#terri-testing

Terri_testing

Ao3

Summary: Severus discovers that the Muggles are quite right: the Bard does indeed have a quote for any occasion.

If you prick us, do we not bleed? … And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

The Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene I

By this stage in the cooling process, the Swelling Solution should be thickening to nearly a gel. Potter’s was runny. Damned near watery.

Severus lifted an eyebrow in silent disdain, and Potter flushed hotly.

Severus spotted some puffer-fish eyeballs scattered across Potter’s desk, and opened his mouth to reprimand the boy for his untidiness and waste of ingredients. Then he shut it again, thinking hard. Potter’s jar was nearly full, no more missing than the few grams this potion needed. Severus cast a quick look down—yes, more eyes glittered on the ground. And, yes, Weasley’s desk was similarly adorned with glints of silver.

Now, whose jar had been emptier than it should have been? And what lines should he assign casually tonight to the appropriate little snakeling—“I will not waste potions ingredients,” or “I will not waste Professor Snape’s class time in teasing Gryffindors?” It partly depended on which had done it—fortunately, Severus had at least one further round of the room to complete.

He rather thought that it had been Draco’s jar which had been suspiciously depleted, but he had the luxury of confirmation. He would wait for more information before making his ultimate determination.

He snorted faintly, and Potter flushed again, apparently taking the snort as additional commentary on his potion. Severus rather thought that his eyebrow had been sufficiently eloquent of itself.

Severus moved on to monitor what atrocities Longbottom had committed today. He was staring, impressed (if not favorably) by the potion’s unique color, when he heard a loud bang. Severus whirled, wand automatically falling into his hand, as a scalding rain fell and the screaming started. His reflexive shield sheltered the children nearest him, but it left the students farther away entirely unprotected.

Most of the shrieks sounded like mere cries of alarm, but one voice shrilled with the harsher note of serious pain.

Severus focused on that one. Gregory Goyle was staggering back from his cauldron, his hands rising to his eyes, screaming like a banshee.

Sweet Circe. He must have gotten the potion full in his face. And Swelling Solution in the eyes—

“Don’t rub them!” Severus shouted. “DON’T RUB THEM!” Futilely, since Greg was unlikely to hear him over the other screams, and the panicking boy was even less likely to have the intelligence to obey orders.

If Greg touched his eyes—if he burst those straining membranes—eyes were among the organs that couldn’t be regrown—

Frantically, Severus cast a partial petrificus on the boy’s arms. Greg’s screams changed pitch to more of a bellow as he realized his arms were now restrained. He blundered about blindly, hands held rigidly in front of his face, struggling in terror and pain.

Severus ran, grabbing the flask of Deflating Draught from his pocket and uncorking it one-handed. He shoved a shrieking Pansy Parkinson out of the way without even glancing at her.

By the time he reached Greg, the boy’s eyes were already as large as saucers.

Severus had a crazy flash of memory of an illustration he’d seen as a child—a dog, was it, with plate-sized eyes...? A black and white line drawing, unmoving, so Muggle, it must have been….

He used his wand to wrench the boy’s paralyzed hands away from his face, and Greg’s screams rose in pitch as the full light hit his enlarged eyes.

That was actually a good sign—it meant he wasn’t already blind. Thank Merlin his potion hadn’t still been at the boil when it splashed him.

Severus snarled, “Drink,” thrusting the flask at Greg’s lips, and the boy obeyed his tone of voice automatically.

The swollen eyes started almost immediately to shrink. Severus sighed in relief and cast an obscuro over the boy’s face to dim the light reaching those oversensitive eyes. Was his standard burn salve safe to use on them? Best not to risk it—stabilize, then get him to Poppy.

A bandaging charm—no, a goggle charm, protecting the eyes without pressure, and without blinding the boy completely and panicking him still further.

Severus cast it, then snapped in the boy’s ear, “Now stay still, Mr. Goyle! I need to attend to the others.”

He straightened to survey his little domain.

It had all happened in only seconds.

His classroom, orderly a few moments ago, was now a shambles. And how could this have happened? The Swelling Solution was stable at this stage; not even Longbottom’s could have erupted spontaneously. And if someone had thrown something into a cauldron, say in retaliation—well, none of the ingredients in use today was this reactive.

Part of Severus’s mind tried to catalog possible ingredient interactions while he scanned the other children, trying to determine who was hurt and how badly. But none of the other cries held that particular terrifying shrill of agony….

Draco’s nose had swollen to the size of a turnip; he was clutching it in horror as though trying by force to keep it from growing more. Vince was shouting and waving an arm that looked like he was suffering from elephantiasis. Daphne Greengrass was sobbing, but the sound was muffled. She was bent over almost double, trying to use her hands to cover herself further from view. Her friend Millie, looking furious and horrified, was valiantly trying to shield Daphne with her own body, disregarding her own flapping, donkey-sized ear.

Severus regarded Daphne’s cowering form, and his lips tightened. Possibly Miss Greengrass had finally learned the unwisdom of flouting the school dress code requiring that school robes always be worn buttoned to the top.

Pansy’s shrieks had turned to incoherent blubbering, as her lips were puffing too much to let her open her mouth. Oh shit, if any of his students had swallowed any of the splashed potion—but no, no one was turning blue, and surely it was too soon for anyone to have collapsed entirely for lack of air—?

“Silence!” Severus shouted. “SILENCE! Anyone who has been splashed, come here for a Deflating Draft—when I find out who did this—”

He still hadn’t thought of any illicit addition that could have produced this effect. Not even Longbottom’s toad plopping into one of the cauldrons could have achieved this carnage.

Severus cast a quick look around as his students started obediently to queue up, making sure there was none too injured to come for treatment. He gave a flicker of a nod to Millie, who stayed firmly in place, her body still hiding Miss Greengrass’s.

Glancing over at the Gryffindor side, his eye caught Potter’s downturned face. The boy was stifling an all-too-familiar laugh. Potter’s ginger sidekick, meanwhile, was regarding their afflicted classmates—Slytherins all, what an odd coincidence!—with an open grin.

Severus’s breath caught. A wave of rage made his hands start to shake and his vision start to narrow on that familiar little smirk. Old, bitter reflexes made him start to raise his wand.

He caught himself after only a twitch. He couldn’t raise his wand against a child. Not even a sneering Potter.

And the rage itself was an indulgence he could not now afford. There were victims here who required his immediate assistance. Severus called on all his discipline to push his feelings down, managed to turn his constricted focus on the injured student in front of him, and went to work.

Draco was up first, tear-stained and red with mortification, unable even to hold his head upright by now for the weight of his swollen nose. He was breathing in gasps through his mouth; and couldn’t lift his head enough to drink from the flask. Severus had to spell the antidote into his mouth.

Pansy, too, had to have the Deflating Draft spelled past her puffed lips.

Pansy—a girl—

Severus accio’ed another vial and tilted two doses into it, telling her, very quietly, “Take this to Miss Bulstrode for herself and Miss Greengrass.”

The next child in line was a whimpering Blaise Zabini, who lifted a swollen hand. The index finger was deeply scored by Blaise’s signet ring. Had the swelling continued much further, the finger might have been severed.

Well, Severus had had warned all his students repeatedly not to wear jewelry while brewing. Still, he winced to see it. “Accio dittany!”

Fortunately the signet itself must not have been enchanted; the cut, although deep and painful, was merely physical, and responded immediately to Severus’s flesh-knitting spell and the dittany.

Not so the wounds made by Tracey Davis’s magical watch; when her arm resumed its normal size, the bloody groove made by the band smoothed away at his treatment, but not the angry imprint left by the face. Severus would have to send her to Poppy.

She could escort Greg, then.

Greg, meanwhile, in his smoked goggles, was leaning against his desk, insisting shakily to a knot of healed but angry fellow-sufferers, “No! I didn’t do nothin’. Perfess’r Snape ‘ud already looked at my potion, and he said it was all right. Well, I mean, he nodded, like he does.”

Some in his audience nodded in understanding, and Greg grabbed a breath. He wailed, “Then—I dunno. I was just letting it sit, like we were s’posed to! Like the perfess’r said! I wasn’ stirrin’ it! I wasn’t even lookin’ at it! And then it splashed, like, and I turned to look at it, and it, it just exploded!”

Draco came to Greg’s rescue. “Greg’s potion couldn’t have just exploded like that. You heard a splash, you said, Greg?”

Greg nodded, wincing as the motion hurt his sore eyes. Draco said, “Then Po—then someone must’ve thrown something, only it fell in and reacted wrong—that’s what must’ve happened.” He folded his arms and nodded sagely.

Pansy said uncertainly, “But sometimes potions do just explode—Longbottom’s have. Maybe Greg’s—”

Draco leaned forward, insisting, “But see, Greg’s potion worked on us, so it must have been all right, just like Professor Snape said. And Swelling Solution isn’t one that can explode for just no reason. So someone must’ve done something to it. They must’ve.”

Greg said slowly, chewing it over, “That splash…?”

Draco nodded. “They must’ve been throwing something, to annoy us, like, only they chucked it into your cauldron by mistake.” His eyes widened suddenly. “Or—or they were aiming to do it! They were trying to wreck someone’s potion, only they exploded it instead. They’re gonna be in so much trouble! The professor….”

The whole group paused in awed appreciation of what the professor might do. Daphne sniffled, burrowing her face further into Millie’s shoulder, and Millie tightened her arm around the smaller girl and actually growled in the Gryffindors’ direction.

Methodically, Severus continued to work with Deflating Draft and the occasional healing spell. The last of his injured students was weedy little Theo, head down to hide his wet eyes. His puffed lips were pressed tightly together, letting no whimper escape. Severus couldn’t tell if the boy was crying from pain or from humiliation, and Theo would never say. Severus spelled the dose past Theo’s swollen lips, and then, on an impulse, vanished the tear-tracks with another wave of his wand.

Theo looked up sharply at that, his expression wavering between sullen anger and involuntary gratitude. Snivellus Snape met the boy’s eyes impassively for a moment.

Then he turned to regard, finally, the rest of his class.

He catalogued the students’ reactions now that the worst of the crisis was over. They were chattering with various degrees of excitement, fear, and fury. Potter and Weasley, he saw, under the pressure of the united Slytherin glares, had adjusted their expressions to match the alarmed faces of the other Gryffindors.

Severus added his own glare to his students’. Then he stalked over to Gregory Goyle’s cauldron and fished within it for the mystery addition.

And dragged out, not a gurdyroot or flobberworm or such, but the unmistakable, if blackened and twisted, remains of a Filibuster firework.

The entire room went silent.

Even Severus found nothing to say.

He felt his hands start to shake again and his vision to white out. He throttled his voice down, very deliberately, to the merest whisper, “If I ever find out who threw this, I shall make sure that person is expelled.”

His Slytherins looked impressed, and even most of the lions looked a little frightened.

But it was an empty threat, wasn’t it?

Severus had seen who had been laughing. And the headmaster would never allow Potter to be expelled.

Worse, nor could Severus.

*

“Headmaster.” Severus tried to present his case for some punishment calmly. “Gregory Goyle was splashed on his open EYES. Had I been a few steps farther away, or not carrying the remedy actually in my pocket, or had I not succeeded in keeping the boy from rubbing his eyes when he flung his hands up to protect them from the light, he might have been permanently blinded.

“And Potter watched Greg blundering about, blind and screaming, and he laughed.”

Severus realized that this last had come out as a scream, and that he was leaning over the headmaster’s desk and shouting into the other man’s face. And shaking. He shut his mouth hard and straightened.

Expressing undue passion was always a mistake around Dumbledore.

He added stiffly, “I apologize for my lack of moderation, headmaster. But Potter—you must admit it must have been Potter!—nearly blinded a fellow student and might easily have killed one of the others, had anyone been unfortunate enough to swallow the potion and have their throat swollen shut.

“Even his father never did so much at age twelve! And—you must admit, headmaster!—someone able to blind a fellow student and laugh at it, is well capable of thinking it funny to petrify the familiar of a man he hates, or to terrorize the rest of the school….”

“No, Severus,” Dumbledore said then, in gentle reproof. “You know that Harry Potter was in hospital, effectively armless, at the time of the last attack. And trust me that he did not know who was responsible for Mrs. Norris’s state. I can attest to that. As to your contention that it must have been Harry who was guilty of that misplaced firecracker, I’m afraid I really must insist upon the precept ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ You don’t, I note, claim to have seen the boy actually throw it.”

Severus inhaled and regrouped. “There’s a simple way to settle it past any doubt, headmaster,” he argued, glancing significantly at the cabinet where reposed Dumbledore’s Pensieve. “Unless you pretend my mind is so disordered I might have hallucinated what I believe to have happened.”

He smiled grimly. Dumbledore didn’t respond, which at least meant he hadn’t an easy rebuttal. Severus leaned forward, and, with an effort, restrained himself from gripping the edge of the headmaster’s desk again. He groped for an argument that might move the man.

“Headmaster—if I’m right, the boy… is in serious danger of becoming as bad as his enemy. If I’m wrong, someone else is. Either way, the true culprit is an obvious danger to his fellows. We need to rein him in, lest the next jolly little prank leads to outright murder.”

He tried hard not to twitch at that, not to clench his fists, not to scream.

Dumbledore pursed his lips, looking dissatisfied.

Severus drew his hand across his mouth and watched the headmaster think. After a moment, he tried, “I understand that your principles forbid you to encourage anything remotely akin to tale-telling among the students. But it is my memory only that we would interrogate—what I would have seen had my back not been turned at the crucial moment. And… moreover… whoever it is… even if I’m dead wrong in suspecting it to have been Potter… if we intervene now, perhaps we can nip in the bud that, that tendency to enjoy his enemies’ pain.”

Dumbledore went still. Finally he answered, for once sober, “Very well, Severus.”

He met Snape’s eyes, and held them. “But in return for this concession, I want one from you—that you will accept my judgment as to the resulting disciplinary action, if any.”

Severus stirred a little indignantly at that. The headmaster’s twinkle abruptly resurfaced. “That you accept it, Severus. That you not fight it, covertly, afterward. Not just that you dutifully agree with me to my face, whilst undermining my judgments later.”

Severus bit his tongue involuntarily. After a moment he nodded, and set his wand to his head. Start with when he turned away from Potter’s cauldron…

*

Within the memory, Severus stalked to the right of the desk shared by Potter and Weasley, where he’d have full view of both boys’ actions after the teacher had turned his back. Memory-Weasley was moodily (and uselessly) stirring his own potion, paying no attention to Potter as Snape’s figure turned away. Well, that answered one question.

Memory-Potter watched the figure of his professor approach Longbottom’s cauldron. Then he glanced swiftly to the side, ducked down behind his cauldron, and pulled a Filibuster firework from his pocket.

“There, see!” Severus grabbed at the headmaster’s arm, but Albus didn’t seem much interested. He was stroking his beard and humming slightly as he gazed abstractedly about the room.

The lit firework sparkled, and Potter’s damned Quidditch reflexes deposited it smoothly in Greg’s cauldron. Severus registered Greg’s half-turn at the splash, and the boy’s widening, utterly unprotected eyes. He flinched and shut his own eyes involuntarily, then cursed at himself and re-opened them.

But Dumbledore was watching unmoved, his eyes bright and calm. And he wasn’t looking at the exploding potion, or at the screaming and panicking children, or at Potter’s smirking face. He was regarding something else entirely, and his calm gaze drew Severus’s to follow his: to a student, similarly unaffected by the sudden uproar, watching until she was sure that her teacher’s attention was fully on the clamoring sufferers. Then she slipped quietly into Severus’s office, into his storeroom, which he’d unlocked at the beginning of this lesson to bring out the powdered bicorn horn.

Which minors weren’t allowed to purchase, but which was needed in almost all potions that transformed the human body. Including, of course, in the Swelling Solution, in minute amounts.

There was a reason why Snape had shifted Swelling Solution to second year, while the students were still pre-adolescent. And the headmaster had agreed with his reasoning. No matter what warnings the teacher gave about not using this potion on delicate, nerve-rich tissues, that it could cause possible tearing and excruciating pain, stupid (or hopeful) students would still try.

But this thief wasn’t a stupid teen pursuing dreams of … enlargement.

Severus’s hands clenched, and he forced himself to stop his mental nattering and just observe what was in front of him.

Granger.

Severus had thought Miss Granger to be still rigidly moral, still upholding the strict code of her decent middle-class Muggle parents.

He had imagined her to be uncorrupted by her association with Potter and his little Pureblood partner-in-crime.

He had told himself that she must have befriended the boys with some hope, some delusion, of being able to rein in their worst excesses.

Instead, there she was, Potter’s willing little accomplice.

Severus wanted to close his eyes again. Instead, he stepped up close to the door of his office. He couldn’t pass through it, but he could see, through the two doors, exactly where she was rummaging through Severus’s meticulously-arranged ingredients. Pilfering.

Well. That word applied to minor thefts.

Bicorn shavings, boomslang skin, raised Granger’s takings to a felony. Then there was her clear complicity in the assault.

If Severus chose to pursue her to the extent of the law (and succeeded in that pursuit, a different issue entirely), she’d be ruined for the rest of her witch’s long life. If he chose rather to tell the families of her victims, privately….

Harry Potter, the boy who threw the firework, was also the Boy-Who-Lived, a celebrity, as well as known to be under Dumbledore’s guardianship. Ronald Weasley, if he had been implicated, was the son of a Pureblood Ministry official who had, despite his eccentricity, even more cronies than enemies. The most privileged of Purebloods, even Lucius, even Sophia Lestrange Greengrass, would hesitate before instituting violent reprisals against either of those two. But let them know a little Muggleborn were an accomplice to a disfiguring and dangerous attack on their children….

Miss Granger could be in some danger merely as the boys’ known associate.

Dumbledore tapped his shoulder, and Severus twisted his head back to stare at the headmaster.

Dumbledore, oddly, was smiling. “If I remember correctly the arrangement of your storeroom, Miss Granger has abstracted only bicorn and boomslang from your many restricted substances Which, in conjunction with what ingredients second-year students have at hand, should enable her to brew… what?”

Little fool, not to have abstracted other rare ingredients just to lay a false trail. Bicorn, boomslang, and common materials? It didn’t take Severus’s encyclopedic knowledge of potions to assemble that brew. Which, fool that he was, he had mentioned to his students at the beginning of this section as the ultimate demonstration of bicorn’s transformative properties.

A potion illegal in itself, and she would have had to have broken into the Restricted Section to have found the recipe. No access to old family grimoires for her.

Her offenses were compounding.

Severus didn’t try to fudge his response. He said tersely, “Polyjuice.”

Dumbledore beamed and drew Severus straight out of the memory back into his office.

He exclaimed, with every appearance of delight, “So you see, Severus, that I was right!”

Severus stared at him, but Dumbledore didn’t expand on this statement, instead humming happily while he pulled his candy dish towards him and started to separate some sherbet lemons which had become stuck together.

Finally Snape bit. “Excuse me. Headmaster. Right about what, precisely?”

The headmaster hummed and looked up. ‘Why, that the boy—both the children—were innocent of malice in their actions, of course.”

Severus’s teeth snapped together. He paused, and then said carefully. “Excuse me, headmaster. I seem to have missed how what we saw, established that.”

Dumbledore beamed more broadly. “But Severus. You surely saw that the action that concerned you, tossing a firework into a cauldron with concomitant temporary injuries to students, was itself merely incidental to an attempt—successful—to steal restricted ingredients from your stores. And that theft itself was clearly consequent on the need to brew Polyjuice. And why did those particular students suddenly feel a need to brew Polyjuice? Clearly, in order to disguise themselves, to investigate more fully, themselves, the recent attacks on the school.”

He met Severus’s eyes. “Apparently, they don’t trust the staff to do so adequately. My vanity may be hurt by their lack of trust, but one must surely commend their initiative, and their devotion to the school’s safety.”

Severus opened his mouth, but for a moment he could find nothing to say.

Dumbledore did not have that problem; he said cheerfully, “Surely, Severus, if anyone should be sympathetic to a student supposing that the Hogwarts staff was not sufficiently … attentive … to the danger posed by a monster, that person must be you.”

