HP Fanfic Commentary: Conspiracy of Silence [Parts 1 and 2]
I figured, since I struggled to find much to say about DtVS eight years after the fact, that I'd be in the same boat with CoS and might as well tackle the whole series in one go.
...And then I rambled enough to fill three LJ posts. Yay?
Intro
So, this is a blast from the past.
I should confess that the main reason I've resisted calls for a commentary on this before is the fact I have it in my head this fic is bad. ...It isn't; I just think it is. All I tend to remember is that it was written so long ago and in such a rush, and my God, the typos, and Sev has Mary Suish super-skills and it's effectively whitewashing his canon flaws and... aaiee. But when I actually reread it, all of that is evident - especially the typos - but none of it's as severe as I tend to think, and there's a lot more to it that I do still love that I'd completely forgotten. So it's good to have been pushed into revisiting it.
This series marked the last time that I ever wrote and published any fic as a WIP, because forcing myself through the middle parts when I'd lost a lot of my free time, enthusiasm and inspiration was pretty punishing. The average length of the stories takes a noticeable dip after part four, though my interest did rally again towards the end.
(I don't think it honestly ever occurred to me that not delivering all seven novellas as promised was a possibility. I followed the usual writing path backwards - several years of trying to sell original work before I first discovered fic - and I think it influenced my attitude to 'publishing' work online a lot. I was used to the commitment of shoving a story in an envelope and sending it out to stand or fall on its own merits, so leaving a fic unfinished or redrafting a story after the first version had already been released was not something I even thought of myself as being 'allowed' to do.)
...Oh, wait, yet another introductory note. It's maybe worth noting that the CoS series was always conceived as a what-if; I never believed that this was canon-Snape, or really anything like him. I was just intrigued by the dichotomy of Snape's role as a long-term undiscovered double agent vs. his wild inability to control his emotions when provoked. So I spun a whole backstory around the idea of "What if the temper tantrums were all part of an act?"
If you want to read along, the series is archived here. Many of the original typos still included, alas. (I really should give it a proper edit one day, but it's just too depressing to contemplate. 42 separate chapter files to update in multiple archives? I could cry.)
Conspiracy of Silence
...This is the point where it occurs to me that I don't actually know what that title is about. I mean, a general theme of secret-keeping, yes, but who is silently conspiring? Snape and Lily? Snape and Dumbledore? I don't know! And I'm not entirely sure I ever did.
Also, in retrospect, if I'd thought about it more I probably would have avoided picking a series title that abbreviates to the same thing as one of the canon books.
First Impressions
I still like the numerical theme I used for titling the seven stories. I think I probably came up with 'First Impressions' and then brainstormed for other numerical phrases to see if I could get a pattern going. Some of the titles are a stretch, but on the whole it works.
Alone of all the children milling about on platform nine and three-quarters, Severus Snape was silent and still. The others laughed and chattered as they met old friends or sniffled and clung to their parents. Sev simply watched.
It's entirely possible I did a gleefully smug little dance of vindication when Deathly Hallows revealed, seven years after I wrote this, that Lily Evans used to call Snape 'Sev'.
See, the thing is, I contemplated JKR's fantastic ear for realistic dialogue for British teenagers. I contemplated my own psychotic loathing of my name being shortened to 'Liz', and the degree of impression this made on my classmates (i.e., absolutely none whatsoever). And I came to the conclusion that there was no way in hell that Severus was getting through school without being called Sev on a daily basis. As an adult, yes, he could cut that prospect dead and probably would, but as a teenager, even if he hated it he would be bound to get called Sev in casual conversation all the time.
I don't think I'd read enough meta at the time to have a clue about the amount of rabid hate many fans have for nicknames, but I probably would have done it anyway. I can understand the gnashing of teeth over characters who we've seen talk in canon using nicknames that they never have, but when it's unexplored circumstances and relationships, there are times when it's more realistic than not.
And JKR agrees with me, so nyerr. *dances*
Orphaned at the age of six after an unfortunate magical accident, Sev had been raised by his mother's brother. His uncle was a kind enough man in his way, but he had neither the time nor the experience to raise a young boy in any way approaching normal. Severus was left to bring himself up - and bring himself up he did.
He remembered little of life with his parents, but his father's words of wisdom to him had stuck in his head. It was wisdom his uncle and others might not have approved of... but to Severus, it made perfect sense.
Never let them see the real you, Sev. Never let them know what you're thinking. There are a lot of people in this world, and you'll find that you're smarter than most of them... but they don't need to know that. Keep it to yourself, Sev. Always play the double game.
This was written before even the first hints at Snape's background from OotP, let alone the revelation that he's actually a half-blood, so I think all we had to go on was that he knew a lot about the Dark Arts when he first started Hogwarts. For the premise of this fic to work he had to be very calculating in his relationships with other people, so I made him too introverted and accustomed to solitude to have much desire to form natural connections, and added some Slytherin advice from his dad.
(I have made the crack that this Snape is probably the closest thing I've written to a self-insert, and in some details it's quite true. Being an aromantic asexual who always scores "100% introverted" on personality tests, I tend to regard the presence of other human beings with a kind of amiable bemusement. Sure, some of them are fun to be around, but I don't miss them when they're not there or anything. I function best when I'm getting at least twenty hours a day of total solitude.)
Only one other student was as short as he was, but the difference in their demeanour was striking. Slim, with golden-white hair and a self-possessed air, he carried a very expensive-looking case and was pontificating loudly about how his father had been head boy when he was at Hogwarts.
Slytherin, for sure. The home of the ambitious.
We didn't know at this stage that Lucius Malfoy was older than the MWPP group, so I had him in the same year. (I think we also didn't know at the time how young the Potters must have been when they had Harry, so it seemed a coincidence but not too great a one that Draco's father might be the same age.) I wanted the ringleader of the prejudiced Slytherins to be in the same year so that Sev would have someone he would have to put on his act for pretty much all the way through his schooling.
"Huh? Oh, whatever." Sirius seemed more concerned with something in his coat pocket. He reached inside, and produced a tiny owl that was looking a bit rumpled.
"Oh, you have an owl!" Lily seemed delighted. "Oh, I wanted to get one, but my parents wouldn't let me!"
"You keep your owl in your pocket?" remarked Remus, eyebrows raised.
"This is Zipper," Sirius explained, carefully smoothing out his ruffled feathers. "He doesn't like cages. Do you, Zip?"
I was amused by the fact that Sirius was the provider of Pigwidgeon the tiny owl, so he gets a mini owl of his own for this fic.
"I'm sorry, are we amusing you?" asked Sirius.
"Not intentionally, I'm sure," said Snape dryly.
Sirius scowled, but James grinned amiably. "Hi, I'm James Potter. This is-"
"I have ears," Sev reminded him.
James blinked. "Do you have a name as well?"
"I'm Severus Snape."
Part of the central conceit of this fic is that the rivalry between Snape and the Marauders is something manipulated from Snape's end for effect, so this James is quite an amiable sort, and initially Snape is simply uninterested in him rather than hostile. Sirius, on the other hand, is still kind of an impulsive jerk.
(I've never quite been able to fully warm to Sirius, since there are aspects of his behaviour that just push some personal buttons. He comes off as one of those people who face being called on their assholery with a big dumb grin and repeated insistence that, "Hey, it was only a joke." And I loathe those people more than anything else on Earth.)
A number of the new kids seemed intimidated by the sheer size of him; they'd never seen anything like it. Neither had Snape, but he recognised him for what he was immediately. Giant's blood in that one, or I'm a Muggle.
It seems ridiculous that no one at Hogwarts seemed to even guess that Hagrid was part giant; I can only assume it's the sort of thing that's taboo for purebloods to even think about. Wizarding society as a whole seems to be good at not seeing things it doesn't want to.
"Right, 'ere we go!" bellowed the enormous man. "No more'n four to a boat! Any more firs' years?"
Oy, I have Hagrid drop an H 'ere. How embarrassing. This was before I did a detailed breakdown of his speech across the books and worked out the grammatical rules. (It's actually surprisingly consistent; if you remember, back before my website died I even coded a gadget that would automatically translate into the accent for you.) Luckily, Hagrid doesn't pop up much more in this series, so I dodged a bullet there.
They got out at the other side, the pudgy Hufflepuff boy stumbling and almost falling in the water. The blond boy snickered, and James shot him an angry scowl. He came over and offered the other guy a hand up.
"Hi, I'm James Potter," he said yet again. Snape found himself wishing he could think up a more original line to introduce himself.
"P-P-Peter Pettigrew," stuttered the boy awkwardly. The blond kid snorted again, and the bulky boy who'd shared their boat chuckled with him. James glared at them angrily, including Sev by default - although he hadn't laughed or even reacted. Snape stared back impassively. Why on earth would he care what Mr. "Hi I'm James Potter" thought of him?
This James is quite the noble defender of the innocent from bullies. So, er, not much like canon James at all, really.
I think the main reason this fic fortunately didn't get taken as being too much of a whitewash of Snape is that it doesn't go the frequent route of building him up by tearing the Marauders down. Here they're the good guys too.
(...Also there's the fact that Sev doesn't so much have a secret heart of gold as a secret heart of amoral indifference.)
As they waited, a tall, very thin man with a scrubby blond beard came forward. "First years, Hagrid?" The huge man nodded.
"Welcome," said the thin wizard, with a slightly distracted smile. "I'm Professor Fractalis. I teach Arithmancy, and I'm the deputy headmaster here at Hogwarts."
This guy's full name, although we don't find it out until a later instalment, is Trigo Fractalis. All the teachers I created for this have JKR-esque job-appropriate names, though I'm not sure I can remember the origins of all of them. This one is made of some fairly obvious mathematical references.
A thousand years ago or more,
When Hogwarts school was new,
The founders formed their houses each,
But wondered what to do.
For they each prized in their own mind
A different virtue clear;
But how to pick those virtues out
When they could not be near?
'Twas Gryffindor who thought it out
And saw the problem's end
And placed a spell on his own hat
On which they could depend.
For I'm the Hogwarts Sorting Hat
I know what's on your mind;
And so, no matter who you are,
A place for you I'll find.
If you are brave and true of heart,
In Gryffindor you'll go;
If you are wise above all else,
Then Ravenclaw, I'll know;
The cunning and the wittiest,
In Slytherin will be;
And those who work and toil hard,
To Hufflepuff I'll see.
I'm never wrong, I never fail,
I'll know by what I've read;
I'll sort you into your true home
So put me on your head!
I am a poetry anti-snob. I try to like the deep and meaningful stuff, and sometimes I really do, but not-so-secretly, I geek out for rhyming verse. I find a lot of fanfic Sorting Songs - not to mention a lot of pro-published greetings cards - quite painful, because I'm very attuned to the rhythm of words at the best of times, and poetry without the correct meter just feels horribly, jarringly, screechingly wrong. It does baffle me a lot that not everybody seems to be able to hear that it's wrong. Doesn't everybody tap out syllable patterns with their fingertips?
(...Actually, come to think of it, I did have a childhood habit verging on obsessive-compulsion where I would lie awake at night getting random phrases stuck in my head until I could find a number of repetitions/system of finger-tapping/way of rephrasing so that the syllables would work out neatly. So, er, possibly this is just me.
