Chapter Text
It's a Saturday; one of the days Severus has office hours, which typically means he sits in his office grading homework and smoking, because it's rare a student actually comes to see him. His Slytherins will, as will the occasional Ravenclaw or wide-eyed Hufflepuff. But usually that's nearer the end of term, or near the start of winter break, when students are scrambling to catch up before their exams. He doesn't think he's ever had anyone come in during the first month of school for help.
The knock on his door marks the exception to that rule. Severus snuffs his cigarette out, quickly waves his hand to clear the smoke with a muttered spell, and bemusedly says, "Enter." Maybe one of his house caught something on fire again?
"U-um—are you sure?" a voice hisses on the other end of the door, stammering and nervous. A very familiar voice, actually. Severus straightens slightly, brows knotted with surprise as the door is pushed open, and then a very pink Neville Longbottom is firmly steered inside by Harry, who looks very sure of himself.
"Mr. Longbottom, Mr. Potter," Severus greets lowly. He moves his eyes from one to the other, and Neville shrinks back with a loud gulp. His eyes skate around, fixing with real terror on the various dead-things floating in their suspensions.
"I—uh—"
"Go on," Harry encourages in a whisper.
Neville straightens, looking vaguely ill, and says, a little firmer, "I, um, I'm sorry, about the boggart thing—sir, I just—"
Severus blinks slowly. "I was under the impression that Professor Lupin put you up to it," Severus says, very drolly, but not without a dash of loathing to punctuate Lupin's name. He returns his eyes to his grading, plunking the quill back into its holder and spelling the ink dry so that he can sort them alphabetically.
Neville stares, very round-eyed.
"Did you come here for a reason, or are you just here to gawk at me?" Severus asks in a clipped voice. His patience is thin these days—not that it wasn't always thin, but he imagines these particular students are seeing the worst of him since he first got clean. And it's only getting worse. Harry narrows his eyes at him, and nods subtly in Neville's direction. Then more sharply, at his own flat look. He looks almost disappointed in him, certainly a little frustrated. Severus shuts his eyes with a sigh, rubbing at his eyes. "Mr. Longbottom," he says, very slowly. "You are, without doubt, the worst student I have ever had the displeasure of teaching." The words are blunt, and perhaps cruel; Neville's face grows redder, and his eyes trail towards the ground. Severus squares his shoulders and folds his hands over his desk. "Are you here to change that?"
The boys head snaps up. His lips part slowly, and then he says, nearly tripping over his own words, "Y-Yes—yes, I would, I um—"
"Very well," Severus says, sharp and brisk, tossing the sheafs of graded work down on his desk with a slap of paper-on-wood. "Come along."
"Where are we—" he hears the distinct sound of feet tripping over the rug he'd put in his office recently—Minerva had brought it back from one of the countries she'd visited this summer—and then the shuffling, teenage muttering of Neville nearly pulling Harry down with him. "—going?'
"The labs. What exactly will you learn in my office? It's the practicals that you bumble through, not the written portion."
"O-Oh," Neville whispers, hurrying to catch up with him. Harry follows along at a leisurely pace, from the sound of the footsteps behind him, and the two presences he can feel at his back.
"Here for moral support, Mr. Potter?" Severus asks, not bothering to look back.
"That an issue, sir?" There's a little too much cocksurety in the boys voice. Severus throws him a narrow look over his shoulder, and the boy shrugs with a smile.
He throws open the door to the lab nearest his office and his quarters—his lab, his personal one. Harry has been in here before. Severus will occasionally let particularly gifted students in here; Margot and the Weasley twins are the only exceptions at present. He's sure there will be more eventually. One of the first years is showing particular promise—that girl that had asked about being muggleborn the first night. Ms. Granger likely would've earned a spot as well, were she not completely dedicated to repeating his information back to him verbatim. Perhaps in the next few years she'll gain some critical thinking skills; her foolish little rebellion under Minerva's supervision will surely teach her something in that vein. Longbottom would usually never get the privilege, but Severus has much finer control over the wards in here: none of the potions he teaches students can go wrong in the way his own experiments sometimes do. And the ones that fire automatically are far less practical in a room full of people; they tend to grow confused.
Longbottom gasps, looking around in... awe.
Interesting.
