It was several weeks before Severus had a chance to do more than dip into the purloined journals and skim. His finger traced the binding of his own journal, but he snatched it back, pulling out an unbound packet of notes and a piece of parchment. With two quick jabs, he drew a large “T” on the paper and began putting the names and achievements of his fellow victims of intellectual robbery in the two columns. If he did discover Belby’s fraud, he decided he might as well discover all of his fraud, and he never would tackle all of the notes if he gave in and read his own first. Several dull hours later, he glanced at the clock and saw, startled, that it was just before midnight, and he had only found a simplified vomiting elixir, an anxiety inducing drought, three separate acne potions, and a potion to give its imbiber hemorrhoids, none of the earth shattering potions Belby had published. With a sigh he piled the notes and journals his teaching bag to peruse as his students worked instead of grading papers.

He sat back at his desk, staring at the ceiling. The seconds ticked past until the clock hands met at the number twelve when great whooshing sound came from within his desk, and with a pop, the bottom came off his desk and disintegrated as the desk itself hit the ceiling. A horrible smell filled the room, and he realized horrified, that someone had mixed Dungbombs and Weasley fireworks and put them into his desk with a timer spell. The desk crashed back down into the middle of his office, and he coughed, gasping against the pungent reek spilling from it. Grasping the handle of his office door with relief, he yanked it down and fled the room, sputtering and swearing, and sped down the halls to fetch Filch.

~*~

In the morning, Ginny grinned, seeing Professor Prince disheveled, bleary eyed, and trying not to nod off over his plate. “What’s wrong with him?” Harry asked, pointing his thumb in the direction of the head table.

Ron smirked. “Wish it happened to him before our class.” Harry looked up at Snape apprehensively, and then at Ron.

“I’m sure,” Ginny told all three of them confidently, “his night was a blast.”

“I hope you didn’t have anything to do with that, Ginny,” Hermione admonished.

“Course I did.”

Harry rubbed the side of his head. “Oh, Ginny.”

“It’s not like he didn’t deserve it,” Ron defended.

“Besides, he’ll be too tired in class today to be too nasty.”

Harry shook his head at the rather exhausted glare Snape was sending his way, and Hermione remarked dubiously, “No doubt.”

“He has the Gryffindor first years first thing this morning. I had to think about them,” she winked.

Hermione favored her with a sidelong look. “So your motives were entirely altruistic.”

“Yeah,” she grinned unrepentantly, “altruistic.”

~*~

That evening, Harry slogged back into the castle with the rest of his double Herbology class, his toes frozen inside his boots. Inside, the mud on his shoes started to thaw and track across the floor. A ripe fertilizer smell rose from all of the class as a group. Harry wrinkled his nose as people walked past, pinching their noses and covering their mouths. The Hufflepuffs headed off down a narrow corridor down to their common room, and most of the Gryffindors did the same, tramping up to theirs. Ron, Hermione, Parvati, Hannah Abbot, and Ernie Macmillian broke away and trooped together up to the fifth floor to the prefects’ bathroom. They lined up one after another, Hanna first, and Harry last.

As each finished bathing, they drifted away to the Great Hall until Harry waited for only Parvati to finish. His stomach rumbled and he wondered if there would be any warm food left by the time Parvati had finished. Harry rapped his knuckles against the door. “Parvati, are you anywhere near done?”

“Give me a minute, I’ve got dragon dung in my hair, you know,” came her muffled voice.

“Yeah, well can you hurry it up a bit?”

“No!”

Harry tapped his foot impatiently. “Come on,”

“Shut it, Harry!”

Harry groaned, leaning back against the wall behind him. He stared up at the ceiling, kicking absentmindedly at the stone floor. When he looked down again, he found himself looking right at Snape, and he was angry.

“Do you have any idea how long I had to spend last night cleaning up your little prank, Potter?”

“Er…”

“I did not get to bed until three O’ Clock in the morning,” his voice had become quiet and precise, dangerously so, “and Mr. Filch is still attempting to set right the mess you made of my office.”

“Er…”

“I presume you’re proud of your achievement.”

“What are you talking about?”

Snape opened his mouth and closed it again. “I’m referring to the shambles you made of my office and bedroom, Potter!” he thundered, a bit of spittle flecking his lip.

“I didn’t do anything to your office and bedroom!” Harry shouted back, thoroughly confused.

“Don’t lie to me!” Snape hissed, moving closer until their noses nearly touched. “You set Dungbombs and fireworks off in my desk and under my bed! They hit the ceiling, both of them!”

