Ginny’s lip pushed itself out into a pout as she glowered at her professor. Her wand twitched in her hand, but she didn’t feel like playing a prank. Pranks were for when things were funny. They were for safe people, people who weren’t evil, just annoying. They weren’t for Snape.

She crumpled her notes into a ball and smoothed them out again, the ink smearing across the heavy parchment. Ron, Harry, and Hermione didn’t know; they had no idea what it had been like at Hogwarts while they were off fighting Voldemort. They didn’t know how fearsome and cruel Snape could really be when he had all the power and they had none, when there wasn’t a Dumbledore or McGonagall to stand in his way. It was the only reason she could think of that anyone could be so blasé about his presence in the school, still there to spread venom and misery. Oh, he might have been fighting against Voldemort, but he wasn’t on their side, not really. He was evil, true insidious evil, and he didn’t have to side with anyone but himself.

Her stomach sloshed as she scuttled across the room to borrow a bottle of ink from Luna Lovegood. Snape’s eyes followed her and she flushed with a sick sort of rage, the sort that gathered in her belly and left her with no idea what to do about it. “Miss Weasley,” he barked when she was nearly to Luna’s desk at the corner closest to the door, “return to your seat.”

She snapped around to face him and fought the wicked smile that threatened to spread across her face, “but I was just going to borrow an ink bottle, Professor Potter.”

Snape reared back as if preparing to strike her from across the room. “A month’s worth of detention, I think,” he spat. “See me after class.” Ginny felt as if one weight had been taken off her chest and a new one left in its place.

When the rest of the students streamed out of the door, Ginny marched up to the desk, gritting her teeth. “I only called you by your real name,” she told him defiantly, her head tossed back, hands folded across her chest, the same wicked smile she had stopped earlier returning to pull at her lips.

“You will return to using my legal surname, Miss Weasley, immediately.”

“Fine,” she snapped, “but that isn’t the real reason you’re giving me a month of detention, is it?”

She whirled around to walk out the door, but he stopped her up short. “There is very little chance anymore that you will become my step mother,” he stated with something that might have been bitterness, but it was so close to his normal tone of voice that she wasn’t sure.

“It’s not like this is my fault,” she roared, fully aware that he was baiting her and not caring. “He should have told me what was going on! This is the sort of thing I’m supposed to know!” She thrust out her jaw and glowered at him, bight orange eyebrows coming together in the center. “I wouldn’t have had to spy if one of them had just told me-“

“The very moment you learned what you wanted to know you shouted precisely who I was for the whole school to hear,” his lip curled and her nails dug into his desk, “and you wonder why Potter and his cohorts never tell you anything.”

Ginny backed up a step, furious. She turned on her heel and stomped away from him. As her hand reached for the doorknob, he growled, “You will not leave until I tell you to.” Her hand dropped to her side and she turned back to him, eyes narrowed. “Next time you open your mouth,” he enunciated, “you should think carefully about who the target of your anger really is.”

“Now can I leave?” she hissed, stepping backward quickly to leave whatever he said.

“Get out.”

~*~

Harry chose a seat on the other side of the room from Ron and Hermione, rolling his shoulders into a sulk.

Snape somehow managed to raise an eyebrow and still glare at the other two as they sat down in the almost abandoned front row. Hermione laid out her parchment, quills, and ink bottle neatly in front of her and wondered how long the students would keep clear of Snape. It had been weeks since everyone had found out, yet even the Slytherins continued to treat him as if he were an unusually touchy Blast-Ended Skrewt instead of the particularly unpleasant professor whom they all had known for years.

Just as class was supposed to begin, Snape stalked in, black teaching robes flapping around him. The first time Hermione had seen him wear his old robes without the glamour, she had done a double take. It didn’t matter that she had known for longer than almost anyone else that the man wearing them was Snape; it was still disconcerting to see a face so much like Harry’s over those robes. She once had wondered morbidly whether he wore those robes so that he didn’t have to change if Voldemort called his Death Eaters.

