Chapter Text
September 1st: Year 3 - 1990–1991
The kitchen was too quiet, which was how Mara knew to be careful. She had learned, over thirteen years, that noise was rarely the dangerous thing in her house. It was the silences that mattered. There was the comfortable silence of her mother reading by the window, mug of cooling tea balanced on the arm of the chair, and there was this one: the too-still, too-careful quiet of a woman holding something in with both hands.
Mara set her trunk down by the door without letting the latches clatter, and waited. "You've got everything?" her mother asked, not turning from the sink. "Yes, Mum." "Socks. You always forget socks." "I checked twice." Her mother nodded, a small, tight motion, and went on scrubbing a pan that had already been clean for several minutes. Mara watched the line of her shoulders the way she might watch a kettle about to boil. Not with fear exactly, not anymore, but with the automatic, practiced attention of someone checking a gauge. Fine. Still fine. She let her own shoulders come down half an inch.
There had been a letter from her father in July. Mara knew this only because her mother had gone very quiet for two days afterward and then, on the third day, burned something that hadn't needed burning and cried about it in a way that had nothing to do with the pan. Mara hadn't asked what the letter said. She had learned not to ask questions she couldn't do anything useful with the answer to.
"You'll write," her mother said. Not quite a question. "Every week. Like always." "Good girl." It cost Mara nothing to say the words that made the kitchen stay easy, and so she said them, and meant enough of them to make it true. She loved her mother. She had simply also learned, the way other children learned times tables, exactly how much weight her mother's good days could carry, and how to keep from adding to the bad ones.
By the time they reached King's Cross her mother's hands had stopped their small, restless motions, which was as good as fine got most mornings. Mara hugged her at the barrier, quick and real, and did not look back more than once as she wheeled her trunk through the crowd toward Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, because looking back too long only ever made both of them worse at goodbyes.
-
The scarlet steam let its whistle go, and something in Mara's chest loosened for the first time in weeks. She found Lydia by the smell of it. An actual, specific smell, cinnamon and pumpkin and the particular waxiness of a new schoolbag, because Lydia Abbott's mother believed firmly that a girl ought to arrive at school smelling of home baking, whatever the practicalities of eight hours on a train might suggest.
"You look thin," Lydia said, by way of greeting, hauling her into the compartment by the sleeve. "Did you eat over summer, or just, think about eating?" "I ate," Mara said. "You look the same as June, which I mean as a compliment." "It is one. Consistency is a virtue." Lydia flopped into the seat across from her and produced, from some fold of her robes, a slightly squashed treacle tart wrapped in paper. "Mum made too many. Eat."
Mara ate. It was, she thought, one of the nicer things about Lydia. That she never asked how was your summer in the particular searching way some people did, the way that made Mara have to decide, quickly, how much of the truth a question deserved. Lydia asked about the tart instead, and about whether Mara's cousin's cat had ever forgiven her for the incident with the gnome, and about whether third year would really be as bad as Bertram Aucoin claimed.
The compartment door slid open without a knock. "Is this seat taken, or are you two just very good at looking unfriendly?" They boy had ink on his hands already, September the first, which Mara noted with the same reflexive attention she noted everything. Sandy-haired, a Gryffindor tie done up crooked, a look about him like he'd run rather than walked to make the train.
"Depends what you did to earn it," Lydia said. "Nothing yet. Give me a term." He dropped into the seat beside Mara without waiting for an actual answer, which she found she didn't mind, and stuck out a hand. "Warren Fletcher." "Lydia Abbott. This is Mara." "Mara what?" "Just Mara for now," Mara said. "You haven't earned the surname." Warren grinned like this delighted him rather than offended him, which told her something useful before he'd said another word. "Fair. What d'you reckon? A new professor for Care of Magical Creatures this year? My cousin says the last one quit over the summer. Something to do with a Puffskein infestation gone wrong." "That's not how Puffskeins work," Mara said, before she could decide whether it was worth saying. "How would you know?" "Because I read the book before term instead of just the title." It came out dry, not unkind, and she watched him blink and then laugh outright, delighted all over again.
By Scotland the three of them had settled into the particular, easy shorthand of people who suspect they're going to spend a great deal of time together and don't yet know how right they are. Warren ate half of Lydia's second tart without asking. Lydia told a long, complicated story about her cousin's wedding that Mara only half followed but enjoyed anyway, for the shape of it more than the content.