Suddenly Ginny’s comments earlier about Snape’s night being a blast made a great deal more sense. “I haven’t even been in your office-”

“You turned my desk and my bed into kindling!”

“I don’t even know your password; how would I have gotten into your office to do anything?”

Snape rested his weight on his back foot, leaning away from Harry. “I’ll find out how. Rest assured, I’ll find out how, and then I’ll see to it that you’re expelled.”

Harry scoffed. “Good luck.”

In an instant, Snape had his face right next to Harry’s again. “Is that a challenge, Potter?”

Harry stood rigidly, stepping away from the wall, forcing Snape back and gazing at him expressionless as he almost overbalanced. “I’d like to see you try, yeah. Even if I had blown up your office, I don’t think you could get me expelled over it.”

“You don’t think vandalizing a teacher’s office and living quarters, not to mention blowing up among other things a set of seventh year essays, which you will all have to redo, is sufficient grounds to have you tossed out of the school?”

“I killed Voldemort!” Harry almost started laughing. “Unless I do something really evil, you can’t do anything to me.” He couldn’t hold back a tired grin. “Besides, you’ve been trying to get me thrown out since I first came here and you haven’t managed it yet, and anyway, I didn’t do it!”

“I told you not to lie to me, Potter! This has you written all over it.”

“What are you talking about? I’ve never done anything like that!”

Snape snorted, folding his arms and stepping back again. “Then tell me, Potter, if you didn’t do this, who did?”

Harry shifted awkwardly. ”I don’t know,” he lied, “why would I?”

Severus’ eyes narrowed, and a nasty smile spread across his face as he watched Potter trying to keep his expression guilt free. “So you didn’t do it Potter.”

“Yeah, I just told you that.”

As Harry replied, Parvati opened the door and padded out, her robes and shoes spelled clean. As she walked, she waved her wand over her hair. “Siccus exsorbeo,” she incanted, and a slight slurping sound came from her wand, and the water from her hair pulled itself into her wand in a thin wet thread. Harry propped the door open with his foot and began to step inside, but Snape held him back.

“But you do know who blew up my office and bed. You know exactly who did it.”

“No,” Harry denied, but Snape just folded his arms. “I didn’t do it, so you can go away now.”

“Detention, Potter, for your abominable state of attire,” he snarled as he pivoted, listing slightly, “you smell like dung.”

Harry caught the implication as Snape stalked off and sighed loudly and stepped into the bathroom, closing and latching the door behind him. Pins and needles shot through his foot as he walked across the marble floor. It had gone numb holding the door open.

~*~

By the time Harry had finished his bath, which was a short one, dinner in the Great Hall had finished, so he detoured into the kitchens on the way to the Gryffindor common room. When he entered, a stack of bowls and plates stacked precariously in one hand and a plate of pastries in the other, Ginny rushed over to help him carry everything inside. “I heard Parvati telling Lavender that Prince cornered you outside the prefects’ bathroom” she told him, taking away the pastries and eating one herself. “Bad luck, that.”

“Awful, he gave me a detention.”

Her eyebrows met in the middle as she wrinkled her forehead. “What for?”

“Needing a bath, apparently.”

“Git.”

“You want to watch yourself, Ginny, he’s looking to expel whoever put the Dungbombs and fireworks in his office and bedroom.”

“Don’t worry,” she told him nonchalantly, sitting down next to him and helping him put his meal on a table near the fire. “He won’t catch me.” She grinned carelessly, laying back over the arm of her chair, her head hanging off the side nearest him. “Besides, it’s like Fred and George used to say, I know where the line is. I’m only putting a toe or two over it, nothing worth expulsion.”

“You blew up the seventh year essays. We’re going to have to redo them.”

“Sorry,” she had contrived to look chagrined, “I didn’t mean to do that to all of you. Rotten luck, he should just forget it, it isn’t any of your fault.”

Harry swallowed a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “Yeah, but Prince doesn’t forget anything.”

“I told you not to worry,” she exclaimed, “he won’t find out I did it.”

Harry shrugged noncommittally and went back to eating. “Yeah, I guess.”

As soon as he had finished eating, Hermione signaled at him that it was time to begin his patrol. Harry didn’t like patrolling in the evenings, especially because he couldn’t take any more than five points away from any student he caught. He poked his head boy badge, which was hanging lopsided and unpolished against his shoulder and followed Hermione out of the common room. Being head boy, he supposed, was much more trouble than it was worth, which was why it had to be dressed up as a privilege.