She glanced over at Ron sucking on his quill with the sort of smile that told her it was a sugar quill and that he wouldn’t be taking any notes at all. With a nudge to his arm, she snatched his quill away and replaced it with her own. He gasped indignantly at her, open-mouthed and she smiled back disarmingly. She had completed the move so smoothly, swooping in with her quill and swooping away with Ron’s, that she didn’t even notice until too late where she put her elbow. Her ink bottle tumbled off the table and shattered on the floor, the ink soaking into the wood grain.

At the sound of breaking glass, Snape spun around from inspecting the notes the chalk wrote on the board and leveled her with a nasty stare. “Detention, Miss Granger, for one week.”

Harry opened his mouth to come to her defense, but Hermione beat him to it. “Oh honestly,” she sniped, “all it needs is a vanishing charm!”

“One month then. You will not talk back to me.”

She sucked bad-temperedly on the sugar quill, and if Ron complained that it was gross when she gave it back, if she gave it back at all, she’d just tell him that kissing had negated that point.

Hermione hung back as the other students crowded through the door. “I don’t believe I asked you to stay after, Miss. Granger,” he snarled, remaining behind his desk.

“No sir,’ she said.

“Then why haven’t you followed your lack-witted fellows?” He waved one hand towards the door as if to sweep her away.

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“That,” he sneered, “was obvious.”

She swallowed, lifted her chin, and strode over to his desk, hands clasped loosely in front of her. “I don’t think that accidentally knocking an ink bottle off a desk very good grounds to assign a week’s detention, Professor Snape, and pointing this out to you is even worse grounds for assigning an extra three weeks.”

“Befouling the castle and disrespect to a teacher isn’t enough grounds?” His eyebrow lowered and his fingers twitched, but she didn’t back down. “Perhaps for an evening’s detention, a week for the disrespect if you stretch.”

“If you expect me to rescind your punishment, you’re wasting your time,” he hissed, dropping his quill.

“I didn’t expect you to,” Hermione cocked her head. “I just don’t think that my clumsiness is the real reason you assigned the detention.”

Her expression was so abominably serious and yet smug that Severus pushed himself away from the desk and lurched to his feet. “What precisely are you implying?” he queried deliberately.

“Only that you have alternative transgressions in mind when assigning the detention, professor.”

“Enticing another student to spy on me is grounds for expulsion, Miss Granger,” he thundered at her. “You’re lucky you only have a month’s detention!”

She supposed there was really no point in denying it. “If you could prove that I had in fact-“

“I have witnesses!”

“Neither of which you could actually convince to accuse me.”

Of all of the Gryffindors, of all of Potter’s specific companions, Granger was the one with whom he would least often associate the word “cocky” but that was changing rapidly. “Did you have a purpose to this conversation?”

She nodded. “I only wished to ascertain that your motives were what I thought they were.”

“Are you satisfied,” he raged, “in your relentless quest to pry into everyone else’s private affairs?”

“For now.”

“You had absolutely no right to do what you did!”

Hermione dropped her hands and the swung free to her sides. “Harry was acting so strange, and you were, and nothing added up! I was afraid,” and she had been, afraid, and frustrated, and hurt that Harry had a secret that she didn’t.

“The war is over, Granger,” he snapped. “You can no longer get away with what you had to get away with before to fight the Dark Lord.”

Hermione fell back, startled, but only for a moment. “I’ve already had this conversation,” she told him primly, “with Harry.” As she turned and strolled out the door, he snarled.

~*~

The letter with the dates and times of Hermione’s detentions arrive the next morning with the rest of the post. It landed directly in the middle of Ginny’s plate of sausages, and when she fished it out, it was dripping grease. “Snape gave you detention too?” she asked, surprised as she passed Hermione the note. “What for?” After six days, she had yet to tell them what her detentions were for, so Hermione didn’t say anything.

Hermione glanced over at Harry, slouching amidst a group of awestruck first years. He looked up and met her eyes.

“Rotten of him to give you a month’s detention for a stupid ink bottle,” Ron remarked, stuffing two slices of toast with bacon and scrambled eggs crammed between them into his mouth. Hermione looked at the ceiling and Ginny answered for her. “He wasn’t really giving her detention for that,” Ginny told him peevishly. “He was giving it to her because she told me something was up with him.’

Ron thought about it. “Yeah, but it was still a lousy excuse.” Hermione wholeheartedly agreed.