Severus stared at him; Dumbledore had the gall to twinkle back. “That fear, that desire to find the culprit themselves, is what motivated, finally, all that these children did. Surely you of all people cannot fault them for that, or wish them punished for their over-eagerness in pursuing those they suppose guilty of consorting with, even releasing, a monster?”

Severus tried. “Not for over=eagerness, no. For injuring fellow students—”

“—which injuries, thanks to your prompt action, were absolutely trivial—”

“—which injuries might well have included permanent blindness, or even death!”

He was shouting again. He knew by that that he had lost.

Dumbledore riposted gently, “Hardly the latter, Severus, not with you in the very room, so prompt to respond to the emergency. It would have taken several minutes for a victim to asphyxiate had the worst occurred, and there was no possibility whatsoever that you would have permitted such a serious reaction to proceed unchecked. In actual fact there were, I must re-iterate, no serious injuries at all. Thanks in part, of course, to your prompt and resourceful response.”

Dumbledore paused, selected a sweet, and sucked it. “Which response these children knew to expect.”

He smiled again at Severus. “Indeed, Severus, you must take this entire incident as an indirect compliment to yourself. Miss Granger and Mr. Potter know full well that you carry antidotes for the day’s brewing on your person when in class. They knew, therefore, that they could rely on you instantly to undo any harm they might inadvertently cause with their, ah, perhaps not carefully considered actions.”

Severus felt his teeth pulling back in a snarl, but the headmaster continued blithely, “They took for granted, therefore, that the spilled potion could do no serious damage. And we see that they were, indeed, quite right. A little excitement, a lot of noise, a few students temporarily embarrassed…. One class disrupted for a short time, and that near its end. Why, you were able even to record grades for your students’ work.”

He stretched his shoulders a little and sighed. “A harmless diversion, no more, to serve their true purpose. Which, even you must agree, was entirely commendable. They want Slytherin’s monster caught, no matter the cost of doing so. Surely, we all share that goal.”

The headmaster’s gaze sharpened on Severus’s. “Do we not?”

Severus could do nothing but nod.

“Of course, there is the problem of averting revenge…. I fear, Severus, that your house shares to some extent your own views about, how to put it, the desirability of letting justice be seasoned by mercy. They seem as a group to be unmindful of the truth that mercy is twice blessed.”

He stared at Severus with a slight air of accusation.

Severus snorted. In what now seemed the halcyon days before Harry Potter’s advent, he and the headmaster had sometimes had cordial arguments about impersonal matters. Debating Shakespeare, Severus had betrayed his sympathy for Shylock, that hook-nosed outsider who’d seized the one opportunity fate offered him against the man who’d repeatedly, not just wronged him, but spat on him.

Dumbledore, naturally, had supported Portia.

However, had not Portia herself admitted, Therefore, Jew, Though justice be thy plea… In citing Portia’s argument to let mercy prevail over justice, Dumbledore was tacitly admitting that Severus and his Slytherins had strict justice on their side.

But Severus remembered as well, vividly, the ending of Shylock’s peroration:

“The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”

He shuddered. Yes, even if their parents stayed aloof, he could see his students embarking on that course once the school authorities failed to punish their attackers. It would be disastrous on all counts if they did. Especially if Daphne’s older brother, or Pansy’s or Greg’s cousins, got involved. Starting a Slytherin-Gryffindor war in the midst of this Heir of Slytherin trouble… Potter and his friends might well be seriously hurt, and his Slytherins likewise in the Gryffindor retaliation.

That would depend on chance and malice. The absolutely assured and immediate result, however, would be the further blackening of his Slytherins’ names. And possibly of their hearts—he didn’t deceive himself that his passionate thirst for retribution against James Potter’s little gang of thugs had benefited or bettered him. However justified it had been.

How to avert that, when the children would have the bitterness of watching their elders let the obvious suspect go utterly unpunished…?

His head snapped up as an idea struck him. “Let that gilded popinjay try his Dueling Club idea, with me assisting. In a week or so. I’ll tell my students tonight that I’ve talked you into it, and that I’ll make sure to pair them with Potter and his friends. That I’ve tricked you, actually, into agreeing. In order to give them the opportunity to exact the punishment that your policy that I must actually have caught Potter in flagrante denies them. And I’ll point out that they themselves take advantage of that policy, so they can’t rightfully complain that it’s now working to Potter’s benefit. That should satisfy their feelings, and none of the second-years has the power or will yet to cast anything really damaging, even if they were fool enough to try in a public venue. That way, I can, I hope, limit the reprisals and make sure the older children don’t take a hand.”

The headmaster stroked his beard again. “Well, you know your Slytherins best—I suppose it’s a little too much to hope for you to persuade them instead of the virtues of forgiving and forgetting. Especially when you yourself have never entirely mastered that philosophy.”

He twinkled at Severus. “Very well.”

*

Severus, in his quarters at last, contemplated the final bitter pill he had to swallow.

Potter had surely not done him the honor of paying enough attention to have caught his brief mention of Polyjuice. Certainly his brewing showed no evidence of his ever having attended to anything said in the general lectures.

Which meant that the scheme itself, as well as the execution of the theft, must have been Miss Granger’s.

She wasn’t Potter’s accomplice in this escapade.

He was hers.

She must have planned the whole.

Severus had thought the Muggleborn girl uncorrupted by her association with Potter. He had told himself that she must have befriended the boys in the hopes of being able to rein them in. Of reforming them.

He’d been wrong. She was as bad as they.

Worse.

She at least had been taught better.

But clearly, she had been taught something new in Gryffindor tower.

She had learned to be unmoved by pain and humiliation, so long as they were a Slytherin’s.

Severus pulled open his Shakespeare, and read again, like probing a wound: Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard, but I will better the instruction.

But Severus must not fulfill that promise, and he must see that his children did not.

*

The children’s inexpert but enthusiastic “dueling,” combined with Gilderoy’s incompetence, had reduced the Great Hall to a state remarkably like Severus’s classroom that day. Down to the shrieks and whimpers.

This had gone on quite long enough.

Severus shouted, “Finite Incantatem,” and tried not to smile too smugly when he managed to cancel all of the students’ spells on the first pass.

He peered through the greenish smoke (remnant of an injudicious, and miscast, salamander invocation from one of the Weasley twins) to spot the pairs of interest.

Millie had Granger in a painful-looking headlock and was looking entirely satisfied at her position. Of course, Millie imagined Granger to be only incidentally a party to the attack on Daphne, not its actual instigator.

Draco, however, was looking disgruntled, and so were most of the other Slytherins, united in glaring at the essentially untouched Potter.

And really, dancing-legs? Of course Draco had no real stomach for causing pain; it was one of the reasons Severus had chosen him as Potter’s partner, though the children naturally assumed it was the Malfoy status, or Malfoy’s status as Potter’s chief rival. But Draco would have to do better than that, or the others would be tempted, later, to take justice into their own hands.

Gilderoy, flustering ineffectually about, finally bleated to the students, “I think I’d better teach you how to block unfriendly spells,”

Severus looked at him; this should be entertaining, whichever side of the demonstration Gildie asked him to take. A Protego could only be as strong as the wizard who’d cast it. On the other hand, a Shield spell cast with sufficient power could, potentially, deflect a hex back onto its caster, though utter precision in shaping the shield was required to do this with any accuracy. In combat, this was rarely achievable.

In a demonstration, however…. Severus smiled slightly.

Gilderoy saw it and paled. He said hastily, “Let’s have a volunteer pair—Longbottom and Finch-Fletchley, how about you—”

Had the idiot not seen what Longbottom had just done to the both of them? And besides, a public demonstration between two students would be ideal for Severus’s purposes.

He interjected, striding forward, “A bad idea, Professor Lockhart. Longbottom causes devastation with the simplest spells. We’ll be sending what’s left of Finch-Fletchley up to the hospital wing in a matchbox. How about Malfoy and Potter?”

Especially if the boys were to be demonstrating the use of the shield spell. Draco flinched from inflicting real damage, but he’d have no problem with the idea of humiliating his rival by making him show fear in front of a large audience.…

He smiled at Gildie meaningfully, lifting his wand lazily to suggest his entire willingness to perform a demonstration if the other didn’t wish to go along with his suggested pairings. Gilderoy, less of a fool than he acted, positively jumped to agree. “Excellent idea!”

Gilderoy gestured the boys to the middle of the hall. Severus went to Draco’s side while Gildie started giving Potter what might with charity be called a demonstration of the shield charm.

If the Protego involved dropping one’s wand instead of one’s hand.

Severus snorted, and bent a little to murmur in Draco’s ear, “A nonverbal spell, Mr. Malfoy? That was ill-advised; it made you faster, yes, but you haven’t the power yet to make a non-verbal hex count. And then … Tarantallegra?”

Draco blushed. “I was laughing too hard to think of anything better, Professor!” If you tickle us, do we not laugh? Severus didn’t flinch. He said aloud, “Well, this is your chance; make it count. I’d recommend using a hex that a Protego would not stop, in the unlikely event that Professor Lockhart succeeds in teaching Potter said spell. An indirect attack. For example, Serpensortia. I understand lions to be unreasonably frightened by snakes.”

Draco’s eyes widened as he visualized the scene, and he smiled. “Yes, I can do that one, sir.”

Draco was wildly unlikely to be able to make a snake that was venomous, but he didn’t need to, to intimidate Potter. And a public display of fear at their house mascot might satisfy the Slytherins’ thirst for justice.

Severus stepped back. Maybe this would be the end of it.

*

But it wasn’t, by a long shot.

Severus found absurd the rumors flying about Potter following the attack on Finch-Fletchley and Sir Nicholas. But then, he had access to Hagrid’s testimony. More to the point, he possessed a moderately logical—and at least minimally functional—mind.

On reflection, however, he saw how he might use these rumors to call his Slytherins firmly off from pursuing Potter.

He stood, therefore, before the fire in the common room, and asked softly, “Tell me, what is the official motto of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?”

He looked around the room and finally nodded to Miles Bletchley, who recited, “Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus.”

“And why should one not do so…,” his gaze swept them again, “… Miss Rosier?”

“Well—because it would be stupid, sir.” She shrugged. “You shouldn’t want to wake one up; there’s no advantage to be gained by doing so, and the dragon would respond violently.”

“Indeed,” Severus responded. “If one wanted to steal from the beast, or slay it, or capture it, or heal it, that could best be done by approaching it in its sleep. But even if one were, say, Gryffindor enough to wish to tease a dumb creature for entertainment… well, tickling a sleeping dragon might possibly evoke no reaction at all. In which case doing so would be an utterly wasted effort. But if one did succeed in provoking a reaction, that reaction would be entirely out of proportion to the stimulus one had applied. And very probably beyond one’s ability to deal with.”

He shifted a little before the fire, gathering their attention.

“Which brings me to Harry Potter.” A number of the children suddenly looked much more alert. “Since Mr. Malfoy’s hex has revealed Potter to be a Parselmouth, some have been wondering whether Potter might be the elusive heir of Slytherin.”

The children murmured among themselves.

“I would point out that, if he is, there’s a curious discrepancy between his public and private actions. Privately he’s attacking Muggleborns and writing messages claiming his heritage as Slytherin’s heir. Publicly, his closest friends are a Muggleborn and the son of the greatest Muggle-lover in the Ministry, and he professes disdain for all things Slytherin.

“Indeed, most here can testify that Potter stayed a long time under the Sorting Hat. No one can conceivably argue that Mr. Potter shows any particular interest in either hard work or learning. So, clearly, the Hat must have wanted to put Potter in our house, and he refused and insisted on Gryffindor.”

Most of the students nodded slowly at that. A few of the older ones pursed their lips a little, as though reserving judgment.

“And yet Potter is, irrefutably, a Parselmouth like great Salazar himself. And also … like the Dark wizard who attacked him when Potter himself was a baby.”

There was a more pronounced stir; Severus paused to let them digest that suggestion.

He continued, lowering his voice, “There are two reasons why there might be so very wide a gap between public and private faces, and both are deeply alarming. The first is… imagine a very clever and calculating young Dark wizard, who wished to develop his powers without interference and to gain influence without suspicion. And who observed the distrust with which You-Know-Who’s known followers and policies are regarded in the contemporary Wizarding World. Such a calculating young man might deliberately, publicly, distance himself from them. Refuse to sort to Slytherin. Profess disinterest in the Dark Arts. Surround himself with friends that demonstrate his disdain for blood purity.

“In which case, everything we seem to have learned about Harry Potter in the last year and more is nothing but a mask he’s been wearing to deceive us. His enemies may or may not be his enemies, but his friends are certainly not really his friends, and woe unto them when they discover that….”

The students were staring, shocked. Satisfied, Severus pursued his argument. “If Potter has the kind of mind to have adopted that kind of deception at age eleven, then he is a very dangerous creature indeed. And the safest course around such a creature is to be neither his falsely-welcomed friend nor his marked-out enemy, but to pass, so far as is possible, unnoticed by him.”

And every child in this room with a single Death Eater relative would find that advice roundly endorsed by their families. Though several, of course, might conclude that it was too late to adopt that course.

Severus lowered his voice still further, to a sinister whisper. “That’s if Potter is consciously deceptive. The alternative is even worse: that he is not. That his own mind is torn between deeply opposed sets of values, and that he may not be aware of what he is doing.”

He paused, then hissed, “As he seemed not to realize that he was addressing Malfoy’s snake in its own tongue. ”

Several students jumped; most of them looked confused. A few did not. Severus leaned forward. “That would be worse. For the word for that is insanity, and the insane are unpredictable. Immoderate. You cannot count on their responding in a reasonable and measured, in short in a human, manner.

“Dragons, in effect.”

Severus paused, but no one interrupted. He dropped his voice almost to a whisper again. “One last point about our school motto: which of the four Founders proposed it?”

He let Tracey Davis give the answer, with a proud tilt of her chin. “Salazar Slytherin!”

“Yes. The school motto is in truth our motto, our house’s. One can scarce imagine a Gryffindor finding glory in it, or a Ravenclaw intellectual satisfaction. We betray our founder’s wisdom when we forget it, and tickle unwisely.”

He took a sudden step back from the hearth, leaving the position in front of the fire abruptly open. The children jerked a little, startled.

“Mr. Malfoy. Please come here.”

Draco, looking apprehensive, stepped forward and halted on the hearthrug.

Severus whipped a small jar from his pocket. “Will you identify this object, please?”

Draco peered, and stiffened a little. ‘It—it looks like a jar from a potions kit, sir.”

From one of the very expensive ones, yes, with jars custom-designed to fit in ranks of padded pouches within a satchel with built-in Extension and Featherlight Charms, its casing spelled impervious to temperature changes, water, and pressure. Only a few in this room would have been given such an elaborate kit; the other students were all now looking at Draco with calculating eyes.

Severus smiled and moved the jar slightly so the silvery contents shifted and glinted. “Indeed. Could you hazard a guess as to which ingredient it contains, Mr. Malfoy?”

Draco bit his lip, but didn’t dare try to evade. “Sir. It could—it could be puffer-fish eyes.”

“And can you guess which student’s kit I abstracted this particular jar from?”

“I would guess—mine, sir.” He was white.

Severus whirled and said to their audience. “As it happens, I do not know whether Harry Potter is either Slytherin’s heir or responsible for the attacks in the hallways. In fact, I am personally inclined to doubt both. But I don’t doubt, though I cannot provide proof, that Potter was responsible for that firework in Goyle’s cauldron. How many of you in that class suspected Potter or his friends of being responsible for your injuries? Raise your hands, please.”

After cautious glances at each other and at him, they did—all ten. Draco was rigid on the hearthrug; his arm barely moved. But lift it did.

Severus lifted the jar so that it would glitter banefully in the red firelight, “But only one of you knew why. Only one of you knew who’d been tickling the dragon, and how.”

That was actually wildly unlikely to be true; some of Draco’s neighbors must have seen what he was getting up to behind the teacher’s back.

But this made for better drama.

Severus turned slowly back to Draco. “Draco, explain to your friends how you’d been entertaining yourself in class that day.” . “I… I’d been… well, throwing puffer-fish eyes. At Potter and Weasley.”

“And Potter took it for a while. Indeed, for most of the class period. By the number of eyes adorning his desk, you must have been at it all class, every time my back was turned. Weren’t you, Draco?”

He leaned forward a little; Draco nodded mutely.

Severus said softly, “And then finally Potter snapped, and retaliated. But he didn’t retaliate in kind, in a reasonable and measured manner; he escalated, didn’t he, Draco? Dangerously. He didn’t throw a potions ingredient, he threw a firework. In his eagerness to get you back, he didn’t count the cost. Not the cost to you, Draco—his response was out of all proportion to your pestering.”

Severus looked around the room, and spotted the biggest cluster of second-years. He spoke the next sentence to them. “Nor yet the cost to innocent bystanders—he didn’t care that he might injure others. You.”

The next statement was flung to the room as a whole. “Nor yet to himself—I’d have given a detention for flinging an ingredient, but that firework would have earned him expulsion if I’d turned and caught him.

“Nor even to his closest friends—he might just as easily have injured them as you.”

He turned back to the cluster, his voice dropping. “It was only by accident that I was on that side of the room, so my Shield Spell protected Potter’s friends instead of you from the exploding potion. Potter …. Potter could not have counted on my protecting them.

“He just didn’t care.”

He paused. “Potter is dangerous. Both to others and to himself, when he is pushed too far.”

He turned back, finally, to Draco, motionless all this time before the fire.

“You tickled the dragon, Draco. Successfully, too. It took you all class, but you roused it from slumber. Congratulations.”

He smiled at the boy, who gulped. “You will oblige me by writing, ‘I will not tickle a dragon without being entirely prepared for the consequences I am invoking.’”

The boy nodded mutely again. Severus added smoothly, “Two hundred times.”

There was a small gasp from one of the first-years; Professor Snape usually made them do twenty or fifty lines.

Severus continued, “After which, Mr. Malfoy, you will write to your parents, explaining precisely what you did and how Mr. Potter reacted, and soliciting their advice as to how to behave around Mr. Potter in future. You will show me the letter, and you will show me their response.”

Draco turned slightly green; Severus smiled at him again. He looked around at the other children. “You are dismissed.”

*

Polyjuice required the ability not to lose one’s place in complex instructions, and the patience to let it mature. But none of the individual steps was terribly difficult. Severus was not at all surprised that Miss Granger seemed to have found it within her capacities; he hadn’t been wrong about her rigor in that regard, at least.

Albus had ordered him not to confiscate it, and to let the children try what they would.

But that didn’t mean he had to leave his Slytherins unguarded against the Trio’s next attack.

Fortunately, the head boy was staying for the holidays, and he was both levelheaded and politically astute. Severus picked his words carefully. “Mr. Miller, while the staff all knows that I’ve had the Slytherins students on a buddy system since the attack on Mr. Filch’s cat, the other houses are unaware that the Slytherins can prove alibis for the subsequent attacks.”

(Damn Minerva and Filius for pigheaded fools for refusing to do the same, insisting it would infringe unduly on their students’ privacy! Did that matter, if it might either catch or deter the culprit? And damn Dumbledore for his insistence on not revealing that the Hufflepuff and Slytherin students could be cleared by that criterion, claiming that he didn’t want the pressure of suspicion surrounding Potter to intensify.)

Robin Miller’s eyes glinted up at Severus, but his dark face stayed fixed in an expression of courteous attention. He waited for his housemaster to continue.

“Over the holidays, with the dormitories so nearly empty and hence unguarded, it would not surprise me if there were an attempt made by students zealous to determine the identity of the Heir of Slytherin, to infiltrate the Slytherin dormitories in their quest for, ah, the truth. Disillusioned, perhaps, or maybe making use of Polyjuice.”

Robin blinked. “Polyjuice, sir? I couldn’t make it myself—couldn’t get hold of the ingredients. Well, not readily.”

He cast Severus an innocent smile, and then looked down.

Severus had no doubt that Robin was furiously cataloging the various ways a student might have acquired boomslang skin and bicorn horn. Family connections, a possible Hogsmeade black market, Knockturn before term had started (legal if expensive for the current seventh-years, and not entirely impossible for others), or, say, by theft from the legitimate stores within the castle….

And that the boy was tallying the possible methods against the short roster of students who’d signed up to remain at school, and who might be expected to run riot in their suspicion of Slytherins.

