A new page has been added to the archive.
Mind the fine print.
The castle is listening.
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Snape’s office smelled like bitter herbs, damp stone, and something old kept too long in glass.
Harry stepped inside and stopped before his sleeve could brush the nearest shelf.
The jars crowded the walls in uneven rows: roots curled like fingers, powders packed in waxed paper, cloudy liquids with shapes suspended where shapes had no business being.
A narrow desk sat beneath a lamp that made the corners look darker.
There were two chairs.
Snape took the one behind the desk.
He left the other untouched.
Harry stood there, suddenly aware of his hands.
Holding them at his sides looked guilty.
Folding them looked rehearsed.
Putting them in his pockets would get him skinned alive.
“Sit, Potter.”
He sat too quickly.
The chair leg scraped stone.
Snape’s eyes moved to the sound, then back to his face.
“You have been in Slytherin for less than a day,” Snape said.
“Already you are making noise.”
“Sorry, Professor.”
“A promising start.
Apology without improvement.”
Harry looked at the edge of the desk.
Inkstand, sealed letters, a stack of essays with red marks severe enough to look like injuries.
Nothing on the surface helped him.
“Do you know why you are here?”
His Sorting.
His mother’s eyes.
James Potter’s ghost arriving in the wrong House.
The scar.
The way Snape had looked at him in the Great Hall, as if the Hat had insulted both of them personally.
“Because my Sorting was unusual.”
“Unusual,” Snape repeated.
“A word chosen by people who would like the facts to step politely aside.”
Harry swallowed.
“Because my Sorting was wrong, then.”
Snape’s mouth thinned.
“Did I say wrong?”
“No, Professor.”
“Then do not improve my sentences for me.”
Heat climbed Harry’s neck.
The first mistake had taken less than a minute.
Snape leaned back by a fraction.
“I am trying to determine whether your placement was accident, manipulation, or contamination.”
The scar gave a cold little twitch.
Harry kept his hand down.
Snape noticed anyway.
“Does your scar pain you often?”
Snape did not ask whether it hurt now.
He asked often, as if the answer belonged in a pattern.
“Sometimes.”
“Specificity continues to elude you.”
“It’s a scar, Professor.
Not a clock.”
The sentence landed harder in the room than it had in his head.
Snape did not raise his voice.
Somehow that was worse.
“Your father also mistook insolence for courage.
He had friends to applaud the distinction.”
Harry’s mouth closed.
The anger came first, hot and useless.
After it came the stranger feeling, the one that belonged to an eleven-year-old who had never known James and still hated hearing him used as a weapon.
“I did not know my father,” he said.
“Plainly.”
Snape let the word sit there.
Harry wanted to answer.
He wanted to use every book, every memory, every future fact like a blade.
He had enough sense left not to give Snape the handle.
“You look at me,” Snape said, “as if you have brought an opinion from somewhere.”
Harry said nothing.
“At last.”
The silence stretched.
Snape was not simply provoking him.
He was finding where provocation worked.
Harry had read about a cruel teacher, a spy, a man warped around Lily Potter’s death until grief and spite had grown together.
Knowing that did not make Snape smaller.
It made him harder to survive.
Summaries were comfortable because they hid the parts that could still hurt you.
“I know very little about you,” Harry said.
“You know enough to choose that sentence.”
Harry looked up despite himself.
Snape’s expression barely changed, but the room seemed to tighten around the desk.
“Your file says you were raised ignorant.”
“My file sounds busy for something I never got to read.”
“It is more generous than your manners.”
“My manners have had a difficult week.”
Snape’s eyes narrowed.
Harry realized too late that he had tried to be amusing.
The room did not reward it.
“Tell me, Potter.
What is the difference between monkshood and wolfsbane?”
He knew it.
The answer surfaced at once, too clean and too old: same plant, aconite.
A memory from a book and a memory from a story tangled together until he could not honestly tell which had come first.
He waited half a heartbeat.
The wait was not enough.
“They are the same plant,” Harry said.
“Aconite.”
“And where did you learn that?”
