"Straight from the Gryffindor's Mouth: Part 1" - Harry Potter: Remus/Harry
Title: Straight from the Gryffindor's Mouth: Part 1
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Harry Potter and Severus Snape (Implied Remus)
Prompt: 020 - Colourless for drabbles100
Word Count: 979
Rating: PG
Author's Notes: I got really carried away with writing this, but it was so much fun for me! It's set during PoA, and there will be a second part, as soon as I write it, which will be later, after I get more sleep. Yes, I'm leaving you with a cliffhanger of sorts. Comments would be great!
“Do you know what this is?” Snape asked, leaning forward across his desk and tipping a small vile of clear, colorless liquid toward Harry, who was sitting in a chair across from him.
Harry silently shook his head in response, but then realizing that the Potions professor probably wanted more of a verbal reply, he quickly added, “No…sir.”
A cruel sneer worked its way across Snape’s thinned lips. “It’s Veritaserum.” At the blank expression that the young boy continued to hold in his emerald eyes, Snape’s own beetle black eyes flashed suddenly. “It’s a truth serum.” He paused just long enough for his words to sink in before he continued, “Now, if you don’t tell me, I’ll be forced to use this. It’s not only colorless, but odorless as well, so if you accidentally drank it, you wouldn’t know.”
“But you’re threatening to use it on me right now!” Harry exclaimed. “There has to be something in your contract against poisoning your students!”
“Potter, it’s not a poison! It’s a potion! And if you drank it, the only thing you would do is tell me the truth!” Snape barked back, rising quickly from his chair.
At the sudden movement from his professor, Harry shrank back in his chair just as suddenly. He realized that he had made the Potions Master angry-not that it was hard to do that-but he really didn’t want to get detention over something so trivial. The thing was, divulging the information to this professor wasn’t something trivial.
Seeing the look of sick realization cross the boy’s face, Snape’s sneer grew even more as he stalked around his desk to crouch down in front of Harry, leaning forward even more to make him even more uncomfortable. He knew that he could just read Harry’s mind, but that took all the fun out of watching him squirm and sweat uncomfortably. Snape reached behind him and procured a sheet of parchment from his desk before shoving it in front of Harry’s face and shaking it. “Potter, you drew doodles all over your Potions essay! Now, who the bloody hell is R?!” he shrieked, his index finger shaking in rage as he pointed to a doodle of a heart with the letters H and R in it.
Harry blinked blankly at his professor before shifting in his seat. So he had doodled on his Potions essay. So what? It was about some silly little potion anyway, in his opinion. Why was Professor Snape making such a big deal about who R was? “Why- why does it matter, sir?” Harry asked quietly.
Snape’s sneer faded from his face, and he began to frown as he stared down his hooked nose at the young boy. He was racking his brain trying to come up with possibilities of who R could be, but he could only come up with two at the moment, and neither of them were good options. He hoped that it wasn’t that blasted Weasley. Knowing how he and Potter acted around each other, though, it probably was. Those two were just too close for anyone’s comfort. The other option was Lupin. In a strangely sickening way, Snape hoped that it was his colleague because then he could get the werewolf into so much trouble. Snapping out of his thoughts, he turned his attention back onto Harry when the boy spoke. “Potter,” he growled in annoyance, “do I have to use this,” he shook the bottle of Veritaserum at him, “on you, or will you just tell me who it is?”
Harry’s back was now straight and stiff against the back of the chair in which he sat, his green eyes wide with fright and anxiety. “I-I d-don’t s-see wh-why it-it m-matters to-to y-you, b-but I-I’ll t-tell y-you if-if you r-really n-need to-to kn-know!” he stammered out finally after a long silence.
Snape’s dark eyes glimmered in the dim light of his dungeon office. “Well?!” he started impatiently. “Spill it, Potter, or else I’ll spill this!”
Harry swallowed hard, his hands now clasped in his lap, wringing them nervously. “Well, it’s kinda hard to tell you…but…it’s-it’s an R for Professor Lupin…since-since his first name is Remus…” he managed to say as smoothly as he could. After a long, deafening silence, he looked up at his Potions professor, his emerald eyes locking with the older man’s beetle black ones. “But he doesn’t know…” he admitted finally.
“Well!” Snape straightened up slowly before he turned his back on the boy. He took his time to fold up the piece of parchment and place both it and the vile of Veritaserum inside the inner folds of his robes before he turned sharply on his heels to face Harry once more, his height making him tower over the sitting form of the boy.
Harry was already upset enough about not having realized that he had doodled all over his Potions essay and turned it in that way, but then he became even more so when he had to blurt out who he liked to the man that he utterly loathed. While Snape’s back was to him, his mind raced with worrying about what this professor might possibly do to him next. When Snape spun around to face him, Harry inhaled sharply in a mixture of surprise and fright and he shrunk back into his chair.
“He doesn’t know because you haven’t told him,” Snape started, the cold, cruel sneer returning to his lips. Suddenly, his thin arm lashed out and grasped Harry’s forearm hard. “Lupin will know now, though!” he jeered. “Come on, Potter, we’re going to pay dear old Professor Lupin a visit now!” And before Harry could protest, Snape had yanked him from the chair and was dragging him along the inner corridors of the school on their ‘field trip’ to the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor’s office.