I still do the tapping thing a bit, but I think I've got better at rerouting my brain so I can get out of the cycle after finding a good pattern instead of rhythm-ising every phrase that goes through my head for the next two hours.)
So. Anyway. JKR writes fantastic rhyming verse that makes the little monkeys in my brain that force me to tap syllables very happy, and I loved getting the chance to write my own version. So much so that I did a wholly unnecessary second Sorting Song for the year two story, too. I'd have done them for all seven if the plot had allowed for it. (And then, years later, I wrote Curse of Durand, ninety percent of my motivation being my deep-seated desire to write rhyming clues. I blame the Redwall books for this.)
"Professor Binns, as you may recall, sadly passed away last term. However, as those of you were in his history class will be aware, his ghost remains with us, and he will continue to teach his classes. Professor Kirrelgun, on the other hand, has left us for a lucrative position in the Ministry of Magic. We are fortunate to have procured a more than capable replacement - may I introduce Professor McGonogall, the new Transfiguration mistress." There was polite applause. A stern-faced young woman with a flood of dark hair stood up and nodded briefly.
Again, we didn't know the Potters and Snape were so young at this stage, so I probably pictured this as taking place almost thirty years pre-Philosopher's Stone rather than barely twenty as is now canon. We didn't have any clue to McGonagall's age or how long she'd been teaching, either, although I think it was referenced that she'd taught the Potters, so I made her a newbie here. (And mispelled her name. Sigh.)
...I have no idea where I got the name Kirrelgun from, and on looking it up, it doesn't seem to be drawn from the Potterverse, so... ??? Perhaps it contains some clever Transfiguration-related wordplay, but I'm buggered if I know what.
There was a mass scramble as the first years fought over the different rooms. Snape ended up sharing his with Malfoy, Crabbe, and two other boys called Nick Avery and Stuart Flint. Malfoy cast a cold eye over their roommates, and appeared to find them acceptable. Snape suspected this had more to do with the fact that they both came from long-established wizarding families than anything to do with their personalities.
I guess in my mind this generation was larger than the post-Voldemort era, and therefore there were two dorms full of first years instead of just one.
However, he was careful to avoid being first to complete things all the time. Generally he would finish second or third - far enough down the list not to get noticed, but not so far down people started thinking he was stupid.
Sev thinks he is being So Very Sneaky, but he is far too attached to his own intelligence to actually pretend to be bad at stuff.
Saxius Fennel was a handsome, dark-haired man with olive skin.
Obvious herb-related name is obvious. I think this guy's a Death Eater, isn't he? This story is so old, I can no longer remember. I shall discover the plot along with you!
Other, more sensitive and less brilliant students had a lot of trouble with him. Remus struggled mightily with his Potions, and Lily was just plain hopeless - despite the fact that she had an excellent memory for detail and was always quick to understand. She knew exactly what she was supposed to be doing... she just couldn't make it work.
Here I accidentally stumble onto canon from the opposite direction, having Snape and Lily work together in Potions because she has trouble with it rather than the opposite.
It's actually quite amusing how this fic has simultaneously been Jossed all to hell and ended up considerably more canonical than it started out. Back when this was written there was no reason at all to believe Snape and Lily could have had an inter-house friendship or worked together on anything. Nor did we have any particular evidence that Snape was a genius student; I just took the fact he was good at logic and knew some Dark curses early and ran with it, but then two books later JKR went and revealed that he was rewriting textbooks and inventing his own spells when he was still a schoolboy.
Slytherin shared Potions with Gryffindor, which gave Malfoy Peter, Lily, and two other mudbloods, Jade Creevy and Jerry James, to pick on.
Apparently I forgot the Creevy brothers were themselves Muggle-born, and so wouldn't have had previous relatives at Hogwarts. This must be an unknown cousin. (Also, I'm not sure Jade is terribly period-appropriate as names go. Sigh.)
Note that Sev has picked up the term 'mudblood' in his internal dialogue here without passing much judgement on it. He can see for himself that the DE rhetoric is false, but that doesn't mean he has a great deal of empathy or concern for the targets of it. He's not perturbed by Malfoy's bigotry or his bullying, only by the fact that he seems to be serious about the idea of a pureblood new world order, and that if this comes to pass it's probably going to lead to the sort of restriction of knowledge that's going to make it hard for Sev to read all the books that he wants.
Sev's world is very internally focused.
If he couldn't disguise his expertise in Potions, Defence Against the Dark Arts was nearly as bad. Their teacher was Professor Malachite, a very well-spoken wizard with icy white hair and a goatee beard. He was head of house Slytherin, and as well-liked as most of his students were reviled. He was always very warm and understanding with the students, aiding them whenever they needed help and seldom handing out any kind of punishment.
Malachite is a gemstone that, among its many alleged properties, is supposed to protect children from witchcraft. Following the gemstone theme, this guy's first name is "Carnus" for Carnelian, which supposedly heralds danger and resists bad temper. (I probably should have thought of the 'carnal' connection, though, since I'm sure somebody out there did, fandom being what it is. Oopsie.)
I kind of liked the idea of a totally non-cliché head of Slytherin who was warm and noble and well-liked.
(Incidentally, the revelations about Malachite's demi-human nature were not planned at this stage at all. I don't think I came up with that idea until about four or five parts in. Although when I did, I read back over everything and was kind of gleeful about how neatly it fitted his established personality.)
Yes, Dumbledore might hide behind an entirely different set of shields than Snape, but underneath they were two of a kind. Sev made a mental note to never try to stare the headmaster down. He had the feeling that it might just be the first time in his life he didn't succeed.
This is kind of retrospectively nifty, given the later canon that both of them are gifted with Legilimency.
Aside from polite chit-chat with the staff, they ate in silence. It was not necessarily awkward, though; silence was Sev's natural state.
It wasn't Lily's. Finally, as if coming to a decision, she seized one of the magical crackers and held it out to him. He regarded it with just the slightest hint of a smirk.
"What's that supposed to be?" he said, rolling his eyes.
Lily rolled hers right back, and prodded him with the end of the cracker. "Think of it as peace offering." He continued to regard her in faint amusement. "Oh, for God's sake, just pull the damn thing, will you?"
He took the end of the cracker and, as apathetically as possible, held onto it while she pulled. There was an explosion of sparks, and a hat with an enormous orange feather fell out. He blinked at it for a minute, then pushed it over towards her. "Yours, I suspect."
"Oh, you're no fun," she retorted. Before he could do anything, she snatched off his wizard's hat and dropped the offending thing on his head.
Snape reached up and removed it cautiously. "I don't think it's really my colour," he said dryly.
I still kind of love this, actually. The dynamic between Sev and Lily in these stories is something I really like. She's direct and no-nonsense while he's introverted and calculating, but they meet in the middle where they actually have a pretty similar sense of humour.
Except when it comes to hats. Severus will never be convinced of the comedic value of funny hats.
"You," she said without preamble, "are going to do me a big favour."
"I am?" he asked dryly.
"You are."
"I just decided this of my own free will?"
"You did. Very generous of you, too."
"That doesn't sound like the me I know."
"You were possessed by the Christmas spirit."
He quirked an eyebrow at her. "I was clearly possessed by something."
This is some rather West Wing influenced dialogue. I think I was writing this pretty much simultaneously with the second DtVS story.
Lily was very bright, but she seemed to have some kind of block about physically preparing a potion. Sev had to use all of his ingenuity to find a way around that block, find new ways of breaking things down and explaining them.
For the first time, he was actually doing something challenging. If learning was easy, helping others to learn was much harder. And, to his shock, he actually enjoyed it.
Sev discovers he likes teaching here. At least, he likes it as a logic problem of finding an inventive way to explain things to a bright, attentive pupil. He will probably find his first class full of uninterested dunderheads a very rude awakening.
Rereading these stories now, the thing that most makes me cringe is how often I felt obliged to bring up how devious/calculating/impassive Sev is. Apparently, stepping beyond the bounds of canon characterisation, I was deeply paranoid that you would forget the take I was going for if I didn't keep reminding you.
Still, it's all Sev's POV, so perhaps we can run with the theory that he's just overly enamoured of his own brilliance.
Lily turned troubled eyes to Snape. "Did he mean Audley Fletcher?"
"I think so," he said, and his voice was far more certain than the words. Audley Fletcher was a popular, talented seventh year, the son of a famous Auror. If Fennel was planning something that he didn't want to do around Dumbledore, then it was almost certainly something to do with the Dark Arts. And if that was true, the Aurors were logical enemies.
Dumbledore mentioned Mundungus Fletcher as one of the people to be gathered at the end of GoF. Most of us wrongly assumed they were Auror types and similar. Still, I don't think I ever gave him a direct name-check, so this can still fit into canon as a different Fletcher.
A 'casual' remark to Professor Parilia, head of house Hufflepuff, revealed that the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws had Potions Wednesday and Friday.
Parilia had a first name when she was created, but since I don't think it ever made it into the fic it's now lost in the mist of time. (I didn't bother to keep the notes for completed fics when I swapped computers back in '03, since I wasn't expecting to revisit them.) She's the Herbology teacher; Parilia is the Roman festival that led to the modern Earth Day.
"Hey. D'you want to know the reason you're still alive right now?"
"I'm sure you're about to tell me," he said, not looking up from his history assignment.
"Because you didn't ask me to be one of those giggling girls for you."
"Wouldn't dream of it," he said mildly.
"Well, good."
"After all, I wouldn't want you to upset your boyfriend."
It was just as well he'd mastered the charm to stop fast-flying objects.
The running boyfriend joke is proof that, no matter how overly mature they are in some ways, they are still definitely twelve-year-olds.
Snape, personally, found Fletcher's vapid grin very irritating. Fennel might be unpleasant - and, apparently, embroiled in a murder plot - but at least he was intelligent. Fletcher might be pulling the top grades, but when it came to spontaneous wit he was sorely lacking.
Snape would rather hang out with snarky intellectual evil people than dumb good guys. Hey, he has his priorities.
For a change, the Slytherin and Gryffindor boys were near-united by mutual dislike. The girls were all blushing and giggling excitedly, and even icy Narcissa Salenica had an unusual touch of colour to her cheeks. Malfoy, who'd been practically marking his territory ever since he'd met her, was looking deeply annoyed.
This was before we knew Narcissa and Sirius were cousins. I don't think 'Salenica' even means anything, it just had the right rhythm to complement the name.
Well-chosen, observed the cool, detached part of Snape's brain that always noted such things. A Gryffindor, for the Slytherins had a bad enough reputation to be suspected of doing something to Fletcher deliberately. Sirius Black, for he had a history of messing around with magic and trying things he shouldn't. No one would believe it had been anything but a foolish accident.
Sev's brain had already run through the possible purple liquids Fennel could have chosen to add to this particular mix, and come to a conclusion. Any minute now, Sirius' cauldron would hit exactly the right temperature... and its contents would violently explode.
A moment later: "Professor! My potion's gone green."
Fennel's eye-rolling sneer looked exactly the same as it always did. "Why am I not surprised, Black? Fletcher! Deal with it."
Audley reluctantly broke away from the trio of girls he was wowing with his Quidditch stories, and came over to Sirius' side. He leaned over the potion to study it more closely. "Now, what do we have here?"
