A/N:
Hi, new chapter!
Nothing's been clicking lately, so I went back to my roots and wrote a demonically weird chapter in one sitting.
It's a bit short, but I hope you enjoy :)
"That's enough, Potter! I'll be seeing you in detention – after dinner, tonight!"
Harry looked up at Professor Snape disbelievingly. "But sir, all I did was drop a-"
"No backtalk!" Snape barked.
Sighing, Harry slumped back into his seat. He knew every school had a bad egg or two, but why Hogwarts continued to employ a teacher that showed such blatant bias against teenagers was beyond him.
He went back to work on his potion, knowing that he'd get a barely passing grade even if it was perfect, and ruminated on his bad luck. An ingredient - albeit an expensive one - had slipped off his desk, and being fragile, it had become unusable once it hit the ground. Snape just happened to be watching at that very moment, and now he would be stuck scrubbing cauldrons (or something equally banal) through a Friday evening he was supposed to have spent with Daph-
CRASH!
Every head in the classroom turned as a potion beaker shattered against the wall of the classroom a few feet away from Snape's desk. It was far enough from the man not to hit him, but close enough for him to flinch and let out a particularly uncomely shriek.
"Oops," Daphne Greengrass said. "My hand slipped. Now all of these ingredients are gone to waste, and my carelessness has compromised the safety of our teacher. I will accept whatever punishment is deemed fit to apologize for my actions."
Snape gave the girl a bewildered look, but a second later recovered his wits.
"Miss Greengrass? This sort of blunder is most unexpected from you. But very well, you will be overseeing Potter's detention tonight as your punishment. Hopefully that...unpleasant experience will ensure you behave more carefully in the future."
"I understand, Professor," Daphne said.
As she sat back down, Daphne caught Harry's eye and winked at him; a new facial technique she had learned the other day.
"Now back to work!" Snape snapped, causing all of the students giving him incredulous looks to return their attention to their potions.
For his own part, Harry just continued to stare at Snape in confusion. His and Daphne's relationship was pretty well known throughout the school, but apparently Snape was out of touch enough to not realize his punishment would now hardly constitute itself as such for either of them. Fortunately, no one in class bothered to correct him.
Snape caught his eye, but before the man could yell at him again, Harry put his head back down and got to work. He was still a bit startled by Snape's ignorance, but on the bright side his detention was now looking a whole lot better than it did before.
Meanwhile, across the classroom, Snape could hardly hide the grin on his face.
Heh, he thought gleefully. I'm sure Potter will hate nothing more than to be ordered around by a Slytherin girl! And I know I can trust Daphne Greengrass to follow my instructions down to the letter…it's what she's best at, after all.
Truly, he thought, this had been a work of his genius.
Daphne walked into the classroom where Harry sat, her loafers clicking menacingly against the stone floor as she approached him. She waved her wand and slammed the door behind her.
"Good evening, Mr. Potter," she said.
Harry blinked up at her. Her hair was up in a high ponytail, and the skirt of her uniform seemed a little shorter than he was used to it being.
"Um…Daphne?" he asked.
"That is 'Miss Daphne' to you," she corrected.
Harry gulped. He was starting to understand what was going on here.
"Wouldn't it be 'Miss Greengrass' instead of-"
"I make the rules here, Potter."
Daphne hopped onto Harry's desk, sitting mere inches away from him. She crossed her legs to maintain some form of modesty, but somehow that just made the whole picture more alluring to him.
"Professor Snape informed me that you would be scrubbing cauldrons tonight," she said. "And yet, all of the cauldrons were mysteriously scrubbed clean by the time we got here."
"How mysterious," Harry concurred.
"Indeed. He noted that if you somehow finished scrubbing cauldrons before your detention was complete, I was to find other, equally mind-numbing activities for you."
"How nice of him."
"As such, I thought of a few things on my way here."
Harry raised an eyebrow. "How did you know you'd need to come up with extra activities if you didn't know the cauldrons were already cleaned until you got here?"
Daphne put a finger against Harry's lips.
"Good boys do not ask questions."
Severus Snape was pleased that he had offloaded Harry Potter's detention duty onto someone else, and yet he still found himself wandering down to the dungeons to observe.
He supposed, at the end of the day, he just couldn't resist but to see his least favorite student suffer.
"That performance was more than adequate, Mr. Potter," a voice that Snape identified as Daphne's came from the Potions classroom. "I suppose I have no choice but to commend you for your efforts."
He tiptoed over to the door, creaking it open a sliver so he could peek inside. Every cauldron was lined up against the wall, scrubbed meticulously, shining like the top of the Chrysler Building. Meanwhile, Harry's face was flushed red, panting from exhaustion.
