In the span of two and a half weeks, Hermione had graduated from one large notebook to a full satchel of newspaper clippings, books, and a new journal to go along with the entirely full first one. It was so full of wards and deterrent spells that Harry could feel the buzzing from where he walked next to her. She had warned both him and Ron that they should be careful not to touch it, on purpose or on accident, because she didn't feel like dragging them up to the hospital wing. Harry thought that having that thing slung across her body could prove a pretty good protection against anyone, up to and including Voldemort himself. Ron had suggested she fling it at Malfoy's face to see what new colours they could discover.

She had even insisted on teaching them a few of the spells she had used, including one to prevent Accio from working on an object. Ron had promptly used it on his old Potions books and thrown them as far as he could into the forbidden forest, to Hermione's dismay and Harry's amusement.

They had given up on asking or guessing what her new project (read: obsession) was. She would tell them when she was ready, which usually ended up being when she successfully finished whatever they were curious about. Considering how broad this one was shaping up to be, Harry despaired of ever finding out.

"Now, Harry," she said. "Remember, you need to stay calm in her class. I know she's wrong, and her curriculum is terrible, and she clearly has no knowledge of–"

Ron cleared his throat, and she shook her head. "Sorry. You need to keep your temper though, Harry."

"How am I supposed to stay calm in class when you can't even stay calm thinking about her?"

"Use Occlumency?" Hermione suggested weakly.

"I've kept my cool for the past week, haven't I?"

"Yes, but for the past week, The Daily Prophet headlines haven't been… that."

Harry scowled darkly at the floor. That morning's news had put him off his breakfast when the owl dropped it right in the middle of his plate reading POTTER ON TRIAL: A DETAILED BREAKDOWN OF THE-BOY-WHO-LIVED'S JOURNEY FROM HERO TO FELON after his third bite.

"Must have been a slow news day, if they couldn't mention anything new," Ron said stoutly, and Harry was grateful for his friends' support.

"The point is, Harry, that you can't afford to get in detention again. Better to fly under the radar than bring even more attention to yourself."

"I won't lose my temper," Harry promised with a sigh.


Harry lost his temper.

He tried to outpace his friends outside the classroom, not wanting to hear their admonishments or see Hermione's worried face, but they easily caught up. Everyone in the hallways steered clear of Harry, leaving an open path for them to run up on either side.

"I don't wanna hear it," Harry snapped when they both took in breath to speak.

"That hag had no right to give you a whole week's detention!" Ron said hotly.

"Never mind, go ahead."

"She was saying some pretty awful stuff," Hermione admitted.

What had really upset Harry the most were the implications she had started making about Snape. A sly reference about how he might soon have a lot more spare time in the evening for future detentions had made his heart drop. Was Snape on her hit list? She'd already booted Trelawney before Harry had come back, and it was obvious that Hagrid was on thin ice.

The difference between them and Snape, however, was a large one. Everyone knew Trelawney was a crackpot 99% of the time (and unconscious when making any kind of real prophecies), and Hagrid's teaching methods left a lot to be desired. Snape was the youngest Potions Master of the century, and while his teaching methods also left a lot to be desired, he at least had a firm hold of his class and presented accurate, age appropriate materials. The worst thing about Snape as a professor was his personality, and Harry thought that Umbridge really had no leg to stand on if she wanted to use that as an argument.

The worst part was that Harry couldn't defend Snape without sounding like a fraud. Everyone knew about the famous animosity between them, so any kind of protest he gave to her nasty remarks would seem fake at best and suspicious at worst.

"No one's gonna be ready for Voldemort if people like her keep going around insisting it's just a lie," Harry said quietly.

Hermione sighed, then looked at him appraisingly. "So maybe we get the word out."

Ron and Harry stared at her curiously, but she had that gleam in her eye. "I'll see you two later." She turned and sped off in the opposite direction, and Harry and Ron both gave each other perplexed shrugs.

Harry drifted through the rest of his classes in a haze of annoyance and worry. He caught himself snapping at Lavender and forced himself to take several meditation breaths. It wasn't any of his classmates' fault that their Defence teacher had it out for him, and despite what the Prophet said, he wasn't a violent criminal.