Harry padded his way across the Great Hall up to where the seventh years customarily sat. “Ron?” he said apprehensively, “Hermione?” They looked away from their plates to face him, and he swallowed. “I just wanted to say I was sorry for… earlier.”

“For being an enormous prat?” Ron suggested helpfully.

Harry looked at him. “Yeah, that.”

“Well sit down then,” Hermione ordered, pointing to the empty space beside her. No one had wanted to sit where Harry usually sat for some reason. Ginny exhaled sharply and shot to her feet. As she stomped off to sit with the first years, Harry supposed he could wait and apologize to her later then.

~*~

Ron scuffed the carpet with the toe of his shoe. “So we have no head girl for a month.”

Harry sighed. It was disconcerting for everything to be suddenly normal between the three of them, pretending the last week and a half hadn’t mattered. ”She’s still head girl.”

“Yeah, but she’s cleaning the loos with Filch, and she didn’t leave you a patrol schedule, did she?”

Harry shrugged. There was a dangerous gleam in Ron’s eyes, and Harry figured he knew what Ron was suggesting. “No, I’m supposed to write it.” Ron nodded. “I suppose you want the kitchens.” Ron nodded harder. “They call that letting the fox guard the henhouse, Ron.”

“Yeah, well, what are you guarding, then?”

“The humpbacked witch.”

“Who’s the fox now?”

“Remember,” Harry wagged his finger, “you’re actually supposed to report anyone you see sneaking around.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Bring me back something with chocolate,” Harry told him, pulling out a sheet of parchment and scribbling down schedules. He had a feeling that if Hermione found out what he was doing, she’d be back to writing schedules, and Ron would be back to guarding the hallways, detention or no.

Hermione peered over his shoulder as she hurried out of the common room. “It’s a good thing you’re finally taking over some of your responsibility as head boy, Harry,” she said with a smirk.

~*~

Ginny stood in Snape’s doorway, glowering from behind her bangs. He glanced up from marking essays and snapped “in,” at her. As she marched stiffly to his desk, she tripped over a door stop and caught herself, ruining her effort at temperamental dignity. Hermione was so lucky, she thought, to have her detentions with Filch instead. She’d give almost anything not to have to spend hours every night with Snape.

The cheap Muggle desk he’d had the night before had vanished and in its place stood a stately carved oak one. Ginny supposed it had been back-ordered. Suddenly she wanted to use what was left of her Fireworks to blow it up, but she decided she’d settle for dropping a stink pellet into one of the drawers during her next detention. “Your detention for this evening is to clean that.” He pointed at a birdcage resting on the top of his bookcase full of doxies.

She stepped over to it and examined it. “Why exactly do you have a cage full of doxies?” she grumbled as one of the little monsters tried to bite her through the bars of the cage.

“The second years are learning about household pests,” he retorted, not looking up from the essays.

“They’re more than pests,” shot back Ginny. “They’re dangerous creatures.”

“In this year alone, you have managed to blow up my desk, spy on me, tell my secrets to the school, bounce apples off of my head, hex my chalk, and induce my quill to sing idiotic torch songs.” He leaned menacingly over his desk, but even standing, she was barely shorter than he was. “Dangerous creatures are the least I can do.”

Ginny thought back on the stories Hermione had told her about detention in the Forbidden Forest with Voldemort and Malfoy. “You better have the antidote in here.”

Snape smiled coldly. “Afraid you can’t handle something nearly all of my second years managed?”

“Do I get to use magic?” she asked huffily.

“You may use freezing charms,” he told her complacently, “and only freezing charms.”

She blew her breath out from behind her teeth as she whipped her wand out and pointed it at the cage. A tap sent the few doxies sleeping on the bottom buzzing to the bars snapping at the end of her wand. With her back safely turned to Snape, she smiled and flicked the latch of the cage door. It swung open and the doxies teemed out. A few chased after her wand, and she pointed at one and muttered “Obrigesco.” It dropped to the ground and she picked it up gingerly to drop it in a waiting box.

“What do you think you’re doing, you little cretin!” Snape yelled as the doxies sped towards him, mouths open, ready to bite. He pulled out his wand, and for a moment, she thought he was about to curse her, but he just shouted the same freezing charm she had used at a doxy poised to bite his nose.