Idiot. Anybody who did that over a potion that was already doing something unexpected deserved whatever they got. However, he doubted Lily would see it that way.
Sev cannot help but admire a good evil plan and lacks sympathy for innocent victims who act stupidly. (Something I'm sure this take on Snape shares with the canon version.) It is probably just as well for the fate of the wizarding world that he did befriend Lily early on.
Though he would totally deny that he cares about her opinion here. It's just logical not to upset her enough that she'll badger him about it. Obviously.
Auror Fletcher was the current darling of the media, having bust up an entire coven of Dark wizards in Bulgaria.
I chose this general region because of Voldemort's later canon wanderings in Albania. And we know there's a substantial wizarding community there because of the Quidditch team and the presence of Veela.
That made his own job only harder. Not only was he well known to be deeply disinterested in the sport, but he was a Slytherin to boot. It would stretch belief for him to show up to support his own team, and he'd stick out like a troll at a tea party at Gryffindor vs. Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw.
Heh. I like this simile.
Audley had turned out to have nothing worse than a dislocated shoulder - and a very queasy feeling after the reaction of the two potions inside him. He was spending the night in the infirmary, under the watchful eye and clucking tongue of Madame Florence.
Painfully obvious namesake is painfully obvious.
The plan had gone off almost perfectly. James Potter had been applauded as a hero, and Sev's part in the whole affair had been grossly misunderstood... by all except one. The most important one. Fennel had to know his cover was blown. You couldn't turn up and cure the Callahan's Brew poison by accident.
The way he saw it, Fennel had two options. Disappear before he could be caught - or kill Fletcher and then disappear before he could be caught. Given that his master didn't seem to be particularly tolerant, Sev's money was on the latter.
Genius that he is, it still doesn't occur to Sev here that Fennel could try to kill him too. He's too accustomed to his own position as outside observer. Plus he still falls into the trap of expecting people to be fully logical in their motivations.
"Then you're caught. Which is why I'll be hiding elsewhere." He stepped back into an alcove, and mumbled a little charm he'd found in one of Professor Malachite's books. It wasn't invisibility, exactly - that was a much more complex spell - it just made him... shadowy. He could be seen, but only by someone who was specifically looking.
Invisibility in the Potterverse appeared to be a difficult trick even before we learned how rare Harry's cloak really was, so I came up with a less effective spell it was plausible for Sev to have learned. Kind of similar to the later canon Disillusionment Charm, but then, there are only so many variations on the Notice-Me-Not field.
It was James Potter. He stood in the doorway still in his sleep-gear, eyes wide behind his glasses and hair even more ruffled than usual. "Hey! What did you do to her?"
Fennel rolled his eyes in disbelief. "Oh, good God, another one."
Heh. I kind of like Fennel, actually.
Unnoticed, Sev stepped out of the shadows behind the pair of them. His shadow-spell was falling away quickly, but he had a cure for that. Ducking over to Fennel's discarded invisibility cloak, he tugged it over his head.
Though I certainly didn't predict canon, I found it kind of odd that James should have something so powerful as an invisibility cloak at school, so in this universe, I had Sev and Lily get it from this Death Eater and then pass it on to James later.
James and Lily were fussed over, hugged, and inspected for injuries by every single person in the room. Sev was extremely glad to be out of it.
There is nothing quite so grim for a touch-averse introvert as other people trying to be comforting. Yes, thank you, very kind, now please go and be comforting from six feet away.
"Ah yes, Mr. Potter. Pray tell us why you were roaming the corridors late at night? On a similar mission of mercy?" said Malachite dryly. James and Sirius' mischievous exploits were already somewhat infamous.
Malachite adopts something of a Snape role in these scenes, except with more humour and less spitting rage. I also had him be Dumbledore's main staff confidante in this series, because McGonagall's too new and I rather liked the idea of the head of Slytherin being Dumbledore's most trusted.
"I was... I was..." For some reason, James glanced over at Dumbledore for reassurance. "I was going to check on somebody." Malachite opened his mouth to query him, but the headmaster waved him quiet.
"I know what this is about. Tell your story, James."
I don't know how long it took the boys to find out about Remus in canon, but here they knew quite early on. I figured they'd need all the time they could get to study up on becoming Animagi.
"Nobody," said James confidently. Lily didn't answer, and Dumbledore gave one of his unreadable half-smiles. Snape would swear that, just for a second, his eyes flickered over to where Sev was hiding under the invisibility cloak.
First rule of Harry Potter fics: of course Dumbledore knows everything.
"Fools," said the headmaster, in a dark tone Sev had never heard from him before. "The Ministry refuses to listen to the evidence that mounts before it. This is an evil time, Carnus. The darkness is ascending."
"Shadows, Albus," said Malachite reassuringly. "It's just shadows. It'll all come to nothing in the end."
"Perhaps," said Dumbledore, pushing around a few marshmallows on a plate. "Perhaps." But as Sev snuck out of the office on Malachite's heels, the headmaster's troubled expression stayed with him.
And if Dumbledore knows everything, one might very well suspect him of deliberately pushing Sev towards his destiny of becoming a spy. Of course, Sev would never believe that someone else was manipulating him...
"Then what is it about?" she demanded.
"Enemies." He held her gaze, suddenly deadly serious. "There's something coming, Lily. The Ministry of Magic might not believe it, but Dumbledore knows it - and so do I. This is about more than just one potions teacher cracking up and hexing a student." He paused for a second. "The dark is coming, Lily. And if we don't have somebody right there where the dark is thickest watching for it, it's going to be too late."
Lily's ire faded into something approaching resignation. "And you think that person's you?" she asked.
"I'm the only one it can be, Lily," he told her. "I'm the only one that knows what to watch for... and the only one that has a chance at getting on the inside. So right now, the worst thing I can have is friends. I need enemies, because all they understand is enemies. I need them to believe that I'm as bitter and twisted up and jealous as they are. So as of right now, I'm turning my back on friends." He hesitated for a fraction of an instant. "And that includes you."
He turned, and walked back up the steps and out of the dungeon without looking back.
That was the last time Sev spoke to Lily that year.
I still rather love this ending. In fact, despite some awkwardness in the writing, I'm quite impressed with how this holds up all these years later.
Lily takes a back seat for the next few instalments of the story. Long ago, before I had such a bloody awful time slogging through the middle stories of this arc, I had grand ideas of doing an accompanying seven-story series from her POV. Alas, none of the notes for that still survive, but I have a feeling it was going to be called Shades of Grey.
Second Sight
Case in point; the pretty red-haired girl forging determinedly through the crowd towards him. Lily; the closest thing to a friend he'd made at Hogwarts.
The fics in this series are filled with rampant semi-colon abuse. At this point in my writing career I was addicted to them and had a terrible tendency to shove them in all sorts of places where a colon, a dash or even a comma would be more appropriate. Poor little things.
Sev gave his trademark thin smile, and filed that information away.
Someone once recced this series with the caveat that they were annoyed by the constant references to Sev filing stuff away. Now I notice them whenever I reread it. You were probably right, long ago person on a comm I've forgotten the name of! Sorry about that!
Auriga Cephus was a flighty young woman who taught astronomy. It was not unusual for her to forget where she had put her wand or the names of her students, but he wouldn't expect her to have missed the Sorting.
Josh leaned over, having noticed Sev's frown. "What's up?"
There was no harm in sharing an observation that anybody could have made. "Professor Cephus. She's not there."
"Oh." Josh pulled a face. "I hope she hasn't left; I always liked her."
"You would, Matthews," interjected Malfoy scathingly. "Trust you to like the only mudblood teacher in the school!"
Obvious astronomy name is also obvious. And also makes it kind of unlikely Malfoy is correct about her being a mudblood, unless she changed her name to fit into the wizarding world. But anyway, this is A Clue that something nasty has happened to her.
Explaining this to Malfoy would be worse than useless. Boys like Malfoy didn't want reasons to victimise people so much as excuses. Malfoy had already made up his mind not to like Josh, and any justification for this was filled in after the fact.
None of this infighting was incredibly important to Sev, so he ignored it in favour of more interesting things.
Once again, Sev sees the unfairness in Malfoy's behaviour, but doesn't feel any compulsion to shield others from injustice. Doesn't affect him personally, therefore he doesn't care.
Professor Alomancia taught Divination to the upper years, and was, like most Divination teachers, widely considered to be a mad old bat.
Alomancy is a form of divination involving throwing salt into flames. Her first name is later revealed to be 'Hepatosa', for 'Hepatoscopy', divination by inspecting the liver of sacrifices. (A lovely name for a girl!)
Sev wanted to hear the official line on Professor Cephus' absence, but it would have been out of 'character' for him to ask, and to his frustration nobody else bothered to. How was he supposed to gather information if everyone around him was too stupid to ask the most basic questions?
Here Sev begins to discover the limitations of his plan to become a master investigator without ever actually having to speak to anyone.
She began to speak, in a cold voice wholly unlike the friendly tones she had just employed. "Choose wisely and well, for your doom will come too quickly. Love will not save you, but that which is most precious will survive. Beware; you think you see him, but the colours he wears are not his, and the face you know now is not the true one. He will betray you!"
We didn't know at this time that Trelawney's talent for prophecy was so rare, so here with get another Divination professor with the same trait.
Sev's being typically self-centred by assuming this prophecy is about him: it's actually about Peter Pettigrew.
Nonetheless, it was another nugget of information to squirrel away
Squirreling rather than filing! Well, it's some variety, I guess.
Josh's only link to the rest of his world was his little brother, and that was a fairly tenuous one. They couldn't sit together at meals, because of the house tables, and they couldn't enter each other's common rooms.
Really, the Hogwarts house system is designed to force factionalism.
"I'm not sure if 'lucky' is quite the right word," chided Dumbledore gently. "Apparently she warned them both that somebody they knew was going to betray them."
"Really? How charmingly vague of her," said Malachite snidely. "I don't suppose she saw fit to furnish them with a name, or even a time?"
Malachite is my favourite OC in this series. He gets all the fun snark.
He let out an explosive sigh and slumped down next to Sev. "I don't know, I don't know," he said bitterly. "Can't you do something? Malfoy listens to you. You could say something-"
"Yes. And then not only would he continue doing what he's doing, he'd also stop listening to me."
"So you won't even try?"
"It won't help."
"You know, sometimes that's really not the point," snapped Josh.
Sev's logical reasoning and the art of looking out for other people's feelings are not really mixy things.
"Ah, cunning," nodded Snape dryly. "A good word that. I think you'll find it means 'just as smart as one of us, but if we use a different word we can pretend it's not the same'."
An observation I'm pretty sure is stolen from Terry Pratchett.
Also, I've trained myself out of using dialogue tags like 'nodded' because other people (including my editors) hate them, but I still don't have any problem with them personally. Yes, I know you can't technically 'nod' a sentence, but there's a lot of things you can't technically do that we say in shorthand ways in writing. It's perfectly clear what meaning is being expressed, so what's the problem? It's just pedantic over-literalism so far as I can see.
The current flying teacher, Jagred Swift, had coached professionally, and the teams he turned out were so good no novice flyer would dare to try and get in.
I have no idea where this dude's name came from. Swift is obvious, Jagred? No clue.
Malfoy, of course, was talking as if he'd already been appointed captain. His parents had bought him the very latest in brooms, a Cleansweep 2. Most of the actual team players only had Silver Arrows.
