors. The two were sat at the back, with Ron to Harry's right, and Hermione, to Ron's dismay, in front. Operation Make-Draco-and-Ron-not-hate-each-other's-guts was not going particularly well, but it was, at least, an attempt to get them on speaking terms.

As Professor Snape entered the room, his cloak billowing behind him impressively, the conversation died down, though Dean still managed to get the last laugh against Pansy Parkinson, albeit at the expense of five points of Gryffindor's.

By the time he had reached his desk and whipped around to face the class, nobody was speaking. Clearly satisfied with the effect, he finally sat, and an audible sigh of relief got Dean another five points docked, and a detention at lunchtime on Friday.

The class, unsurprisingly, kept quiet as Snape lunged into a speech about Potions, and how tricky it could be to get them right. Coming from any other professor, it would have been heartfelt, and a love letter to the subject they taught, but coming from Snape… it was a speech. Not a bad speech, but very forced indeed, and unnecessary, too. It sounded, not practised, for that implies effort, but memorised after so many years of teaching students half his size, sometimes less.

He rounded on Ron for a few very tricky questions about the essence of a bezoar in relation to the blood of a Banksy, or something else including at least… one of those words? Whatever the question was, Ron was stumped, but Hermione seemed very eager to answer, given the way she was jumping up and down in her chair.

"No? Anyone else?" he asked, promptly ignoring Hermione with a passion.

…

As some of the turquoise liquid fell on a Ravenclaw boy's foot, causing him to yelp in pain, Harry could have sworn he saw Snape smirk, but a moment later, he thought he must have imagined it, for he took no part in the situation, allowing several of his friends to help him up, and, when they saw that the teacher was not going to stop them, carry him to the hospital wing.

Eventually, it was time to hand their boil curing potions to the front. Once everyone had placed theirs in front of him, Snape announced that only four people out of the two years had gotten something very good, and that he would have marked the rest a D at best, which Harry learnt stood for 'dreadful' later, from Hannah.

Speaking of whom, she was shaking in silent rage as they walked up from the dungeon, though not being in the room seemed to calm her enough to have an intelligent conversation about History of Magic.

…

In Harry's personal opinion, the potion-making experience sucked. He forgot ingredients and put ingredients in the wrong order multiple times, and each time he did, Snape would come up with a fresh remark to make him do it again.

While everyone else's potions looked more or less identical, his would have been a contrasting colour where they both planted on the colour wheel, and, naturally, their all-intelligent Potions teacher douche-bag had great glee in knocking Ravenclaw down to last place in the house cup.

…

The rest of the lesson continued as follows:

Snape would ask a question while they were making their potions, which nobody would have the answer to except Hermione, but he obviously didn't care what she had to say for no clear reason to Harry, so it just went unanswered.

As he came round the back, Snape had nothing to say about Harry, Hermione, or Draco's potions, probably because both he and Draco had their house as a shield, and it would have been impossible to critique Hermione's work. Ron, however, was not so lucky.

"And what, Weasley, is this?"

Ron muttered something that sounded like 'Dragon vomit', but before Snape could scold him, the bell rang to signal the end of the lesson.