“A book.”
“Which book?”
Harry could feel it close around the pause.
“I do not remember the title.”
“Convenient.”
“It was probably in an index.”
“Probably.”
Harry’s fingers tightened against his knee.
He made himself loosen them one by one.
“I read too quickly when I am scared,” he said.
“Some things stay.
Some do not.”
For a moment Snape only watched him.
The answer was true enough to have weight and incomplete enough to smell of evasion.
“Fear does not create scholarship.”
“It creates notes in margins.”
“And you brought these notes to Hogwarts?”
Harry almost said yes.
His trunk had books.
His head had worse.
Instead he said, “I brought what I could.”
The scar pulsed before Snape could answer.
Green light.
A woman’s voice breaking around his name.
Lily, not as history, not as a fact.
The memory struck from beneath the older mind and stole his breath.
He looked down too late.
Snape went still.
The stillness was not softness.
It was a door slammed shut from the other side.
“Leave.”
Harry blinked.
“Professor?”
“You heard me.”
He stood.
The chair gave another scrape, smaller this time.
Snape’s face had gone unreadable in a way that did not feel controlled so much as locked.
At the door, Harry stopped because Snape spoke again.
“Potter.”
He turned.
“Curiosity is not discipline.
Fear dressed in cleverness remains fear.
Learn the difference before the school is forced to endure the consequences.”
Harry nodded once.
“Yes, Professor.”
Snape looked away first, but it did not feel like victory.
Harry left with his answers reduced to scraps.
Snape had learned more than he had said.
Harry had learned that Snape could retreat and still win the exchange.
The worst part was simpler: for one second in that office, his scar had spoken before he could.
***
Potions the next morning began in a room designed to make students feel like ingredients.
The benches were narrow, the air cold, the shelves packed with bottles whose labels looked more confident than the people expected to use them.
Slytherins arranged themselves with care.
Gryffindors arrived with louder feet and worse attempts at not staring.
Harry chose the place beside Nott because sitting beside Draco would look like allegiance and sitting alone would look like an invitation.
Nott glanced at him over the edge of his book.
“You returned.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“Only academically.
I had a theory.”
“About what?”
“How long private interviews take when the professor wins.”
Harry almost smiled.
Then Snape entered, robes cutting through the classroom noise, and every bench remembered that amusement was temporary.
Snape did not need to shout.
He set one book on his desk, opened it, and waited until even Seamus stopped whispering.
“There will be no foolish wand-waving here,” he said.
“No fireworks, no giggling charms, no childish belief that magic exists to reward enthusiasm.”
Hermione Granger straightened in the front row with two quills ready.
Ron sat three benches away, his face guarded around a curiosity he did not want Harry to see.
Draco watched from the Slytherin side with the satisfaction of someone expecting a show he would not have to pay for.
Snape’s gaze passed over all of them and settled on Harry.
“Potion-making is precision.
Memory.
Discipline.
A careless addition can make medicine indistinguishable from poison.”
The class understood, all at once, that the warning had a target.
Harry kept his eyes on the empty parchment in front of him.
“Potter.”
Of course.
“What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?”
Hermione’s hand was in the air before Snape finished.
He ignored it.
Harry knew the answer.
He also knew the shape behind it, the old fan theory, Lily folded into asphodel and regret folded into wormwood until a question became a grave.
That knowledge had no place in his mouth.
“The Draught of Living Death,” he said.
“A sleeping potion.”
“How charmingly incomplete.”
His stomach sank.
“A powerful sleeping potion,” Harry corrected.
“Sir.”
“Powerful.
The refuge of students who have met an adjective and mistaken it for knowledge.
Ingredients, effects, risks, preparation.
A name is not understanding.”
Hermione’s hand lowered an inch.
Ron looked caught between sympathy and the memory of being hurt.
Draco looked delighted until he noticed the other Slytherins counting the room with their eyes.
“Five points from Slytherin for presenting recognition as competence.”
The words took a second to become real.
Five points.
Because Harry Potter knew enough to answer badly.