His gaze is up, at the various things Severus collects and dries himself from his jaunts into the forbidden forest. The moss and lichen Harry and Draco helped him collect is currently sitting in a tank of murky water to keep it from doing the same, glimmering faintly. "I hear from Sprout you're a deft touch in herbology, Longbottom." Severus says as he checks the stasis charm on the latest batch of his own potions that are set on the worktable nearest the door. Most of them will need to be bottled tonight; except for the potion he takes for his heart, which will need to steep for two more days, stirred at intervals of twelve hours.
"Er...yeah," Neville says, ducking his head a little. "Nothing special, sir, but I do alright."
Severus stalks to the other end of the room, "Do not touch anything without my explicit permission." He hefts one of the cauldrons stacked at the corner up—and nearly drops it. His ring and middle finger have gone numb. Damnation. The numbness has gotten worse than the pain—an unintended side-effect of his switching dosages, he assumes. At least he's managed to avoid the nausea for the last two days. His slip doesn't go unnoticed; Longbottom is staring at him in confusion, and he can see Potter watching him out of the corner of his eye, one hand inches from one of the softly-glowing bottles on the shelf in the middle. "That includes you, Potter," he snaps as he slams the pewter cauldron down onto the worktable, before gathering the requisite copper and brass ones.
"What, um—what are we doing?" Neville asks faintly, wringing his hands.
"You seem to perform better when there are real stakes," Severus says blithely, wheeling over the enormous chalkboard he'd had against one wall. Neville pales.
"Wait—wait—I can't—" Severus flips the board over, so the work he'd been jotting out on it is replaced with a blank surface. "Sir—" He begins jotting down the recipe, feeling eyes on his back.
"You are going to brew an antidote to common poisons, Longbottom—" the boy shrinks in on himself, obviously imagining either himself or something dear to him being poisoned, "—and I am going to poison myself." He'd rather not terrorize the boy as he did in the previous lesson, and it isn't like his wellbeing is high on Longbottom's list of priorities, nor could the child ever reliably manage to hurt him, not without being caught.
"What?" Harry and Neville cry at once.
He's been considering this for a week or so—though he hadn't really thought Harry would get Longbottom to come to him—and can't help but feel just the slightest bit giddy at the horrified look on both of their faces. The boy has been utterly unteachable; it is not a trial to read clear instructions and follow them, even if you must go slower. He's asked Poppy if the boy needed glasses, he's asked Minerva if he has the same trouble in any of the other classes, he's assigned the child extra homework in an attempt to have him engage with the material—and as something of a punishment for ruining class supplies that Severus has to replace with his own money. Not that the students know that. They probably assume new equipment just falls out of the bleedin' sky. It's been two years, and Severus is still at square one, as far as teaching Neville Longbottom goes. The class with the shrinking solution is the first one that Longbottom has done passably in, and Severus is rather morbidly curious about whether that is a result he can get again. And it isn't as if he doesn't know what he's doing, whether these two know that or not. He raises a brow, "Well?"
"Sir, you can't—"
"Longbottom, you can either do as I say, and improve yourself, or you can see yourself to the door." Severus says, narrowing his eyes at the boys recalcitrance.
"...I'm going to poison my teacher," Neville whispers to himself, tremulously.
"You'll—you'll do fine, come on," Harry encourages, sounding very nervous himself. He keeps casting glances at Severus, as if expecting him to reveal that this whole thing was a ruse.
"Potions is, at its highest levels, a discipline with a very real time limit," Severus lectures as Neville hurries to procure the ingredients Severus listed. "If you do seek out a lesson like this again, I will impose one. For now... you have however much time you need."
There's a moment of frantic, nervous silence; Longbottom is reading the directions, but he goes too fast, Severus can see, and his hands are clumsy. "Just—calm down," Harry mutters, "He wouldn't actually let you kill him."
"What if I do though—"
"Longbottom," Severus says flatly, "Look at what's on your workspace."
The boy does, and Severus waits, but he shakes his head helplessly. "I don't get it."
"You know what all of those ingredients are," Severus drawls, patience thinning again. He very consciously reins himself in, with a slow, angry breath. "What are their effects?"