I back-engineered from the canon that a Cleansweep 5 was considered an old broom in Harry's second year and a Cleansweep 7 current. (Although later canon from Quidditch Through the Ages has it that the Cleansweep 2 was released in 1934 and the 3 in 1937. I think this is possibly a case of JKR being Bad At Maths.) The Silver Arrow was ref'd as a discontinued model in PoA.
I had it as unusual for girls to be on the school Quidditch teams in this era, though I think from what we see in canon the wizarding world is supposed to have greater gender equality than the Muggle world. I thought it would be neat to have Lily be decent at Quidditch, though it didn't seem like she could have played on the main team much or Harry would have heard about.
Josh fell to his knees, screaming again. His voice had cracked and gone hoarse with the strain he'd put onto it, yet he didn't stop. He fell to the floor, writhing as if there were something inside of him trying to escape. Sweat was literally flowing from him, pouring down his tortured face. And still Malfoy didn't stop the curse.
Huh. Some quite evocative description here. And more surprisingly, correct use of the subjunctive. Since I'm fairly sure I didn't know the rules for this at the time, I must have got the grammar right by instinct.
(Actually, all my grammar is done by instinct. My technical education in English essentially began and ended with, "A noun is a naming word, a verb is a doing word, an adjective is a describing word," plus where to put capital letters and full stops. Almost everything I know about writing was intuited from reading books. I have gradually picked up technical definitions for rules here and there as I've gone along, but don't ask me to put proper names on anything.
And I still don't know what the phrase 'diagram a sentence' even means.)
Avery and Simon Lestrange were watching with a horribly eager light in their eyes, as if this was the most fascinating thing they'd ever seen. Everybody else in the room, even the thuggish Colin Crabbe, had looked away, unable to stand a moment longer. Jack Brisingamen had his hands jammed over his ears, although Sev doubted that it could be doing anything to block out that unearthly howl.
I think at the time of writing this, we had heard 'the Lestranges' mentioned, but it wasn't fully clear that Bellatrix, Rastaban and Rodolphus were they, or else it wasn't known how many of them there were. Hence, Simon. He's certainly psychotic enough to be a Lestrange, anyway.
Jack here is, apparently, named for the Alan Garner book the Weirdstone of Brisingamen, which, uh, I've never actually read. (I tried The Owl Service and totally couldn't get into it.) But my brother had a copy and the title has stuck with me.
Sev couldn't meet those eyes, but he couldn't look away. He started counting inside his head, doubling numbers and doubling them until they were big enough to fill his head and blank out any other kind of thought.
Two. Four. Eight. Sixteen. Thirty-two. Sixty-four. One twenty-eight. Two fifty-six. Five hundred and twelve. Ten twenty-four. Twenty forty-eight. Forty ninety-six. Eighty-one ninety-two...
The numbers grew bigger, taking up his more and more of his thoughts until he had to think about the math, blocking everything out, not seeing or thinking or feeling...
Switch-hitting between this and the DtVS stories caused some moments of linguistic confusion, as evidenced by the "math" here. Ironically, I'm far more likely to drop accidental Americanisms when writing British characters than vice versa, because I actually pay attention when I'm trying to sound American, whereas writing Brits I let out whatever comes flowing from my brain. And there's a lot of American vocabulary stuffed in there.
I used to do the powers of two in my head thing in particularly boring lectures. I usually gave up after 262,144 because I get too bogged down rechecking my calculations to progress.
It seemed odd to think that barely ten minutes had passed; that it was still a sunny Saturday afternoon up there, and people were still playing. Sev gave a humourless snort at his own sense of drama: what had he expected, a sudden dark and stormy night?
I always get confused when I'm intently focused on writing something and then look up and the weather's all wrong. I'm not much of one for needing the mood set when I'm writing - I play music on random play all the time and will cheerfully write an angsty tearful death scene to the sound of the Macarena. The only thing that I find really distracting is new music that I'm still learning the lyrics to.
In the end, he trusted to his own skill, mixing ingredients he knew had healing and soothing properties. He worked as much through instinct as through knowledge, judging quantities and mixtures by what seemed to feel right. He heated the mix in his cauldron until its colour seemed to settle, and risked a small dab on his tongue. A numbness quickly suffused it, and he felt momentarily light-headed. He took a deep breath to clear his head, and poured the potion into a vial.
It was the first potion he had ever made up without adhering to a strictly drawn-up recipe. The school had very strict rules about that kind of experimentation. Magical ingredients could react extremely unpredictably, and even very experienced research wizards could be caught by surprise. But Sev's faith in his own intelligence was such that he'd never entertained the possibility he might do something wrong.
Once again, I am amused that the capabilities I totally made up for Sev with little canon basis are now fully supported by later books.
Sev 'happened' to wander by in time to see Malachite catch the three boys on the edge of the Forbidden Forest. It was pretty clear that Crabbe and Avery had planned to chase Josh inside, maybe even get him lost.
Despite their repeated assurances that it was just a prank - Josh, of course, was not stupid enough to argue - Malachite went ballistic.
"It's the Forbidden Forest!" he told the three of them. "It's not called the 'ooh, probably not too smart to go in there' Forest. It's not the 'maybe ought to stay away from' Forest. It's Forbidden! It's Forbidden for a reason."
Malachite's overreaction here was originally only intended as a red herring to make him a possible suspect when Sev discovers the bones at the end of this story, but I picked up on it again later when I made Malachite a Naga in the later stories.
Sev was trapped. He was surrounded by house Slytherin on all sides; it was to be Malfoy's finest hour, and there was no way by any reckoning he could possibly hope to leave. Not without calling the attention of the entire school down on him, and shattering forever any hope of gaining Malfoy's trust.
So he was forced to sit through the entire match, contemplating what might be going on that he could do nothing about.
Sev begins to learn in this story that although he sees himself as the genius master manipulator, he can't be everywhere at once, and in a lot of ways he's as constrained by his own plans as the people he's trying to manipulate.
The lights were dimmed, and not even Mr. Litavori the librarian was there.
I guess this name is derived from Lit-a-vore as in carnivore.
Professor Ephemeria kept a hand on Sev's shoulders, as if he might suddenly take flight if she didn't - or perhaps it was to keep herself steady.
Dumbledore's steely blue eyes were sharp. "What is it, Janeida?" he asked gently.
'Ephemeria' is obviously a variant on 'ephemeral', since this potions teacher is only going to be a temporary filler of the position before Severus takes over, but I'm not sure where I got Janeida from.
"And can you tell me who might have done this?" the headmaster asked.
Sev was intrigued by his choice of words; very intrigued. As if he was asking not if Sev knew, but whether he would tell. As if he had a very clear idea of what was going on here...
"No, sir," he said, meeting the headmaster's gaze steadily. The bright blue eyes that looked back at him were as unreadable as his own.
Dumbledore continues to know everything.
He was so busy looking around that he didn't look down. He tripped over something, and fell heavily. Inspecting his wand carefully to make sure he hadn't broken it, Sev said "Lumos!" and flicked the magical light over to the object he had caught his foot on.
It was a human skull.
Dun dun dun...! I think this was a chapter break in the original. I'm working from a version without the breaks marked so I'm not entirely sure. The stories in this series aren't really structured in distinct chapters the way my others are; I just happened to end up posting First Impressions in six chunks, so I kept that pattern for the later stories.
Sev automatically stumbled a few steps backwards. Impassive or not, there was something utterly instinctual about recoiling from a skeleton.
Once automatic reaction was done, cool reflection kicked right back in. It was a skeleton; it was far beyond any help he could have provided, and there was no reason to be afraid of it. He took a closer look.
I am fairly unperturbed by dead animals, bones, and the like, but there's always an instinctive jerk-back reaction when your brain first processes what you're looking at.
Sev held the pair of them in his palms and studied them thoughtfully. They were familiar... He closed his eyes, and allowed his mind to flood back; back over a thousand vividly stored memories, snapshots of his life.
Apparently I gave Sev a photographic memory. Huh. I have an extremely good memory myself, but it's almost entirely verbal; I can't picture images in my head at all, and while I'm okay at recognising faces - provided it's somebody I've met several times and am primed to expect to see again - could not successfully describe my own family members to a sketch artist. ("Grey hair, grey eyes... nose? Yes, he does have one. I'm pretty sure I'd have noticed if he didn't. Ears? Yep. Two. One on either side. Attached to a face that is... face shaped.")
The thing my memory is good for, like the rest of my brain, is rhythmic sequences. Anything like a PIN code, password or telephone number will stick in my mind for good once I've had to recall it on two or three separate occasions. (Whether it's useful or not. The userid I had for the school computers when I was eleven was 12145.)
It was difficult to read by the light of his wand, and he leaned in closely. The note read: The blood of wizardry has been diluted. We will suffer these wretched half-breeds no more. Signed: the Brotherhood of the Death Eaters.
The name was unfamiliar to him. Next to the final 's' was what looked like a dark blot on the paper. Sev placed a hand behind the note to pull it closer to his eyes, and then leapt back as green light flared. Reflexes had him halfway across the clearing, wand out, before he recognised that this spell was not a magical boobytrap.
The tiny star of sparkling green that drifted outwards and upwards seemed utterly incongruous - like a fairy light or a fragment of a firework. Then, as Sev watched, it split in half and in half again. The lights multiplied rapidly, forming a globe of dancing lights several feet across, easily visible against the black of the night sky.
The lights swarmed around each other like miniature fairies. They bunched together, and then spread out again, taking on a new shape. Before his eyes, they formed into an obscenely grinning skull, hugely and distorted with a snaking tongue. In one of the eyesockets the lights flared in a supernova wink.
Hey, cool. I really like this sequence!
I find a lot of my writing from this era pretty awkward now, but there's the occasional bit like this that pops out at me. It's interesting to reread this stuff after so much time has passed that I really don't remember what I'm going to find.
"I should think, with everything that's going on," Malachite observed bitterly, "people should see that my house are very much the victims here. But no; whenever house Slytherin is involved, all the old prejudices come out."
"It can be easy to fall into that trap," Dumbledore acknowledged. His voice sounded further away now; he was somewhere off to Sev's right. "And it can be easy to fall too far out of it."
Heh. This is a good line from Dumbledore. This is a really good chapter all round, actually. I seem to have hit a sudden burst of inspiration here. I like this whole conversation between Dumbledore and Malachite.
Seeing Lily laughing with her friends like that made him feel a sudden pang of some melancholy he couldn't quite identify. He scrabbled in his bag, and pulled out the invisibility cloak. Then he took out a scrap of parchment, and scribbled out a few brief words.
In the crush of the station, he managed to brush by her, and slip the cloak into her school bag, with the note tightly wrapped up in its centre.
Be careful, and take this. I think you might need it.
And so the cloak passes to Lily, from whom it will eventually pass to Potter, and part two ends on a somewhat ominous note.
I'm quite surprised how much my writing seems to have improved across the course of these two fics, considering they were both written within the space of four weeks.
(And then, four days later, I started posting part three. I was at full time university! And writing a novel! And multiple West Wing fics! Seriously, now I write full-time and have plenty of leisure time to work on fic, I just cannot begin to match my productivity from back in the day when I was insanely busy. I wrote 360,000 words of fic in 2002. I have absolutely no idea how.)