He did all of that in just fifteen minutes!? Snape exclaimed silently. Daphne must have driven him ridiculously hard – saddling her with his detention might have been my most brilliant idea yet…
Satisfied with the progress of Harry's punishment, Snape skulked away.
"Not that I'm complaining, but is one-hundred kisses really the type of detention activity you thought Snape had in mind?"
Daphne blinked. "I am simply a robot; I simply follow commands. He requested 'mind-numbing' activities. Is your mind not numb?"
"Well…" Harry couldn't argue that he wasn't feeling a little flustered, so he guessed Daphne won on a technicality there.
"Up next, we will be writing lines," she said. "Fifty, to be exact."
Harry raised his eyebrows. That seemed rather pedestrian.
"What am I missing?" he asked.
"You will be writing fifty things you love about me."
Harry laughed. "Oh, so it's easy, then."
Whirrrrr
"No backtalk," Daphne scolded, as if Harry couldn't hear that his words made her happy. "I will have you write one-hundred then."
Harry shrugged.
"Still easy."
While Snape was content with what he saw last time he checked in on Harry's detention, he wanted to ensure that Daphne had found sufficiently arduous tasks for him to complete with the cauldrons out of the way.
Slinking back down to the dungeons, he poked his head through the door once again.
"More lines," Daphne demanded. "Line one-hundred-ninety is too similar to line seventy-three, so now you must write fifty more as punishment."
"I thought you wanted one-hundred?" Harry exclaimed. "We're up to two-hundred-fifty now – I'm running out of vocabulary!"
"If you continue complaining, I will make it three-hundred!"
Snape's eyes widened in surprise. There were limits he couldn't cross as a teacher, but Daphne - being a student - didn't have those limits. Ultimately, her detentions looked much more brutal than his normally were.
Well, it serves you right, Potter, Snape thought, sneaking away. That'll teach you not to waste my potion ingredients.
When Harry had printed out his three-hundred-fiftieth line of 'things he loved about Daphne', she finally let him stop. He had gotten a bit desperate towards the end to find unique things about her that he loved, but her supportive kisses and constant whirring kept him encouraged.
"My hand is tired," Harry said. "Can we do something else now?"
"I suppose we can," Daphne replied regretfully. "Let us begin practicing proper posture."
"Proper posture?"
"Yes. I have noticed recently that you have begun to slouch your shoulders. While this is typical for the modern student due to the demands of desk work, it is important to understand when you are doing this and how to fix it."
"Uh, okay?" Harry said. "And this is detention?"
She nodded. "It is my duty as an educator to correct your etiquette, especially when it concerns your long-term body health."
"Alright then. So what are we going to do, exactly?"
"We are going to stretch."
Snape couldn't help himself. Fifteen minutes after his last visit, he creeped back down to the dungeon to see what cruel and unusual punishment Daphne was inflicting on Harry this time.
When he cast a spell to check through the door, he was not disappointed.
"Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!"
Harry was lying face-first on a mat on the floor while Daphne pushed her hands into his back and shoulders.
"Ouch! Ouch! Daphne, hold on a second!"
"I will not hold on a second," Daphne said. "This is for your own good."
Snape immediately dropped his spell and turned away. While he might lose his job if he employed corporal punishment on a student, he surely couldn't be faulted if he simply ignored it, right?
"You have not been stretching after your quidditch practices, have you?" Daphne demanded, finally letting up on Harry.
"Well, sometimes I do, but admittedly I usually get tired and skip it…"
Daphne heaved a dramatic sigh that was entirely for show as she didn't actually need to breathe. "And that is why your muscles are so tight. We will need to have weekly massage sessions to fix this issue before we may progress with our stretching."
"Do we have to?" Harry whined. "Stretching is boring, and your massages kind of hurt…"
"They hurt because they work," she countered. "And it is an investment; through these exercises, you will ward off back pain as an adult. When you are able to give our grandchildren piggybacks as an octogenarian, you will think back to this moment and thank me."
Harry blushed, and then sighed. It made him weirdly happy that Daphne was already thinking about grandkids.
"Okay, fine. When you put it like that, it's hard to argue."
"Good. You are not supposed to argue. This is your detention, after all."
Harry blinked. "Oh right, I forgot about that."
He looked at the clock on the wall, and realized he still had fifteen minutes left of what was supposed to be his 'detention'.
"So now what?" he asked.
Daphne hummed. "Admittedly, I did not plan this far ahead. You gave your kisses and wrote your lines faster than I calculated."