“Polyjuice is merely one of the possibilities the house should be on guard against,” Severus said blandly. “One of several.”

The young man stiffened slightly, frowning as something bumped his thought processes to a halt. Then his face went utterly blank. After a moment he looked up again into Snape’s eyes.

“Of course, professor,” he said, out-blanding Severus. “No one in the house would be pleased if some oiks, say from Gryffindor, made themselves at home in our common room for an hour. Or maybe raised a ruckus trying to steal things. I’ll make sure to remind everyone to be on guard over the holidays, and I’ll be sure to go over all the possible methods of infiltration. Not just Polyjuice. And make sure everyone keeps up the buddy system at all times.”

He glanced over at Rosier, waiting quietly for him down the hall just out of earshot.

“That would be wise,” Severus said gravely.

*

On Boxing Day, Miller intercepted Severus when he strode from the Great Hall after breakfast.

“Sir, I know you like to stay informed about your Slytherins’ health. I’m afraid two of the second-years, Crabbe and Goyle, rather overdid it yesterday. They stayed late in Hall for extra dessert, which apparently disagreed with them. When they hadn’t come down after half an hour, Malfoy and Bletchley and I finally went to look. Found ‘em wandering the dungeons, apparently disoriented, and then after just a little while in the common room the two turned all sorts of queer colors and ran off, saying they were going for medicine for their stomachs.”

He grinned up at Severus. “Fair enough—they probably needed it by then. But then when we went to look for them again, Crabbe and Goyle had locked themselves into the broom closet in the main hall, with their shoes outside the door. They were fine by then, no problems, no more indigestion or disorientation. Except for not remembering any of what they’d just done.”

The young man bounced a little on his heels, clearly big with further news.

“What they’d just done?” Severus arched a brow in inquiry. “It sounds like they did nothing of note, save overindulge. A normal enough activity, with that pair.”

“Well. While they were in the common room, Malfoy did his best to keep them entertained. He told them all about where his dad hides their family’s super secret illegal Dark Arts stuff, and all about how he wants to help Slytherin’s Heir kill Mudbloods.”

Robin’s very white and perfect teeth were briefly bared. Then he smiled again. “Oh, and Malfoy gave them that newspaper clipping his dad had sent him—you know, the one about the inquiry on that Weasley fellow. They seemed to find it interesting reading.” “Reading?” Severus exclaimed involuntarily.

The head boy’s eyes danced. They shared a brief reflective silence.

Severus broke it with the casual comment, “Well, those two are not the only casualties of yesterday evening. That second-year Muggleborn girl, Granger—you know, the one who goes around all the time with Potter and the youngest Weasley boy?”

“The one who beat my score on Flitwick’s first-year final?” Robin, unlike Draco, didn’t seem annoyed about having been beaten.

“That’s the one. It seems that she had some sort of mishap that left her partially transformed into a cat.” Severus paused and added. “A black cat. Pure black. No bib or mittens or, ah, tail-tip. Like Miss Bulstrode’s pet; you must have seen it in the common room.”

“Really!” Robin exclaimed brightly. “How could something like that have happened? Did someone hex her?”

“She won’t say what happened, so Madam Pomfrey infers that she’d been playing with some spell that she should not have. The girl, it seems, had managed to wangle a pass to the Restricted Section of the Library from my respected colleague Professor Lockhart. The transformation is remarkably persistent, so we suspect the Dark Arts may be involved.”

“Or perhaps a Dark potion,” the head boy suggested helpfully.

“Madam Pomfrey asked for my professional opinion, but I told her I could not recommend any particular course of treatment without knowing which spell—or, as you say, potion—the girl had botched. And Miss Granger refuses to say. So Madam Pomfrey will simply have to essay such restoratives as have proved efficacious in like cases. Without a firm diagnosis, the cure may take weeks.”

“Pity about that,” Robin said. “I heard that kid’s sharp. Sharp enough to cut herself. Well, maybe it’ll teach her something.”

Their eyes met.

*

After the midnight feast, the restorations, the celebrations, Severus waited. Not hopefully, but patiently.

Potter and his friends accepted their second scoop of the house cup with evident self-satisfaction.

Severus waited to see if anything else would follow, after the implications had sunk in.

If Granger and Potter had considered themselves morally justified in assaulting ten Slytherins, in the belief that one Slytherin was conspiring to commit worse crimes, then now that they’d learned that their belief had been misplaced—surely, the thing for an mistaken, but honorable, enemy to do, would be to apologize for that misguided attack, which had caused such pain and humiliation to their, as it transpired, entirely innocent victims?

“Draco, I’m sorry that I thought you were behind the attacks. You can be a bigoted arse, but you never, ever, tried to kill anyone, and I’m sorry I suspected you of something so awful. Pansy, Millie, Daphne, I’m sorry I put you through that horrible transformation. I thought that some Slytherin was to blame, and that the only way to find out was to brew Polyjuice, but I was wrong, and anyway I shouldn’t have hurt and humiliated you, and all of the others, just to try to expose the one who was really at fault. I’d be furious if you attacked all the Gryffindors just to get one of us….”

Once, Severus had spent some time hoping for a change of heart to be expressed by a Gryffindor.

He’d never heard it then, either.

The girl didn’t seem—none of the dream team seemed—to suffer from any touch of remorse.

They were triumphant. Easy. Not concerned in the slightest about having injured and humiliated other children, and provably to no good end whatsoever.

Not even her, whom he’d wanted to believe might have clung to some standards of decency.

Severus even went to watch the thestrals draw the students off to Hogsmeade Station, lest there be a last-minute confession and apology.

He didn’t expect it, no. And he wasn’t disappointed.

Severus stared down the empty, sunlit drive and thought savagely, “Hath not a Slytherin eyes? Hath not a Slytherin hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?”

Apparently not, in the girl’s—in the Gryffindors’—estimation.

*****

Someone was forcing Potter to participate in a dangerous tournament where Severus could not intervene directly to protect the boy. The Auror who’d assisted at Severus’s interrogation was not only running free in the castle, but was also, apparently, higher in the headmaster’s confidence than he was, though the headmaster steadfastly denied this.

And the Mark was darkening daily. When it didn’t do worse.

Meanwhile, Severus faced the daily joy of trying to drum a little basic knowledge about potions—today, about antidotes—into determinedly thick heads.

As if in response to his dour thoughts, Severus’s arm twanged again. He swallowed involuntarily, sick with pain and apprehension.

A voice jeered in his memory, You can’t wait to join You-Know-Who, can you?

There was no one here to see his weakness. Severus slumped against the dungeon wall and shut his eyes, just for an instant, cradling his arm and remembering that voice.

None of my friends can understand why I even talk to you.

And after that she never had.

He stiffened, the agony shooting up his arm abruptly almost inconsequential. My friends, she had said.

Not, my other friends.

It had all already been decided, hadn’t it? Before he’d fucked up so badly.

She had learned to be unmoved.

*

Severus pushed himself off the wall.

Within a few feet, his steps were steady.

Severus heard a burst of laughter coming from around the final corner, then a confusion of voices, several rising in a way that made him lengthen his stride. There was a hush, and then two treble cries, one barely behind the other: “Furnunculus!” “Densaugeo!” The words were followed by a sharp cry of pain, and then by a higher-pitched, softer whimper.

Draco had finally found an occasion to get off his spell, then. He’d worked so hard to learn it, too, spending much of last year using that as his practice spell while he was grimly exercising his crippled arm.

Well, by the sounds of things he’d finally recovered his full strength.

Severus doubted if Draco understood exactly why he’d chosen that particular hex to master, from amongst all the body-engorgement spells that the Malfoy library could offer. But tooth enamel was as nerveless as it was tough, and the excessive growth of teeth was entirely reversible. Only his victim’s amour-propre could be damaged, but that, spectacularly.

Draco had not yet admitted to himself his lack of appetite for physical pain, nor his queasiness when faced with anyone’s bodily harm, not just his own. But to Severus and the older Malfoys, the boy had long been transparent. Lucius was desperately trying (especially now) to train Draco to regard his distaste as a weakness. As in some contexts, perhaps very soon now to be encountered, it would be…. Severus pressed his aching arm against his side.

He was in the middle of the milling students before any of them noticed him.

He said, “And what is all this noise about?”

There was an immediate answering clamor; Severus pointed at Draco and said, “Explain.”

The other Slytherins obediently fell silent, and Draco began, “Potter attacked me, sir—”

Potter interrupted, shouting, “We attacked each other at the same time!”

“—and he hit Greg—look—”

Greg was trying manfully not to cry from the pain of the boils covering his face. Severus tactfully ignored the traces of moisture and said calmly, “Hospital wing, Mr. Goyle.”

“Malfoy got Hermione!” Weasley shouted. “Look!”

Weasley pulled the girl forward and forced down her hands, though it was clear that she was trying to use them to cover her teeth from view.

Severus stared at cosmic justice. Draco had aimed for Potter, whom he’d believed responsible for his maiming in second year. But he’d hit, by chance or fate, the real culprit.

Granger was sniveling in mortification.

The girl who had, two years earlier, masterminded the mass mutilation of the Slytherins. For a very, very good reason, which she’d subsequently discovered to have been dead wrong. Which discovery had never led her to apologize to her victims.

She had the absolute face now to stare at Severus with tear-drenched eyes that begged for sympathy, and her friends to demand punishment—punishment! —on her behalf.

Yes indeed, she should have punishment. Severus’s vision was narrowing again, and his wand fell eagerly into his hand.

But he couldn’t raise it. Not against a child. Not even against a pitiless, stuck-up, little Gryffindor Muggle cow.

Who had never apologized.

Never even when it had been proven that she had been wrong.

But wrongs done to a Slytherin didn’t count. Not to her.

You pricked us. Did we not bleed?

He couldn’t say that. He wasn’t supposed to know that she had.

And likely she hadn’t even the wit to catch his meaning.

Severus stared into those self-righteous brown eyes, now drowning in tears of self-pity. He sucked in a breath through his own uneven teeth and found words for her.

“I see no difference.”

Granger turned and fled after Goyle.

Who had, to be fair, not been permanently blinded by her actions.

For a moment Severus struggled blindly with his rage, wanting to call her back. To make her face her victims’ justified, indeed sparing, retribution.

To make her face him, her eyes filled with fury and humiliation.

Let us hypothesize that Dumbledore had a quadruple agent among the Death Eaters. This spy’s life—more importantly, his mission—depended on his ability to persuade the Death Eaters (and the Dark Lord, should he return) that he was on their side, really. Whatever Dumbledore thought, whatever lip service the spy might pay to Dumbledore’s ideals, at heart the spy shared the Death Eaters' values and tastes. Or so they must be made to think.

In Harry’s class, we know of at least four people who might report on Professor Snape’s behavior to former (and possible future) Death Eater parents: Draco, Vince, Greg, and Theo. Then there’s Harry himself, who will (inadvertently) eventually report directly to Voldemort. Snape presumably didn’t know of the mental channel between Voldemort and Harry until OotP, but he always knew perfectly well that the Dark Lord was a Legilimens. (A Legilimens, moreover, whose schemes to kill Harry and steal the philosopher’s stone were thwarted by Snape that first year.) Should Voldemort return again and capture Harry, he would be entirely capable of sifting Harry’s memories for information about Professor Snape’s loyalty.

As Draco showed us in HBP, someone who has either a conscience or squeamishness about physical violence really is not cut out to be a Death Eater. He (almost always he) might join, but he won’t be very happy about having to remain. To be a satisfied and successful Death Eater, one must be either indifferent to, or actively enjoy, inflicting pain and death on others.

So giving people the impression that you’re the sort who kills small animals for kicks (or in cold blood to make a point), is decidedly a good thing to do if you’re trying to persuade people you might credibly be a loyal Death Eater who’d be happy to see the Dark Lord return.

Which brings me back to the “poisoning Trevor” incident in Potions class in PoA. Like Professor Flitwick in PS/SS, the professor responded to Neville bringing his pet to class by using the pet in a classroom demonstration. What made Snape’s use of Trevor particularly cruel, of course, was Neville’s fear that his mis-made potion might hurt Trevor.

Let’s look closely at the sequence of events:

“Orange, Longbottom,” said Snape, ladling some up and allowing it to splash back into the cauldron, so that everyone could see. “Orange. Tell me, boy, does anything penetrate that thick skull of yours? Didn’t you hear me say, quite clearly, that only one rat spleen was needed? Didn’t I state plainly that a dash of leech juice would suffice? What do I have to do to make you understand, Longbottom?”

Neville was pink and trembling. He looked as though he was on the verge of tears.

“Please sir,” said Hermione, “please, I could help Neville put it right—”

“I don’t remember asking you to show off, Miss Granger,” said Snape coldly, and Hermione went as pink as Neville. “Longbottom, at the end of this lesson we will feed a few drops of this potion to your toad and see what happens. Perhaps that will encourage you to do it properly.”

He moved away, leaving Neville breathless with fear.

“Help me!” he moaned to Hermione.

Seamus, Harry, and Draco then talk about Sirius until …

Snape called, “You should have finished adding your ingredients by now; this potion needs to stew before it can be drunk, so clear away while it simmers and then we’ll test Longbottom’s….”

Crabbe and Goyle laughed openly, watching Neville sweat as he stirred his potion feverishly. Hermione was muttering instructions to him out of the corner of her mouth, so that Snape wouldn’t see. Harry and Ron packed away their unused ingredients….

The end of the lesson in sight, Snape strode over to Neville, who was cowering by his cauldron.

“Everyone gather ‘round,” said Snape, his black eyes glittering, “and watch what happens to Longbottom’s toad. If he has managed to produce a Shrinking Solution, it will shrink to a tadpole. If, as I don’t doubt, he has done it wrong, his toad is likely to be poisoned.”

The Gryffindors watched fearfully. The Slytherins looked excited. Snape picked up Trevor the toad in his left hand and dipped a small spoon into Neville’s potion, which was now green. He trickled a few drops down Trevor’s throat.

There was a moment of hushed silence, in which Trevor gulped; then there was a small pop, and Trevor the tadpole was wriggling in Snape’s palm.

The Gryffindors burst into applause. Snape, looking sour, pulled a small bottle from the pocket of his robe, poured a few drops on top of Trevor, and he reappeared suddenly, fully grown.

“Five points from Gryffindor,” said Snape, which wiped the smile from every face. “I told you not to help him, Miss Granger. Class dismissed.”

First point: When Snape started berating Neville, he knew exactly what was wrong with Neville’s potion. He knew, therefore, that the potion was salvageable. Then Hermione volunteered to help Neville put it right, and Snape scolded her for showing off. But he had taught Hermione for two years (and he probably knew exactly how she ended up with that fur and tail last year). If she said she could help Neville put it right (which was not that hard, after all, especially as Snape had just diagnosed—aloud—exactly what the boy had done wrong), she almost certainly could.

And it was AT THAT POINT—not before—that Snape threatened to feed Neville’s potion to Trevor. Oh, and not immediately—at the end of the lesson. And then Snape moved away. And then he STAYED away, carefully on the other side of the room; we know that because Harry was free to chatter with his neighbors.

Could anyone knowing Hermione imagine for a moment that she wouldn’t help Neville correct his potion, given such an opportunity?

Then too, it was only at the end of the lesson—after Snape had already seen that the potion was acceptable—that Snape made a point of suggesting that Trevor was “likely to be poisoned” if Neville had done it wrong. When he made the original threat to test it on Trevor, Snape didn’t use the loaded word “poison” (which suggests, though it does not absolutely insist, that the effect might be fatal). Had he used that term initially, its effect would have been to rattle Neville even further. Instead, Snape used the term only at the end of class, to implant in the students’ minds the idea that killing Trevor was his intent in administering the (harmless) potion.

If Snape had truly wanted to poison Trevor (assuming Neville’s botched potion to have been poisonous), he could have fed it to the toad at once. If he’d wanted to poison Trevor but also to savor Neville’s terrified anticipation, he could have made the same threat as he did, but moved Hermione to the other side of the room—Snape did move people, split up partners, on other occasions. Or he could simply have hovered over them (making the occasional withering comment about Neville’s blundering attempts to correct the potion), giving Hermione no opportunity to tell Neville what to do.

And one final point: if Snape had wanted to kill Trevor without repercussions to himself (“A regrettable oversight, Headmaster”) he could have done so with the corrected potion. All he had to do was “forget” to have the antidote handy. How long does a tadpole survive out of water? Would Neville even realize at once that his pet was suffocating, or, panicking, remember in time that there’s a water source in the room? Is the “icy jet” spouting from the gargoyle’s mouth even suitable for tadpoles? So Snape could—with no blame at all attaching to himself—have ensured that Neville’s pet suffered greatly or maybe died.

Instead, Snape had the antidote at hand and restored the toad instantly.

Indeed, killing the tadpole by withholding the antidote would have allowed Snape to show a nicely double face to his various target audiences. To the other teachers he could have claimed irritably, “Longbottom’s botched potion was harmless enough; I was just trying to frighten the boy into leaving his pet in the dorm as he should. And I never thought the potion would work, so I didn’t trouble to have the antidote handy. I never even considered the implications of the thing’s turning into a tadpole.” Whereas to Lucius he could have smirked, “I was careful not to have the antidote nearby, just in case the potion worked. But of course I told Dumbledore I simply overlooked the matter. The best part was, I even warned the stupid boy exactly what would happen, that his toad would become a tadpole.”

No, Snape had never any intention or expectation of harming Trevor. What he did was to seize an opportunity to put on a show: “I’m a sadistic b— who enjoys killing animals in cold blood!” And he established this firmly in his audience’s minds without having to harm a wart on Trevor’s little head.

Of course, the point could equally—in fact, better—have been made by actually killing an animal. Snape could easily, as I have pointed out, have seized the chance to kill Trevor. But he also could readily have engineered another type of show, and not waited on chance at all. We know that many potions use animal parts as ingredients; the potions master could have asserted that some delicate potion (wolfsbane?) required truly fresh ingredients, and put on a display of enjoying the ‘necessary’ preparations. Perhaps for one of Harry’s detentions, and making sure the word got back to the Slytherins.

Now, there is in fact one obvious drawback to using idle threats rather than actions to establish one’s reputation for callous cruelty—someone might notice that one doesn’t follow through. Bellatrix, remember, did see through Snape’s theatrics—though she attributed his “usual empty words, the usual slithering out of action” to self-preserving cowardice rather than to any distaste for brutality.

Summary:

Snape is seen as cruel for his treatment of Neville's toad, Trevor. Is this "cruelty" supported by the text?

Notes:

This is part one of an essay I posted on Snapedom in 2010. Since Snapedom is mostly inactive, I'm reposting it for a wider audience.

PETA has no branches in the Potterverse

Chapter Text

We had a debate going on the PoA spork about the “poisoning Trevor” Potions lesson. It sparked some thoughts: first on cruelty to animals in the Potterverse; secondly, on how JKR chose to highlight some incidents and downplay others (part I). And then I thought about how Snape used this particular incident to establish a reputation for cruelty, and why he might have wanted to do so… (part II) . So I thought I’d bring the debate about the “poisoning Trevor” potions class over here, and let everyone join in.

Part I: PETA has no Branch in the Potterverse

When I was eleven (not thirteen), a classmate brought a garter snake to school. Had he been caught, the snake would have been confiscated and the boy punished. But if a teacher had threatened to kill the snake in front of us, we would not have believed the threat. Even if we believed that the teacher hated snakes, or hated the boy, or was evil enough to relish killing animals, we wouldn’t have believed s/he would follow through. Because in my town any teacher who openly killed a child’s pet would have been sacked, and probably the principal sacked for hiring that teacher in the first place, and maybe a new school board voted in for having hired the principal. Killing pets in front of children was simply not acceptable behavior. In my community.

So while it’s certainly to Snape’s discredit that Neville (and apparently the other children) thought him capable of wanting to poison a pet—it’s equally to the WW’s discredit. Because to take the threat seriously, the children had also to believe that the professor expected he could actually carry it out with impunity. Neville, Ron, and some of the Slytherins are, after all, Purebloods from old families—they have, by age thirteen, at least some idea of what behavior is condoned in their society and what is not. Which means that abusing, even killing, pets—in front of children—was conduct they thought their seniors would consider acceptable in a teacher.