"Um—uh—t-this is unicorn horn, it's not... it won't poison you, I guess, and neither will the standard mix of herbs used in healing draughts. Honeywater and lavender are fairly harmless, and bezoar won't hurt you at all, but the mistletoe berries are poisonous, sir—" Neville looks up at him, brows furrowed. Severus raises one brow, unimpressed, and pointedly looks at the ingredient Neville was referencing. It's not more than a handful of the berries—a child’s handful, actually.
"And?" He prompts impatiently, when the silence has dragged on too long.
"And—" Neville searches his face, shoulders rounding, rocking a little with his hands against the worktops with his anxiety. Then he looks down at the berries, and back up at him, and says, very hesitantly, very softly, "...but not... not enough to really do anything to a grown man. Except an upset stomach, maybe."
Severus nods in satisfaction. "You need to think in my class, Longbottom."
"I am," the boy snaps, voice hard and angry. There is that boy that stood up to his own friends in his first year. Severus' eyes widen, and Longbottom shrinks, making a soft, terrified sound. "I am, I just—oh, no—"
Severus has advanced on the both of them—Harry is leaning on the worktop, chin perched on his fist, watching. He's stiffened, slightly, though, as Severus reaches the worktable, hand splaying on the shining black surface.
Severus leans down, so he can make eye contact with the boy.
And wrenches the lever on the workbench back, so that it clicks three times, and the surface just beneath the cauldron heats. The boy stares up at him, pale, and trembling, and Severus remembers himself at this age, absolutely vibrating with rage at how easily dismissed he was, no matter how good he was, or how clever, or how hard he worked. He could surpass everyone in the bleedin' school and still be worthless. Invisible.
And if he'd been like Longbottom is now, he'd be dead. Or wish he was. "Very good," he says.
"W-What?"
Severus eyes him evenly, "The world will do you no favors, Mr. Longbottom. And neither will I." He pulls out a stool beneath the bench on the next worktop back, so that he can sit and watch. He gestures lazily, "If only you were so confident in my class. You'd make half the mistakes and get twice the results."
"I..." Neville stares at him a little longer, then averts his eyes, shaking his head a bit. But he follows the instructions on the board—and he seems slightly less nervous.
When he's half way done, after a good while of Neville speaking nervously to Harry, or sparing scared glances his way, Severus walks to his shelving, eyeing the vials and jars lining the surface. He, of course, has the stores right next to his office—all of this is overflow; new things waiting to replace the old in his main stores, old that needed shifted to make room when he reorganized, and such. Bruise salve, antidotes to common and uncommon poisons, antivenom, a much stronger variant of pepper up, a much weaker version of dreamless sleep, wideye potion, draught of peace, veritaserum—ah. Severus pauses, thumbing at a bottle of bloodroot poison. That will do. Not fatal by any means, but certainly uncomfortable. And something he's been poisoned with before.
He taps his wand, summoning the mug of tea he'd left sitting on his desk—and warms it when he finds it stone-cold. Potter and Longbottom look up sharply.
"S-Sir..." Neville stammers. Severus glances into the boy’s cauldron.
"Slightly off color," he says, "You didn't crush the bezoar finely enough." He's not particularly concerned—it's a far better effort than anything Longbottom has done so far. But the boy scrambles, eyes a little wide, and then stammers, "How—how do I fix that," he mutters, reaching for some of the lavender petals he'd not yet used.
Severus catches his wrist, "Do not just start throwing things in there hoping it will fix it," he growls. "I have given you instructions. Follow them."
"But—but I've messed up!" Neville exclaims, distraught.
"Yes, and doubling down will get you where, exactly?"
"I—" Neville swallows hard, and glances at the mug and vial Severus had sat on the worktop opposite him. "Please don't drink that. This—it isn't going to work—"
"Do you know what it is?" Severus prods.
"Uh—no—"
"Mm. And so you have no idea what it does?"
"Well, no, sir," Longbottom mutters. Then he frowns, "Is it even a poison?"
"It is," Severus answers bluntly. "One I have experienced before and will not mind experiencing again." For emphasis, he dumps the whole vial into his mug. The stuff is rather foul tasting, and he'd rather not down it straight.
"...before?" Harry asks, picking up his head. "What do you mean before?"
