“Just remember it isn’t Snape,” Ginny chanted again, grinning. The words still almost made her bounce with jubilation. Harry held in a groan, pushing away his plate full of scrambled eggs way and leaving his seat. It was his first class taught by Snape since the revelations of the summer, and he wasn’t looking forward to facing the man, and knowing that the same professor who had done his best to make Harry’s school years intolerable was his in some way.

He left the table with the pitiful excuse that he had forgotten his textbook and meandered back to Gryffindor tower. There was still time before class, and he didn’t feel like spending it with Ron, Hermione and Ginny, all happily unaware that they would soon be facing Snape after all, whether they knew it or not.

Harry knew, and he couldn’t say anything.

Outside the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom, Harry realized he had not been heading back to Gryffindor tower, but that his feet had other plans. When Snape arrived, Harry was already waiting for him.

“What are you doing here, Potter?” Severus snarled, keeping his voice low. Harry noticed vaguely that he wasn’t wearing his usual severe black robes, but instead an assortment of clothing that looked as if he might have stolen most of it from Remus and transfigured it into something more appropriately Wizarding. A pang of loss hit him, but he pushed it down.

Harry did his best to force an angry smile. “I have class here in a few minutes.” Seeing Snape up close, with every word and movement reminding him brutally that it was Snape he was talking to and not some black eyed grown up version of himself, brought a deep ache up from his bones. This man was somehow a piece of him, a creation of his and Eileen’s. It was incomprehensible.

Snape’s glare became sidelong and Harry realized belatedly that he had just given the man a challenge to drag less obvious information out of him. “And why are you here now and not a few minutes from now?”

Harry shrugged. Sheer obstinacy had foiled Snape in such skirmishes before. Besides, Harry wasn’t sure why he was there either, and he neither wanted to admit that nor have Snape successfully wring the reason from him. He didn’t think he’d like it. “I’ll be here in a few minutes too.”

Snape unlocked the door and threw it open so that it clattered against the wall normally beside it with a bang. Close behind him, leery of the wildly swinging door, Harry shuffled in. The glower Snape sent him from behind his desk made him think better of it, but the door had already slammed shut behind him. As Snape swore, undoubtedly colorfully, under his breath and stamped over to thrust it open again and ram a door stop under it with a forcefully executed hex, Harry dropped into a desk, somewhere in the discreet middle of the room.

The chalk clicked and squeaked against the board Harry lost count of how long he sat there returning the occasional poisoned glances Snape sent his way before other students began to trickle in, preceding a great throng that arrived all at once, jabbering and pointing. Ron dropped down beside him, and Hermione chose to sit beside Ron, leaving an awkwardly empty seat beside Harry, who wished they were flanking him as they had in previous years.

The seat didn’t remain empty, because Neville slid into it just before the class began. At exactly nine o’clock, Snape flicked his wand, jerking the door stop out from under the door, which leapt closed. Harry had a sudden urge to put an arm around Neville’s shoulder to shield him, except he wasn’t the third year who had brought forth a boggart Snape any longer.

Snape was only Snape inside the classroom. Outside he might be a bitter unpleasant individual, but inside the classroom, his teaching robes billowing behind him with every swoop onto an unprepared student, he transformed himself into a figure more ominous than the man who stalked the halls of Hogwarts stealing points from every house except his own. The menace radiated off him as powerfully as ever as he spoke, new face and teaching robes or not.

“You are all here today after having survived the worst assault of Dark Magic the Wizarding World has seen since 1980, and before that, since Grindelwald in 1945.” For a moment only, Snape appeared lost, almost guilty, but it passed before anyone except those who knew Harry well enough to recognize them in the instant they flashed over the similar features. “Doubtless you feel proud of yourselves.”

Stunned, Harry’s mind tried to wrap itself around the notion that Snape might have complemented them, but before he could, Snape’s speech resumed, his tone ruthless. “If any of you could subtract, you’d realize that 1980 is only thirty five, and if one is counting from the point at which-“ his jaw clenched, “Voldemort began his rise, only twenty five years between Dark Lords.”

“You will face another Dark Lord or Dark Lady within your lifetimes, possibly several, and possibly one of them is attending Hogwarts now as Voldemort was when Grindelwald fell.” He scanned the room, as if trying to separate out a Dark Lord from amongst his stunned students. The grim lines around his mouth deepened. “Nearly every Wizarding generation has had its own great evil to face. You are none of you alone in your victory; do not be too enamored of it.

“Those of you who did more than merely survive had older and wiser wizards and witches fighting beside you. Next time, you must be prepared to be those older, wiser wizards and witches instead. This is why you are still in this room, not for your N.E.W.T.s or careers that require it, but because you will need to fight the dark again and again.”