The only other time we saw a Hogwarts student bring a pet to class (also Neville/Trevor, as it happens), the professor used the pet in a classroom demonstration. So that may actually be S.O.P. at Hogwarts—scare the kids into leaving their pets in the dorms by using any animal brought to class as a test subject.

Now, the scene in which Snape used Trevor as a test subject was written with great detail; Neville’s fear for his pet was made very real to us. So of course, Snape looked cruel (as he was) for subjecting Neville to such fear, even though he never actually harmed the toad. In contrast, the class where Flitwick used Trevor as a test subject was just casually mentioned after the event. So we weren’t shown anything that could trigger a “how mean!” reaction about nice little Professor Flitwick.

But when you think about it—what Flitwick actually did was to “zoom” Trevor about the room. Now, my family had pets of many species—no toads, but many other types, from turtles to Labradors. Every animal I’ve ever owned would have been terrified at being levitated. You know, like those Muggles levitated by Malfoy’s crew at the QWC were? So it’s arguable that Flitwick’s use of Trevor as a test subject would have caused the toad distress, as Snape’s did not.

Moreover, Neville is the boy whose family tested him for magic by dropping him—off piers, out of windows…. And it’s canon that Neville is afraid of flying (brooms in book 1, thestrals in book 5)—he’s described variously as “white with fear” and “shaking.” So though Harry (who loves flying) might have found the sight of a toad being “zoomed” helplessly about the room cool, it is hard to imagine that Neville wouldn’t have been upset by it. But as it all happened off camera, JKR’s readers were not affected by seeing Neville terrified for Trevor.

Similarly, we are told (in Ron’s notes in Fantastic Beasts) that Fred killed Ron’s pet Puffskein by “using it for Bludger practice.” Stop and think about that. A boy took a club and beat a ball of fluff, his baby brother’s pet, to death. If we had seen that—if JKR had made us read that scene, or one of Ron coming across the bloodied body of his pet—would we so easily have bought the image of Fred as a lovable prankster?

Indeed, in CoS when the twins experimented with stuffing fireworks down a salamander’s gullet, JKR played the scene for laughs. I reread carefully; we aren’t actually told whether the unfortunate beast survived. We are told that sparks showered from its mouth, that the terrified beast escaped into the fire, and that there were “accompanying explosions.” And no one but Percy reacted negatively to the salamander’s possible danger, fear, or pain, and we readers are expected to react that, oh, that was just Percy being an officious little rule-upholder again. We would certainly have felt differently about the incident if the salamander, rather than being stolen from the teacher, belonged to a firstie who was screaming in terror for her pet while the twins laughed.

The point is this: Snape is set up to be condemned by readers for threatening to commit an atrocity against an animal—which he did not in fact commit. JKR carefully builds up Neville’s fear to make it clear to readers that Snape is cruel. Yet when Fred & George commit actual atrocities against animals, when Flitwick did something that reasonably ought to have terrified both Trevor and Neville, the author takes care to have the crime committed out of sight, or presented as humorous, lest our sympathy for those characters be tarnished.

Yet it’s only because, in JKR’s world, people like the twins get away with assaulting animals that Snape’s threat could be credible.

And along those lines, does anyone remember what the First Task of the Triwizard Tournament was?

Oh, right, dragons. Harry decoyed his away from her egg by flying, and Fleur tied to put hers to sleep. But the noble Cedric Transfigured a rock into a dog for the dragon to munch on instead. Do Transfigured dogs feel pain like real ones? That’s a philosophical question JKR doesn’t address. However, we can infer that Cedric must have created the dog to REACT like a real one if he expected it to keep the dragon’s attention—that is, it must have fled, and acted terrified, and yelped in agony, bleeding or burning, if the dragon caught it. And the only criticism made of Cedric is that his dog wasn’t wholly effective as a distraction.

Similarly, Victor used the spell which Sirius had tried to recommend to Harry, the Conjunctivitis Charm—which hurt the (real) dragon so badly that she trampled her own eggs thrashing around in pain. Victor got points taken off for damaging the eggs (not for causing the animal distress), but he still tied with Harry for first place.

But again, JKR chose to make these scenes happen off-screen—we might have reacted differently if she’d made us actually watch the Chinese Fireball writhing on the ground in agony (and reflected that Sirius had wanted Harry to do that), or if we’d seen a singed Labrador panting in terror as it darted back and forth in the enclosure, yelping and trying to dodge a dragon’s flames and claws.

More thoughts inspired by C....

Twinkles wasn’t just indulging and flattering Harry to make the boy like him back, though manipulation was a part of his calculations.  Yes, it served Twinkles well that the Boy-Who-Was-to-Die should be reckless, impulsive, driven by his emotions, unreflective, blindly trusting in his mentor while bristling with hostility at any other authority figure or attempt to assert authority.

But the uncalculated part was, in indulging Harry Albus  was indulging his own guilty conscience.  He knew he’d treated Harry abominably—in consigning him to the Dursleys, in making him the WW’s (unmerited) celebrity, and most of all in his secret scheme to have the boy suicide as soon as he came of age.  And Twinkles’ notion of compensating for all that was to give the child extra sweeties and let him stay up past bedtime.  Every day for six years.

He explained exactly how he thinks one best expresses “caring about someone” at the end of OotP:

“I cared about you too much,”  said Dumbledore simply.  “I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed.  In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects fools who love to act.”

“Is there a defense?  I defy anyone who has watched you as I have…  not to want to save you more pain than you had already suffered.  What did I care if numbers of nameless and faceless people and creatures were slaughtered in the vague future, if in the here and now you were alive, and well, and happy?...  My only defense is this:  I have watched you struggling under more burdens than any student who has ever passed through this school, and I could not bring myself to add another—the greatest one of all.”

…. “You may, perhaps, have wondered why I never chose you as a prefect?  I must confess… that I rather thought… you had enough responsibility to be going on with.”  [Cries.]

So there you have it.  To Albus, love equals lying.  And allowing the loved one to evade responsibility and reality.  If you tell someone the truth or expect them to act responsibly, you’re showing that you don’t care for them.

Interestingly, this is exactly the same way the Dursleys show they care about Dudders.  No wonder Harry accepted Twinkles as his mentor rather than Snape!

But what did Twinkles say about the Dursleys’ treatment of their son?  Oh, yes, that they had inflicted “appalling damage” upon the “unfortunate boy.”

See, if you know someone has to die (and, er, who doesn’t, in the end?), there’s two ways of looking at the issue (assuming that you assign the matter high importance): make sure the doomed person is indulged as much as possible, to make up to them for the impending death.

Or tell them, “This night shalt thy soul be required of thee.”  Prepare! 

If Christian, prepare to meet thy maker; but if not, still prepare.  Set your affairs in order, comfort those you will leave behind, make amends to those you’ve wronged, make a final difference if you can.  You’ll leave an impression behind you in the world, so take your last opportunity to make it a good one.

The first is a perfectly reasonable reaction to a doomed fifteen-month-old:  oh, the poor widdle thing!  Register with the “Make a Wish” foundation!  A trip to Disney World, riding a pony, enough ice-cream to choke a cow?  What do you want, sweetie?  Bring it on!  Have a racing broom and a House Cup—have two!

And if rampant overindulgence isn’t actually very good for a child’s long-term moral development or physical well-being or social adjustment, if it won’t make the child grow up mens sana in corpore sano or able to make friends or good at facing life’s challenges, well, what does that matter?  It’s not like the kid has a long-term.

And that seems to be Albus’s attitude to Harry.

But I’d be insulted if offering me infinite ice cream was someone’s reaction to MY diagnosis with pancreatic cancer or Dark-Lord-itis or whatever.

Another possible response is, this teen has only a limited time left to grow up into a decent human being.  And he has a LONG way to go; right now he’s acting like a spoiled and malicious toddler—better get cracking!

Whether one thinks becoming a decent adult matters because God only lets the decent ones into Heaven.

Or because one thinks Lily would want her son to be someone she could respect and like, not just (presumably) love.

Or because, perhaps, one fears that the spoiled toddler might possibly, before his eventual death, endure the horrific experience of discovering that his heedless and selfish actions have destroyed people that he actually loves.  Like, y’know, “one” did.

Or even just because one thinks it’s a better thing to be a responsible adult than a whiny brat, and one wouldn’t wish, oneself, to die as less, and one wouldn’t see someone one cares for live and die as less if one could prevent it.

*

But Albus didn’t see it that way.  He only cared that the boy he abused should have some transient pleasure to make up for the abuse.

Moreover, as long as the boy ultimately did what Dumbledore demanded of him, that he should suicide upon request, Albus didn’t see that it should matter why the boy did it.  That’s why Albus deliberately fanned the flame of vengeance (while lauding Harry’s “purity” and “capacity for love”) in HBP, and that’s why Twinkles gave Harry the Suicide Stone.

As long as the boy eventually gave himself to Tom, what did it matter why?

In fact, Dumbledore generously gave the boy the traditional three choices.  Or rather, he gave the boy a choice among three reasons to fulfill the destiny Albus had programmed him for.  Harry could die in blind obedience to his master’s word, Dumbledore’s man through and through.  He could kill himself in order to destroy his hated enemy, out of a furious lust for vengeance.  Proud to die, so long as he died facing his enemy.  Or, if he resisted, he could be driven to suicide by the compulsion of the noxious shades evoked by that Stone.

It’s all good, it’s all the same to Albus.

Only it wasn’t all the same to Severus, when he eventually worked things out.

Severus had already tried lust for vengeance, pride, compulsion, and blind obedience, and he knew where they all led.  To that dark and savage wood that Dante described.  Where one looks around, belatedly, to find oneself utterly lost.  In so terrible a place that death itself could hardly be more bitter.  That passing though the very gates of Hell, traversing its every circle, is manifestly a better choice than standing still.

That’s why Severus gave Harry the memories he did.  It was his final moral lesson to the boy:  the record of his own journey.  He didn’t just want to be known to the boy—he wanted to teach by his own example.

To offer the boy a fourth choice, after Albus’s three.

Not a different choice of what to do; Severus didn’t see any alternative to the boy’s death.  But he could offer Harry a different choice about why to do it, a different reason.

His own.

And unlike his earlier lessons which Harry shrugged off, this one Harry apparently absorbed (at least until Albus got hold of him again).   

Reread the chapter that came after “The Prince’s Tale.”  Harry didn’t walk to that clearing gloating over how he was tricking Tom into killing his own soul-fragment.  In fact, he didn’t once think about vengeance on that walk.  (Nor did he try at all to emulate Sirius’s cockiness in the face of death.) He didn’t require the suicide cheerleader-squad to compel him.  And, once past the first shock and pain of learning of his lifelong betrayal (less than one page of the fourteen), Harry stopped obsessing about whether Dumbledore really loved him or congratulating himself on his perfect obedience to God’s Will

 Dumbledore’s clever plans.

No, Harry walked out of Hogwarts and into the forest feeling his fear fully, and thinking about his friends.

“… he could not see any of the people he loved, no Hermione, Ron, Ginny, or any of the other Weasleys, no Luna.  He felt he would have given all the time remaining to him for just one last look at them….”

Until he met the Dementors, and used the Stone Albus had so thoughtfully provided for him, after which “The dead who walked beside him through the forest were much more real to him now that the living back at the castle:  Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and all the others were the ones who felt like ghosts…” 

But once he’d dropped the Stone and escaped its influence, Harry returned to his own motivations; Hagrid’s grief was real to him, and Harry’s last thought was of Ginny.

Now, Harry imagined that it was Dumbledore who had called him to sacrifice himself to save those he loved.  Indeed, he probably could not have accepted the choice to do so if he’d perceived it to be Snape’s last gift and lesson.

Harry told himself, “Dumbledore knew, as Voldemort knew, that Harry would not let anyone else die for him now that he had discovered it was in his power to stop it.”

Except.  Dumbledore manifestly did not know, or believe, or act upon, any such thing. Instead, in HBP (“Horcruxes”) after multiple one-on-one “lessons” with the boy, after close observation of Harry’s reactions and actions all through sixth year, Albus was convinced that the best way to get Harry’s commitment (under false pretenses) to kill-Voldemort-or-

 die was by appealing to Harry’s “furious desire for revenge” for Tom’s murder of Harry’s father.

Hmm—never noticed before that Albus specified the murder of Harry’s father as what must have imparted that “furious desire” in Harry.  Not mother, not both parents.  Twinkles was deliberately, then, invoking James the arrogantly—suicidally—brave , while excluding from his conversation Lily, said (by him) to have been the source of ultimate love and effective protective sacrifice rather than furious (and pointless) courage.

Only, see, Albus was almost certainly correct.  Then.

This was the great Legilimens, after all, who had looked into Severus’s eyes and seen exactly what to offer him to gain an ultimate commitment.  Why should we expect him to have gotten it all wrong with Harry?

That was the right tack to take with the Harry of Book 6 (as it had never been with Severus).

It had absolutely the desired effect.  We witnessed Harry’s reaction to Dumble’s manipulation, and it was inspiring:

He thought of his mother, his father, and Sirius.  He thought of Cedric Diggory.  He thought of all the terrible deeds he knew Lord Voldemort had done.  A flame seemed to leap inside him, searing his throat. 

“I’d want him finished,”  Harry said quietly.  “And I’d want to do it.”

“Of course you would!”  cried Dumbledore.  “…. He will continue to hunt you… which makes it certain, really, that—”

“That one of us is going to end up killing the other,”  said Harry.  “Yes.”

But he understood at last what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him.   It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high.  Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two, but Dumbledore knew—and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents—that there was all the difference in the world.

So. Dumbledore was successful.  Harry was utterly willing to die to try to “finish” Tom, and was proud of himself for being so.  Dumbledore’s pep talk left Harry self-inflated with warrior pride and with a “searing” desire to “finish” Voldemort himself. 

And Harry’s feelings were further validated by his belief that his parents had felt just the same.

Vengeful Harry.  Prideful Harry.  Hateful Harry.  And convinced that his hatred was love.

Then as his backup plan Twinkles bequeathed Harry the Suicide Stone, which would if used separate him emotionally from the living people he loved!

And then Albus’s final living encounter with Harry was an outing designed as a test of Harry’s obedience.

But none of that, in the end, is what ultimately moved Harry to walk into the forest that night.

Because Severus intervened, giving Harry one final lesson.

For Severus, too,“had taken trouble to get to know” Harry.

Severus was, one might say, deeply acquainted with many of the boy’s flaws.  Intimately, even.

The boy was reckless, prickly, obstinate.  Fatally hot-tempered; incapable of holding his tongue when provoked, cost what it may.  Cherishing revenge fantasies against his enemies, spying on them, ultimately using Dark Magic against them. Incapable of acknowledging where the path he was on would likely lead him.  Responsible for the death of someone he loved by accident, out of sheer stubborn refusal to heed the (obvious!) consequences of his actions.  

Who utterly refused to reflect.  Who allowed himself to be—hell, who insisted on being!—blinded by his own fury and hatred and pride.

Yet who was also deeply motivated by a “saving-people thing.”  Who, however great his capacity for hatred, was also capable of devotion.  Of loyalty and love.

So Snape gave Harry, in his memories, one last gift beyond the information that Albus had required  Severus to impart.

Not an order to be blindly obeyed.  The very last memory Snape gave to Harry showed Severus disagreeing with Albus over his refusal to share information, and made it absolutely clear that, while Severus was still adhering in general to Albus’s plans, by then he was following his own judgment.  In fact, Severus was now withholding information from Albus when he saw fit to do so.

Not a further incitement to vengeance.  Though had Snape imagined that to be helpful to Harry, no doubt he’d dozens of memories of the Dark Lord in storage that could have proved, ah, provocative.

And not a Stone instead of bread.

No.  Snape’s final gift to Harry, his final lesson, was the knowledge of himself.  His own journey through life.  Tracing the path that a flawed, impulsive, passionate boy—a nasty boy, even—had taken.  Where he’d gone wrong, what he had destroyed in doing so, where he’d finally gone right.

And that he’d thereafter held to that path.

Despite its great cost.  Despite his own continued flaws and missteps.

Despite even his guide’s betrayal.

Follow the Prince, would you, boy?  Then follow where he went right, not just where he went wrong.

What Severus gave Harry, ultimately, was a model. One that the boy could recognize himself in, enough to believe that he could follow if he would.  No inflated standards, no false appeals to fearlessness or to supposed flawless purity.  Or to glory; acknowledgement by others didn’t matter.  What mattered, was what was.

“Lately, only those whom I could not save….  Expecto patronum!”

A modest enough claim.  I love, and I act from love.   The lesser love, and the greater.

Always.

The fourth choice, the one that Albus never offered Harry.  To sacrifice himself in full knowledge, and for the right reasons.

“Out of love, and because it needs doing.”  (Emma Bull, Bone Dance)

The first was written largely in response to smallpotato’s response to my fiction “Liberacorpus”, and examines canon parallels to the actual actions we see James take.

The second re-examines James after Snilysocanon took me to task for being unduly unsympathetic.

“James the Bully: Canon Parallels”

We are privileged actually to view James in action three times. Chronologically in James’s life, they are Severus’s meeting him on the Hogwarts Express, SWM, and his death at Riddle’s wand.

Every action we actually witness James Potter take has a parallel elsewhere in canon.

James says, “Who’d want to be in Slytherin?” Like Draco Malfoy says about Hufflepuff.

James is obsessed by Lily Evans, who rejects him. Like Severus, acto Jo a bully.

James attacks an individual while backed by a gang of three, the most sycophantic of whom is a rat-faced boy named Peter (Piers…) P. One of his cohorts holds the victim immobile while James presses the attack. Like Dudley Dursley.

James uses Levicorpus to hurt and humiliate someone. Like the Death Eaters do at the Quidditch World cup.

And James as a father, presented at his most sympathetic (from the unsympathizing perspective of Tom Riddle) … is shown indulging his son, and trying, unarmed and unsuccessfully, to protect his wife and son from someone armed with magic he can’t possibly combat. Like Vernon Dursley confronting Hagrid.

Everyone, EVERYONE, whose actions parallel James, is presented canonically as a bully.

One can even find parallels between James and Umbridge: using innocuous-seeming spells to torture (assigning lines / using Scourgify to waterboard).

Then there’s one more parallel. James is described to us as a dark-haired, charming boy, “exceptionally bright”, attractive to both his contemporaries and his teachers, regarded with distrust by his Transfiguration teacher but generally receiving such acclaim he makes Head Boy. After years of his gang’s terrorizing other students, and after successfully covering up at least one overt crime he’s involved in—releasing a Dark creature on unsuspecting potential victims. And the headmaster never suspects him.

Like Tom Riddle.

Maybe I’m misremembering. Maybe there’s some scene, somewhere, in JKR’s fiction that doesn’t compare James Potter to the worst of the worst. (Come to think of it, now we have the prequel: anyone come up with any parallels to that?)

One more piece of evidence about James: the dog that spends seven years adamantly refusing to bark in the night. I grew up in a small town of about 10,000 people (about the size of Britain’s Wizarding community per the fabulous Jodel). My father committed suicide when I was 11. For about a year after, no one mentioned him to me. But after that—my father had previously been well-respected and loved, and people told me so. My 7th grade civics teacher tried to talk me into becoming a lawyer, like my dad. The librarian talked about his involvement on the library board. A police officer told me how my dad spent his limited free time researching forthcoming legislation and letting the department know how it would affect their duties. And so forth.

Who ever talked to Harry about his parents? Even Remus wouldn’t, before Sirius. We know for sure that Minerva, Filius, Horace, Hagrid, and Poppy were on staff while Harry’s parents were at Hogwarts; it’s probable that others were as well. And none of them but Hagrid, not a one of them, ever found a good word to say to a hungry orphan boy about his parents? That beggars the imagination, unless it’s a case of “nil nisi”. (Note that Horace, in contrast, won’t shut up about Lily. Which makes one wonder a little why Minerva and Filius did.)

