Chapter Text
“—And do you know what occurred on the train, Professor? I offered him my hand. My hand! And he refuses! Even after I sincerely apologized for his parents being dead when we were at Madam Malkin’s!”
Lyra Malfoy paced in front of Snape’s desk, her aristocrat’s blonde hair swaying to-and-fro with each pivot of the foot.
“I was being perfectly civil! Father always says a Malfoy ought to make a good first impression. I even tried to explain to him how things worked. And what does he do…? He associates with that riffraff, Weasley.”
“A most grievous insult, I am sure.” Snape murmured, not looking up from grading parchment. A comment about brevity to Percy’s long-winded all-knowings, a binaural threat of detention on Fred's upper-left corner and the George's upper-right corner to match their binaural cheek.
“Exactly!” Lyra practically jumping in her own skin at excitement from someone finally getting it. “I even introduced Crabbe and Goyle! Potter probably can’t even tell one of them apart from the other. I can tell which one’s which, most of the time! And it’s like Potter’s everyone’s favorite! Potter—”
“Miss Malfoy. Sit.”
Lyra did as she told, putting her legs together and her hands on her hands on her lap like there were important guests being hosted at the dinner table. The coldness of the dungeon became more apparent with her back up against the chair.
“Five hundred and thirty-one Galleons, twelve Sickles, and five Knuts…” Snape deliberately recounted the denominations of his monthly salary as if they were ingredients to a potion being individually weighed on the scale.
“Hm?” Lyra’s train of thought halted at hearing about some trivial amount of money. “Is that some sort of poor kid’s allowance? Is it Longbottom’s?”
“Together, with room and board, I have considered it adequate remuneration. Until now.” Snape drawled on the second R in ‘remuneration’. “The incessant mewlings of an eleven-year-old child have obliged me to reconsider.” This time he picked the W in mewlings.
Snape had set aside his quill and parchment at this point. He was looking directly at her.
“Professor, I only meant to—”
“I am perfectly aware of what you meant, Miss Malfoy. You have made your position concerning Potter abundantly clear. Of his lackluster intelligence, of his glasses, of his hair, of his arrogance, of his choice of friends, and most repeatedly—of his prior rejection of you. On three separate occasions in my office now, in the short eleven days following the start of the term.”
Snape paused. In less than a fortnight since entering Hogwarts, young Lyra Malfoy had deemed it appropriate to visit his office on three separate days to rant about the exact same subject.
“Do not make it four.” Snape commanded with a dead-eyed stare, the dread of the potionmaster’s gloom filling the room.
Had this been nearly any other student, there would not have been a second or third either. It was unlikely there would have even been a first. This was Snape being nice.
But…
“HEY!” Lyra stood up as she slammed both of her hands down on Snape’s black desk, loud enough for the gloomy shelves’ glass jars filled with pickled-green-somethings to vibrate back alive for a moment with a ringing chorus. “You’re Severus Snape, aren’t you?! My father said you were a first year when he was a seventh year, right?! That means he’s your senior, which means I’m practically your senior too!! And he’s on the Board of Governors, so I’m also Dumbledore’s senior!! Do something about Pottah you filthy greasy bloody…blood-half!”
“…”
“Half-blood!” Lyra self-corrected her slur.
Had Lucius’s spawn been born a prince rather than a princess, that finality of Snape’s grim ‘Do not make it four’ should have been enough to pop all of the hot air then and there.
Being that Lyra Malfoy was instead a pampered little girl who seemed quite comfortable in the fact that she always got whatever she wanted, however, she wasn’t that bad. She was worse. This one would shout at the dragon from inside its maw, until the moment came that its teeth clamped down on her and she experienced pain for the very first time in her life.
And it was an ignorance that was well-founded.
—The Dark Lord will return. Or so Albus had said.
If—and when that time came, a loudmouth little girl saying the wrong thing to right person could have implications for Snape’s future unofficial duties under Dumbledore. Especially if that person were the Dark Lord’s former chief lieutenant.
And so, everything Snape said to her had to be poured and measured down to the millimeter.
—Snape refreshed his quill in the inkpot, and resumed to grading the stack of Gryffindor papers. He always sorted his graded assignments by house, not by year.
“And—what—would you like me to have done with Mr Potter?”
“Well…” Lyra’s evil green eyes looked off to the side, averting Snape's gaze for a moment. “We could have him transferred to Slytherin. That way we can keep an eye on him more directly, and you can punish him whenever you wish!”
“An excellent idea, Miss Malfoy. If only I had the administrative capacity or even the slightest desire to see Potter in my House.”
“Then throw him out, send him back wherever he came from! Make it so I don’t have to see his stupid face anymore!”
“Expulsion, then? And what shall I write in my letter to Professor Dumbledore that will persuade him toward your opinion?”
“That Potter’s not that special. Potter’s not that great. And he’s full of himself. And he’s an utter dunce who couldn’t even answer any of Professor Snape’s questions in our first potions class last Friday, you remember!”