Severus shrugs, "I live an interesting life, Mr. Potter." That's not exactly a lie, but the truth of the matter is he's poisoned himself on far more than a few occasions. He doesn't have many people to test things on, after all, and so usually his own body bears the brunt of his experimentation.
He's alive, so he must be doing something right.
"Oh, please don't drink that—" Neville lurches in place, as if he'd intended to knock the mug out of his hands, but he restrains himself, and Severus drinks out of it, utterly unfazed.
"That will need to brew for forty minutes in the current cauldron, and then thirty four in the brass, and a further thirty in the copper. Do settle in."
"And, um—how long—how long does that take to have an effect?" Longbottom asks in a small voice.
"About an hour and a half."
Longbottom whimpers.
###
Snape slunk off to his office to grab his grading around the twenty minute mark, and comes back without his outer robe, and the inner one unbuttoned, which has the dark navy waistcoat and dark green cravat showing—and a stark-black set of pins with gem-blue eyes, in the shape of fat little serpents at his throat near either side of his collar. He settles at the table across from them, bent over homework that he defaces with a foreboding amount of red ink, sipping from his mug as if he hasn't a care in the world, and as if there isn't poison in there.
Neville waits anxiously, occasionally looking in askance at Harry, who shrugs, but seems a little nervous despite himself. "You didn't tell me he was mad," Neville says lowly, hoping Snape won't hear. Harry makes an ambiguous noise.
"I mean—he's a little mad," he holds up a hand with his fingers a scant distance apart.
"If you're going to insult me, do it less conspicuously," Snape drawls, not bothering to pick his head up. Neville gulps. Why didn't he take points? Or—or give them detention? Or at least insult them? He stares across the room at Snape's bent form, looking a little more human with a smudge of dark red in bleeding into the edge of one white sleeve, chin tipped against an upturned palm, eyes narrowed to slits as he squints down at the parchment in front of him.
"It wasn't an insult," Harry says with a grin—since when does Harry Potter grin at Severus Snape? They hate each other—
"Why..." he can't form the question, really. Why isn't Snape being nasty? That would go over well, wouldn't it? Why is Harry acting weird? That'd also go about the same amount of well. Neville rubs at the back of his neck, looking down at his slightly off-color potion.
Snape and Harry have both looked up at him, though, and he shrinks.
"I'd rather you not kill anyone," Snape answers, scratching furious words onto the edge of some poor students essay—it must be a year above them, to have gotten an entire essay due already. He—that wasn't what he was asking, not at all, but it gives him a bit of pause. "If yelling at you or assigning homework won't get it through your thick skull that you need to pay attention, maybe this will." He tips his head a little, "Though I would not have gone out of my way. It was my understanding that you did not want to learn."
Neville bristles, "Well—well maybe if you weren't so—" he gestures very vaguely, feeling frustrated at the ineffectiveness of his own words.
"Terrifying?" Harry asks glibly.
"Yeah. That." Neville mutters, suddenly embarrassed. He knows, logically, that Snape wouldn't—wouldn't hurt him, right? He—the headmaster wouldn't let someone do that, right? Hogwarts wouldn't. But... it doesn't help. Not really.
Snape is very quiet, for a moment, except for the scratching of his quill. He drinks from the mug again, and Neville shifts his weight anxiously. He's given no outward sign that he's feeling unwell, though, so maybe—maybe it was all just a ruse. But then, he had said it will take a while. "I'm surprised," Snape says eventually, in a low, pensive voice that Neville can't really make much of. Is he angry? Sad? He— "I figured you would have worse things to fear than me, Mr. Longbottom," he says it briskly, without much emotion, but Neville jerks.
Swallows hard. "You're realer," he says, brows furrowed. He knows what Snape is implying; maybe it would make more sense, if they were his boggart. If she was. But it wasn't. Maybe it's better that way. He sees Professor Snape all the time; he doesn't think he'll ever see anything of...them.
Harry frowns, looking away.
"I suppose I am," Snape mutters bitterly. He reaches over to dip his quill—and knocks the pot of ink over. His face reddens the slightest bit, and Neville watches as he angrily spells the spilt ink back into the bottle, shaking out his hand like it hurts.