Hermione, with her deep abiding affection for the rules and extensive knowledge of rule breaking, an unusual, and in Harry’s opinion dangerous combination, had written the duty roster with prefects guarding the kitchens, all of the secret passages, and the Room of Requirement. Fortunately for Harry’s state of mind, she and he guarded the humpbacked which themselves, and she hadn’t betrayed its location to Filch.

“You’re watching the kitchens tonight, Harry,” she told him brightly, and he shook his head to himself, wondering if being head girl energized her in some way. “So you can take those back to the kitchen while you’re down there,” she glanced at the stack of dirty dishes in his arms.

~*~

Friday started out about as bad as it was possible for an ordinary school day to begin, with a letter delivered with a nasty nip from Bodmin, detailing the time and place for his detention that evening with Snape. Harry put his head in his hands, and passed the note to Ron, who had asked to see it. “What the bloody hell did he give you detention for?”

“Needing to bathe,” Ginny answered for Harry flippantly.

“Needing to… what? We all needed to bathe; Sprout had us up to our elbows in dragon manure!”

“I remember. The whole class smelled really revolting coming into the common room.”

“Shut it, Ginny.”

“Shut it yourself, Ron.”

“Oh, shut it, both of you.”

“Hermione,” Ron exclaimed, affronted.

“Yes, well some of us are trying to eat our breakfast in peace.”

After they had finished eating, they wandered away to their respective classes. Hermione had Arithmancy, and Harry and Ron had a free period over which Ron had been gloating for months. For the first time in a long while, Harry didn’t have an essay to do, or a homework assignment he had to do for his next class, or any work at all really. Unfortunately, his lack of pressing work simply gave him the opportunity to fret about his upcoming detention. Disgusted with himself, he absently took out the notebook into which he scribbled Quidditch plays.

After his last and only class of the day (charms, which he felt very good about, having just not only made his hedgehog tap-dance across the desk but twirl its cane as well), Harry left Ron and Hermione and headed down to the dungeons before catching himself and climbing back up to the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom. It was with some astonishment and no little trepidation that he suddenly realized he hadn’t received a detention from Snape all year until then.

He knocked on the door uncertainly and Snape snapped at him to come in. Snape led Harry the few feet to his office and pushed him through the door. The room was mercifully free of the odor of Dungbombs, but what had once been the desk had been swept away, and in its place was a large cardboard box. “What are you waiting for Potter, get to it.”

“To what, exactly?”

Putting together the desk in the box you’re staring at.” Snape folded his arms across his chest and sent him a piercing glare. Harry supposed Snape thought it was obvious.

Severus moved to stand against the wall next to his bookcase and pulled out a journal at random out of his pile of stolen notes and found that it was his own. He rubbed his finger over the cover, sparing a silent curse for Belby. The miserable fraud hadn’t just stolen his ideas, whatever they may have been, but had lost him his job. Employers didn’t typically keep researchers around who couldn’t remember from one day to the next what they had been working on for the past several months. The job had paid much better than his teaching job too.

“Couldn’t you just magic it together?” Harry grumbled, using a letter opener to cut through the packing tape and pulling out the instructions.

“I could,” Severus remarked thoughtfully, “and then I could have you spend your detention scraping Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum off the undersides of classroom desks.”

“No,” Harry replied, wincing slightly. “This is perfectly fine.” He laid out the different sized pieces of particleboard, the little bottle of wood glue, and a screwdriver he had transfigured out of a spare quill and set to work.

“Don’t the professors here usually…” Harry trailed off, trying to screw the metal racks for the rolling shelf under the desk without having the whole construction, held together with half dried wood glue, fall down on top of him.

“Usually what?” Severus snarled, surfacing from his journal.

“Have, well, good desks,” Harry stuttered. “You know, the nice kind with real wood. This one isn’t even new.” There had been dried glue already on the sides of the pieces.

“This is my desk from home, Potter,” Severus spoke though clenched teeth, “I have brought it here until a replacement can be made. One has been ordered, and you can tell whichever of your compatriots who thought it clever to put Dungbombs and fireworks in the bottom of my desk and under my bed that the school had to pay several hundred Galleons to replace each and to ship them here, and that when I locate the student who caused this, not only will that student be expelled, but that student’s parents will receive the bill!”