“I was present.” Professor Snape commented dryly, lacing his fingers together. “Unfortunately, whilst Potter may be an addle-brained dunderhead…”
“Heheheheheh, addle-brained dunderhead.” Lyra snickered to herself like a goblin getting ready to raise interest rates. She’d remember that one for later.
“…such a quality is not grounds for his permanent removal from the castle grounds, regrettable as that may be to us both. Now, Miss Malfoy, do you have a valid reason for me to recommend expulsion to the Headmaster’s Office, or has this all been yet another fantastic waste of time?”
“Yeah, I…he…um, Harry Potter sexually harassed me!!”
—Snape put down the quill once again.
“That is quite a creative accusation, Miss Malfoy. I am impressed that you possess the bearings to such a subject in your young age.”
“Hmph, naturally!” Lyra puffed her chest out in pride, hand over heart. “I know all about this ‘sexual harassment’!”
“Oh?” Snape leaned forward, his face stony—but his eyebrows raised the slightest bit. “And what is that phrase’s definition…?”
“It’s…it’s…” Lyra stumbled over her words, rummaging through her brain to try to find the memory of when she first heard it. “It’s…a spell, right?! My mother said it’s like magical words you say to make men you don’t like disappear from their jobs and your life! I bet you’re sexually harassing me right now too, aren’t you Severus?! Harassmentius!!”
Malfoy stabbed her hawthorn wand in the air towards Snape as though it were a rapier, expecting him to vanish. He didn’t.
“Improper wandwork, perhaps?” Snape asked, with a dropper’s measure of cold amusement in his voice.
“Make a mockery of me, will you?! My father will hear abou—!!”
“Should your father inquire, Miss Malfoy, I shall be certain to inform him that you have displayed a remarkable passion for both Mr Potter and for visiting my office. If only you showed a comparable behavior for your studies. Eight inches of parchment on the applications of wormwood and asphodel, on my desk next Friday—this time in your own handwriting, I have endured quite enough of Mr Goyle’s charming vocabulary.”
Snape refreshed his quill in ink once more, and resumed to grading papers, his attention turned back away from the all-important pureblood heiress. “I trust you are well-acquainted with my door by now, Miss Malfoy? I suggest you put that familiarity to use.”
—Lyra opened her mouth, trying to fit in one more protest.
“Out.”
“Hnnnnnn—!!!” Lyra Malfoy’s face puffed up like a pufferfish without the poison, her cheeks inflated with the desire for Snape to suffer the death of whoever he loved most. “—FINE!!” She stamped her feet on the ground and slammed the office door behind her on her way out, utterly infuriated at receiving the lightest slap on the wrist ever dolled out by Professor Snape’s ten year reign of terror at Hogwarts. The former owners of Severus’s Supposed Seven Secret Severed Scalps would have screamed ‘Injustice!’ at such leniency. If the preserved heads they once belonged to were truly still being kept alive in glass jars somewhere deep in the dungeons, as whispered in the common rooms.
“DOBBY!!!” Malfoy whined, her eardrum-shattering pitch rattling throughout the dungeons.
…
…
…Dobby didn’t come.
—Hang on, I live at Hogwarts now.
“Crabbe! Goyle!” Lyra shouted for Dobby’s replacements.
Both of them popped out of their waiting spot around corner, lumbering towards Malfoy with their hands to the sides of their heads.
“What on Earth are you two doing…?” Lyra asked, looking baffled at their strange ritual.
“Ringing.” Crabbe grunted miserably.
“What, ringing in your ears again? Honestly, every time I call for you two, it’s always the same thing! Go get that checked out already, you oafs.”
“Aready got it checked out…” Goyle muttered. “Pomfrey says I got tinn—tinn—hearing stuff.” He quickly gave up on pronouncing ‘tinnitus’.
“You too?” Crabbe looked over at Goyle. “They said stay away from loud noise…”
“Well, then, ask Severus for a potion! It’s like I have to do all the thinking for you two!”
“Sorry, we know…” Crabbe hung his head down low.
—They were halfway back to the Slytherin Common Room, when Lyra absentmindedly blurted out a question—clearly still mulling over something else in her mind.
“…What lesson do we have tomorrow, again…?”
“Flying, Malfoy.” Her magical homework diary, Goyle, replied.
“Think they teach Qudditch?” Crabbe’s face perked up, hopeful.
“Hmph.” Lyra’s nose pointed up at the dungeon ceiling at the suggestion of such a boyish sport. Between that and food, it was all those two ever seemed to care about. Especially ever since that time her father had taken the trio to see last year’s World Cup. “Quidditch, what a vulgar little pastime. I don’t even want to bother, yet with one word from my father, I could be on the team and already be Slytherin’s best seeker in a century if I truly wished. I doubt Potter will even be able to fly…”
“’Ey wait, why we talking bout Potter again?” Goyle asked, confused.
—Lyra’s green snake eyes shot up at him with a concentrated sidelong evil from down below.
“Stuff it, Crabbe.”
"But I'm Goyle."