“Yes, Professor.”
“I had not invited you to agree.”
Another murmur tried to start and died under Snape’s look.
“Where would you look if I asked you for a bezoar?”
“The stomach of a goat,” Harry said.
Too fast again.
“Would you.”
The correction came late.
“Taken from the stomach of a goat.
It can counter many poisons.”
“Many.”
Harry stopped himself before saying not all.
The effort showed on his face.
Snape saw that too.
“Ten points from Slytherin.”
Draco sat straighter.
“For discovering, in public, that silence can arrive too late.”
The lesson moved on.
Snape called on others, sometimes because they knew, sometimes because they did not.
Hermione was finally allowed to answer and gave more detail than the room wanted.
Snape gave her no points and no satisfaction.
Ron mispronounced aconite under his breath while copying notes from Seamus and looked annoyed when Hermione heard him.
Harry worked through the potion with hands that wanted to hurry and a mind that kept stepping around traps.
That made him slower.
Nott’s cauldron settled into the correct color first.
Draco’s followed, neat and controlled.
Hermione’s was better than both and visibly offended by its own tiny imperfection.
Harry’s potion came out acceptable after one nervous correction and a burnt smell he managed to hide by stirring properly for the last three minutes.
Acceptable did not feel like survival until Snape stopped beside his bench.
“Fragments, Potter.
You possess fragments.”
Harry kept his eyes on the cauldron.
“Fragments are dangerous when worn as armor.”
“Yes, Professor.”
“Twenty points from Slytherin.”
His head lifted before he could stop it.
Snape’s face was calm.
“For requiring the lesson to be repeated.”
The bell rang into the silence like someone making a bad joke.
Snape swept away.
The classroom did not explode; it compressed.
The compression was worse.
Slytherins gathered books with careful hands.
Gryffindors watched with a mixture of horror, pleasure, and uncertainty, none of which helped.
Thirty-five points gone by breakfast on the first full day.
Nott closed his textbook with one finger marking the page.
“Efficient.”
Harry looked at him.
“The potion?”
“The punishment.
Obviously the punishment.”
Draco packed with theatrical care.
“My father will be fascinated.”
“Does he collect scores?”
“Patterns, when they concern Harry Potter.”
Draco’s smile was thin.
The warning under it was not friendly, but it was still a warning.
Cassian Selwyn, two benches back, said nothing.
He did not need to.
Silence in Slytherin already had dialects.
Nott’s silence withdrew.
Draco’s prepared.
Cassian’s silence felt like a letter waiting for ink.
Harry put his notes away and tried not to imagine the common room.
Hermione appeared at the edge of the bench before he reached the door.
“It was unfair,” she said.
Ron hovered behind her with his bag over one shoulder, pretending he had been delayed by a strap.
Harry said, “Yes.”
Hermione blinked.
“You cannot just say yes.”
“I am fairly sure I can.”
Ron gave a short sound and turned it into a cough.
Hermione’s mouth tightened.
“You knew the answers.”
“I knew parts of the answers.”
“Where from?”
The impossible question had followed him into a kinder voice.
“Mostly books, when I could get them,” Harry said.
Hermione looked at him the way she had looked at the pamphlet in Diagon Alley: as if the printed category was hiding a door.
“Books have titles.”
“Usually, when someone wants them found.”
“Harry.”
Her frustration had worry under it.
That made it harder to dismiss.
Before he could answer, Professor McGonagall appeared in the corridor, severe enough to straighten three nearby students who had done nothing wrong.
“Potter.”
The room turned toward her.
“The Headmaster would like a word.”
Draco’s interest sharpened at once.
Hermione looked from McGonagall to Harry, the unfinished question still on her face.
Ron stopped pretending the conversation was none of his business.
Harry picked up his bag.
McGonagall waited without hurrying him.
That almost kindness made the summons worse.
He followed her into the corridor.
Students parted for her before she asked.
Snape had taken points, questions, and any chance that Slytherin would treat Harry’s knowledge as a private problem.
Now Dumbledore wanted a turn.
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