"Well, I'm sure Snape won't notice if we dip out a bit early?"
"No," Daphne said flatly. "I still have you for fifteen more minutes. I will not let you escape so easily."
Harry narrowed his eyes, voicing the suspicion he'd been building for a while now. "Daphne, are you enjoying this?"
"I enjoy everything with you," she said innocently.
"Very cute. But are you particularly getting a kick out of ordering me around?"
Daphne averted her gaze, but then proceeded to answer perfectly honestly nonetheless.
"It is rather fun," she admitted. "Normally I prefer it the other way around, but being in charge is nice once in a while too."
Harry gave her a bemused look.
"Alright. Sure, Daphne. You have fourteen minutes left, so use them wisely."
Who was Snape kidding? The last time he walked away from the Potions classroom where Harry was spending his detention, he didn't even bother leaving the hallway. He just walked up and down a few times, knowing he'd be checking back in again soon enough anyway.
And now, as he did, he knew it would have to be the last time.
This clearly has nothing to do with detention! Snape exclaimed silently as he watched Daphne extend her bare feet in front of Harry. Now she's just trying to humiliate him!
Snape watched in shock and horror as Harry took a bottle of nail polish from the girl and started painting her toes. Forcing a classmate to attend to her feet was a cruelty beyond what Snape had anticipated the rigid girl to come up with, and his surprise was now making room for a different feeling.
A strange, foreign emotion wormed its way into Snape's heart.
Is this…guilt? Snape thought, clutching at his chest.
Indeed, while Snape hated Harry Potter with a passion, Daphne's abject mistreatment of him was a step beyond what he was comfortable with as an educator. And as that thought struck him, he realized that the lines of mistreatment he was comfortable with as an educator were already much too far.
It's too late for me to do anything here, Snape thought, turning his back on Harry's detention. If I showed up now, Potter's humiliation would simply increase. But perhaps I should take it easy on him for a while after this…
"Harry?"
"What's up?"
"This feels good in a way I was not expecting. I think something dangerous is awakening inside me."
Harry looked down at his girlfriend's beautiful feet. He had just finished painting each of Daphne's delicate toes, and she wiggled them cutely under his gaze.
"Yeah, me too," he gulped.
Daphne stared down at her boyfriend, who was in turn staring down at her feet. He'd scarcely taken his eyes off of them since removing her socks.
Printing Thought Sequence: I am afraid that ship has long since sailed, Harry.
At that moment, the hour turned, and Harry's detention was complete. Though his sentence was already served, he still helped Daphne put her socks back on.
"You are surprisingly competent at painting nails," Daphne said when he was done, choosing not to remark on how long it took him to pull her socks up. "You do not have practice with other girls, do you?"
Harry nodded. "Yep. Loads."
Possible Emotion Detected: Fury
"Who? Tell me now so I can plan their demise as a coping mechanism."
Harry gave her a weird look. "My younger sisters…they ask me to paint their nails sometimes when I'm home."
"Oh. Never mind. That is fine then. I am sorry."
He shook his head confusedly, and they picked up their things and got ready to leave the classroom.
"So what shall we do now?" Daphne asked as they left. "We still have a few hours remaining before curfew, and there are no classes tomorrow."
Harry glanced over at her. "I have an idea or two."
"Do tell."
Abruptly, he slammed his hands on the wall above Daphne, pinning her in place under him.
"Harry?" she asked questioningly, looking up at him with big blue eyes. She knew where this was going, and her circuits sparked in excitement.
"What? You didn't think you were going to get to have all the fun, did you?"
Daphne blinked. "Have I been a bad girl?"
"Very bad," he said. "And from now until curfew, you're going to be listening to my orders."
Whirrrrr
"Yes mas-"
A couple weeks later, Professor Snape stopped Harry in the hallway.
"Potter! Come here for a moment."
Hesitantly, he walked over to Snape. He didn't think he'd done anything wrong recently, so he really didn't know what the man could possibly want with him.
"Yes, Professor?"
Snape fidgeted awkwardly, and then turned to look at him. "G-Good job on your last Potions assignment."
Harry's jaw dropped. Never in his six years at Hogwarts had Snape ever complimented him. And he could see on the man's face that the words pained him to say as much as they weirded Harry out to hear.
"So…er, keep up the good work."
Snape moved to pat Harry on the shoulder, but then stopped halfway and retracted his hand. He cleared his throat uncomfortably and then walked away, his cloak billowing all the while.
Harry continued to stare down the hallway for several minutes after the man left, in a state of complete bafflement.
"What in the world was that about?" he wondered.