The commentary continues with parts 3 and 4 here.
...And then I rambled enough to fill three LJ posts. Yay?
Intro
So, this is a blast from the past.
I should confess that the main reason I've resisted calls for a commentary on this before is the fact I have it in my head this fic is bad. ...It isn't; I just think it is. All I tend to remember is that it was written so long ago and in such a rush, and my God, the typos, and Sev has Mary Suish super-skills and it's effectively whitewashing his canon flaws and... aaiee. But when I actually reread it, all of that is evident - especially the typos - but none of it's as severe as I tend to think, and there's a lot more to it that I do still love that I'd completely forgotten. So it's good to have been pushed into revisiting it.
This series marked the last time that I ever wrote and published any fic as a WIP, because forcing myself through the middle parts when I'd lost a lot of my free time, enthusiasm and inspiration was pretty punishing. The average length of the stories takes a noticeable dip after part four, though my interest did rally again towards the end.
(I don't think it honestly ever occurred to me that not delivering all seven novellas as promised was a possibility. I followed the usual writing path backwards - several years of trying to sell original work before I first discovered fic - and I think it influenced my attitude to 'publishing' work online a lot. I was used to the commitment of shoving a story in an envelope and sending it out to stand or fall on its own merits, so leaving a fic unfinished or redrafting a story after the first version had already been released was not something I even thought of myself as being 'allowed' to do.)
...Oh, wait, yet another introductory note. It's maybe worth noting that the CoS series was always conceived as a what-if; I never believed that this was canon-Snape, or really anything like him. I was just intrigued by the dichotomy of Snape's role as a long-term undiscovered double agent vs. his wild inability to control his emotions when provoked. So I spun a whole backstory around the idea of "What if the temper tantrums were all part of an act?"
If you want to read along, the series is archived here. Many of the original typos still included, alas. (I really should give it a proper edit one day, but it's just too depressing to contemplate. 42 separate chapter files to update in multiple archives? I could cry.)
Conspiracy of Silence
...This is the point where it occurs to me that I don't actually know what that title is about. I mean, a general theme of secret-keeping, yes, but who is silently conspiring? Snape and Lily? Snape and Dumbledore? I don't know! And I'm not entirely sure I ever did.
Also, in retrospect, if I'd thought about it more I probably would have avoided picking a series title that abbreviates to the same thing as one of the canon books.
First Impressions
I still like the numerical theme I used for titling the seven stories. I think I probably came up with 'First Impressions' and then brainstormed for other numerical phrases to see if I could get a pattern going. Some of the titles are a stretch, but on the whole it works.
Alone of all the children milling about on platform nine and three-quarters, Severus Snape was silent and still. The others laughed and chattered as they met old friends or sniffled and clung to their parents. Sev simply watched.
It's entirely possible I did a gleefully smug little dance of vindication when Deathly Hallows revealed, seven years after I wrote this, that Lily Evans used to call Snape 'Sev'.
See, the thing is, I contemplated JKR's fantastic ear for realistic dialogue for British teenagers. I contemplated my own psychotic loathing of my name being shortened to 'Liz', and the degree of impression this made on my classmates (i.e., absolutely none whatsoever). And I came to the conclusion that there was no way in hell that Severus was getting through school without being called Sev on a daily basis. As an adult, yes, he could cut that prospect dead and probably would, but as a teenager, even if he hated it he would be bound to get called Sev in casual conversation all the time.
I don't think I'd read enough meta at the time to have a clue about the amount of rabid hate many fans have for nicknames, but I probably would have done it anyway. I can understand the gnashing of teeth over characters who we've seen talk in canon using nicknames that they never have, but when it's unexplored circumstances and relationships, there are times when it's more realistic than not.
And JKR agrees with me, so nyerr. *dances*
Orphaned at the age of six after an unfortunate magical accident, Sev had been raised by his mother's brother. His uncle was a kind enough man in his way, but he had neither the time nor the experience to raise a young boy in any way approaching normal. Severus was left to bring himself up - and bring himself up he did.
He remembered little of life with his parents, but his father's words of wisdom to him had stuck in his head. It was wisdom his uncle and others might not have approved of... but to Severus, it made perfect sense.
Never let them see the real you, Sev. Never let them know what you're thinking. There are a lot of people in this world, and you'll find that you're smarter than most of them... but they don't need to know that. Keep it to yourself, Sev. Always play the double game.
This was written before even the first hints at Snape's background from OotP, let alone the revelation that he's actually a half-blood, so I think all we had to go on was that he knew a lot about the Dark Arts when he first started Hogwarts. For the premise of this fic to work he had to be very calculating in his relationships with other people, so I made him too introverted and accustomed to solitude to have much desire to form natural connections, and added some Slytherin advice from his dad.
(I have made the crack that this Snape is probably the closest thing I've written to a self-insert, and in some details it's quite true. Being an aromantic asexual who always scores "100% introverted" on personality tests, I tend to regard the presence of other human beings with a kind of amiable bemusement. Sure, some of them are fun to be around, but I don't miss them when they're not there or anything. I function best when I'm getting at least twenty hours a day of total solitude.)
Only one other student was as short as he was, but the difference in their demeanour was striking. Slim, with golden-white hair and a self-possessed air, he carried a very expensive-looking case and was pontificating loudly about how his father had been head boy when he was at Hogwarts.
Slytherin, for sure. The home of the ambitious.
We didn't know at this stage that Lucius Malfoy was older than the MWPP group, so I had him in the same year. (I think we also didn't know at the time how young the Potters must have been when they had Harry, so it seemed a coincidence but not too great a one that Draco's father might be the same age.) I wanted the ringleader of the prejudiced Slytherins to be in the same year so that Sev would have someone he would have to put on his act for pretty much all the way through his schooling.
"Huh? Oh, whatever." Sirius seemed more concerned with something in his coat pocket. He reached inside, and produced a tiny owl that was looking a bit rumpled.
"Oh, you have an owl!" Lily seemed delighted. "Oh, I wanted to get one, but my parents wouldn't let me!"
"You keep your owl in your pocket?" remarked Remus, eyebrows raised.
"This is Zipper," Sirius explained, carefully smoothing out his ruffled feathers. "He doesn't like cages. Do you, Zip?"
I was amused by the fact that Sirius was the provider of Pigwidgeon the tiny owl, so he gets a mini owl of his own for this fic.
"I'm sorry, are we amusing you?" asked Sirius.
"Not intentionally, I'm sure," said Snape dryly.
Sirius scowled, but James grinned amiably. "Hi, I'm James Potter. This is-"
"I have ears," Sev reminded him.
James blinked. "Do you have a name as well?"
"I'm Severus Snape."
Part of the central conceit of this fic is that the rivalry between Snape and the Marauders is something manipulated from Snape's end for effect, so this James is quite an amiable sort, and initially Snape is simply uninterested in him rather than hostile. Sirius, on the other hand, is still kind of an impulsive jerk.
(I've never quite been able to fully warm to Sirius, since there are aspects of his behaviour that just push some personal buttons. He comes off as one of those people who face being called on their assholery with a big dumb grin and repeated insistence that, "Hey, it was only a joke." And I loathe those people more than anything else on Earth.)
A number of the new kids seemed intimidated by the sheer size of him; they'd never seen anything like it. Neither had Snape, but he recognised him for what he was immediately. Giant's blood in that one, or I'm a Muggle.
It seems ridiculous that no one at Hogwarts seemed to even guess that Hagrid was part giant; I can only assume it's the sort of thing that's taboo for purebloods to even think about. Wizarding society as a whole seems to be good at not seeing things it doesn't want to.
"Right, 'ere we go!" bellowed the enormous man. "No more'n four to a boat! Any more firs' years?"
Oy, I have Hagrid drop an H 'ere. How embarrassing. This was before I did a detailed breakdown of his speech across the books and worked out the grammatical rules. (It's actually surprisingly consistent; if you remember, back before my website died I even coded a gadget that would automatically translate into the accent for you.) Luckily, Hagrid doesn't pop up much more in this series, so I dodged a bullet there.
They got out at the other side, the pudgy Hufflepuff boy stumbling and almost falling in the water. The blond boy snickered, and James shot him an angry scowl. He came over and offered the other guy a hand up.
"Hi, I'm James Potter," he said yet again. Snape found himself wishing he could think up a more original line to introduce himself.
"P-P-Peter Pettigrew," stuttered the boy awkwardly. The blond kid snorted again, and the bulky boy who'd shared their boat chuckled with him. James glared at them angrily, including Sev by default - although he hadn't laughed or even reacted. Snape stared back impassively. Why on earth would he care what Mr. "Hi I'm James Potter" thought of him?
This James is quite the noble defender of the innocent from bullies. So, er, not much like canon James at all, really.
I think the main reason this fic fortunately didn't get taken as being too much of a whitewash of Snape is that it doesn't go the frequent route of building him up by tearing the Marauders down. Here they're the good guys too.
(...Also there's the fact that Sev doesn't so much have a secret heart of gold as a secret heart of amoral indifference.)
As they waited, a tall, very thin man with a scrubby blond beard came forward. "First years, Hagrid?" The huge man nodded.
"Welcome," said the thin wizard, with a slightly distracted smile. "I'm Professor Fractalis. I teach Arithmancy, and I'm the deputy headmaster here at Hogwarts."
This guy's full name, although we don't find it out until a later instalment, is Trigo Fractalis. All the teachers I created for this have JKR-esque job-appropriate names, though I'm not sure I can remember the origins of all of them. This one is made of some fairly obvious mathematical references.
A thousand years ago or more,
When Hogwarts school was new,
The founders formed their houses each,
But wondered what to do.
For they each prized in their own mind
A different virtue clear;
But how to pick those virtues out
When they could not be near?
'Twas Gryffindor who thought it out
And saw the problem's end
And placed a spell on his own hat
On which they could depend.
For I'm the Hogwarts Sorting Hat
I know what's on your mind;
And so, no matter who you are,
A place for you I'll find.
If you are brave and true of heart,
In Gryffindor you'll go;
If you are wise above all else,
Then Ravenclaw, I'll know;
The cunning and the wittiest,
In Slytherin will be;
And those who work and toil hard,
To Hufflepuff I'll see.
I'm never wrong, I never fail,
I'll know by what I've read;
I'll sort you into your true home
So put me on your head!
I am a poetry anti-snob. I try to like the deep and meaningful stuff, and sometimes I really do, but not-so-secretly, I geek out for rhyming verse. I find a lot of fanfic Sorting Songs - not to mention a lot of pro-published greetings cards - quite painful, because I'm very attuned to the rhythm of words at the best of times, and poetry without the correct meter just feels horribly, jarringly, screechingly wrong. It does baffle me a lot that not everybody seems to be able to hear that it's wrong. Doesn't everybody tap out syllable patterns with their fingertips?
(...Actually, come to think of it, I did have a childhood habit verging on obsessive-compulsion where I would lie awake at night getting random phrases stuck in my head until I could find a number of repetitions/system of finger-tapping/way of rephrasing so that the syllables would work out neatly. So, er, possibly this is just me.
I still do the tapping thing a bit, but I think I've got better at rerouting my brain so I can get out of the cycle after finding a good pattern instead of rhythm-ising every phrase that goes through my head for the next two hours.)