He ate mechanically through dinner. Right before he stood to leave, a quaking first-year Hufflepuff stumbled up to him. Several other small Puffs stood a few feet back, watching in rapt horror.

"F-for you," the first-year stammered, holding out a note to him.

"Thanks," he said flatly, realising that the boy's friends were watching to make sure he didn't get attacked by Dangerous Harry Potter. He glared at them, but to their credit, they didn't run away and abandon their friend. They did huddle closer together, but Harry felt bad about scaring them and didn't judge them for it. "Who's it from?" he asked the kid.

"Professor Snape," he squeaked. Harry turned to the paper, and he bolted away.

"They're like tiny minnows," Ron said in fascination as the boy joined his friends and they made a run for it.

"Loyal ones," Harry said, unfolding the note.

"S'blank!" Ron exclaimed, looking over his shoulder.

"No, it's not!" Harry blinked, surprised.

"Sorry, I thought that when there's no words on the paper, that's called 'blank'," Ron snarked.

"Maybe it's spelled, 'cause I can read it."

"Well, what's it say then?"

Harry scanned it, then looked up in confusion. "It says to bring my swim trunks to my lesson."

"What? He's teaching you—" his voice dropped comically, even though there was no one around, "—Occlumency, not how to swim."

"I gave up on figuring out Snape's strange mind a long time ago, mate," Harry laughed. "I'm sure it'll be some weird thing that he'll give a long speech about how it's relevant to Occlumency, and then he'll sit back and laugh at me while I look stupid doing it."

"That doesn't sound like a healthy working relationship," Ron pointed out. Harry ignored him, folding up the paper and sticking it in his pocket.

He was actually rather relieved. It appeared as though Snape had made a change in his lesson plans for today. Harry was more than ready to take a break from sitting there unproductively; the past five lessons had been rough as Harry struggled to arrange his mind maze. He understood what he was supposed to do, but not how he was supposed to do it. He had made little progress since the concept was first introduced to him, and could tell that Snape was getting progressively more frustrated. Harry was as well, and while he would never admit to it, was also growing more and more doubtful of his own ability to do it.

When Harry made his way down to the dungeons after dinner with his swim trunks, he was surprised to find that the entryway to Snape's private quarters was open again. He hadn't been allowed back into those quarters since his first time inside, and he was still entirely too curious about them. Snape wasn't in his office or classroom, so Harry took a chance and walked inside. Snape wasn't there either.

He settled himself on the couch after a brief moment of wondering whether he should go back into the office. If he had to wait, he decided, he might as well be comfortable. It wasn't his fault that Snape left the door open.

He had barely settled in when a new entrance he hadn't seen before opened up in the wall of the kitchen and Snape stepped through. He didn't look upset about Harry's presence, so he figured that the door must have been left open for him.

"I've got my trunks," Harry said, holding them up, "although I have no idea what I'd need them for."

"Generally, people wear a swimming costume when swimming," Snape said calmly.

Harry resisted the urge to roll his eyes and say well, duh, but it was a close thing. "So where are we going to swim? Lake's a bit frozen right now," he said instead.

Snape did roll his eyes. "Obviously," he drawled. "We will be using the hidden swimming pool."

"I knew it!" Harry cried triumphantly. The hidden Hogwarts swimming pool was a legend, and many students had spent years of their lives looking for it. He'd personally been told about it by Fred and George, who tried to convince him that it was actually found in the middle of the forbidden forest. He'd almost checked, too, until Ron told him it was probably a lie. In his defence, that had been back in second year, and he'd been desperate for any distraction from the chamber of secrets and the school-wide rumours about him. "Where is it?"

"In the middle of the forbidden forest," Snape said.

"Seriously?" Harry asked, aghast.

"Of course not," Snape sighed. "Come, I will show you the way."

The hidden Hogwarts swimming pool was in the dungeons. This, somehow, did not surprise Harry. There were many hidden levels to Hogwarts' dungeons that hadn't been visited since they stopped torturing students a century or two earlier. It was possible that even the twins hadn't explored all of them. The dungeons were the Slytherins' domain, and not always a safe place to be for any unwary Gryffindor.