Mara said little, as she generally did, and noticed everything, as she always did. She found that this specific arrangement of two other people, was the closest thing she had to the quiet, safe kitchen silence rather than the dangerous kind.
-
The Great Hall in September always struck Mara the same way: too much light, too much noise, four hundred voices bouncing off stone that had heard four hundred voices bounce off it for a thousand years. She liked it anyway. There was a kind of safety in a crowd that large. No single person's mood could tip the whole room.
She caught, halfway through the first years' Sorting, a familiar profile at the staff table: black hair, black robes, a stillness that seemed almost deliberate against the general fidgeting of the other professors. Professor Snape wasn't watching the Sorting particularly closely. He was watching the Hall generally, the way she watched a room herself. "He gives me the shivers," Lydia murmured, following her gaze. "Genuinely. I had one lesson with him last year where he didn't even shout and it was worse." "He's fine if you don't mess anything up," said Warren, from Lydia's other side, with the easy confidence of a boy who had, in fact, messed several things up in his first two years and lived to tell it. "Mostly just ignores you."
Mara said nothing. She had had two years of Potions and no particular opinion of Professor Snape beyond a vague, background awareness that he was someone to be careful around, filed in the same drawer as don't run in the East corridor after Peeves has had a bad day and the greenhouse tree has something that stings. She had never been shouted at by him. She had also never, she realized now, been looked at by him.
It did not occur to her, watching him from three tables away while Lydia pointed out which first years looked likely to cry, that this would be the year that changed.
-
Potions was the last class before lunch on Wednesday, and the dungeon was, as ever, several degrees colder than seemed strictly necessary. Professor Snape did not raise his voice to begin the lesson. He never did. He simply stopped talking to the room in general and started talking to the room in particular, and the particular attention had a way of making forty thirteen-year-olds go still all at once, the way a held breath goes still.
"Third year," he said, "means I no longer have the luxury of assuming ignorance excuses incompetence. The Swelling Solution requires precision I have not, in two years, seen the majority of you demonstrate. I would advise those of you who intend to continue being disappointing to do so quietly, and out of my line of sight." He set them to work with the particular economy of someone who resented explaining things twice.
Mara had always liked Potions, in the private, unshowy way she liked most things that rewarded attention. There was a comfort in it, a set of rules that, unlike people, did not change their minds. Add the porcupine quills too soon and the potion would tell you so, honestly, every time. She stirred her cauldron the recommended seven times clockwise, added the leeches at the recommended interval, and did not look up from her work. In her experience of adults, not being noticed was generally the safer position.
She had nearly finished, the potion gone the correct pale, uneasy pink the textbook promised, when the shadow fell across her table. She hadn't heard him come. That itself unsettled her slightly. Mara heard most things. "You've added the leeches early," said Professor Snape. "Two minutes early, sir. The book allows a margin either side of the fifteen-minute mark for consistency of dragon liver batch." There was a pause. It was not the pause of a man considering whether she was right. It was the pause of a man deciding how much he minded being told he might be wrong.
"Did I ask for a recitation of the footnotes, Miss —" "Hawthorne, sir." "Miss Hawthorne." He said her surname the way he said most words, precisely, with no more air behind it than necessary. "I asked you a question. I did not ask for your opinion of the acceptable margin." "No, Professor." She kept her eyes on the potion, not his face, which was, she'd found over thirteen years of practice with a much more frightening kind of unpredictability, generally the wiser place to look.
"I only meant that the timing wasn't an error." "I did not say it was an error." His voice had gone very soft, which she was already beginning to understand -faster than most of her classmates, who still flinched hardest at volume- was worse than loud. "I said you'd added them early. Whether that constitutes an error is a determination I am equipped to make, and you are not, three weeks into your third year of instruction."
Mara said nothing. There did not seem to be a version of sorry, Professor that wouldn't sound either falsely contrite or, worse, sarcastic, and she had learned long before Hogwarts that the wrong tone of apology could make things sharply worse rather than better. She simply went still, the specific, deliberate stillness she kept for her mother's bad evenings, and waited for the weather to pass.
It seemed to unsettle him, faintly, or she thought it did, in the half-second before he moved on to loom over the Cross boy's cauldron instead, which had begun, with a soft hiss, to smoke in a colour not found anywhere in the textbook. She couldn't have said what exactly she'd seen. Only that the pause before he turned away had lasted a fraction longer than the reprimand had needed.