So. Anyway. JKR writes fantastic rhyming verse that makes the little monkeys in my brain that force me to tap syllables very happy, and I loved getting the chance to write my own version. So much so that I did a wholly unnecessary second Sorting Song for the year two story, too. I'd have done them for all seven if the plot had allowed for it. (And then, years later, I wrote Curse of Durand, ninety percent of my motivation being my deep-seated desire to write rhyming clues. I blame the Redwall books for this.)
"Professor Binns, as you may recall, sadly passed away last term. However, as those of you were in his history class will be aware, his ghost remains with us, and he will continue to teach his classes. Professor Kirrelgun, on the other hand, has left us for a lucrative position in the Ministry of Magic. We are fortunate to have procured a more than capable replacement - may I introduce Professor McGonogall, the new Transfiguration mistress." There was polite applause. A stern-faced young woman with a flood of dark hair stood up and nodded briefly.
Again, we didn't know the Potters and Snape were so young at this stage, so I probably pictured this as taking place almost thirty years pre-Philosopher's Stone rather than barely twenty as is now canon. We didn't have any clue to McGonagall's age or how long she'd been teaching, either, although I think it was referenced that she'd taught the Potters, so I made her a newbie here. (And mispelled her name. Sigh.)
...I have no idea where I got the name Kirrelgun from, and on looking it up, it doesn't seem to be drawn from the Potterverse, so... ??? Perhaps it contains some clever Transfiguration-related wordplay, but I'm buggered if I know what.
There was a mass scramble as the first years fought over the different rooms. Snape ended up sharing his with Malfoy, Crabbe, and two other boys called Nick Avery and Stuart Flint. Malfoy cast a cold eye over their roommates, and appeared to find them acceptable. Snape suspected this had more to do with the fact that they both came from long-established wizarding families than anything to do with their personalities.
I guess in my mind this generation was larger than the post-Voldemort era, and therefore there were two dorms full of first years instead of just one.
However, he was careful to avoid being first to complete things all the time. Generally he would finish second or third - far enough down the list not to get noticed, but not so far down people started thinking he was stupid.
Sev thinks he is being So Very Sneaky, but he is far too attached to his own intelligence to actually pretend to be bad at stuff.
Saxius Fennel was a handsome, dark-haired man with olive skin.
Obvious herb-related name is obvious. I think this guy's a Death Eater, isn't he? This story is so old, I can no longer remember. I shall discover the plot along with you!
Other, more sensitive and less brilliant students had a lot of trouble with him. Remus struggled mightily with his Potions, and Lily was just plain hopeless - despite the fact that she had an excellent memory for detail and was always quick to understand. She knew exactly what she was supposed to be doing... she just couldn't make it work.
Here I accidentally stumble onto canon from the opposite direction, having Snape and Lily work together in Potions because she has trouble with it rather than the opposite.
It's actually quite amusing how this fic has simultaneously been Jossed all to hell and ended up considerably more canonical than it started out. Back when this was written there was no reason at all to believe Snape and Lily could have had an inter-house friendship or worked together on anything. Nor did we have any particular evidence that Snape was a genius student; I just took the fact he was good at logic and knew some Dark curses early and ran with it, but then two books later JKR went and revealed that he was rewriting textbooks and inventing his own spells when he was still a schoolboy.
Slytherin shared Potions with Gryffindor, which gave Malfoy Peter, Lily, and two other mudbloods, Jade Creevy and Jerry James, to pick on.
Apparently I forgot the Creevy brothers were themselves Muggle-born, and so wouldn't have had previous relatives at Hogwarts. This must be an unknown cousin. (Also, I'm not sure Jade is terribly period-appropriate as names go. Sigh.)
Note that Sev has picked up the term 'mudblood' in his internal dialogue here without passing much judgement on it. He can see for himself that the DE rhetoric is false, but that doesn't mean he has a great deal of empathy or concern for the targets of it. He's not perturbed by Malfoy's bigotry or his bullying, only by the fact that he seems to be serious about the idea of a pureblood new world order, and that if this comes to pass it's probably going to lead to the sort of restriction of knowledge that's going to make it hard for Sev to read all the books that he wants.
Sev's world is very internally focused.
If he couldn't disguise his expertise in Potions, Defence Against the Dark Arts was nearly as bad. Their teacher was Professor Malachite, a very well-spoken wizard with icy white hair and a goatee beard. He was head of house Slytherin, and as well-liked as most of his students were reviled. He was always very warm and understanding with the students, aiding them whenever they needed help and seldom handing out any kind of punishment.
Malachite is a gemstone that, among its many alleged properties, is supposed to protect children from witchcraft. Following the gemstone theme, this guy's first name is "Carnus" for Carnelian, which supposedly heralds danger and resists bad temper. (I probably should have thought of the 'carnal' connection, though, since I'm sure somebody out there did, fandom being what it is. Oopsie.)
I kind of liked the idea of a totally non-cliché head of Slytherin who was warm and noble and well-liked.
(Incidentally, the revelations about Malachite's demi-human nature were not planned at this stage at all. I don't think I came up with that idea until about four or five parts in. Although when I did, I read back over everything and was kind of gleeful about how neatly it fitted his established personality.)
Yes, Dumbledore might hide behind an entirely different set of shields than Snape, but underneath they were two of a kind. Sev made a mental note to never try to stare the headmaster down. He had the feeling that it might just be the first time in his life he didn't succeed.
This is kind of retrospectively nifty, given the later canon that both of them are gifted with Legilimency.
Aside from polite chit-chat with the staff, they ate in silence. It was not necessarily awkward, though; silence was Sev's natural state.
It wasn't Lily's. Finally, as if coming to a decision, she seized one of the magical crackers and held it out to him. He regarded it with just the slightest hint of a smirk.
"What's that supposed to be?" he said, rolling his eyes.
Lily rolled hers right back, and prodded him with the end of the cracker. "Think of it as peace offering." He continued to regard her in faint amusement. "Oh, for God's sake, just pull the damn thing, will you?"
He took the end of the cracker and, as apathetically as possible, held onto it while she pulled. There was an explosion of sparks, and a hat with an enormous orange feather fell out. He blinked at it for a minute, then pushed it over towards her. "Yours, I suspect."
"Oh, you're no fun," she retorted. Before he could do anything, she snatched off his wizard's hat and dropped the offending thing on his head.
Snape reached up and removed it cautiously. "I don't think it's really my colour," he said dryly.
I still kind of love this, actually. The dynamic between Sev and Lily in these stories is something I really like. She's direct and no-nonsense while he's introverted and calculating, but they meet in the middle where they actually have a pretty similar sense of humour.
Except when it comes to hats. Severus will never be convinced of the comedic value of funny hats.
"You," she said without preamble, "are going to do me a big favour."
"I am?" he asked dryly.
"You are."
"I just decided this of my own free will?"
"You did. Very generous of you, too."
"That doesn't sound like the me I know."
"You were possessed by the Christmas spirit."
He quirked an eyebrow at her. "I was clearly possessed by something."
This is some rather West Wing influenced dialogue. I think I was writing this pretty much simultaneously with the second DtVS story.
Lily was very bright, but she seemed to have some kind of block about physically preparing a potion. Sev had to use all of his ingenuity to find a way around that block, find new ways of breaking things down and explaining them.
For the first time, he was actually doing something challenging. If learning was easy, helping others to learn was much harder. And, to his shock, he actually enjoyed it.
Sev discovers he likes teaching here. At least, he likes it as a logic problem of finding an inventive way to explain things to a bright, attentive pupil. He will probably find his first class full of uninterested dunderheads a very rude awakening.
Rereading these stories now, the thing that most makes me cringe is how often I felt obliged to bring up how devious/calculating/impassive Sev is. Apparently, stepping beyond the bounds of canon characterisation, I was deeply paranoid that you would forget the take I was going for if I didn't keep reminding you.
Still, it's all Sev's POV, so perhaps we can run with the theory that he's just overly enamoured of his own brilliance.
Lily turned troubled eyes to Snape. "Did he mean Audley Fletcher?"
"I think so," he said, and his voice was far more certain than the words. Audley Fletcher was a popular, talented seventh year, the son of a famous Auror. If Fennel was planning something that he didn't want to do around Dumbledore, then it was almost certainly something to do with the Dark Arts. And if that was true, the Aurors were logical enemies.
Dumbledore mentioned Mundungus Fletcher as one of the people to be gathered at the end of GoF. Most of us wrongly assumed they were Auror types and similar. Still, I don't think I ever gave him a direct name-check, so this can still fit into canon as a different Fletcher.
A 'casual' remark to Professor Parilia, head of house Hufflepuff, revealed that the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws had Potions Wednesday and Friday.
Parilia had a first name when she was created, but since I don't think it ever made it into the fic it's now lost in the mist of time. (I didn't bother to keep the notes for completed fics when I swapped computers back in '03, since I wasn't expecting to revisit them.) She's the Herbology teacher; Parilia is the Roman festival that led to the modern Earth Day.
"Hey. D'you want to know the reason you're still alive right now?"
"I'm sure you're about to tell me," he said, not looking up from his history assignment.
"Because you didn't ask me to be one of those giggling girls for you."
"Wouldn't dream of it," he said mildly.
"Well, good."
"After all, I wouldn't want you to upset your boyfriend."
It was just as well he'd mastered the charm to stop fast-flying objects.
The running boyfriend joke is proof that, no matter how overly mature they are in some ways, they are still definitely twelve-year-olds.
Snape, personally, found Fletcher's vapid grin very irritating. Fennel might be unpleasant - and, apparently, embroiled in a murder plot - but at least he was intelligent. Fletcher might be pulling the top grades, but when it came to spontaneous wit he was sorely lacking.
Snape would rather hang out with snarky intellectual evil people than dumb good guys. Hey, he has his priorities.
For a change, the Slytherin and Gryffindor boys were near-united by mutual dislike. The girls were all blushing and giggling excitedly, and even icy Narcissa Salenica had an unusual touch of colour to her cheeks. Malfoy, who'd been practically marking his territory ever since he'd met her, was looking deeply annoyed.
This was before we knew Narcissa and Sirius were cousins. I don't think 'Salenica' even means anything, it just had the right rhythm to complement the name.
Well-chosen, observed the cool, detached part of Snape's brain that always noted such things. A Gryffindor, for the Slytherins had a bad enough reputation to be suspected of doing something to Fletcher deliberately. Sirius Black, for he had a history of messing around with magic and trying things he shouldn't. No one would believe it had been anything but a foolish accident.
Sev's brain had already run through the possible purple liquids Fennel could have chosen to add to this particular mix, and come to a conclusion. Any minute now, Sirius' cauldron would hit exactly the right temperature... and its contents would violently explode.
A moment later: "Professor! My potion's gone green."
Fennel's eye-rolling sneer looked exactly the same as it always did. "Why am I not surprised, Black? Fletcher! Deal with it."
Audley reluctantly broke away from the trio of girls he was wowing with his Quidditch stories, and came over to Sirius' side. He leaned over the potion to study it more closely. "Now, what do we have here?"
Idiot. Anybody who did that over a potion that was already doing something unexpected deserved whatever they got. However, he doubted Lily would see it that way.