Hagrid managed to snag photos for Harry’s album, presumably from his parents’ old friends, but none of those friends ever once tried to contact the boy. It was the Weasleys who took him in and acted as surrogate parents. When Harry received attention, it was for being the ‘Boy-Who-Lived’—not for being James’s son (except for Sirius), not for being Lily’s son (except for Slughorn). Just how “popular” were Harry’s parents, anyway? Was it the same popularity as Dudley and his gang enjoyed, per Harry—that nobody cared to disagree with them openly, for fear of being hurt?

Minerva, not knowing Harry was listening, did talk about James to Filius, Hagrid, and Fudge. She did NOT confirm Lupin’s sycophantic statement that James and Sirius were “the best in the school in whatever they did” (OOTP) or “the cleverest students in the school” (PoA): she says that they were “exceptionally bright” (note: “bright,” not “the best,” even in her own field, Transfigurations, which was presumably the Animagis’ best subject and James’s wand’s strength, per Ollivander).

What James and Sirius WERE the best at, per Minerva McGonnagall, was at making trouble.

And Minerva was probably at school with Tom Riddle, which is quite a standard of comparison.

We know who did talk of James to Harry: Quirrelmort, Dumbledore, Hagrid, Sirius, Remus under Sirius’ influence, and Severus. As for Severus—for two years Snape DIDN’T throw the despised James in Harry’s face, whatever he might have felt. The first time Snape mentioned James to Harry was when Severus caught Harry returning from a forbidden, hazardous excursion (which the boy had indulged in only for his own entertainment), lying about it, and reveling in having frightened and assaulted a fellow student. Sound like the behavior of anyone Severus had known as a child?

Regarding the assessments of James: the only one who doesn’t have an obvious axe to grind is Hagrid, and we know that Hagrid’s greatest flaw is his absolutely uncritical admiration of “interesting creatures”. With which we can, apparently, class James Potter.

Hoo boy. Does JKR have ANY idea what she wrote? Talk about Bad Boy Syndrome!

The Children of Privilege: Reconsidering James and Sirius as Tragic… Whatevers.

Um, sorry, the word I should be inserting here is ‘Heroes, ’ and I can’t. But it can be argued, as in the Greek tragedies, that James and Sirius brought about their own destruction because of a single tragic flaw. Hubris is the classic flaw of Greek tragedy: that form of arrogance which consists of believing one is smarter or stronger than one’s fate, that one can get away with overstepping the bounds of mortals.

And overstepping is always what James and Sirius were ABOUT. But the thing is, they were the golden boys, the children of privilege: they were raised to think they could get away with overstepping. And for years they did. But eventually….

Did you ever see the short (extremely so) animated film, “Bambi Meets Godzilla”? I’ve seen it several times; once was in a seminar as the example of what happens when one’s fantasies meet reality. As the opening credits roll, we watch Bambi gamboling on a spring meadow, while sweet music tinkles in the background. Then Godzilla’s foot comes down, splat, and the closing credits roll.

One could say that that’s what happened to James and Sirius.

I had a very long exchange with a Sirius fangirl (Nyxfixx) last year which altered my understanding of Sirius. Not that she got me to like him, or to forgive his treatment of Severus. But she did get me to see that his mind worked fundamentally differently from mine in some ways, and that behavior I saw as inexcusable, in fact criminal, was not ill-meant from his point of view.

It was not meant at all.

I may need to extend that charity towards James.

My grudge against Sirius was two-fold. I could wrap my mind, barely, around the thought that sending Severus to Remus in the Shrieking Shack was not attempted premeditated murder. It was hard for me to grasp that idea, because it seems intuitively obvious to me (as it did to Severus himself) that the expected, normal, predictable result of sending a sixteen-year-old into an enclosed space with an unconfined werewolf is a dead (or mutilated and infected) sixteen-year-old. So one would not do it unless one wanted that result. But Sirius was thoughtless and careless; maybe he really was stupid enough to imagine that Snivellus would just get a scare.

But afterwards he must have realized that he’d endangered Snape’s life, and he should have been sorry. And he clearly wasn’t: “He deserved it,” Sirius told Harry.

Similarly, I could see a bunch of reckless teens thinking it was cool and exciting to roam the countryside with a werewolf. Unlike them, but like Hermione at fourteen, my first thought is ‘That’s incredibly dangerous! OMG, what if he got away and bit someone!’ But I could understand, and maybe forgive, a bunch of thoughtless boys NOT worrying about that.

Until the first time it almost happened.

But that they continued to let the werewolf out to play after “many” near misses indicated, to me, that they were near-psychopathic criminals. They repeatedly, callously, endangered the lives of every student at Hogwarts and every villager in Hogsmeade, for no reason but their own idle amusement. They committed the same crime for which Hagrid was expelled and Tommy should have been: loosing a lethal monster in an inhabited area.

What Nyxfixx kept saying and saying until it finally sank in was, ‘But nothing really happened! Why should Sirius be sorry or worry about something that didn’t happen?”

Now see, that’s fundamentally—I do mean, FUNDAMENTALLY—foreign to my mind. I usually think—a lot—about things before I do them. I do sometimes do or say things on impulse or without adequate forethought; and I did that more when I was sixteen than now. But then I think about it afterwards; I have to. Especially if it seemed a mistake or a near-disaster.

If I’d been stupid enough to let a werewolf out to romp in the streets of Hogsmeade or the grounds of Hogwarts, the first time it almost got away and killed a courting couple or old lady out gathering moonlit herbs, I’d have been sick with horror for days. As Lupin apparently was in retrospect. I would have felt, each time afterwards that I let out the wolf, that I was playing Russian roulette—at best, one round closer to an inevitable disaster. Keep playing long enough, and disaster WILL occur.

(Note: speaking as a math major, statistically, letting out the wolf is not strictly the same as Russian roulette, in that each near-miss does not make a fatality next time more likely. But I would have felt it did. Which means that, for me, the only way I could have continued to let out the wolf is if I were a psychopath who put my entertainment above other people’s lives. You know, like Tommy.

You understand, there are times when I’ve put my selfish interests or my feelings above other people’s feelings, if never their lives. So I can understand doing that, putting my interests first. I can’t understand simply not thinking about probable consequences to others, even after having my nose rubbed in those consequences, because I can’t imagine not thinking. Eventually, at least, even if I flew off the handle at first. Sooner or later my mind catches up and starts calculating probable consequences, including ones I seem to have escaped this time, whew! Not thinking of consequences at all? In anyone whose intelligence bests Gregory Goyle’s? Does not compute.)

What Nyxfixx made me realize is that for Sirius, each near-miss had the OPPOSITE effect.

The fundamental thing that Nyxfixx made me realize about Sirius is that he was a child of privilege. He spent his childhood being sheltered from the consequences of mistakes he made. So he grew up believing that any mistake could be put right: he never really BELIEVED in consequences past mending.

And part of that is that Sirius grew up with magic—and intention does matter in magic, except when it doesn’t. What does Bella (possibly Sirius’s babysitter) tell us about the Unforgivable Curses? “You have to really mean them.” But Sirius thinks that applies to everything: if he doesn’t intend a consequence, he’s blind—almost literally—to the idea that it might happen anyhow. Even if it’s much more likely than what he did intend. Like sending another kid to meet a werewolf and sincerely expecting no worse to happen than that the other kid will be scared.

When Sirius said, “He deserved it,” in POA the eavesdropping Severus thought Sirius meant, “Snape deserved to be torn to pieces” for the high crime of trying to garner enough evidence of the Marauders’ crimes to turn them in to the headmaster and get them expelled—as Harry was trying with Draco in HBP. This interpretation is natural enough, I contend, since being torn to pieces is both the most probable result of going down a tunnel with a werewolf, and what would have happened in reality had James not intervened (per James, Severus, and Albus). So I don’t hold Severus wrong for thinking that way, and for being a tad annoyed that Sirius is reiterating his belief that Snape deserves to die horribly for interfering with Sirius’s criminal schemes.

But I think now that what Sirius really meant was, “Snape deserved a good scare”—and that Sirius STILL, years later, didn’t quite understand (or admit to himself) that he almost killed the other wizard.

Further, Sirius (and James) HATE Dark Magic. And they really seem sincere in thinking that so as long as they’re not using Dark Magic, anything goes. As I pointed out in another post, it’s actually worse from the point of the view of the victim to be tortured by a common household spell than by the Dark Arts: if one is to suffer torture flashbacks, which is worse: having the trigger being someone yelling “Crucio” or someone saying “Scourgify”? Which trigger is one more likely to encounter frequently in the WW?

But Sirius (and James) really seem to think that THEY’RE not using Dark Magic, they’re not INTENDING evil, therefore it’s impossible that evil results will occur.

And every time they got away with something—whether letting out the werewolf or torturing other students—for them, it just reinforced that they are golden, that they can control the consequences.

In his heart of hearts, Sirius truly believed that consequences are controllable: that if he doesn’t MEAN harm he hasn’t committed it.

And James is mostly the same. True, James had sense enough to rescue Severus from being killed (and Remus from probable execution, and Sirius from a life sentence in Azkaban). But James, too, is golden; he grew up indulged. As a teen, he got away with criminal behavior (torturing other students, becoming an illegal Animagus, letting out a werewolf in an inhabited area) with no serious consequences. And he successfully fooled the Headmaster, weathering the investigation into Sirius’s attempted manslaughter with Dumbledore getting not the least idea that the Marauders are Animagi who’ve been letting Remus out to play among the unsuspecting villagers and students.

So of course, three or four years later, James would be vulnerable to the suggestion (from Pettigrew?) that if he and Sirius could so easily fool Dumbledore, they could fool You-Know-Who, the wizard who dasn’t take Dumbledore on. Because that’s really what using Pettigrew as the Secret-Keeper relied on—rather than using Dumbledore, who couldn’t be taken or broken unless their whole side had irrevocably lost anyhow, they’d play a shell game with Voldemort. And they were so sure they could pull it off, they had no backup plans at all.

Which, from the point of view of someone who always broods over possible consequences and failures, is unthinkably remiss. From the viewpoint of a golden boy, who’s used to luck breaking for him, it’s natural.

*

Now, to backtrack to myself: I’m the child of an alcoholic and a suicide. Anyone who’s lived in the alcoholic brand of dysfunctional family learns that the drunk always claims the morning after that they didn’t mean anything bad they’d done the night before. And for years the child agrees, it doesn’t count (except it does) because they didn’t really mean any harm. It was the drink speaking and acting; it shouldn’t really count. What COUNTS is what they MEANT, their innocent intentions.

(Translation: being affected by their misbehavior, however egregious, is wrong of YOU. Get over it already; forget it! They have, after all. They didn’t mean to hurt you, so it’s wrong and perverse of you to insist that you were damaged by their words and actions.)

If one ever becomes healthy enough or hardened enough to resist that argument, “I meant no harm” becomes the ultimate red flag.

Which leaves me peculiarly ill-suited to like the Marauders. In tormenting other students, the Marauders didn’t mean any harm; they were just relieving boredom. In loosing the werewolf, they didn’t mean to endanger innocent people; they just wanted to get some kicks. In relying on their own cleverness to fool Voldemort, James and Sirius didn’t mean to make Harry an orphan; they just thought they could pull it off. After all, they’d pulled the wool over Dumbledore’s eyes for years, and he’s smarter than Voldemort.

Even years later, in dragging his feet in taking the Wolfsbane that night, Lupin didn’t mean to almost kill three kids, to allow Pettigrew to go free, and to condemn Sirius to remaining a fugitive; he just wanted to wind Snape up a little.

See, it’s a philosophical or personality difference. I, after watching (and enduring) the damage my alcoholic (but charming and attractive) mother inflicted, find it HARDER to forgive someone who “meant no harm”—but did it, repeatedly, anyhow, and used the pristine innocence of their intentions to insist they should be let off the hook to do harm AGAIN—than to forgive someone who DID mean harm, but who subsequently repented and tried their hardest to make amends.

A comparison of Pride and Prejudice and JKR’s romances between James/ Lily and Severus/Lily.

Like many fans, I assumed before DH (back in my innocent youth, when I was willing to accept what JKR said about her characters, rather than minutely examining what she showed) that James as a boy might have been a bully and over privileged jerk, but that he’d grown out of it before Lily accepted his suit. I assumed that SWM was James’s nadir, that the werewolf “prank” followed it, and that the realization that he and his friends had almost killed someone had sobered James. (I’d also assumed that James had in fact rescued Severus at least in part because, like Harry with Dudley and the Dementors, he was too decent to stand by and let even an enemy die when he could do something. Remus’s assurance that James had rescued Snape “at great risk to his life” had assured that parallel for me—until years later when I realized that James had always had the option of turning into his stag form and saving himself. )

So I accepted what I thought was Rowling’s line about James: that pre-prank, James had been a bullying idiot, but that post-Prank, James straightened up, stopped hexing people for fun, and became responsible and virtuous enough to merit being made Head Boy and winning Lily’s love.

Then JKR decided to destroy that reading by making SWM follow the prank.

So if the Marauders’ near-manslaughter had no effect whatsoever on James’s attitude and behavior, to what were we supposed to credit his supposed reformation? Why did Rowling expect us to believe that a sadistic bully whom she showed us torturing someone for giggles and whom she told us repeatedly endangered the lives of innocents for thrills became a hero worthy of Saint Lily? What did she think the mechanism of his change was? And Rowling is obviously confident that she did show us enough to make James’s reformation plausible; she expects her readers to just ‘get’ how that James became one of the heroes of his age.

Well, I think we’re supposed to understand that James, like Severus (too late), was Reformed by the Love of a Good Woman. And JKR thinks that she showed us the endpoints of the process and gave us the model she followed, so that her readers should just connect the dots.

JKR has mentioned being a fan of Jane Austen. I think that James was supposed to be a rewrite of Austen’s best-known hero, Mr. Darcy, and that (lower-born, but it’s SO rude to harp on that) Lily’s rejection of him in SWM was supposed to be James’s Pride and Prejudice moment. “The turn of your countenance I shall never forget, as you said that I could not have addressed you in any possible way, that would induce you to accept me…. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You shewed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.” (Mr. Darcy, P&P, Volume III, Chapter XVI)

The Lizzie-Darcy romance, shorn of Austen’s sparkling prose, is: Proud rich boy meets lower-born (but still acceptable to all but the worst snobs in his class) girl. Boy alienates girl with his arrogance. Girl is impertinent to boy; boy falls for her. Boy proposes. Girl rejects boy with stinging criticism. Girl finds out that her own prejudice had led her to wrong boy. Boy, humbled, changes his arrogant behavior; girl is touched and flattered by the change. Boy secretly saves someone he despises for the sake of girl’s peace of mind. Girl falls hard for boy, who still loves her. He approaches her again, this time without presumption. And they both live happily ever after.

*

Or, at any rate, they marry.

*

Mr. Darcy’s flaw was unregulated pride; the misbehavior resulting from that flaw was behaving with no consideration to those he considered beneath him. His reformation occurred off-stage; his turning point came not when he heard Lizzie’s criticism, but when he finally accepted it and applied himself to changing his ways. “Your reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: ‘had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner.’ Those were your words. You know not, you can scarcely conceive how they have tortured me—though it was some time, I confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow their justice.”(Mr. Darcy, P&P, III: XVI)

Here is Darcy’s full confession to Lizzie of his errors, after months of self-examination: “I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son, (for many years an only child) I was spoilt by my parents, who though good themselves, … allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing, to care for none beyond my own … circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own.” (P&P, III:XVI)

So. Was James Potter supposed to be a modern Fitzwilliam Darcy? Spoiled only son in a rich and well-born family, check. Blessed in addition with above average looks and talents, check. “Taught what was right… given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit,” check, per JKR. (James was, after all, always on what JKR assures us was the “right” side regarding those delicate questions of sorting into Gryffindor vs. Slytherin, pureblood politics, and Dark magic, even while he strutted around Hogwarts felling other children left and right with his hexes.) Surprised and chagrined when the lower-born girl turned him down, check. Secretly saved someone he despised who was connected to the girl (James knew full well that Severus at least had been Lily’s friend), check. Changed his behavior for the girl’s sake, check.

And Lily’s equally obviously modeled on Lizzie. She’s both of lower birth than her suitor and nominally his equal according to all but the worst snobs (she’s a powerful witch, if a Muggleborn, as Lizzie’s a gentleman’s daughter); she’s easily superior to her “better-born” rivals in talent and intelligence (Head Girl). Lily’s manners, like Lizzie’s, were sportive, lively, playful—and impertinent, but charmingly so.

“Now be sincere: did you admire me for my impertinence?” “For the liveliness of your mind, I did.” (P&P, III: XVIII) “Vivacious, you know. Charming girl…. Very cheeky answers I used to get back too. (Slughorn on Lily, HBP, IV)

And, of course, both Lily and Lizzie rejected their suitors with the utmost disdain, as though “insensible to the compliment of such a man’s affection.” (P&P, II: XI)

Here’s Lizzie refusing Darcy, and his reaction: “You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it.” Again his astonishment was obvious; and he looked at her with an expression of mingled incredulity and mortification. (P&P, II: XI)

And here’s Lily refusing James, and his reaction: “I wouldn’t go out with you if it was a choice between you and the giant squid,” said Lily. … “What is it with her?” said James, trying and failing to look as though this was a throwaway question of no real importance to him. (OotP, SWM)

Rowling’s language is markedly less elegant than Austen’s, but the parallel is exact.

So I think Rowling gave us the beginning (or middle) in SWM, gave us the ending (Reader, I married him, to quote another classic), told us through Sirius and Remus that James had “deflated his head” to win Lily, and just expected us to fill in the gaps. The hero was humbled; the heroine realized that the hero had been a better man all along than she’d been willing to give him credit for. Every reader already knows this storyline. So Rowling felt no need to SHOW us James’s reformation, or what made Lily decide that James was a better person than she had previously thought him to be.

Moreover, since Lily did decide in James’s favor, so too should the readers. We all know, after all, that Lizzie’s prejudice against Darcy had led her astray in judging him; her reassessment (once Darcy had deflated his head a bit) that he was a worthy partner was correct. So Rowling didn’t need to show us James becoming a good and virtuous man: his winning Lily was all the proof we should need.

Finally, if Lily is supposed to be Lizzie, that makes sense of Rowling’s interview assertion that Lily could possibly have loved and chosen Severus. Because Lizzie, in canon, acknowledged but was unmoved by Darcy’s wealth, good looks, social status, and even intelligence (though she could not have loved someone she disdained as her intellectual inferior). Instead, Lizzie’s first preference was for a talented man of inferior birth to her own and no money at all. She was weaned of that preference only when she became convinced that her first choice, Wickham, held moral standards that were unacceptable.

If Lily were a Lizzie, then, so too must Lily have been unswayed by James’s surface attractions, and been attracted only when James had established his MORAL superiority to her other suitor. And Lizzie’s reason for coming to love Darcy (well after she’d decided that Darcy was worthy of her general approbation) was explicitly her gratitude for his loving her enough to change in response to her criticisms: “But above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within her of good will which could not be overlooked. It was gratitude.—Gratitude, not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection…. Such a change in a man of so much pride, excited not only astonishment but gratitude—for to love, ardent love, it must be attributed.” (P&P, III: II) So had Severus (James’s equal in being “a man of so much pride,” if not in wealth, looks, or social status) changed in time, attended to Lily’s criticisms instead of giving up after her stinging rejection and allying himself with the Death Eaters, obviously Lily might have loved him instead.

Indeed, Severus in canon might even have been Lily’s Wickham, her lower-born but talented first choice—though there’s little canon support for the contention that Lily ever found Severus sexually attractive (one blush when he looked at her “intently”, which might as easily have been embarrassment as reciprocal sexual awareness). Still, he was at least her acknowledged “best friend” during the period that she was overtly scorning James. If so, like Wickham, Severus insisted on proving himself unworthy of her.

There’s a further parallel between Wickham/Severus and Darcy/James besides that both Wickham and Snape proved themselves ultimately unworthy of a good woman’s affections. Darcy had to save Lydia’s good name to save Lizzie’s reputation and peace of mind. He forced the marriage between Lydia and Wickham, paid up Wickham’s debts and settled money upon her, and left Lizzie’s happy sister to “all the claims of reputation which her marriage had given her.” (P&P, III, XIX)

Darcy did this with absolutely no wish whatever of saving Wickham. But save Wickham he did: from debtor’s prison and from permanent infamy. Helping Wickham was the unpleasant consequence of saving others: Lydia from the consequences of her impulsive folly, Lizzie from an unmerited on her part, but overwhelming and probably permanent, loss of family reputation.