One of them tangled itself in his hair, but Ginny froze it. He untangled it with a grimace and tossed the petrified thing at her. She caught it, her face twisting into a sneer, and dropped it into the box beside its fellow.

Freezing charms flew thickly through the room as the pair tried to round up the buzzing gaggle of irate doxies before they zoomed back to attack them again. “You imbecile, you didn’t even learn the one thing Lockhart was competent to teach!”

She smiled impishly at him. The doxies hadn’t rushed to attack her, so she considered the enterprise a success. “And that is?”

Snape didn’t reply as three more doxies fell to the floor. Ginny gathered the fallen and dropped them into the box. At last, the office fell silent and Ginny asked “How many of them were there?”

Snape glared balefully at her. “Ten.”

Ginny poked her wand into the box to count the doxies. “One, two, hay, what’s this?” The box into which she had chosen to drop the creatures was half full of notebooks and loose pieces of paper and parchment. The large rounded writing on the loose pages didn’t look at all like Snape’s cramped spiky script. She pulled it out to examine it closer.

“Put that back, Miss Weasley.” Snape came to stand behind her and she flinched without meaning to.

“It’s someone else’s research,” she accused.

Severus paused a moment to reflect that she thought he was doing exactly what Belby was. “It isn’t any of your concern,” he snarled. “I’m certainly not about to steal someone’s recipe for-“ he plucked the sheet from her fingers, “an ear hair vanishing elixir.”

“Then what are you doing with it?” She did her best to look down at him even if he was just a bit taller.

He scowled at her. “I borrowed them from a colleague before you were born, Weasely, I found them when I changed offices.” She didn’t believe a word of it, and his jaw clenched as she pursed her lips. A terrible suspicion flooded him. “You will not rummage through my notes further,” he demanded tartly. “Haven’t you had your fill of sneaking around?” She gave him a last defiant glance, but dropped the paper back into the box, suitably chagrined. “How many doxies?”

She counted them quickly, “nine. Accio doxy!” It sped forward, beating its wings against the spell. “Obrigesco,” she said halfheartedly, and it fell to the ground where she picked it up and threw it in with the rest.

Snape conjured a bucket of soapy water and a rag and buried his head in a new stack of essays as she stripped the doxy droppings and a few flecks of paint off the cage. When the cage was clean and the water was a pale beige, Snape stepped over to her and cast a drying charm on it. “You got my floor wet.”

He sounded so sulky that Ginny almost laughed as she set the cage on top of his bookcase and pushed the doxies into it. With the last one safely shut away, she jabbed her wand at the cage. “Finite Incantatem,“ she mumbled, and the doxies waved their tiny fists at her.

~*~

Just after midnight, Harry stumbled into the common room, his arms full of chocolate cream puffs. Ron, a cake and a plate of éclairs balanced haphazardly in his hands, yawned hugely. “I hate patrol nights.” Harry raised his eyebrows and pointed at the cake. “Yeah, I know, and I’m going to have to stay up even longer to finish this.”

Harry snickered and Ron sauntered up the stairs. “Did you even patrol at all, or did you spend the whole time in the kitchen?” Ron just grinned and waved at him. Harry turned his head away and grinned to himself as he meandered over to the fireplace and flopped down into an armchair.

He looked up as he heard a rustling from the chair beside him, and he saw a figure seated in it against the arm rest, her back to him. “Ginny!” She flinched, but ignored him.

“Are you going to talk to me?” he asked softly. She shook her head. “I hope you don’t mind if I talk,” he said uncertainly.

She pressed herself against the back of the chair and folded her knees up against her chest.

“I’msorryIdidn’ttellyouSnapewasSnape,” he garbled, and she turned to face him. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you Snape was Snape,” he tried again. “And I’m sorry I shagged Eileen.”

Ginny crossed her arms and rolled her shoulders inwards, her head down.

“Ginny?”

“Go away,” she whispered. Harry heaved a sigh of relief. She didn’t sound like she was crying or about to start screaming at him again. She just sounded tired.

“I am sorry.”

“Go away.”

He left, but he left a couple of cream puffs on the table in front of her too. It was a while before she uncurled and reached for one.