Harry sat open mouthed as he finished, feeling a bit as if his bubble had burst, but since it was a bubble he knew he had, it had burst gradually and months ago. That likely didn’t help his fellow students, who were staring up at their professor in horrified expectation. He sat as still and as silent as any of them, and realized how it must be for the rest of the class. This professor, this unknown quantity, might possibly be more terrifying than any other they had before, perhaps more so than the Carrows, whom they could fight against if they dared.

For the first time, Harry realized what Hermione had meant back in sixth year when she said Snape sounded like him.

Severus walked among the students, splitting them into groups of five. “You will be practicing cursing several people at once,” he snapped at them all. Without seeming to do it purposely, he split Potter and his two… he hesitated to call them lackeys, junior partners, three ways. The boy glared at him mutinously, but he attempted to do it covertly.

Harry found himself placed in a group with Hannah Abbott, Tracy Davis, Ernie Macmillan, and Padma Patil and gazed wistfully at where Hermione was lecturing Neville and then to where Ron’s ears were turning red as he gripped his wand aimed at Theodore Nott and Millicent Bulstrode.

Snape tapped the board sharply. “Instructions are on the board.”

~*~

After Snape had released the class, Ron glowered at the scrap of parchment he had copied down their assignment onto. “Two feet on cursing several people at once, three chapters of reading, and next week he expects us to do this again silently?” he gasped, furiously, “When does Prince expect us to do this?”

Even Hermione looked less than thrilled about the assignment, but she kept quiet about it, much to Ron’s annoyance. Harry, who had been expecting no different from Snape, was too busy pondering the speech to bother sharing in Ron’s grumbling. As Ron continued though, he decided Snape might have once again with very little effort made himself the most hated of all the professors. Either it was a remarkable talent or a remarkable lack of talent. Harry supposed the consistency was comforting.

In some eerie other world, he could see himself in twenty years instead of Snape, giving that speech, and it made him afraid.

For the first time, Harry realized something that in retrospect should have been obvious. When Voldemort had first risen, Snape was still in school, Harry’s parents, Sirius and Remus among them. They were the young proud warriors, even as Harry and his friends were. In a few dozen years, he and his friends might have to take their place. He tried to imagine himself as Dumbledore, or McGonagall or Remus or Sirius, or even Tonks, and failed.

~*~

There had only ever been one period, excluding the most recent school year, though even then he was sure many of the students despised him for the Carrows’ excesses more than they despised the Carrows themselves, where Severus had a serious rival for the position of most hated professor. It had taken a ministry drone stuffed full of naked bigotry and barely hidden depths of sadism to show him in a positive light by comparison, and the sheer venom she had brought forth in her students, especially Potter and his friends, had almost made him jealous.

Contrary to popular belief, Severus did not relish being hated. He enjoyed being left alone, one of the consequences of being reasonably powerful and hated, and he enjoyed the short term obedience it elicited from most of his students, but he didn’t enjoy the hatred itself. So of course, he should have grabbed onto his second chance and used it to make himself a more palatable professor. Yet, he didn’t know how to gain even short term compliance from adolescents without also gaining their rancor, and truthfully, it was only in his bleakest moments that he minded much at all.

Still, he was unused to seeing so many horrified faces staring back at him while he was attempting to teach their wearers. According to Minerva, it didn’t do to show too much passion for the subject one was trying to teach, because one became so swept up in personal affection for the subject that one forgot to show the usefulness of the subject to the students, who, being of too small mind to actually determine the use themselves, would then lose interest. Those were perhaps not her exact words, but it was how he had interpreted her meaning.

Somehow teachers like Flitwick managed to glow with their personal adoration for their chosen subject, though Severus had never seen what there was to be adored in such an artless pursuit as charms, and still manage to keep student attention. There were also teachers like Lupin, who succeeded in making his lessons outright amusing to students, but Severus would have done anything short of murdering a student to avoid emulating Lupin.

He supposed that he didn’t really need to explain the use of defensive magic to his students when the most recent, and one of the most gratuitously violent in recent times, dark lord had been defeated at least in part, by one of their own number. That pressed the point home far better than he ever could, but the continuing use of Defense Against the Dark Arts was another matter.

He supposed from the appalled expressions directed towards him that he had accomplished simultaneously showing passion, making his subject appear relevant, gaining rapt (or terrified) attention, and earning the loathing of his students. It was something of a unique experience. Yes, he thought, listen, learn, Voldemort isn’t the only evil in the world. He supposed it was a distressing thing to learn, but as it was an obvious one, he had no pity for his students, not that he ever did.

It distressed him somewhat that the only student who appeared to be considering what he was saying was Potter. Even Granger seemed too busy staring at him in stunned fury to absorb anything he said, and she had by Minerva’s account digested Umbridge’s start of term speech and disseminated it’s meaning among her fellow Gryffindors. Then again Potter had prior notice about what he would be dealing with. Every modicum of sense he possessed told him to become worried when Potter was thinking, even if he was disappointed no one else was.