Similarly, James Potter saved Severus from the werewolf, not for Severus’s sake, but because James had to in order to save those he DID care for. Saving Severus was a unfortunate side effect of saving Sirius from his impulsive folly in setting Snape up to be killed, and Remus from being exposed as a werewolf. And James clearly scorned Severus as much (or more) after the rescue as before—as Darcy did Wickham.

[In one particular, however, Severus is more like another Austen villain, Willoughby ofSense & Sensibility, than Wickham. Austen’s readers never see Wickham mourn his (deserved) loss of Lizzie more than casually. Willoughby, on the contrary, betrayed his love Marianne—and then grieved (though not as extravagantly as the Half-Blood Prince) over his self-inflicted loss, readers are told, to the very end of his days. And when Willoughby believed that his betrayal had brought the woman he still loved into danger of death, he took himself to his enemy to confess and to make what poor amends he could: “Tell me honestly”—a deeper glow overspreading his cheeks—“do you think me most a knave or a fool?” (Willoughby in S&S, XILIV)

Severus’s fans and detractors are still debating that question regarding Snape’s joining the DE’s.

*

So that’s the model Rowling was following, and she thought the parallels were perfectly plain.

Yet if that was Rowling’s intent, why didn’t it work for me once I looked more closely at the characters? Why did her assertion that Lily could possibly have chosen Severus fall flat, and why do I have trouble believing in James’s reformation?

*

The problem is, James Potter was no Darcy. Nor was Severus another Wickham. And that in turn made Lily no Lizzie when she chose the one over the other.

The first issue I have with reading James as Darcy could, if it stood by itself, simply be an example of Rowling’s recurring “tell don’t show” problem. Seeing is believing. Austen showed us Darcy’s reformation; she showed him exerting himself to be polite to people whom previously he would have ignored or scorned. Austen showed too Lizzie’s astonishment at the change: “Why is he so altered? From what can it proceed? It cannot be for me, it cannot be for my sake that his manners are thus softened. My reproofs at Hunsford could not work such a change as this. It is impossible that he should still love me.” (P&P, III: I) Rowling, in contrast, had James’s two best friends (hardly unprejudiced witnesses) assure Harry that James had changed—but we readers were never shown ANY example of James’s “after” behavior that solidly demonstrated James’s newfound humility and maturity. In fact, the prequel instead showed James and Sirius behaving much the same as ever.

That, if it stood by itself, could just indicate that Rowling expected us to take her (or Sirius and Remus’s) word for it. Which, way back when I felt I could trust Rowling’s moral judgment, was okay if artistically unsatisfying. However, once I realized I was dealing with an author who thought using the Cruciatus could ever be excused as gallant (IOIAGDI), that didn’t work so well. I wanted to see how post-reformation James had ACTED, to judge his behavior for myself.

The second problem can’t be explained away as artistic misjudgment on Rowling’s part. Austen’s Darcy changed his behavior, not in hopes of influencing Lizzie, but because he accepted her reproofs as justified. He expected never to see Lizzie again. Darcy altered his behavior rather in the hope of making himself a person who would in principle merit Lizzie’s esteem, than in the hope of changing Lizzie’s actual opinion.

Darcy explicitly said as much to Lizzie. However, readers were not required to take Fitzwilliam’s word for this. Darcy had earlier tried (to Lizzie) to excuse his incivility to strangers as being due to innate lack of ability at seeming interested in their concerns—and Lizzie had retorted that she didn’t blame her lack of mastery of the piano on lack of ability, but on not taking the trouble to practice enough.

So the mere fact that Darcy was able to demonstrate mastery of the art of conversing politely with the Gardiners in front of Lizzie proves that he must have been at pains at practicing the uncongenial exercise ‘being polite to strangers’ during the intervening months when he’d expected never again to see her.

Darcy didn’t change to impress Lizzie. He changed because he acknowledged that Lizzie’s rebukes had been well-founded, and he wanted to be a better man, to live up to Lizzie’s standards. Even though Darcy thought that Lizzie would never learn of his changed behavior, and thus would never alter her previous (and justified) bad opinion of him.

James, however, did the EXACT opposite. He changed his behavior in front of Lily (and in front of authorities whose reports on his behavior might get back to Lily), but his friends admitted that he continued his previous misbehavior behind her back.

It is canon that James continued hexing at least one person, Severus, and concealed this from Lily when she believed that he’d stopped entirely. As others have pointed out, the Head Boy had no need to resort to hexes to defend himself from Snape’s attacks, if the problem were simply that Snape had started egregiously attacking James. The Head Boy could simply have taken points from the offender, and let Slytherin House put pressure on the miscreant. So even if Severus were instigating their brawls by then, James was hexing by preference, not necessity.

Moreover, the fact that James COULD conceal his hexes so entirely from his girlfriend suggests that it was, at least much of the time, the person who had an invisibility cloak, the Marauder’s Map, and a rat Animagus lookout, who picked the fights. Severus had neither any motive nor any known means of keeping their continued hex-war a secret from Lily. In fact, had Severus known Lily admired James for having stopped hexing others, that she thought that this showed maturity and restraint on James’s part, he had a strong motive for the exact opposite, for making sure that Lily had occasion to see James preferring to resort to violence instead of point-taking when provoked.

But if James was picking the venue of their “fights,” he had to have been the instigator, at least some of the time. At the best, he might have been “maturely” taking points from Snape in public when Snape hexed him—and then privately “getting him back” later. (As Lupin admitted, “… you couldn’t really expect James to take that lying down, could you?” (OotP, XXIX) ) At the worst, James might have been continuing to instigate most of their encounters as he did with the one we witnessed in OotP: using the map and cloak to ambush Snape, possibly with benefit of superior numbers, and enjoying Snape’s furious and humiliated attempts to defend himself against superior firepower. While letting Lily think that James had given up all such pleasures.

So James, unlike Darcy, never felt that his initial behavior was truly wrong and that he ought to live up to Lily’s standards—just that it was impolitic to let Lily observe him behaving in certain ways.

He didn’t truly change; he manipulated Lily into thinking he’d changed, in order to manipulate her feelings about him.

He assumed the semblance of virtue, rather than becoming virtuous. Which is rather more the behavior of a Wickham than a Darcy.

Or to invoke another literary reference—consider Les liaisons dangereuses. The wicked Vicomte de Valmont decided to seduce a virtuous [rigidly moral yet very tenderhearted] woman, so he started ostentatiously to behave in a manner that led her to conclude that the Vicomte had secretly reformed his behavior under the influence of his overwhelming, unrequited love for her…. No, I don’t actually think that James was that cynical.)

The third problem I have is, in P&P both protagonists have a moral journey to make before they can meet as lovers. Darcy’s half was to admit that he had not been behaving as a true gentleman ought, and to regulate his pride and temper and start treating his ‘inferiors’ better. We saw that James did not truly do that—he just cheated and said he had. But Austen’s Lizzie had her part, too: to swallow her own pride in her superior intellect/judgment and admit that her prejudices had led her previously to misjudge Darcy.

The problem here is, Austen very carefully established that Lizzie HAD previously misjudged Darcy, that Darcy was in truth a better man than Lizzie had originally given him credit for. First there was the letter, overturning all Lizzie’s ideas about Darcy’s treatment of Wickham—and establishing further that his motives in separating Jane and Bingley were more creditable than Lizzie had supposed. (If Darcy had been right [which he was not] in his reading of Jane’s character, that she was encouraging Bingley’s courtship without feeling a reciprocal passion, then Jane would have been accepting Bingley’s attentions from the exact motive that made Charlotte accept Mr. Collins’: “a pure and disinterested desire of an establishment.” What friend would let his best friend marry such a woman without trying to stop him?)

But further, Austen established that Darcy, outside of Lizzie’s view, was both conscientious in the performance of the duties his privileged position gave him and consistently kind to those in his power. He was a responsible landowner, a considerate master to his servants, and a caring guardian to his sister. His position gave him power over others (servants, sister, tenants), and he wielded that power carefully and with attention to the feelings of those who would have been nearly helpless had he chosen to abuse his position. Not only his friends, family, and housekeeper said so; Mrs. Gardiner’s disinterested (in fact hostile-to-Darcy) sources affirmed that Darcy </i> “was a liberal man and did much good among the poor.”(P&P, III, II) </i>

So Lizzie had been wrong about Darcy’s general character, even if his behavior in front of her had been rude and inconsiderate, fully earning her disapprobation. Austen showed us that Darcy was in substance good, even when his arrogance and inconsideration had led him to act in a manner unworthy of his better self. So for Lizzie to forgive him, admire him, and come to love him, was a merited reward. And it required her first to get over herself, to give up her mistaken belief in the infallibility of her own ‘First Impressions’.

So: had Lily been misjudging James, accusing him unjustly, and did it show her better judgment when she came instead to accept and love him?

What, precisely, did Rowling tell us James was doing outside of Lily’s view? How was James using his position and his talents? Like Darcy, James had unusual power and privilege; how did he use it?

Er. Um.

James used his illegal Animagus ability to loose a werewolf on unsuspecting villagers—getting his thrills out of endangering the lives of strangers. If one accepts the Prequel as canon, he used his magical abilities to lead the police on a wild-goose speeding chase (endangering them and every Muggle on the streets that night), then taunted them and destroyed their property. He used lethal force against his broom-riding pursuers—with that trademark Marauder overlay of “humor”. Wasn’t it FUNNY to see the people chasing him smash at high speed into the fat, stupid policemen’s car? That was straight out of the Roadrunner cartoons. (Of course, outside of cartoons such an impact would break the pursuers’ necks and/or smash their skulls. You’ll note that James and Sirius didn’t pause to examine the bodies of their victims.)

And we know that James used his position as Head Boy to continue his sport of Snape-baiting—possibly even Snape-hunting.

We never once are shown James using his position as a wizard or a rich man to help those he considered beneath him. We are told (not shown) that he did help his closest friends. What we were shown, however, repeatedly, was James enjoying inflicting pain and humiliation on lesser beings, and endangering friends, enemies, and bystanders for his own entertainment. (Loosing the werewolf endangered his friend Lupin as well as the villagers—at the very least, it made it much more likely that Lupin’s secret would be guessed.)

We don’t ever see James the teen acting kindly, or responsibly, or considerately, when out of Lily’s view. Or, indeed, at all.

Now consider how people spoke of James to his son. He was a hero/martyr in the fight against Voldemort; there is a statue to the Holy Family in Godric’s Hollow, for crying out loud. So what did people say about him? How did they praise the young hero to his orphaned son? Who came shouldering up to Harry in the Leaky to brag about being at school with the great James Potter? Who took on Augusta Longbottom’s role with Neville, reminding Harry that he ought to try to live up to his martyred father’s memory?

Well, er, no one.

They tried not to bring him up, most of them. Nil nisi…. Minerva told Harry, once, that James had been a great Quidditch player and would be proud to see Harry the same. Out of Harry’s earshot (she thought) she described James as bright but a great troublemaker, and called him the “ringleader” of a “gang”—the same words used by Dumbledore of Tom Riddle and by Harry of Dudley.

Should the reader find that a reassuring parallel?

Note too that Sirius and James were described as a matched set—and that while people were shocked that Sirius should have betrayed his great friend James, no one had any trouble at all believing Sirius capable of the mass murder of innocent bystanders.

We know that what Dumbledore told Harry about James was wholly disingenuous, deliberately intended to mislead without overtly lying. (In comparing the Snape/James enmity to the Harry/Draco one, he knew that Harry would NOT take from the comparison the thought that James might have been an arrogant pureblood who had gathered a gang to pick on his halfblood rival unrelentingly. And the version of the Prank Dumbledore gave Harry first year was an absolute masterpiece.) Since Dumbledore was encouraging Harry to mold himself into what Harry chose to believe his father to have been (brave, flinging himself into danger without counting the cost, loyal, and self-sacrificing), we can’t count on anything Dumbledore said as reflecting his real opinion of James.

Sirius and Remus, of course, whitewashed James’s behavior (and their own) and tried to excuse it when Harry revealed that when he’d actually seen an example of his father’s behavior, he found it unacceptable.

Hagrid was the only non-Marauder to wax (nonspecifically) enthusiastic over James—and as Hagrid was also the one we watched cooing to a (female) baby dragon spitting flame at him, “Norbert! Where’s Mommy?” Hagrid’s judgment must be deeply suspect.

So readers are not given anything to base Lily’s turnaround on, except that James, according to his best friends, “deflated his head.” The only other possible explanation from canon is that Lily, like Lizzie, melted towards her arrogant suitor when she realized he’d undergone significant unpleasantness to rescue someone he despised—for (perhaps) her sake.

Perhaps Lily took James saving her friend Severus’s life to be a noble, courageous, and unselfish action.

Only problem with that is, we the readers, unlike Lily, know that Prongs risked nothing in doing it. He could have transformed into his deer form and been safe from Moony—true, Prongs could not have run in the tunnel as described, but he didn’t need to—Moony didn’t attack Animagi in their animal forms, only humans. So it required no courage or self-sacrifice on James’s part to enter that tunnel.

Furthermore, we know—as Lily very evidently did not—that two of James’s closest friends were at risk of expulsion or Azkaban had Sirius’s “joke” succeeded in killing Severus. (That’s assuming, charitably, that Severus was wrong in thinking James had had a hand in planning the “joke” with Sirius; if Severus was right that James were an accessory before the fact, then if proved, James might have joined Sirius in expulsion and wand-breaking, and/or a life sentence to Azkaban. Setting a lethal monster upon fellow students, when known, isn’t taken lightly.)

Moreover, any serious investigation (say under Ministry Veritaserum) would most likely have revealed James’s own independent criminal activities (being an unregistered Animagus is a criminal offense, and loosing a Class XXXXX creature upon Hogwarts and Hogsmeade is, in fact, the crime for which fourteen-year-old Hagrid had been expelled from Hogwarts and had his wand broken). So we the readers know that saving Severus was probably in James’s own self-interest, and was certainly necessary to protect both Sirius and Remus.

So the only incident that JKR actually gives us that could have significantly changed Lily’s impression of James, would have been based on Lily’s FALSE interpretation of James’s motivations. And on her refusing to listen to her supposed “best friend” when he tried haltingly to enlighten her.

Lizzie’s re-evaluation of Darcy was based on her realization that she’d previously misjudged him; Lily’s of James, quite possibly, on starting to misjudge him. Opposites, in fact.

*

Which takes us to the next problem in comparing James and Darcy, the biggest of all: how do James’s flaws compare to Darcy’s, and Lily’s reproof to Lizzie’s?

Lizzie accused Darcy of two specific offenses. The first was that he had been “the means of ruining, perhaps for ever, the happiness of a most beloved sister,” (P&P, II:XI) the second that he had “in defiance of honour and humanity, ruined the immediate prosperity and blasted the prospects of Mr. Wickham.” (P&P, II: XII) But Lizzie made also the following general criticism: “… your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that ground-work of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike….” (P&P, II: XI) Darcy could refute the specific accusations, but her general criticism he eventually accepted: “For, though your accusations were ill-founded, formed on mistaken premises, my behaviour to you at the time had merited the severest reproof. It was unpardonable. I cannot think of it without abhorrence.” Darcy’s fundamental flaw was improper pride, and the misbehavior which he subsequently corrected was lack of consideration for the feelings of those he felt to be beneath him. (Note that his supposed crimes against Jane and Wickham both fell into this category: Lizzie thought that he broke Jane’s heart, and ruined Wickham’s life, because he thought them socially beneath him and because he could. Instead, Darcy mistakenly thought Jane, and correctly judged Wickham, to have no feelings that could merit his—or anyone’s—consideration.)

JKR seems to think that this was James’s fundamental flaw as well. On those occasions when she allowed James to be criticized by any character in text the key word was always arrogant: Snape (“as arrogant as your father” PoA), Lily (“arrogant toerag” OotP, SWM, and DH, TPT), distraught Harry (“judging from what he had just seen, his father had been every bit as arrogant as Snape had always told him.”OotP, SWM)

Now, no reader could deny that James in SWM exhibited “arrogance,… conceit, and …selfish disdain of the feelings of others.”

But were those the only, or worst, flaws that James there exhibited?

Here are Lily’s criticisms of James: “You think you’re funny,” she said coldly. “But you’re just an arrogant, bullying toerag, Potter.” “You’re as bad as he is.…” “Messing up your hair because you think it looks cool to look like you’ve just got off your broomstick, showing off with that stupid Snitch, walking down corridors and hexing anyone who annoys you just because you can—I’m surprised your broomstick can get off the ground with that fat head on it. You make me SICK.” (OotP, “SWM”- XXVIII) The problem here is that Rowling and I seem to disagree on what were the worst flaws James Potter really exhibited in SWM (and elsewhere).

And that Lily apparently agreed with Rowling fatally diminishes Lily in my eyes.

Trying to look cool, showing off with the snitch, hexing people “because he can”—what made Lily “sick” was apparently that James was a conceited show-off who had the gall to expect her to be an automatic member of the Potter fan club.

Not that James was a sadistic jerk who was “using his magic against other people, to frighten, to punish, to control” [HBP, “The Secret Riddle”].

James Potter’s “instincts for cruelty, secrecy, and domination” [ibid.], were nearly as marked as those of an earlier dark-haired Head Boy-to-be. And that didn’t bother JKR, and it apparently didn’t bother Lily.

Now, Lily didn’t know all of James’s misbehavior. She didn’t know, as we do (and as JKR does), that James, like Tom Riddle, repeatedly let loose, for his own amusement, a monster which could kill most people it encountered (but which HE could control). Lily didn’t know that James was an illegal Animagus. She didn’t know that James was the creator of the Marauder’s Map, which enabled the holder to ambush other students and to evade authority figures. She didn’t know that James had an invisibility cloak, or think how that could be used, again, to set ambushes and escape detection in wrongdoing.

She didn’t know that James was the leader of a gang which was attacking people on the quiet, under the radar of the authority.

But what she did know, what she witnessed for herself, she criticized for the wrong reasons.

Let’s put this in context.

Suppose I, at age sixteen, witnessed a gang of my schoolmates (led by a pair of rich, upper-class jocks) publicly beat up a loner from the wrong side of the tracks. They overwhelmed him with superior numbers, immobilized him, stripped him to his underwear and threatened to bare him completely, and held his face in a bucket of soapy water while he fought, gagged, and struggled to breathe.

My first condemnation of the gang leader (assuming I had had the courage to try to intervene—perhaps not a justified assumption) would not have been, “You think you’re funny,” nor my final judgment that the gang leader had a “fat head.”

I would have thought the gang leader a sickeningly brutal little thug. Arrogant, yes, that too: he clearly thought that Daddy’s wealth and influence and his own popularity would let him get away such an attack in public. And in the actual case in question James was, of course, absolutely correct in thinking this. But what would have bothered me far worse than the arrogance would have been the viciousness—the indulgence of those obvious instincts for cruelty and domination.

Furthermore, Lily was, after all, the queen of judging (and discarding) people by the insults they used under stress. So what insult did she use to/of James, twice, in canon? “Arrogant toerag.” That’s actually a fascinating epithet to apply to James, because “toerag” denoted someone too poor to afford shoes, a vagrant or criminal who had to wrap their feet in rags. A lower class person. So the worst insult Lily could think of to hurl (as Severus’s was “Mudblood”) was to accuse someone of being lower class—an epithet utterly worthy of Petunia’s sister.

That insult was clearly misapplied to James in a literal sense: his social status was as high as it could be in the WW, much higher than hers. It’s worth noting, however, that if social standing were what Lily cared most about, as her choice of insults seemed to indicate, Severus was quadruply inferior to James: in the Muggle world for being “from Spinner’s End” rather than rich, in the general WW for being (like Lily) the son of a Muggle, among the Hogwarts students for being an unpopular geek rather than a Quidditch star, and in the eyes of Lily’s Gryffindor housemates for being a stinking Slytherin (JKR carefully shows us three generations of Gryffs telling each other that Slytherins are innately inferior: Hagrid to Harry, James on the train, and the Trio to Neville).