"Something wrong?" he finds himself asking nervously; what if—what if that's the poison kicking in? Or something? His potion still has ten minutes to go in the brass cauldron, and—
"No," Snape says harshly, and with a wave of his hand vanishes the papers he was grading, the ink, and the quill. He stands, and shakes his head a bit, with a deep breath and a hand on the worktop, before stalking over to where he and Harry have been loitering.
He takes a ladle, and tests the consistency, lets it spill back into the cauldron, an uneasy mauve. "Certainly not O worthy," Snape drawls lazily, flicking the ladle clean with a spark of magic that has Neville staring. He can maybe count on two hands the number of wizards he knows who so casually use wandless magic. Professor Lupin is one of them, of course; and then there's one of his uncles, and some near-perfect strangers his gran talks to sometimes. People who were involved in the war—all of them very old. And Headmaster Dumbledore, of course. "But it will be passable." Snape cocks a brow, "Did you realize, Mr. Longbottom, that this potion will not be assigned to your class until right before winter break?"
Neville stares. "I—no, that can't be right," he mutters, staring down at the cauldron. "I... I can't have done that, not ahead of everyone else—"
"I would not waste my breath lying to you, Longbottom. Especially not to stroke your ego." Snape clears his throat strangely, rubbing at the side of his neck like he's in pain. Neville shifts from foot to foot.
"So—so you'll be alright, then?"
"I'd’ve been alright regardless," Snape says dryly, jabbing a thumb in the direction of the shelving lining the wall. "Do you think I'd not have my own antidotes?"
Neville stares, "Oh. Oh, so—so like in class—"
"I do not tend to leave things to chance. Not when it can be helped." Snape shakes his head dismissively, mouth pressed into a thin line. "Besides, I've built an immunity to poisons over the years—it would take something truly dangerous to give me more than a headache and a bit of nausea." He smiles a nasty, grim little smile, "Hazard of the occupation."
Neville's shoulders slump slightly with relief, "Then—then why—"
"Think," Snape drawls, leaning forward on the work top so his hair swings against his jaw, and Neville has the absurd realization that he must be tipped up on the balls of his feet to even manage that, as tall as he is, and it knocks some of the fear out of him. His face is still very eerie; like he can't quite manage the same expressions other people do, but has he always been so...short? "Ponder, for a moment, why I might put you in a high stress situation and demand you perform to a certain standard."
Neville swallows hard. Snape looks a little peaky, but he's being surprisingly patient, despite his nasty tone of voice, waiting expectantly for Nevile to answer. "I... well—I did it, I guess, so—so maybe you just... thought it would work?"
Snape shakes his head again, or rather he starts to and then seems to think better of it. "If you can do it now, what exactly is stopping you from doing it with the stakes are lowered?"
Snape ladles Neville's potion into a vial he'd picked up somewhere along the way, or otherwise he just keeps some on hand all the time. He sets that one aside, and then lazily taps his wand on the rim, "bottle the rest of this."
"What—"
"It's proof that you are completely capable of following instructions—and following them passably." Snape stares at him expectantly, hand casually rested on the vial he'd filled himself.
Neville swallows, and does as he's told. When most of it is in vials—he notices they're the much cheaper sort found in the general student labs, not the fancier glass on the shelves in here—Snape picks up the one he'd filled himself, and downs it like it's a shot of alcohol, wincing a little bit, likely at the taste. "Like I said. Passable."
"...you're really fine?"
"Perfectly so," Snape drawls in that disinterested way of his, but his eyes, Neville notices, are keen, and maybe a little... a little proud? Couldn't be. "And I expect that you can repeat this performance without my needing to poison myself? Now you've seen you can do so?"
"I...I don't know if it's that simple," Neville mumbles, but Snape seems very sure of himself.
Harry claps him on the shoulder. "See? I told you you could do it." Neville smiles sheepishly.
"Yeah... I did."
"Take five of those vials with you, each of you."
"Wait—really?"
Snape nods, "A reminder not to act like a bumbling fool in my class again; and a reward for taking initiative, Longbottom."
"Why am I getting some?" Harry asks, brows furrowed, but he doesn't really protest when Neville slides him five of the bottles.
"I can think of few students more likely to find a way to get themselves poisoned than you, Potter."
"Oh."
"Yes, oh." Snape says bitingly. "Five points to you, Potter, for helping a friend; and five to Mr. Longbottom for finally developing a backbone. Now—" he sounds, abruptly, rather uncomfortable, "—as far as the rest of the school is concerned, this did not happen. Get out."