The twists and turns it took to get there also made it hard to find. Harry himself did not think he would be able to find it again without Snape's help. He hoped that he would never be told to meet him down there for a lesson. Harry was sure he'd get lost and wind up wandering the halls as a ghost after he starved to death, unable to find his way back upstairs.

It was dim at first, but then Snape flicked his wand and a series of torches around the room flared to life. The room was unexpectedly hot and muggy for a dungeon room in January, but when he trailed his fingers in the water, it was chill.

Snape pointed at a row of stalls against the far wall. Harry quickly changed.

When he came back, he found Snape standing beside a blackboard. On it, a diagram had been drawn of a person doing freestyle in the water next to a chart. At least, he thought it was a swimmer.

"Art was never your strong suit, was it, sir?"

Snape glowered at him. "Your cheek is exhausting."

"So what's it for?" Harry asked, beginning to sweat. He hoped it wouldn't take too long for Snape to explain; the pool was starting to look more and more attractive.

"Do you know how to swim? I am not talking about basic survival. Do you know how to front crawl?"

Harry nodded, then shrugged. "Basically."

Snape crossed his arms. "And what does that mean?"

"I get the basics, but… well, I was never able to breathe right."

Melodramatically, Snape dragged a hand over his face. "I suppose everyone need start somewhere," he said, with ill grace.

Harry fanned his face a few times, hair flapping lazily away from his face. "Okay then, how do I fix it?"

Snape gave him a narrow-eyed look for a few minutes, likely trying to decide if Harry meant any disrespect. Finally, he turned to the diagram and pointed at the stick figure's hips with his wand. "While swimming, it is important to keep your hips up and your face directed towards the bottom of the pool. Not only will this make your kick more efficient and body streamlined, but it will also put you in a better position to breathe to the side. Depending on what–"

"Hold on," Harry said, "you can't teach someone to swim with a diagram!"

"Oh, can't I?" Snape said dangerously.

"No! S'like trying to learn how to ride a bike by reading a book. It just doesn't work!"

"This is coming from your expansive aquatic experiences, I trust."

"I'm just saying, it'd be better if you actually showed me."

Snape's contemptuous face turned dour. "I will not be putting on a bathing costume to play in the water with you, Potter."

Ten minutes later, the two of them were shivering in the pool as Harry kicked against the wall. Snape had instructed him to hold his hands against the edge and kick with his face down in the water, breathing out to the side whenever he ran out of air. Every so often he would fall back on the instinct to lift his head up and forward, and Snape would push it back down. He quickly learned not to do that when water rushed up his nose.

Eventually, after another twenty minutes of basic stroke training, Snape swam over to where the blackboard leaned against a bench near the side of the pool. Harry followed, staring curiously at the chart. At some point, Snape must have smudged out the bad drawing, because the right side of the board was now mostly chalk dust.

"This is a set of focused, deliberate kick patterns set into 'beats'. The kick beat you choose depends on your desired speed and endurance. The slowest, a two-beat kick, would be used when swimming at a steady pace over long distance. The fastest, a six-beat kick, is for sprinting short distances. The four-beat kick rests in the middle, and the three-beat kick is a hybrid of the two- and four- beat kicks. The number of kicks is performed within two armstrokes, or one stroke cycle."

Harry squinted up at the board, pulling off the goggles Snape had conjured. His glasses were sitting on his clothes, which were folded and resting on the bench. "I see. Well no, actually, I don't, but I think I get it."

"Employing a steady beat kick takes concentration and an awareness of your whole body: breaths, arms, torso, legs. You must be able to coordinate all of these to maintain the beat."

"Ohh," Harry nodded. "There it is." Snape gave him a look, as if he wanted to know what Harry had meant but didn't want to lower himself by asking. Harry explained anyway. "The point of it for Occlumency."

"I am hoping that the mental multitasking and coordination will help you in arranging your mind maze," Snape admitted.

"Maybe," Harry sighed, bobbing lower in the water. Thinking about the roadblock he'd hit in Occlumency always brought his mood down.

Snape rested his elbow against the grate. "Perhaps it will also give you a physical outlet for the temper that seems to have gotten the better of you this afternoon."

Harry groaned and plopped his face down in the water. Of course Snape found out about the detention. He blew out a stream of bubbles, face twitching when they tickled the skin of his cheeks. He felt a nudge on his shoulder and looked up. The older man's face had little sympathy. "Begin with two-beat."