Her potion, when she decanted it at the end of the lesson, was the correct pale pink, and earned no comment at all, which she understood even then, to be the closest thing to praise Professor Snape handed out.
-
"He's awful," Lydia said with relish over dinner, recounting the whole thing to Warren as though he hadn't been three tables down and hadn't actually heard most of it. "Properly awful. Poor Mara didn't even do anything." "I added the leeches two minutes early," Mara said. "That's not doing something, that's a rounding error." "He didn't say it was wrong. He said I shouldn't have said why."
Warren looked between them, faintly delighted by the whole exchange in the way he seemed to be delighted by most conflict that wasn't his own. "Sounds like he just doesn't like being right second." Mara considered this and found, to her mild surprise, that it fit rather well. She filed it away without deciding yet what to do with it, the way she filed most things about people she didn't yet understand.
Curfew in the Hufflepuff dormitories was, by long and comfortable tradition, taken as a strong suggestion rather than a law, provided one didn't get caught, and Lydia had never in three years let a good excuse for staying up go to waste.
"Library," she said that first Friday, tugging her dressing gown on over her pyjamas with the seriousness of a general arming for battle. "Madam Pince won't chase us out till nine if we're quiet, and I want to look at the picture in that book on magical creatures of Albania before Care of Magical Creatures ruins the mystique." "You could look at it during the day." "During the day it's full of people wanting to talk to me." Lydia said this as though it were self-evidently a design flaw in daytime.
They found Warren already there, feet up on a chair he had no business putting feet up on, halfway through what appeared to be either homework or a nap, it was difficult to say which. The library at that hour had a particular hush to it. Candlelight rather than the daytime brightness, the smell of old paper and dust, Madam Pince's quill scratching somewhere among the shelves like a small persistent insect.
Mara liked it best of anywhere in the castle, though she would not have said so aloud even to Lydia. There was a kind of silence here that asked nothing of her. Not her mother's careful silence, not the dangerous kind, not even the comfortable-but-managed quiet of the Hufflepuff common room where she was always half a degree aware of who else was in the room and what mood they carried. Here, no one needed reading except for the numerous books in the shelves. The books simply sat, and waited, and told the truth every time you opened them, the same reliable honesty she loved in a well-brewed potion.
She spent the hour with a book on basic wandless theory she had no immediate use for, mostly because the chapter on non-verbal control of small, contained magical effects had caught her eye, and there was something in the idea of containing a thing precisely, of holding a door shut through sheer discipline of mind, that appealed to her in a way she couldn't yet have explained even to herself.
They were chased out at nine, as promised, by Madam Pince's basilisk stare rather than her voice, and made their way back through corridors gone dim and cool, Warren narrating an increasingly implausible theory about who the new Care of Magical Creatures professor might actually be. Lydia arguing every point on principle, Mara saying little and cataloguing. Just three friends, a corridor and the ordinary tiredness of a first week done.
It was rather a good beginning to the year. She did not think of Professor Snape again before she slept. It would be some time yet before she understood that he had, in the privacy of his own quarters two floors below, thought of her -a girl who had cited a footnote at him without a trace of impertinence in her voice- and had gone very still under correction in a way that struck him, distantly and without him quite wanting it to, as familiar.
-
Severus Snape did not, as a rule, remember individual students. He remembered mistakes: a badly minced root, an ill-timed stir, the particular acrid smell of a Swelling Solution gone wrong that told him precisely which student had rushed the leeches. And he remembered, with more permanence than he would have liked, the handful of students each year who were either dangerously careless or, more rarely, dangerously competent. Competence, in his experience, was the more useful thing to watch. Careless students injured themselves and occasionally each other. Competent ones, unwatched, became complacent, and complacency was where real damage began.
The Hawthorne girl's potion had been correct. Not merely passable, correct, down to a shade of pink the textbook description rendered in words that most thirteen-year-olds couldn't translate into a cauldron if their lives depended on it. She had also, when reprimanded for a decision that had in fact been the right one, said nothing further in her own defence beyond the single necessary correction, and had then gone still in a manner he associated (though he did not examine the association closely, having long ago stopped examining most of his own associations closely, as a matter of general policy) with people who had learned, the hard way, that further words rarely improved a bad moment.
He set the thought aside, as he set aside most thoughts about students that threatened to become anything more than professional assessment, and turned his attention to the far more pressing matter of Cross' cauldron, which had, for the third year running, proven itself an object worthy of considerably more concern than any third-year girl with tidy handwriting and an inconvenient habit of being right.