Neville sputters a little, startled laugh. "I—thank you, sir. Can I um... can I come back, if I need help again?"
"...office hours are posted, Mr. Longbottom." Snape impatiently herds them both out of his lab, slamming and locking the door behind him, and Neville follows Harry down the corridor.
"See? I told you it'd go fine."
"...I guess he is only a little mad." Harry barks a laugh, bumping shoulders with him. He only hopes he actually manages to do better in a real class. He doesn't want to know how Snape might react if all that was for nothing.
###
It's third period on a Monday, which means potions class. Except everyone's gotten their bags put away, has pulled out what books and parchment they need—outlined on the board, as usual—and it's five minutes after class was supposed to start. Everyone's started murmuring uncertainly. "Where do you think he is?" Hermione asks him. She's set up on the end seat across the aisle from Harry's own. "He's not been late once this year."
Harry does remember him being late to class once or twice last year, but it was always very rarely, and usually due to some actual emergency. Like when the Slytherin seventh years decided it was a good idea to try and shoot off fireworks in the Slytherin common room, and had apparently flooded the room by cracking one of the windows in there. Or when Madame Pomfrey needed help with that fourth year that managed to poison himself with some sort of potion he'd bought in Knockturn to "open his mind’s eye." Stuff like that. "I wonder if someone's hurt," Ron says, frowning.
"Or maybe one of the dementors got him," Pansy Parkinson jokes, making exaggerated, mocking faces at him, nudging at Malfoy with her elbow. Except Malfoy nudges her back hard enough she nearly teeters off her stool, scowling.
"Shut up, Parkinson. Don't joke about that," he curls his lip at her, and she cowers, eyes lowering. Harry's brows raise.
Some of the other Slytherins look equally unnerved by her words. Why, though—
And then Harry really looks at them, and he realizes he can pick out the faces. Some students he can't quite remember the first names of, of course—he doesn't talk much to Slytherin students, and they certainly don't talk much to him—but he can see Crabbe and Goyle, and Flora and Hestia Carrow, and Mary Jugson.
All of them, Harry knows from Snape having passed him a list of last names one night last summer, silent and somber and very dire—do not tell anyone I gave this to you. Do not speak of it. Memorize it, and then burn it, Potter, and never be alone with any of the adults in these families. The children of known death eaters. It's funny, they'd seemed so eager to mock him about it before, but putting Snape into the mix shuts them up right quick. Harry wonders how many of them know Snape was in Azkaban, and know he'd not like them saying that sort of thing about him.
The Slytherin half of the classroom—because it is fairly evenly split down the middle, as it always is—eventually turns in on itself, conversing very quietly. And then the Gryffindor side does the same, and the entire room dissolves into the racket of a bunch of unsupervised teenagers chattering away the time.
Which is, of course, when the door bangs open. Every head in the room snaps around, but Snape doesn't explain his tardiness, as he has every other time—usually complaining angrily about someone’s stupidity. He looks ill; his face has a slightly waxen look to it, the sallow beige drained and wan, and his hair is clinging to his jaw in little, lank curls in places. His eyes are a little glassy, but he seems otherwise very alert, gaze snapping about the room. "Begin." He taps his wand harshly against the board, and the instructions for the current lesson bleed onto it.
Snape dumps his own leather satchel onto the desk as the class scrambles to find what they need—the man's tone of voice bodes very ill for how forgiving he'll be in this lesson. Harry, though, lingers. Usually he's early enough they don't see this part, and Harry had forgotten what that bag looked like.
It's almost identical to his own. The leather is black, instead of brown, and it's the Slytherin seal pressed into the side, and it's a bit larger, with more straps to fasten it shut, but he's sure it's at least from the same place. It also looks old. Maybe not so old that Snape got it in school—he wouldn't have had the money for such an expensive thing, anyways—but it's not new by any means, the strap worn and stretched, the leather scuffed and creased in places. "Potter," Snape says sharply, "Are you content to loiter about my classroom, or will you actually be deigning to participate today?"