As simple as the chart (probably, Harry just saw a neat blur) made it seem, Harry quickly found that it was not as easy as thought. It was just so much to think about. Kicking, and breathing, and—wait, no, that was only one arm stroke—have to hold legs still for the next stroke—okay, now you can kick again… it was difficult. Snape had shown him first, and Harry tried to remember what he'd done. Surely there hadn't been this twitchy set of two fast kicks and an awkward pause… No, Snape had done one kick per arm stroke. That made sense, he guessed. Harry tried to do that, but it wasn't easy to resist the urge to follow one kick immediately with the other. He felt like he was overbalancing in the water.

He heard a muffled voice. Lifting his head up and trying to shake the water out of his ears, Harry asked, "What?" a little too loudly.

"You are overcompensating," Snape repeated. "Do not kick so hard. Focused, firm flutter kicks from the hip. Think of the two-beat as a way to rotate in the water as you use your arms to pull yourself through the water."

It helped, although not as much as he would have liked. When Snape was satisfied (or bored, Harry wasn't sure which,) he had Harry switch to the four-beat. After that was the six-beat, and by then, Harry was pretty much exhausted.

"I suppose we can skip the three-beat," Snape allowed as Harry pulled himself out of the pool and flopped, limply, onto the damp stone floor. Harry weakly waved his hand at him.

Snape climbed out as well, but Harry was too tired to keep track of him after that until a towel hit him in the head.

"I have a meeting with the Slytherin prefects in twenty minutes. Get dried and dressed."

Harry groaned and rolled over pathetically. He was probably being a little dramatic, but his brain felt kind of fuzzy from trying to keep track of twelve things at once. To stall, he asked, "What if someone sees me coming up from the dungeons? What'll I say?"

Snape's voice, when it came, was distant, and Harry realised that he had disappeared into one of the stalls. "Tell them I took you to the torture rooms in the dungeons for your detention."

"And it wouldn't even be a lie," Harry muttered under his breath.

"Potter," Snape growled warningly.

Deciding not to test his patience any further, Harry grabbed his clothes and glass and picked a stall of his own.

When Snape had extinguished the torches and the two of them walked out of the pool room, a flying paper note slapped Harry in the forehead. Harry blindly grasped at it, rubbing the spot.

"It probably could not get past the pool's wards," Snape mused, starting off in the direction that Harry thought they might have come from.

He unfolded the note and scanned it. "My detention with Umbridge's been cancelled!"

"Has it really," came the light response.

Harry glanced up and stared at the back of Snape's head suspiciously. "What do you know about it?"

"Just what you have told me, of course."

"Hmm." Harry was doubtful. Snape was being shifty; his fingers were tapping a light rhythm on his thigh and his step was higher than usual. "I'm not complaining, of course. I'm just happy she's not rescheduling it."

"How shocking."

They parted ways at a fork that led up to the Great Hall. Snape thought it best that Harry and the Slytherin prefects not interact. ("I have no desire to listen to a petty squabble.") Harry concurred.

As he walked to Gryffindor tower, Harry thought about the note in his hand and the oddly cheerful professor he had just left behind. He hoped the two weren't related. It was entirely possible, of course. Snape always enjoyed putting a student through a difficult and exhausting task, and Harry was no exception. He struggled to make himself believe it.

It didn't work.


There was an odd sort of hubbub coming from the DADA classroom as they approached for class the next day. Harry was moving stiffly, sore from his long swim the night before.

"I wonder what's going on," Hermione wondered, holding her satchel closer as they slowed.

"Only one way to find out," Ron said.

Harry stepped in first, closely followed by his two friends. There was an actual crowd near the desk, which quickly moved when they noticed the three of them walking over. Harry immediately saw what they were all frantically whispering about.

Lined up on the desk in a neat little damning row were the broken remains of several ruined Blood Quills.

A/N: I've never been one to out my trauma through fanfiction, but Harry's struggle during the kick beat lesson was a very personal one of mine from high school swim, lol. Sorry this was posted so late, I made an amazing homemade chicken cordon bleu dinner with rice and vegetables and then almost had to take my dog for emergency surgery (the two are not related) and it took up most of my day.