But of course the flip side of Lily’s calling James a toerag was: there is an upper-middle-class sensibility which does regard (excessively overt) parading of oneself as déclassé. So one might read “you’re an arrogant toerag” as modern slang for the reproof “you are behaving in an ungentleman-like manner.”

So Lily’s criticisms (like Lizzie’s to Darcy) gave James pointers on what he would have to do to win her approbation: stop expressing his overweening self-satisfaction so openly and tone down on the showing off (both with the Quidditch-star posing and the hexing).

But unlike Lizzie’s criticism of Darcy, there was nothing in there at all about starting to show consideration for the feelings of others.

And yet James, unlike Darcy, had shown himself to be a sadist, keenly savoring humiliating and physically hurting others.

Canon Darcy was rude and cold to people he considered beneath them, but we never saw him physically attack anyone. Moreover, his wit was exercised at other people’s expense, but not, apparently, expressly for the purpose of hurting their feelings.

Contrast Darcy to Severus in this—Snape (like James) appeared to Harry to register and relish the reaction of his targets.

Darcy amused himself by passing sarcastic comments on his inferiors, but in indifference of the reception of his insults. Darcy’s barbs often, like Mr. Bennet’s to his wife, went over his victims’ heads: “[Darcy] paid me the compliment of saying, that he was so well convinced of Lady Catherine’s discernment as to be certain she could never bestow a favor unworthily.” (Mr. Collins exulting in Darcy’s reception of him, P&P, I, XVIII). Or Darcy would insult someone absent with no expectation (or intention) that the insult might be relayed. “She a beauty!—I should as soon call her mother a wit.” (P&P, III, III)

And certainly in his first proposal to Lizzie Darcy didn’t expect that his “honest confession of the scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design” to be received by his intended as showing “so evident a design of offending and insulting me.”(P&P, II, XI).

Darcy, in short, showed “disdain of the feelings of others,” as Lizzie charged. But he didn’t set out specifically to hurt others for his pleasure. Others’ humiliation was a side-effect of the exercise of his wit (one he could be trained out of—“If he did roll his eyes, it was not until Sir William was absent” ), not his goal. Lily’s two suitors, James and Severus, in contrast, showed active relish in hurting the feelings of others—both apparently enjoyed verbally attacking others, and James also clearly relished inflicting physical pain and humiliation.

So Lily, unlike Lizzie, apparently found a cruel streak to be acceptable in her suitors.

Indeed, the ethos of Gryffindor house seems to be that hurting people is not just acceptable, but commendable—so long as the victims could be claimed to “deserve” it. Look at the vicious way Fred and George treated Dudley at the beginning of GoF, and Draco and his friends at its end.

Or consider the fallout from Sectumsempra in HBP. McGonagall told Harry that he was lucky not to have been expelled, and Pansy Parkinson vilified Harry far and wide (but who cared about her opinion?). But Harry’s housemates? They were angry that Harry had done something that gave Snape an excuse to ban him from the final Quidditch game. And that did seem to be the light in which they, and Harry, regarded attempted evisceration. Ginny even said that Hermione “should be glad Harry had something good up his sleeve!” (Because Expelliarmus, Stupefy, and Impedimenta are so ineffective at neutralizing an opponent without harm, yes.)

Others have commented what it says about Hogwarts if, as JKR would have us believe, a couple of days after Harry had almost killed Draco everyone was more interested in gossiping about his love life than his crime. “After all, it made a very nice change to be talked about because of something that was making him happier… rather than because he had been involved [as perpetrator] in horrific scenes of Dark Magic.” However, given that Harry was Bubble Boy, who the year before didn’t even RECOGNIZE, still less know the names of, some of his (thirty—really not an excessive number) classmates from other houses, all that we can really infer is that GRYFFINDORS found Harry’s love life more interesting than his crime against Draco. (The only gossiper mentioned by name was Romilda Vane, Gryffindor.)

Now let’s circle back to consider Lily—who (unlike Hermione, who objected to the Prince’s humor) was placed instantaneously in Gryffindor. And whose sister (family members often share the same underlying values) clearly felt that neglecting and verbally abusing a child was an acceptable thing to do, so long as the toddler “deserved” it (in Harry’s case, for being a magic-wielding freak).

What was it that Lily asked James, again, at the very beginning of her gracious intervention in SWM? Oh, yeah. “What’s he done to you?”

Wait a minute. Saint Lily the prefect has just witnessed several students gang up to attack another who’d previously been doing nothing except quietly reviewing his test answers. This gang disarmed the other student, viciously insulted him, immobilized him, stripped him nearly naked, and waterboarded him. The gang, moreover, was notorious for attacking “anyone who annoys you … just because you can”. Yet Lily’s response was to imply that if James could give her an answer that established to her satisfaction that Sev “deserved” it in some way, she would just walk away and leave the Marauders to their fun?

Well, yes.

After all, that’s exactly what she DID do when Sev insulted her, didn’t she? The prefect flounced away after getting her own verbal dig in at the victim, leaving the criminals free to do anything they wanted.

So cruelty and violence are, in fact, entirely acceptable to Lily, so long as she can argue that the victim ‘deserved it’.

She’d undoubtedly have approved of Harry’s Cruciatus. He’d finally come into his own as a True Gryffindor, chivalrously torturing the deserving.

I somehow cannot see Eliza Bennett approving of someone torturing an immobilized victim, even one who had grievously insulted her. (Lizzie insisted that Darcy reconcile with Lady Catherine, after all.) As for Mr. Darcy, we know that rather than dueling his reprobate rival Wickham after Wickham had seriously injured Elizabeth’s peace of mind and her family’s reputation, he resorted (with great distaste) to bribing him.

Lily and James were no Lizzie and Darcy.

*

In some ways it’s actually Severus who better mirrors Darcy—but without the reward of getting the girl in the end.

Darcy’s original crime, remember, was rudeness—which was born largely from his arrogance. Pre-reformation Darcy didn’t waste social niceties on people he didn’t care for or respect, and he exercised his wit at their expense. Yet at the same time he protected those to whom he felt he owed care. Does that sound at all like anyone we’ve met in the Potterverse?

Severus Snape had no reason to be arrogant about his birth, looks, or wealth, but, like Darcy, he WAS arrogant about his superior intelligence, talent, and competence. When Snape berated a victim, it was almost always for stupidity, lack of talent, laziness, or incompetence—or for presumed “arrogance” over unearned advantages.

Darcy talked of those who had “a real superiority of mind” making it quite clear that he considered himself one of them. He analyzed himself for Lizzie in volume one: “I have faults enough, but they are not, I hope, of understanding. My temper I dare not vouch for.—It is I believe too little yielding—certainly too little for the convenience of the world. I cannot forget the follies and vices of others so soon as I ought, nor their offenses against myself. My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper would perhaps be called resentful.—My good opinion once lost is lost for ever.” “That </b>is a failing indeed!”—cried Elizabeth. “Implacable resentment is a shade in a character. But you have chosen your fault well.—I really cannot </b>laugh </b> at it. You are safe from me.” “There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.” “And your defect is a propensity to hate every body.” (P&P, I: XI) Note that Darcy values the possession of intelligence above good temper and social skills (“[My faults] are not, I hope, of understanding.” ). Is there anyone in the Potterverse who seemed to prefer to be resentful and resented than a dunderhead? Anyone who was ever accused of having “a propensity to hate every body”? And who yet, once he truly allowed himself to love someone, somehow excluded his loved one(s) from his “implacable resentment,” </i>from his ongoing mental tally of</i> “follies and vices … [and] offenses against myself”? </i>

For Severus, like James and like Darcy, continued to love even after being rejected stingingly (and he thought, irrevocably). And Darcy, like Severus and James, continued to love even after being grievously insulted by his loved one.

Further, Snape’s pro-Slytherin bias could be read as a version of the flaw Darcy admitted after deeper self-reflection: a tendency “to care for none beyond my own … circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own.” (P&P, III: XVI)

Indeed, it might be partly the Darcy parallel that misled so many fen into thinking, pre-HBP, that the Snapes must have been a wealthy Pureblood family (the WW equivalent of gentry). Snape Manor might be the fan version of Pemberley.

And finally, SEVERUS was the one who, we find out, truly paralleled Darcy’s reformation—once we place very firmly at the front of our minds the fact that Lily, unlike Lizzie, never reproved her suitor(s) for, um, incivility.

The behavior that Lily insisted was wrong in Severus was supporting Voldemort and echoing blood prejudice. And we know that whatever else he did not change, Snape did eventually—with Lily in mind, but with no faintest hope of any reward from her, nor even of her ever knowing—reverse course in those two particulars.

“My reputation, Iago! My reputation!” Shakespeare, “Othello.”

*

Years ago on Snapedom we had a discussion about Snape’s relationships with his Hogwarts colleagues. It occurred to me recently to wonder anew about the changes in those relationships over time.

*

When Harry reported Snape’s murder of Dumbledore, Minerva and the other Hogwarts staff and Order members accepted Harry’s testimony instantly, though with shock and (in some cases) obvious reluctance.

Yet in the WW even more than ours, eyewitness testimony of a crime must necessarily be suspect. Polyjuice, glamours, the Confundus charm, all could cause a gull to testify, utterly sincerely but completely inaccurately, to another’s guilt.

The Order even had the ghastly cautionary tale of Sirius to remind them not to believe in appearances.

And everyone there present knew that Harry hated Snape so much that the boy would swallow even the flimsiest illusion incriminating his hated professor.

Hagrid had simply flat-out refused to believe Harry’s eyewitness testimony that Snape had murdered the headmaster.

Just as Hagrid had refused in book one to believe that Professor Snape had tried to kill Harry or would try to steal the Stone, despite the children’s eyewitness testimony attesting to Snape’s perfidy.

Minerva and the other staff, in contrast, accepted Harry’s word on the matter at once in book six. Not happily, no, but without a moment’s question.

As Minerva had NOT done in book one, when the Trio told her their suspicions of Snape.

Meaning that as of Book Six, most of the Hogwarts staff considered that killing Dumbledore was something possible to believe of Snape. Despite their having had no misgivings about calling him to help defend the school against the invading Death Eaters, they all credited Harry’s vicious slur—excuse me, unvarnished report—instantaneously.

Except for Hagrid.

Why the difference?

*

Let’s start by comparing Hagrid’s reactions on various occasions his beloved Harry testified against the professor. We’ll look first at the broom-jinx post-mortem in Hagrid’s hut (PS chapter 11)

“It was Snape,” Ron was explaining. “Hermione and I saw him. He was cursing your broomstick, muttering, he wouldn’t take his eyes off you.”

“Rubbish,” said Hagrid, who hadn’t heard a word of what had gone on next to him in the stands. “Why would Snape do somethin’ like that?”

Harry, Ron, and Hermione looked at one another, wondering what to tell him. Harry decided on the truth.

“I found out something about him,” he told Hagrid. “He tried to get part that three-headed dog on Halloween. It bit him. We think he was trying to steal whatever it’s guarding.”

Hagrid dropped the teapot.

“How do you know about Fluffy?” he said.

[Note that Hagrid’s very evident alarm and surprise here is, by what he chooses to focus on, at learning that the KIDS have found out about the Cerberus, NOT at what they’ve just said about Snape. For anything we know, he had already been told that Snape—or that some unnamed staff member—had been bitten while guarding the Stone on Dumbledore’s order. Perhaps someone had been down at his hut asking about the proper treatment for such bites…?]

….

“But Snape’s trying to steal it.”

“Rubbish,” said Hagrid again. “Snape’s a Hogwarts teacher, he’d do nothin’ of the sort.”

“So why did he just try and kill Harry?” cried Hermione.... “I know a jinx when I see one, Hagrid. I’ve read all about them. You’ve got to keep eye contact, and Snape wasn’t blinking at all. I saw him!”

“I’m telling yeh, yer wrong!” said Hagrid hotly. “I don’t know why Harry’s broom acted like that, but Snape wouldn’ try an’ kill a student! Now, listen to me, all three of yeh—yer meddlin’ in things that don’t concern yeh. It’s dangerous. You forget that dog, and you forget what it’s guardin’….”

Hagrid is not worried at all about Snape here; nothing the kids have told him has worried him in the least. Rather, he’s worried about the kids’ “meddlin’ in things that don’t concern yeh.” And he actually gets angry at the kids’ insistence on what they did, after all, witness with their own eyes.

Contrast this with Hagrid’s behavior earlier (in PS8) when Harry and Ron talked about their first week and first impressions of the Hogwarts staff:

… Harry and Ron were delighted to hear Hagrid call Filch “that old git.”

“And as for that cat, Mrs. Norris, I’d like ter introduce her to Fang sometime. D’yeh know, every time I go up ter the school, she follows me everywhere? Can’t get rid of her—Filch puts her up to it?”

Harry told Hagrid about Snape’s lesson. Hagrid, like Ron, told Harry not to worry about it, that Snape liked hardly any of the students.

“But he seemed really to hate me.”

“Rubbish!” said Hagrid. “Why should he?”

Yet Harry couldn’t help thinking that Hagrid didn’t quite meet his eyes when he said that.

“How’s yer brother Charlie?” Hagrid asked Ron. “I liked him a lot—great with animals.”

Harry wondered if Hagrid had changed the subject on purpose. (PS8)

Inferences from these two passages?

One: Hagrid’s not that good a liar. The obvious conclusion from PS8 is that Hagrid knew that there was, in fact, damned good reason for Professor Snape to “hate” James Potter’s lookalike son. But Hagrid neither held that grudge against the professor (if he did, he should be just as willing to trash Snape to Harry and Ron as he did Filch and Mrs. Norris), nor did he think it proper to burden young Harry with the real reason why Snape might “hate” him.

Two: Harry saw shiftiness in Hagrid’s defense of Snape in C8, versus heat in C11 . It would seem, therefore, that it was perfectly plausible to Hagrid that Snape might hate Harry enough on his father’s behalf to dock a single house point unjustly from Potter’s son.

(O! The unspeakable horror of such behavior! One whole, entire point! Cue the chorus to faint alternately on the sopha.)

Note that it’s (only) the unfounded (in his eyes) accusation that makes Hagrid angry with the kids. Accuse Snape of hating Harry for something Harry couldn’t control and taking a point in pure spite? Hagrid denied the charge, but without meeting Harry’s eyes.

Claim that Severus Snape would try an’ kill a child, any child, even James Potter’s loathéd son, or try an’ steal the Stone?

Rubbish!

And we saw that Hagrid’s trust in the professor remained utterly unshaken as of Book 6. After Hagrid and Harry put out the fire after “The Flight of the Prince,” Hagrid asked

“But what happened, Harry? I jus’ saw them Death Eaters runnin’ down from the castle, but what the ruddy hell was Snape doin’ with them? Where’s he gone—was he chasin’ them?”

“He…” Harry cleared his throat; it was dry from panic and the smoke. “Hagrid, he killed…”

“Killed?” said Hagrid loudly, staring down at Harry. “Snape killed? What’re yeh on abou’, Harry?”

“Dumbledore,” said Harry. “Snape killed… Dumbledore.”

Hagrid simply looked at him, the little of his face that could be seen completely blank, uncomprehending.

“Dumbledore wha’, Harry?”

“He’s dead. Snape killed him.”

“Don’ say that,” said Hagrid roughly. “Snape kill Dumbledore—don’ be stupid, Harry. Wha’s made yeh say tha’?”

“I saw it happen.”

“Yeh couldn’ have.”

“I saw it, Hagrid.”

Hagrid shook his head; his expression was disbelieving but sympathetic, and Harry knew that Hagrid thought he had sustained a blow to the head, that he was confused, perhaps by the aftereffects of a jinx….

“What musta happened was, Dumbledore musta told Snape ter go with them Death Eaters,” Hagrid said confidently. “I suppose he’s gotta keep his cover.” (HBP, C28)

*

Contrast that with Minerva’s volte-face. In book one, when the Trio warned her that Snape would be trying to steal the Stone, she was as disbelieving as Hagrid.

“Look,” said Harry, throwing caution to the winds. “Professor—it’s about the Sorcerer’s Stone—”

Whatever Professor McGonagall had expected, it wasn’t that. The books she was carrying tumbled out of her arms, but she didn’t pick them up.

“How do you know—?” she spluttered

“Professor, I think—I know—that Sn—that someone’s going to try and steal the Stone. I’ve got to talk to Professor Dumbledore.”

She eyed him with a mixture of shock and suspicion.

“Professor Dumbledore will be back tomorrow,” she said finally. “I don’t know how you found out about the Stone, but rest assured, no one can possibly steal it, it’s too well protected.”

Two points. Like Hagrid, she seemed far more concerned with Harry’s illicit knowledge than with his actual accusations. Unlike Hagrid, she didn’t specifically rise up in indignant defense of Professor Snape.

But then, Harry knew better than to make a point of whom, precisely, he was accusing of being a thief, didn’t he? He let slip “Sn—“, but then changed his accusation to “someone.”

Which is a very interesting little clue about Harry’s perception at that time of the relationship between his most and least trusted teachers, when you think about it.

If I go so far as to accuse X of being about to attempt a crime, presumably I have (or think I have) solid evidence against X specifically. If, conversely, I say that I think “someone” is about to do it—well, that’s a much weaker accusation, and one much less likely to have real evidence in support. And therefore much less likely to be believed, or even listened to.

(Not that Minerva’s precisely a model of listening patiently to accusations she finds ludicrous.)

The only reason to change from the stronger to the weaker accusation is if one thinks that naming the accused will itself bias the authority against one’s case.

Or in simpler words, the only reason for Harry NOT to accuse Snape directly is if he thought (or more accurately, felt intuitively) that naming Snape would make McGonagall less, rather than more, likely to take his charge seriously. That is, that Harry believed that McGonagall, like Hagrid, would trust her own reading of Snape’s character above the Trio’s earnest, sincere, and indeed accurate (so far as it went) marshalling of evidence against him.

Which effect would, of course, be the exact opposite to the effect of mentioning Snape’s name in connection to villainy to Harry and Ron in book one, or indeed at any time.

And if Minerva DID notice whom, precisely, Potter was accusing of such a crime (I suspect she did, at least upon reflection: Harry’s change was hardly subtle), she did indeed dismiss out of hand Potter’s outrageous accusations against the professor he was known not to get on with.

Contrast that to her reaction in book six (c27):

“Harry, what happened? According to Hagrid, you were with Professor Dumbledore when he—when it happened. He says Professor Snape was involved in some—“

“Snape killed Dumbledore,” said Harry.

She stared at him for a moment, then swayed alarmingly; Madam Pomfrey, who seemed to have pulled herself together, ran forward, conjuring a chair from thin air, which she pushed under McGonagall.

“Snape,” repeated McGonagall faintly, falling into the chair. “We all wondered… but he trusted… always… Snape… I can’t believe it…”

[Of course she means here that she CAN believe it, but wishes she did not.]

…

“He [Dumbledore] always hinted that he had an ironclad reason for trusting Snape,” muttered Professor McGonagall, now dabbing at the corners of her leaking eyes with a tartan-edged handkerchief. “I mean… with Snape’s history… of course people were bound to wonder…. but Dumbledore told me explicitly that Snape’s repentance was absolutely genuine… wouldn’t hear a word against him!”

She TALKS about having to accept that DUMBLEDORE was wrong about Snape.

But we can contrast her visceral reaction with Lupin’s, whose opinion about Snape was, per what he’d told Harry eleven chapters earlier (c16), that “It comes down to whether or not you trust Dumbledore’s judgment. I do: therefore, I trust Severus.”

Iron Minerva almost fainted at Harry’s eyewitness confirmation of the report that Snape was somehow “involved” in Dumbledore’s death. That Snape had killed him.

Lupin merely said harshly, “Snape was a highly accomplished Occlumens…. We always knew that.”

Which was shocked and stunned at having had a former trust betrayed, and which merely that Snape had managed to fool Dumbledore?

But both believe immediately that the charge must be true.