Sev cannot help but admire a good evil plan and lacks sympathy for innocent victims who act stupidly. (Something I'm sure this take on Snape shares with the canon version.) It is probably just as well for the fate of the wizarding world that he did befriend Lily early on.
Though he would totally deny that he cares about her opinion here. It's just logical not to upset her enough that she'll badger him about it. Obviously.
Auror Fletcher was the current darling of the media, having bust up an entire coven of Dark wizards in Bulgaria.
I chose this general region because of Voldemort's later canon wanderings in Albania. And we know there's a substantial wizarding community there because of the Quidditch team and the presence of Veela.
That made his own job only harder. Not only was he well known to be deeply disinterested in the sport, but he was a Slytherin to boot. It would stretch belief for him to show up to support his own team, and he'd stick out like a troll at a tea party at Gryffindor vs. Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw.
Heh. I like this simile.
Audley had turned out to have nothing worse than a dislocated shoulder - and a very queasy feeling after the reaction of the two potions inside him. He was spending the night in the infirmary, under the watchful eye and clucking tongue of Madame Florence.
Painfully obvious namesake is painfully obvious.
The plan had gone off almost perfectly. James Potter had been applauded as a hero, and Sev's part in the whole affair had been grossly misunderstood... by all except one. The most important one. Fennel had to know his cover was blown. You couldn't turn up and cure the Callahan's Brew poison by accident.
The way he saw it, Fennel had two options. Disappear before he could be caught - or kill Fletcher and then disappear before he could be caught. Given that his master didn't seem to be particularly tolerant, Sev's money was on the latter.
Genius that he is, it still doesn't occur to Sev here that Fennel could try to kill him too. He's too accustomed to his own position as outside observer. Plus he still falls into the trap of expecting people to be fully logical in their motivations.
"Then you're caught. Which is why I'll be hiding elsewhere." He stepped back into an alcove, and mumbled a little charm he'd found in one of Professor Malachite's books. It wasn't invisibility, exactly - that was a much more complex spell - it just made him... shadowy. He could be seen, but only by someone who was specifically looking.
Invisibility in the Potterverse appeared to be a difficult trick even before we learned how rare Harry's cloak really was, so I came up with a less effective spell it was plausible for Sev to have learned. Kind of similar to the later canon Disillusionment Charm, but then, there are only so many variations on the Notice-Me-Not field.
It was James Potter. He stood in the doorway still in his sleep-gear, eyes wide behind his glasses and hair even more ruffled than usual. "Hey! What did you do to her?"
Fennel rolled his eyes in disbelief. "Oh, good God, another one."
Heh. I kind of like Fennel, actually.
Unnoticed, Sev stepped out of the shadows behind the pair of them. His shadow-spell was falling away quickly, but he had a cure for that. Ducking over to Fennel's discarded invisibility cloak, he tugged it over his head.
Though I certainly didn't predict canon, I found it kind of odd that James should have something so powerful as an invisibility cloak at school, so in this universe, I had Sev and Lily get it from this Death Eater and then pass it on to James later.
James and Lily were fussed over, hugged, and inspected for injuries by every single person in the room. Sev was extremely glad to be out of it.
There is nothing quite so grim for a touch-averse introvert as other people trying to be comforting. Yes, thank you, very kind, now please go and be comforting from six feet away.
"Ah yes, Mr. Potter. Pray tell us why you were roaming the corridors late at night? On a similar mission of mercy?" said Malachite dryly. James and Sirius' mischievous exploits were already somewhat infamous.
Malachite adopts something of a Snape role in these scenes, except with more humour and less spitting rage. I also had him be Dumbledore's main staff confidante in this series, because McGonagall's too new and I rather liked the idea of the head of Slytherin being Dumbledore's most trusted.
"I was... I was..." For some reason, James glanced over at Dumbledore for reassurance. "I was going to check on somebody." Malachite opened his mouth to query him, but the headmaster waved him quiet.
"I know what this is about. Tell your story, James."
I don't know how long it took the boys to find out about Remus in canon, but here they knew quite early on. I figured they'd need all the time they could get to study up on becoming Animagi.
"Nobody," said James confidently. Lily didn't answer, and Dumbledore gave one of his unreadable half-smiles. Snape would swear that, just for a second, his eyes flickered over to where Sev was hiding under the invisibility cloak.
First rule of Harry Potter fics: of course Dumbledore knows everything.
"Fools," said the headmaster, in a dark tone Sev had never heard from him before. "The Ministry refuses to listen to the evidence that mounts before it. This is an evil time, Carnus. The darkness is ascending."
"Shadows, Albus," said Malachite reassuringly. "It's just shadows. It'll all come to nothing in the end."
"Perhaps," said Dumbledore, pushing around a few marshmallows on a plate. "Perhaps." But as Sev snuck out of the office on Malachite's heels, the headmaster's troubled expression stayed with him.
And if Dumbledore knows everything, one might very well suspect him of deliberately pushing Sev towards his destiny of becoming a spy. Of course, Sev would never believe that someone else was manipulating him...
"Then what is it about?" she demanded.
"Enemies." He held her gaze, suddenly deadly serious. "There's something coming, Lily. The Ministry of Magic might not believe it, but Dumbledore knows it - and so do I. This is about more than just one potions teacher cracking up and hexing a student." He paused for a second. "The dark is coming, Lily. And if we don't have somebody right there where the dark is thickest watching for it, it's going to be too late."
Lily's ire faded into something approaching resignation. "And you think that person's you?" she asked.
"I'm the only one it can be, Lily," he told her. "I'm the only one that knows what to watch for... and the only one that has a chance at getting on the inside. So right now, the worst thing I can have is friends. I need enemies, because all they understand is enemies. I need them to believe that I'm as bitter and twisted up and jealous as they are. So as of right now, I'm turning my back on friends." He hesitated for a fraction of an instant. "And that includes you."
He turned, and walked back up the steps and out of the dungeon without looking back.
That was the last time Sev spoke to Lily that year.
I still rather love this ending. In fact, despite some awkwardness in the writing, I'm quite impressed with how this holds up all these years later.
Lily takes a back seat for the next few instalments of the story. Long ago, before I had such a bloody awful time slogging through the middle stories of this arc, I had grand ideas of doing an accompanying seven-story series from her POV. Alas, none of the notes for that still survive, but I have a feeling it was going to be called Shades of Grey.
Second Sight
Case in point; the pretty red-haired girl forging determinedly through the crowd towards him. Lily; the closest thing to a friend he'd made at Hogwarts.
The fics in this series are filled with rampant semi-colon abuse. At this point in my writing career I was addicted to them and had a terrible tendency to shove them in all sorts of places where a colon, a dash or even a comma would be more appropriate. Poor little things.
Sev gave his trademark thin smile, and filed that information away.
Someone once recced this series with the caveat that they were annoyed by the constant references to Sev filing stuff away. Now I notice them whenever I reread it. You were probably right, long ago person on a comm I've forgotten the name of! Sorry about that!
Auriga Cephus was a flighty young woman who taught astronomy. It was not unusual for her to forget where she had put her wand or the names of her students, but he wouldn't expect her to have missed the Sorting.
Josh leaned over, having noticed Sev's frown. "What's up?"
There was no harm in sharing an observation that anybody could have made. "Professor Cephus. She's not there."
"Oh." Josh pulled a face. "I hope she hasn't left; I always liked her."
"You would, Matthews," interjected Malfoy scathingly. "Trust you to like the only mudblood teacher in the school!"
Obvious astronomy name is also obvious. And also makes it kind of unlikely Malfoy is correct about her being a mudblood, unless she changed her name to fit into the wizarding world. But anyway, this is A Clue that something nasty has happened to her.
Explaining this to Malfoy would be worse than useless. Boys like Malfoy didn't want reasons to victimise people so much as excuses. Malfoy had already made up his mind not to like Josh, and any justification for this was filled in after the fact.
None of this infighting was incredibly important to Sev, so he ignored it in favour of more interesting things.
Once again, Sev sees the unfairness in Malfoy's behaviour, but doesn't feel any compulsion to shield others from injustice. Doesn't affect him personally, therefore he doesn't care.
Professor Alomancia taught Divination to the upper years, and was, like most Divination teachers, widely considered to be a mad old bat.
Alomancy is a form of divination involving throwing salt into flames. Her first name is later revealed to be 'Hepatosa', for 'Hepatoscopy', divination by inspecting the liver of sacrifices. (A lovely name for a girl!)
Sev wanted to hear the official line on Professor Cephus' absence, but it would have been out of 'character' for him to ask, and to his frustration nobody else bothered to. How was he supposed to gather information if everyone around him was too stupid to ask the most basic questions?
Here Sev begins to discover the limitations of his plan to become a master investigator without ever actually having to speak to anyone.
She began to speak, in a cold voice wholly unlike the friendly tones she had just employed. "Choose wisely and well, for your doom will come too quickly. Love will not save you, but that which is most precious will survive. Beware; you think you see him, but the colours he wears are not his, and the face you know now is not the true one. He will betray you!"
We didn't know at this time that Trelawney's talent for prophecy was so rare, so here with get another Divination professor with the same trait.
Sev's being typically self-centred by assuming this prophecy is about him: it's actually about Peter Pettigrew.
Nonetheless, it was another nugget of information to squirrel away
Squirreling rather than filing! Well, it's some variety, I guess.
Josh's only link to the rest of his world was his little brother, and that was a fairly tenuous one. They couldn't sit together at meals, because of the house tables, and they couldn't enter each other's common rooms.
Really, the Hogwarts house system is designed to force factionalism.
"I'm not sure if 'lucky' is quite the right word," chided Dumbledore gently. "Apparently she warned them both that somebody they knew was going to betray them."
"Really? How charmingly vague of her," said Malachite snidely. "I don't suppose she saw fit to furnish them with a name, or even a time?"
Malachite is my favourite OC in this series. He gets all the fun snark.
He let out an explosive sigh and slumped down next to Sev. "I don't know, I don't know," he said bitterly. "Can't you do something? Malfoy listens to you. You could say something-"
"Yes. And then not only would he continue doing what he's doing, he'd also stop listening to me."
"So you won't even try?"
"It won't help."
"You know, sometimes that's really not the point," snapped Josh.
Sev's logical reasoning and the art of looking out for other people's feelings are not really mixy things.
"Ah, cunning," nodded Snape dryly. "A good word that. I think you'll find it means 'just as smart as one of us, but if we use a different word we can pretend it's not the same'."
An observation I'm pretty sure is stolen from Terry Pratchett.
Also, I've trained myself out of using dialogue tags like 'nodded' because other people (including my editors) hate them, but I still don't have any problem with them personally. Yes, I know you can't technically 'nod' a sentence, but there's a lot of things you can't technically do that we say in shorthand ways in writing. It's perfectly clear what meaning is being expressed, so what's the problem? It's just pedantic over-literalism so far as I can see.
The current flying teacher, Jagred Swift, had coached professionally, and the teams he turned out were so good no novice flyer would dare to try and get in.
I have no idea where this dude's name came from. Swift is obvious, Jagred? No clue.
Malfoy, of course, was talking as if he'd already been appointed captain. His parents had bought him the very latest in brooms, a Cleansweep 2. Most of the actual team players only had Silver Arrows.