~*~

Hermione did her thinking several floors up and stone walls away from Professor Prince. It was a holdover from a childhood spent idolizing teachers that the distance made her feel safer when considering not quite mutinous thoughts about a professor. She had been alone in her dormitory dismally without a current book to read when she first came to the conclusion Professor Lupin was a werewolf, and when she had decided to present the idea of Dumbledore’s Army to Ron and then Harry.

When she had thought that Snape was after the Philosopher’s stone in first year, it had been something of a disruption to her vision of the world that a teacher might be bad. Then Quirrell turned out to be after the stone, and she had to confront the idea that not only might a teacher be evil, but she could be wrong, no matter how carefully she examined a situation. In second year, her trust and loyalty to the educators of the world had culminated into the inevitable conclusion when it had manifested as a crush on Lockhart. His pure narcissism had snapped her out of her blind love for teachers, but she still contemplated treasonous thoughts about them best when they were absent.

Teachers had always liked Hermione, and as a bright bossy girl as she had been, and still was, she had been more likely to find kindness and friendship among their ranks than among her own peers. When a teacher stepped out of that comforting pattern, she became nervous, and, older, suspicious as well. Professor Prince made her suspicious.

Every year, the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor had a secret, so perhaps she had simply become accustomed to that norm. The natural state of the world for her included something fishy at Hogwarts. Once she knew what precisely was fishy, all would be well again. Each of the Defense Against the Dark Arts professors had a secret, therefore this one had a secret as well. There was an obvious logical flaw in that reasoning, and Hermione saw it, but still she had no doubt Professor Prince was hiding something.

Perhaps it was intuition, the sense that Harry was able to trust so implicitly, the instinct that something was wrong. Perhaps it was the look on Harry’s face as the professor spoke, as if he expected hostility, and could look past it to think. He knew something, that he hadn’t bothered to tell her about, and he certainly hadn’t told Ron, who wouldn’t have been able to keep it from her. All Hermione could conclude was that the defense against the Dark Arts professor again had a secret, and Harry knew it, and that alone was troubling.

~*~

Ginny didn’t have Defense Against the Dark Arts until Thursday afternoon. Her opinion of the class became immediately clear from the way she threw herself down onto the bench after attending it and stared at her plate without eating anything. Hermione’s book snapped shut and Ron tossed a comforting, brotherly arm around her shoulder. She let it rest there a moment before shrugging it off to try to induce Harry to do the same only in a less brotherly manner.

“Just met Prince?” Ron asked sympathetically.

She slammed her fist down onto the table, startling Harry, who had just realized what she wanted him to do and was steeling himself to comply. “The other professors warned him about me!”

“Warned?” asked Hermione, noticing her food as soon as she stopped reading.

“About me, yes,” she grumbled, “it’s the only explanation.”

“Warned him about what?” Ron sputtered outraged, “what would they have to warn him about?”

Ginny spared him an expression of unsurprised anger, but otherwise ignored him in favor of beginning her tale of the professors’, in her opinion, duplicity. “I was just sitting there, when Prince looked at the board and noticed that the chalk was writing rude word, and he just said,” she folded her arms and began to mimic him in a way that made Harry glad that Snape was too busy talking to McGonagall to notice, “’Miss Weasley, detention, juvenile attempts at humor such as this display will not be tolerated in my classroom. You. Have. Been. Warned.’ And he sort of spit the last few words, too; it spattered all over my desk.”

Harry’s eyes widened and he worried suddenly that their secret might not be safe for long. Ginny’s impressions of Snape were identical to her impressions of “Prince”. He shuddered and tried to hide it, but Hermione caught his eye and raised her eyebrows. At least he succeeded in not wincing.

“That wasn’t very fair,” Ron began, affronted on his sister’s behalf and not noticing Hermione’s stare, the stare she always gave to tell someone that they were missing the point, “blaming you before he even met you.”

Harry finally slipped his arm around Ginny’s shoulder as she began her irate agreement, drumming her fingers on the table. “I know! The other professors shouldn’t tell each other about students, right? Let them find out for themselves, give us a chance.” She grimaced. “I can’t believe he calls a detention a warning. It isn’t a warning, it’s a punishment! A warning is when they don’t punish you.”

Harry patted her shoulder gingerly. “Sorry he spoiled your prank and gave you detention.”

A slow grin began to spread across her face. “But he didn’t spoil my prank.” By the time she had finished her denial, her grin stretched as far as her mouth possibly could. “The chalk was a distraction. Every time he tries to give a student a bad mark, his quill’s going to sing Celestina Warbeck songs.

Harry tried and failed to picture Snape’s expression when his quill started belting out “A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love”, and decided he didn’t want to anyway.