*

In the previous discussion of Snape’s relationships with his colleagues, I pointed out that in book two, their all allowing him to take point in the united attack against Gilderoy demonstrated that—at that time—they

trusted that Snape, like them, had at heart the best interests of the school and of the students.

Click here for the earlier discussion.

http://asylums.insanejournal.com/snapedom/154280.html

When did that trust shatter, and why?

*

I had previously argued that it was only Dumbledore’s murder itself that shattered it. But on reflection, the fact that Hagrid, and only Hagrid, entirely disregarded Harry’s eyewitness statement, shows that indeed Snape’s other colleagues’ trust in him had been previously compromised.

Their trust in Snape might well have changed when Snape showed Fudge his Dark Mark. The discovery that the youthful Severus had not merely run with a bad crowd for a time at Hogwarts, but had actually pledged himself to Voldemort, might well have caused his colleagues to revise their earlier, generally favorable, impressions of him.

Only—surely Dumbledore told Snape’s shocked colleagues at least as much as he’d said in Karkaroff’s hearing (and had told the Ministry previously), that Snape had changed sides and spied on the Death Eaters for Dumbledore “at great personal risk.”

Anyone at all conversant with the tactics employed by Lord Voldemort and his followers in the first war could make a moderately-informed guess as to how “great” a “personal risk” the double agent must have faced when he “changed sides.”

So, Snape had made a terrible mistake in giving himself to Voldemort, had quickly repudiated it, and had risked death and horrific torture to make amends for his original mistake. All Dumbledore would have had to add was that Snape had turned his cloak at the very time that Voldie seemed to be winning, while cowards were flocking in the other direction, and Snape would look like a hero, and his colleagues’ previous trust in him would be reinforced.

If, of course, Dumbledore wished it to be reinforced.

*

However.

There’s the matter of Snape’s cover.

Dumbledore might well have thought that Snape’s “return” to Voldemort would look more convincing if his colleagues did NOT truly trust his character, but rather extended the same ‘trust’ that Lupin did:

“Dumbledore trusts Severus, and that ought to be good enough for the rest of us.” (HBP16)

Voldemort knew (or thought he did) why Dumbledore believed in Snape’s repentance. If Dumbledore’s followers accepted Snape merely on Dumbledore’s say-so but didn’t fully themselves trust him, Snape would be rendered by that suspicion a less useful agent to Voldemort, to Tom’s disappointment.

However, their acceptance of Snape would then demonstrate merely their unswerving belief in Dumbledore’s infallibility, not that Snape might have legitimately earned their trust by demonstrating his personal probity and his loyalty to the school, the students, his headmaster, or his colleagues.

Conversely, if Snape’s colleagues universally (or even generally) seemed to accept him as someone who’d established his reputation as a good person, a teacher who clearly cared about the well-being of his students and his school….

We-ell, that wouldn’t exactly be the type of person who could find any reason to welcome Voldemort’s return, would it? Whereas a sadistic opportunist whose sick schemes to revenge himself on his old enemies’ kids had, for years, been partly reined-in by Dumbledore, might well think that a Voldemort regime would afford him more opportunities for self-expression.

So, if Snape’s colleagues trusted him too implicitly, it should follow that Voldemort should not.

So it might actually be helpful if Snape’s colleagues generally regarded Severus with a tinge of suspicion….

If so, was it merely the revelation of the Dark Mark that induced this?

In fact, wouldn’t it be much better if Snape had induced reservations among his colleagues long before then? Would Dumbledore not think it better if Voldemort’s sources reported (WELL before Voldemort’s call to Severus to resume his active service) that the double agent was regarded with some reservations by the other teachers, that they had {felt they had] good reason to harbor doubts about Snape’s underlying character?

This question, after ten years of apparent peace, might well have arisen to haunt Albus and Severus in the year that they first seriously entertained fears of Tom’s attempting an imminent return.

AKA Harry’s first year at Hogwarts.

*

Severus had good independent reasons to establish himself, to Harry and the children of former Death-Eaters, as a Harry-hater in the very first class. That taking a point unfairly might cause his colleagues to feel Snape’s former (and natural and well-founded) antipathy to James was leading Severus to behave a bit unprofessionally towards Potter’s innocent son, might of itself have been collateral damage rather than a deliberate effect.

But there was an event later that fall, after Severus and Albus had clear cause to suspect Quirrell, which also must have lowered Snape in his colleague’s esteem.

Remind me again: why, exactly, did Snape volunteer to referee Harry’s second Quidditch match?

Oh yeah, to run interference between Quirrell!mort and Harry.

Which can obviously better be done on a fast-moving broom, while keeping track (official track, no less, with an interested and partisan audience critiquing one’s every call) of thirteen other children’s shenanigans and three balls (one of them a lethal missile)…

Than from the ground, focusing only on Quirrell and the probable victim.

As Severus had done in the previous match.

And Snape’s heroic, self-sacrificing, and obvious (to Voldemort) interference in Quirrell’s murderous plot was, in the event, rendered entirely null and void by Dumbledore’s last-minute decision to attend the match himself.

Really, shouldn’t Severus and Albus, sole co-conspirators in saving Harry, have been a little better coordinated with each other?

But, of course, we KNOW that running interference was Snape’s REAL motivation for refereeing, because we were TOLD so.

In confidence.

By Tom.

Whose record for truthfulness very nearly matches Albus’s.

However, in this case I reluctantly concede that Tommy was almost certainly the sinned-against, rather than the sinner.

Only, Tom’s record on figuring out what his loyal servant Severus was really up to wasn’t exactly stellar either, was it now?

Let’s look at what Quirrell!mort said:

“Snape was trying to save me?” [said Harry]

“Of course,” said Quirrell coolly. “Why do you think he wanted to referee your next match? He was trying to make sure I didn’t do it again. Funny, really…. he needn’t have bothered. I couldn’t do anything with Dumbledore watching. All the other teachers thought Snape was trying to stop Gryffindor from winning; he did make himself unpopular…. and what a waste of time, when after all that, I’m going to kill you tonight.” (PS, c 17)

*

I’m reminded (appallingly belatedly) of a comment I put in the mouth of the perceptive Miss Lovegood in my fanfic “The Protean Charm”:

“One of the things I came to understand is that, when dealing with the smarter Slytherins, one should always at least consider the possibility that what DOES happen is what they WANTED to make happen.”

*

So… what DID happen as a result of Snape refereeing that match?

Severus “made himself unpopular” among his fellow teachers. He established a reputation for himself as a cheater.

His colleagues considered that he went beyond the line of what was acceptable for a Head of House in cheating for Quidditch (such as “bending” a hundred-year ban on allowing first year students to play, or letting team members off homework in one’s classes the week of a match).

And, per the Weasley twins—our probable source for Ron’s original “information” that Snape blatantly favored his own house—he’d never done such a thing before.

Oh.

Is there a wall handy to bash my head against?

*

But of course there’s a huge difference between being willing to cheat a little too much to get the Quidditch Cup (after all, Quidditch!), and being willing to countenance harm to one’s students. Someone condemned roundly as a cheat might still be trusted not to deliberately hurt children under his care.

And the incident at the end of CoS where the other teachers followed Severus unhesitatingly in his attack on Gilderoy showed that they did then so trust Snape.

Harry believed (perhaps from the start) that Snape (Professor Snape, Harry!) enjoyed humiliating, frightening, and hurting his less-favorite students. Snape’s fellow teachers, however, might have evaluated him differently. They might possibly have thought that Severus was a little too free in his use of intimidation and sarcasm, but after all they themselves used ridicule (Minerva, Sybill, Filius, Hagrid), threats (Minerva, Hagrid), and abusing pets as experimental subjects (Filius) in their own classes. So if Severus’s colleagues disagreed in any respect with his disciplinary methods, it was about the degree rather than the kind of the methods he used.

And we readers repeatedly watched Severus issue threats he had neither the authority nor the true desire to follow through on. Harry’s worst fear was being expelled from Hogwarts, and Snape constantly threatened Harry with that.

But in fact, from book one on, Snape instead regularly helped to shield Harry when his misdeeds might have earned such a punishment. (In book one, Snape blackmailed the Malfoys into covering up Hagrid’s Azkaban-worthy illegal dragon, and the Trio’s expulsion-worthy complicity with him, and Harry and Hermione’s actually bringing the dragon into the school proper…. In book three, he assured the Minister that the children had been bewitched by Black into mounting their assault on Snape… In book six, an assault that would probably have been lethal but for his intervention---well. ‘Nuff said.)

It seems probable that Severus made other empty threats as well. (Indeed, in book four, Harry thought that Snape was repeatedly threatening to poison Harry, which manifestly never happened.)

Perhaps Severus might, on some occasions, have threatened to poison or to use as potions ingredients the next pet some dunderhead had improperly introduced into his classroom?

If Snape’s colleague had all repeatedly heard from students that Snape had issued such threats, or had heard Severus ranting in the staffroom about what he’d like to do the next time some student was idiot enough to bring a bloody pet to a class involving fire and volatile ingredients which included the damned pet’s bloody internal organs—didn’t the children REALIZE what might HAPPEN if a toad jumped into the wrong pot…?

And if Snape’s fellow teachers had all dismissed that Snapely ranting as fellow-instructor hot air—well, it must have been a considerable and unpleasant shock when Severus eventually followed through on the threat.

Maybe Harry and the Death Eaters’ children in Snape’s third-year Potions class weren’t the only target audience for Severus’s elaborate charade of poisoning Trevor.

Maybe they weren’t even the primary one.

*

The other Heads of House all backed Severus when he attacked Gilderoy near the end of Harry’s second year. At the very beginning of the next year, in one of his first classes, Snape (seemed to) cross another line in his treatment of students he disliked.

Hogwarts permitted instructors to confiscate pets brought to class and use them as experimental subjects, true. Filius demonstrated that in one of Harry’s first-year Charms classes. But to try actually to kill one…. no, that went too far. And the additional cruelty of using the little boy’s own botched poison to do so, making the child an involuntary accomplice to his pet’s death, his own incompetence the cause—

That’s just evil.

Snape’s s colleagues might well have had cause that night to exclaim in the staffroom, as Slughorn did some three years later: “Snape! I thought I knew him!”

Click here for my analysis of how Snape had never any intention nor expectation of doing Trevor any harm—he expected and intended Hermione to help Neville fix his potion, and was simply seizing the opportunity to establish firmly in the children’s minds that he was totally a sadistic bastard who would happily torture a little boy’s pet to death in front of him—without having to DO anything of the sort.

http://asylums.insanejournal.com/snapedom/263723.html

I’ll just digress to add that, on further rereading, there’s one nuance that I missed before. Snape capped his villainous performance by hissing, “Five points from Gryffindor. I told you not to help him, Miss Granger. Class dismissed.”

But in fact he had not told her that. He’d said only, when Hermione first volunteered to help Neville fix the potion, “I don’t remember asking you to show off, Miss Granger.”

If the KIDS had noticed this discrepancy, they’d simply have taken it as further proof of how unfair that big meanie was. However, Miss Granger and Mr. Longbottom were the most—maybe the only—law-abiding kids in Gryffindor. At that point in Granger’s career, if a teacher HAD directly ordered her not to help another student, there was the risk that she might have obeyed. Couldn’t take that risk….

So Snape turned down her offer with an insult but did not directly forbid her to do help. But at the very end he implanted in the children’s minds the suggestion that he HAD ordered her not to, and that our plucky Gryffindor heroes had been brave enough to directly disobey the villain’s evil orders. Much more heroic to defy the villain than to sneak behind his (carefully-turned) back!

A couple more points.

Neville’s other teachers had their noses firmly rubbed in just how deeply Neville had been traumatized by the incident by the news that Professor Snape had actually terrorized the boy so much as to become Neville’s boggart.

Which, by a stunning coincidence, was revealed that very afternoon.

By sheerest chance, a boggart moved into, of all places, a wardrobe in the staffroom—the only room other than Professor Snape’s own office or quarters where Severus might reasonably be found during his free periods. And the ONLY room (of the above cited) where another teacher might reasonably bring students for a practicum.

This boggart moved in the very day before Professor Snape’s lesson on brewing Shrinking Solution with the Gryffindors. And the day before Professor Lupin’s very first lesson with them.

And Lupin, also coincidentally, decided that defeating a boggart would make a very nice introductory practical lesson for his Gryffs.

Er, on whose suggestion?

Dumbledore and Snape couldn’t have known for sure that this part would work, but it was certainly worth a try.

*

For that matter, how many potions ARE there that can be botched in such a manner that a precocious fourteen-year-old could be relied upon to fix them? We certainly never saw Hermione help Harry or Ron to correct any of their messes.

And wasn’t it a fortunate coincidence that Neville just happened to make the exact mistakes in brewing this specific potion that Hermione knew exactly how to correct?

Should we really blame Neville’s notoriously bad memory here for the fact that he forgot that one rat spleen only was needed, and that a mere dash of leech juice would suffice?

Tsk, tsk, Professor Snape. I confess myself disappointed in you. Confunding a student must surely be considered most unprofessional behavior.

I had originally believed that our Severus had taken lightening-fast advantage of an opportunity that presented himself, to blacken his reputation without having to really cause physical harm.

Which we know he was reluctant to do.

After all, a professor of Hogwarts endeavoring, for political reasons, to establish a reputation for being a sadist might easily do so by, oh, say, repeatedly casting Unforgiveables on small animals in front of children whose parents had been tortured and killed by those same curses. (Relishing the child’s reactions, refusing to stop until another child—Miss Granger---shrilly put a stop to the direct torture of the spider and the indirect torture of Neville.)

In the interests of showing them what they’re up against, of course.

Or by turning a child s/he didn’t like—it would seem that in Snape’s case he’d have a wide selection of potential victimsl—into a small animal and repeated slamming the fragile body against a stone floor.

Or by permanently mutilating children in his detentions.

Or even have demonstrated his callousness about human suffering by insisting that children injured in his class wait until class was over to get medical attention for any injuries that were not actually life-threatening.

All atrocities we saw other Hogwarts instructors get away with performing [Barty, Barty, Dolores, & both Barty & Hagrid].

As I said, at first I assumed that Snape had seized an unforeseen (at most, maybe hoped-for) opportunity to use Neville and Trevor to put on a performance as pet-torturing sadist without having to harm a child’s pet.

But the more I think about that boggart, the more the whole thing smells to me like a deep-laid plan.

For what did our plucky Gryffindors find lying in wait for them when they entered that staffroom? Snape, “a nasty sneer playing around his mouth.”

And what had he been waiting to do?

He got to his feet and strode past the class, his black robes billowing behind him. At the doorway he turned on his heel and said, “Possibly no one’s warned you, Lupin, but this class contains Neville Longbottom. I would advise you not to entrust him with anything difficult. Not unless Miss Granger is hissing instructions in his ear.”

Deliberately drawing Neville’s attention to the last class and to Neville’s terror that his own incompetence would be used to kill his pet.

Remember too Neville’s (apparently quite rational) fear the year before: “They went for Filch first. And everyone knows I’m almost a Squib.” (CoS, 11) Neville’s a pure-blood; he knows perfectly well how his world treats those of even the purest of blood who are Squibs or nearly so. Neville’s own great-uncle Algie had demonstrated more than once how highly valued was the life of someone useless at magic (PS 7).

Really, the transference was neatly done. Neville’s long-standing (and well-founded) terror that he was magically incompetent and that his own world would kill him for this, were directed with one caustic comment onto that menacing (and eminently competent) figure in billowing black robes who had just tried to kill innocent Trevor … to punish Neville for incompetence.

And—surprise!—all Neville’s anxieties did indeed crystallize into one sinister boggart-image: Professor Snape, black eyes flashing, reaching inside his robes as though to pull his wand and attack...

One wonders—had Snape also been specifically ordered to give Lupin an opportunity to look good to Harry and the Gryffs? For he certainly managed that as well. If so, that part of the order must have burned him. As must the certainty that if the ploy did work, Lupin would be afforded the opportunity to make Snape look ridiculous in front of the Gryffs—and by gossip, the whole school. The Marauders strike again!

However, Lupin couldn’t have been that happy either; a closeted werewolf could hardly have wanted to demonstrate publicly that his boggart was the full moon.

I should imagine that Snape took a curtain call in the staffroom that evening, sneering icily, “I was entirely within my rights to use the child’s pet as an experimental subject, since he himself brought it into my class. I very much doubt that Mr. Longbottom will ever again presume to do so. The rest of you should be grateful; you’ve suffered as much as I from the ever-escaping Trevor, and one way or the other, I managed to put an end to that toad’s unexpected appearances in our classrooms.

“…What? I should be concerned that I’m the boy’s boggart? Excuse me? His parents are in St. Mungo’s, incurably insane from the Cruciatus, and the worst thing the boy can picture is me? I’m hardly to blame for that dunderhead’s utter lack of imagination.”

*

If the Trevor incident were indeed what broke his colleagues’ previous trust that Severus Snape was at heart a decent man who usually put his students’ welfare above his own petty feelings, Hagrid’s exemption from that otherwise-universal change of opinion is also readily explicated.

One, poisoning a toad, even a pet one, might well seem much less shocking to the man whose main job for fifty years had been killing animals to order.

We know that Hagrid doesn’t particularly care for toads (he disparaged them in book one), and at this point in canon he’d barely met Neville, to be care especially about Neville’s feelings. So to Hagrid, It’s not like Snape had committed an offense like trying to poison a dragon or somethin’ innerestin’.

(And later in the book we see Hagrid reproving Ron for his grudge against Hermione over Scabbers’ “death,” indicating that he doesn’t particularly empathize with other people’s love for their animals, however ferociously he may love his own monsters.)

But … two, this all happened at the exact same time that Hagrid was spending much of his time in a drunken stupor over Buckbeak’s attack on Draco. Remember, the Trevor incident happened in the very same class to which Draco swanned in late, having just at that moment been released by Madam Pomfrey. Hagrid wasn’t hanging out much with the other teachers, to hear their shocked murmurs about an attempted toad-killing and how traumatized poor little Nevile was by it.

It’s even possible Hagrid never heard about it at all. By the time he was paying attention to anything but his own troubles, it was all old news.

*

One last thing. If Severus had indeed, for years, been threatening to kill the next pet brought to his class, and had finally tried to make good on what his colleagues had always previously taken to be a completely empty threat—then how could said colleagues be ever after be quite sure which others of Severus’s threats hadn’t really been empty?

Like the ones about wanting to kill someone, say?

It’s truly terrible to realize that you don’t know at all where someone would draw the line—if they have lines left to draw—just that it’s not where you would. Living with an alcoholic parent who was intermittently abusive when drunk taught me that: even when she wasn’t at the moment doing anything, there was no way of knowing what she might do if her mood shifted. The uncertainty left me with dreadful anxiety even when nothing at all bad was happening.

I couldn’t know what she might do next, and I was never quite sure if there were, in fact, anything at all she wouldn’t do.

The teenaged boy has for years been subjected to merciless attacks for no valid reason. His enemies taunt him at every opportunity, try to discredit him before his peers, repeatedly attack him physically, verbally, and magically. His tormentors have even attempted to kill him. Moreover, his enemies have not restricted these attentions to him; they have repeatedly, openly, taunted and attacked innocent bystanders, and, he believes, (correctly) even endangered others’ lives—mostly without reprisal, save what he and his friends can inflict.

The Ministry of Magic is both corrupt and ineffectual. And the boy knows that some at least of the authorities side with the richest and most influential of his enemies.

But there is a third group, led by a powerful, brilliant, and charismatic outsider. Eccentric, yes; he has some strange ideas. Some say that he could have been the Minister of Magic, but he preferred to work outside the conventional power structures, untrammeled by bureaucratic constraints. (Though he too has strings to pull at the Ministry.) This third group offers the boy, if not protection precisely (he still isn’t safe), at least people on his side fighting his attackers. And they accept him; they show that they value his talents.

The boy is by nature a bit of a loner; his neglectful and abusive childhood has left him inclined to insist now on self-reliance. When he does allow himself to love a friend, he’s fiercely loyal, sometimes blindly so. But he’s not really much of a joiner.

But he has little choice here: the other side will attack him whatever he does. So does he fight alone, does he support the degenerate and incompetent Ministry, or does he throw in his lot with the charismatic outsider?

Harry and Dumbledore’s Order...