Harry scowls at him, but the words were—strange. Loathing, yes, but almost strained. Like he couldn't get enough breath. He squints—but he can't see anything else wrong with him—and the look on his face says he won't tolerate any more dallying around, so Harry reluctantly joins everyone else, pulling necessary equipment from shelves, and ingredients from their various places, either on the table in the back or on the other shelving. "What's gotten into him?" Ron asks him heatedly as they pull out pre-cut lengths of fresh wolfsbane.
"I think he's sick," Harry says under his breath, very conscious of the eyes on their backs. Snape can read minds—and for all Harry knows could hear him from the front of the room besides.
"He's still a prat, though," Ron mutters angrily.
Everyone settles at their workstations—and everyone is at least a little surprised when Snape doesn't begin lecturing them on the potion they'll be doing today.
"The lecture portion will be at the end of class today," Snape eventually says, eyeing their frozen uncertainty with disdain and a curled lip. Not even the Slytherins like Snape when he's in this kind of foul mood. Everyone starts to work immediately. Harry glances over at Neville; he knows that he'd done somewhat better in that private lesson, but he seems...he seems a bit frantic, still.
"Slow down," Harry whispers. Neville jolts a little. He keeps looking up to where Snape is sitting at his desk, bent over what Harry assumes are either notes or marking. He doesn't look well at all, actually. Harry thinks back to when he'd been in Snape's quarters:
Said it's a side effect of something new he's taking, Sirius had said. He's said a little more, while Snape wasn't present. Harry had asked. But the simple "he's not exactly in a good way" and "I don't know”s have still left him feeling a bit in the dark. He's certain there's more going on than they're saying, not that Snape ever says much other than "I'm fine."
It's only once people get past the ingredient preparation that Snape stands and starts making his rounds about the room. He doesn't look any better for having sat down for half the class, however, and Harry notices that his speaking voice is completely at odds with his face, which is tired and drawn. He sounds put together, completely unfazed, but the rest of him hasn't quite gotten the memo.
He comments on various tables as he passes, in between telling them all about the many uses of the Jolting Draught. Harry doesn't think he says a single nice thing to anyone. Eventually, he stops in front of their workstation, and Harry watches him eye he, Ron, and Neville's potions with withering disappointment. But he just drawls, "Disappointing," and moves to the next.
Or rather, he starts to. The moment his back is turned, Neville—like he'd done in the private lesson—begins panicking, Harry can tell, and before he can tell him to calm down, Snape snaps, with his back still turned, "Mr. Longbottom, if you throw that fistful of beetle wings into that cauldron I will give you a year’s worth of detention."
Neville goes pink, but he does put the beetle wings down. The class has held its breath. Last time Snape lashed out at Neville it escalated in the extreme, and since then Neville has, fundamentally, participated in putting him in ladies’ clothes before the whole school. Harry knows for certain Snape hasn't taken that well, either, apology from Professor Lupin or not.
"Continue," he snaps at the room as a whole, "You are not in this classroom to dawdle and gawk like morons." There's the sound of people hurrying—a general rustle of fabric and clatter of equipment. Harry sighs to himself, working on his own potion, which is maybe three shades off from the deep blue it's meant to be.
When class ends, Snape says, "This will take another class to complete. Pull the levers on your worktable to the sixth position to enable the stasis charm. For homework, outline three uses for this potion not found in the text or in my lecture. Or outline in detail why exactly three ingredients in the text have been omitted from your practical. Any questions?" Two hands go up, but Snape continues without even looking at them, "No? Dismissed."
Snape watches them all leave. Harry intended to go up to his desk, but he isn't sitting at it like he usually is; he looks like he's waiting to leave himself, actually. "Sir, I—"
"Can it wait, Potter?' Snape asks, as the class empties the rest of the way. It's just them, with Hermione and Ron lingering at the door, watching him. Hermione's brows are furrowed thoughtfully.
"Um—I guess, yeah." He lowers his voice, "I just—are you alright, sir?'
Snape stares at him flatly.
"Right," Harry finds himself coughing, "I'll go, then. Um—" He'd like to ask about Sirius, but he can't do that now, not with Hermione and Ron watching him. Maybe he can catch Margot to pass on a message at lunch, or something? When they're out in the corridor, the door at their back, they all jump a little at the sound of it slamming shut. He looks over his shoulder, but Snape is gone. How does he even do that?