Harry blanched, thinking about Mr. and Mrs. Weasley’s barren Gringotts vault and hoped Ginny didn’t come up with any other pranks to play any time soon. “I’ll pass the word along,” he retorted, angrily, “but for all I know, it could be Peeves,”

“Peeves never does anything that he thinks is severe enough to get him turned out! No, whoever did this was a student, and I don’t believe for a moment that you don’t know which one.”

“If you had any evidence I knew who blew up your desk, I’d have a lot more than a detention to worry about,” Harry shot back, sliding the last drawer into place. “Which means you don’t know anything, and you’re hoping to bully me into telling you something, but I can’t, because I don’t know!”

Severus snorted skeptically and returned to his journal, but Potter interrupted him again. “I finished your desk,” he pointed out. “Can I go now?”

“Duro,” he cast in response, hardening the wood glue with a jab of his wand. “Get out.”

Harry mock saluted and walked stiffly to the door while Snape, not to be outdone moved to open it with a sarcastic bow, complete with a smile and a flourish of the hands. Before he could leave, Harry stood in the doorway and watched as Filch stumbled past, muttering about gruesome consequences for the next student to cross his path, six light bulbs rolling on the floor behind him, squeaking about Ravenclaws and transfiguration. Harry and Snape couldn’t help but turn to each other and share a bemused glance before they caught themselves and looked down.

“Before you go, Potter,” Snape said with a small smile that boded very badly for the state of Harry’s nerves, gesturing for him to return to his office. Harry turned to lean against the desk he had so recently put together. “This student prankster isn’t you-”

“I told you that.”

“Shut up.”

“Fine.”

“The prankster isn’t you, it isn’t Mr. Weasley, he lives in your pocket, it isn’t Granger, she’s too fond of order, but it is someone you’re willing to protect.”

“I’m not protecting anyone.”

“I told you to shut up.”

“Git.”

“Another detention. As I was saying, it isn’t one of your two sidekicks-”

“Ron and Hermione are not sidekicks-”

“Ten points from Gryffindor for interrupting again. It isn’t one of your two sidekicks, but you feel the need to protect whoever it is. Of course, the worst mischief maker currently attending Hogwarts is your girlfriend.” Harry shifted awkwardly and tried to keep his face blank. “So it is Miss Ginevra Weasley.”

“No!”

“But how would you know that, Potter, unless you knew who did it?” Snape demanded triumphantly.

“You have no proof!” Harry raged. “You can’t do anything-”

“I can keep an eye on her,” he smirked, “and wait for her to slip up.”

“You’ve been watching me for seven years,” Harry reminded him with a smirk of his own, “and you haven’t been able to get me yet.” Snape’s smirk fell away, and Harry forced down a grin. “I’ll tell her you’re watching.”

“You do that. Perhaps it will keep her from blowing anything else up.”

Harry pushed himself away from the desk and almost leapt the few steps to the door, but then stopped. “I thought you should know,” he said, turning his head back to Snape, “Hermione knows about you.”

“What?” Snape swooped down on him and backed him into the corner. “How dare you tell her?”

“I didn’t!” Harry shouted. “She figured it out on her own.”

“And how, pray tell, did she do that?” Snape hissed dangerously.

“She checked the Durmstrang class lists.” Snape swore. “And she checked the Beauxbatons and Hogwarts lists too.” Snape swore even more foully. “And some books about modern magical advances in Greece and Eastern Europe.” Snape swore again, and Harry wondered if he could get away with giving the professor a detention.

Wrinkling his nose, Snape stared right at him. “Knowing Miss Granger, she confronted you, hoping for conformation of her hypothesis?”

Harry bristled. “Yeah, well, when your best friend comes up to you and says ‘I know he’s Snape,’ it’s a bit difficult to bluff your way out.”

Snape put his hands on either side of Harry and rested them against the wall, trapping him. “What exactly does Granger know?”

“She knows that you’re really you,” at a glare from Snape, he continued quickly, “and that’s all, I swear.”

“Anything else?” he growled.

“She knows I know.”

“And?”

“She knows something else is going on.”

Severus’ head snapped up and his stomach dropped. “Then she will find out what it is.”

“Well it’s eating her up that she doesn’t know, yeah, but I think I managed to shame her into not snooping.”

“That girl has no intellectual shame.”

“Yeah, that’s what I told her.” he retorted testily. “I think I made her feel guilty about prying.”

Snape stared at him, taken aback, and for a moment, he almost looked impressed. Harry felt vaguely flattered and appalled at the same time.