I back-engineered from the canon that a Cleansweep 5 was considered an old broom in Harry's second year and a Cleansweep 7 current. (Although later canon from Quidditch Through the Ages has it that the Cleansweep 2 was released in 1934 and the 3 in 1937. I think this is possibly a case of JKR being Bad At Maths.) The Silver Arrow was ref'd as a discontinued model in PoA.
I had it as unusual for girls to be on the school Quidditch teams in this era, though I think from what we see in canon the wizarding world is supposed to have greater gender equality than the Muggle world. I thought it would be neat to have Lily be decent at Quidditch, though it didn't seem like she could have played on the main team much or Harry would have heard about.
Josh fell to his knees, screaming again. His voice had cracked and gone hoarse with the strain he'd put onto it, yet he didn't stop. He fell to the floor, writhing as if there were something inside of him trying to escape. Sweat was literally flowing from him, pouring down his tortured face. And still Malfoy didn't stop the curse.
Huh. Some quite evocative description here. And more surprisingly, correct use of the subjunctive. Since I'm fairly sure I didn't know the rules for this at the time, I must have got the grammar right by instinct.
(Actually, all my grammar is done by instinct. My technical education in English essentially began and ended with, "A noun is a naming word, a verb is a doing word, an adjective is a describing word," plus where to put capital letters and full stops. Almost everything I know about writing was intuited from reading books. I have gradually picked up technical definitions for rules here and there as I've gone along, but don't ask me to put proper names on anything.
And I still don't know what the phrase 'diagram a sentence' even means.)
Avery and Simon Lestrange were watching with a horribly eager light in their eyes, as if this was the most fascinating thing they'd ever seen. Everybody else in the room, even the thuggish Colin Crabbe, had looked away, unable to stand a moment longer. Jack Brisingamen had his hands jammed over his ears, although Sev doubted that it could be doing anything to block out that unearthly howl.
I think at the time of writing this, we had heard 'the Lestranges' mentioned, but it wasn't fully clear that Bellatrix, Rastaban and Rodolphus were they, or else it wasn't known how many of them there were. Hence, Simon. He's certainly psychotic enough to be a Lestrange, anyway.
Jack here is, apparently, named for the Alan Garner book the Weirdstone of Brisingamen, which, uh, I've never actually read. (I tried The Owl Service and totally couldn't get into it.) But my brother had a copy and the title has stuck with me.
Sev couldn't meet those eyes, but he couldn't look away. He started counting inside his head, doubling numbers and doubling them until they were big enough to fill his head and blank out any other kind of thought.
Two. Four. Eight. Sixteen. Thirty-two. Sixty-four. One twenty-eight. Two fifty-six. Five hundred and twelve. Ten twenty-four. Twenty forty-eight. Forty ninety-six. Eighty-one ninety-two...
The numbers grew bigger, taking up his more and more of his thoughts until he had to think about the math, blocking everything out, not seeing or thinking or feeling...
Switch-hitting between this and the DtVS stories caused some moments of linguistic confusion, as evidenced by the "math" here. Ironically, I'm far more likely to drop accidental Americanisms when writing British characters than vice versa, because I actually pay attention when I'm trying to sound American, whereas writing Brits I let out whatever comes flowing from my brain. And there's a lot of American vocabulary stuffed in there.
I used to do the powers of two in my head thing in particularly boring lectures. I usually gave up after 262,144 because I get too bogged down rechecking my calculations to progress.
It seemed odd to think that barely ten minutes had passed; that it was still a sunny Saturday afternoon up there, and people were still playing. Sev gave a humourless snort at his own sense of drama: what had he expected, a sudden dark and stormy night?
I always get confused when I'm intently focused on writing something and then look up and the weather's all wrong. I'm not much of one for needing the mood set when I'm writing - I play music on random play all the time and will cheerfully write an angsty tearful death scene to the sound of the Macarena. The only thing that I find really distracting is new music that I'm still learning the lyrics to.
In the end, he trusted to his own skill, mixing ingredients he knew had healing and soothing properties. He worked as much through instinct as through knowledge, judging quantities and mixtures by what seemed to feel right. He heated the mix in his cauldron until its colour seemed to settle, and risked a small dab on his tongue. A numbness quickly suffused it, and he felt momentarily light-headed. He took a deep breath to clear his head, and poured the potion into a vial.
It was the first potion he had ever made up without adhering to a strictly drawn-up recipe. The school had very strict rules about that kind of experimentation. Magical ingredients could react extremely unpredictably, and even very experienced research wizards could be caught by surprise. But Sev's faith in his own intelligence was such that he'd never entertained the possibility he might do something wrong.
Once again, I am amused that the capabilities I totally made up for Sev with little canon basis are now fully supported by later books.
Sev 'happened' to wander by in time to see Malachite catch the three boys on the edge of the Forbidden Forest. It was pretty clear that Crabbe and Avery had planned to chase Josh inside, maybe even get him lost.
Despite their repeated assurances that it was just a prank - Josh, of course, was not stupid enough to argue - Malachite went ballistic.
"It's the Forbidden Forest!" he told the three of them. "It's not called the 'ooh, probably not too smart to go in there' Forest. It's not the 'maybe ought to stay away from' Forest. It's Forbidden! It's Forbidden for a reason."
Malachite's overreaction here was originally only intended as a red herring to make him a possible suspect when Sev discovers the bones at the end of this story, but I picked up on it again later when I made Malachite a Naga in the later stories.
Sev was trapped. He was surrounded by house Slytherin on all sides; it was to be Malfoy's finest hour, and there was no way by any reckoning he could possibly hope to leave. Not without calling the attention of the entire school down on him, and shattering forever any hope of gaining Malfoy's trust.
So he was forced to sit through the entire match, contemplating what might be going on that he could do nothing about.
Sev begins to learn in this story that although he sees himself as the genius master manipulator, he can't be everywhere at once, and in a lot of ways he's as constrained by his own plans as the people he's trying to manipulate.
The lights were dimmed, and not even Mr. Litavori the librarian was there.
I guess this name is derived from Lit-a-vore as in carnivore.
Professor Ephemeria kept a hand on Sev's shoulders, as if he might suddenly take flight if she didn't - or perhaps it was to keep herself steady.
Dumbledore's steely blue eyes were sharp. "What is it, Janeida?" he asked gently.
'Ephemeria' is obviously a variant on 'ephemeral', since this potions teacher is only going to be a temporary filler of the position before Severus takes over, but I'm not sure where I got Janeida from.
"And can you tell me who might have done this?" the headmaster asked.
Sev was intrigued by his choice of words; very intrigued. As if he was asking not if Sev knew, but whether he would tell. As if he had a very clear idea of what was going on here...
"No, sir," he said, meeting the headmaster's gaze steadily. The bright blue eyes that looked back at him were as unreadable as his own.
Dumbledore continues to know everything.
He was so busy looking around that he didn't look down. He tripped over something, and fell heavily. Inspecting his wand carefully to make sure he hadn't broken it, Sev said "Lumos!" and flicked the magical light over to the object he had caught his foot on.
It was a human skull.
Dun dun dun...! I think this was a chapter break in the original. I'm working from a version without the breaks marked so I'm not entirely sure. The stories in this series aren't really structured in distinct chapters the way my others are; I just happened to end up posting First Impressions in six chunks, so I kept that pattern for the later stories.
Sev automatically stumbled a few steps backwards. Impassive or not, there was something utterly instinctual about recoiling from a skeleton.
Once automatic reaction was done, cool reflection kicked right back in. It was a skeleton; it was far beyond any help he could have provided, and there was no reason to be afraid of it. He took a closer look.
I am fairly unperturbed by dead animals, bones, and the like, but there's always an instinctive jerk-back reaction when your brain first processes what you're looking at.
Sev held the pair of them in his palms and studied them thoughtfully. They were familiar... He closed his eyes, and allowed his mind to flood back; back over a thousand vividly stored memories, snapshots of his life.
Apparently I gave Sev a photographic memory. Huh. I have an extremely good memory myself, but it's almost entirely verbal; I can't picture images in my head at all, and while I'm okay at recognising faces - provided it's somebody I've met several times and am primed to expect to see again - could not successfully describe my own family members to a sketch artist. ("Grey hair, grey eyes... nose? Yes, he does have one. I'm pretty sure I'd have noticed if he didn't. Ears? Yep. Two. One on either side. Attached to a face that is... face shaped.")
The thing my memory is good for, like the rest of my brain, is rhythmic sequences. Anything like a PIN code, password or telephone number will stick in my mind for good once I've had to recall it on two or three separate occasions. (Whether it's useful or not. The userid I had for the school computers when I was eleven was 12145.)
It was difficult to read by the light of his wand, and he leaned in closely. The note read: The blood of wizardry has been diluted. We will suffer these wretched half-breeds no more. Signed: the Brotherhood of the Death Eaters.
The name was unfamiliar to him. Next to the final 's' was what looked like a dark blot on the paper. Sev placed a hand behind the note to pull it closer to his eyes, and then leapt back as green light flared. Reflexes had him halfway across the clearing, wand out, before he recognised that this spell was not a magical boobytrap.
The tiny star of sparkling green that drifted outwards and upwards seemed utterly incongruous - like a fairy light or a fragment of a firework. Then, as Sev watched, it split in half and in half again. The lights multiplied rapidly, forming a globe of dancing lights several feet across, easily visible against the black of the night sky.
The lights swarmed around each other like miniature fairies. They bunched together, and then spread out again, taking on a new shape. Before his eyes, they formed into an obscenely grinning skull, hugely and distorted with a snaking tongue. In one of the eyesockets the lights flared in a supernova wink.
Hey, cool. I really like this sequence!
I find a lot of my writing from this era pretty awkward now, but there's the occasional bit like this that pops out at me. It's interesting to reread this stuff after so much time has passed that I really don't remember what I'm going to find.
"I should think, with everything that's going on," Malachite observed bitterly, "people should see that my house are very much the victims here. But no; whenever house Slytherin is involved, all the old prejudices come out."
"It can be easy to fall into that trap," Dumbledore acknowledged. His voice sounded further away now; he was somewhere off to Sev's right. "And it can be easy to fall too far out of it."
Heh. This is a good line from Dumbledore. This is a really good chapter all round, actually. I seem to have hit a sudden burst of inspiration here. I like this whole conversation between Dumbledore and Malachite.
Seeing Lily laughing with her friends like that made him feel a sudden pang of some melancholy he couldn't quite identify. He scrabbled in his bag, and pulled out the invisibility cloak. Then he took out a scrap of parchment, and scribbled out a few brief words.
In the crush of the station, he managed to brush by her, and slip the cloak into her school bag, with the note tightly wrapped up in its centre.
Be careful, and take this. I think you might need it.
And so the cloak passes to Lily, from whom it will eventually pass to Potter, and part two ends on a somewhat ominous note.
I'm quite surprised how much my writing seems to have improved across the course of these two fics, considering they were both written within the space of four weeks.
(And then, four days later, I started posting part three. I was at full time university! And writing a novel! And multiple West Wing fics! Seriously, now I write full-time and have plenty of leisure time to work on fic, I just cannot begin to match my productivity from back in the day when I was insanely busy. I wrote 360,000 words of fic in 2002. I have absolutely no idea how.)
The commentary continues with parts 3 and 4 here.