“You foolish, guilt-ridden, self-effacing Gryffindor!” Severus roared, pulling himself out of the still-spinning Floo connection. “I suppose it made perfect sense to omit the fact that you had completely drained your magical core at Weasley Manor from your little sob-story yesterday, did it?” He bore down on the woman, eyes blazing white fire. He wasn’t simply royally pissed off with the Weasley matriarch, really. It was more along the lines of wanting to rip the woman’s head off and lob it into a cauldron of Skrewt acid.

“How could you be so stupid? Casting spells so soon after experiencing magical exhaustion is tantamount to attempting suicide! Are you completely daft?” It was a real effort not to whip out his wand and hit the woman with a body bind before flinging her through to Hogwarts. “Have you NO THOUGHT for your children?” he hissed.

Molly, who had been sitting quite peacefully in an armchair near the fireplace, knitting, as usual, was floored. She sat gaping at the normally dour man as he ranted and raved, waving his hands about, before his last comment caused her to gather her wits.

“Now Severus, that was completely uncalled for,” she said, glaring at him fiercely from under her rather limp, dull mat of hair. “It’s been three weeks since that incident, and I feel fine!”

Her eyes instantly widened, and Severus nearly smirked in triumph. Boy, had she just dug herself a hole. 

“Really, now?” he asked silkily, clasping his hands behind his back smoothly and donning a frighteningly amicable expression. “Feeling fine, are you?” His eyes flitted about the room, noting the way light seemed to be being sucked right into the walls. Despicable. “Cast a spell.”

“Surely – “

“Oh come now, Molly,” Severus said, stepping closer to stand over her chair, still wearing that cheery expression. “Just a simple Lumos, and no harm done, right? Because you feel so fine.”

The older woman hesitated, and then produced her wand. She stared at it for a minute, to Severus’ secret amusement, as if she were trying to persuade the birch stem to produce a beam of light or else. Severus cleared his throat loudly, enjoying Molly’s discomfort. “Sometime today, Weasley.”

After a minute more of preparation, Molly finally deflated, tucking her wand away and holding her knitting close to her chest. “I can’t do it, Severus.”

“Obviously,” he bit back, now annoyed with the woman for wasting his time. He raised his wand and produced a travelling bag. “Anything you want to carry with you to Hogwarts should go in here. Just say what it is you want, and it will come to you. I will be in the kitchen.”

Severus flapped into the kitchen, content for the moment to fume, and then release Molly Weasley into the tender care of one Poppy Pomphrey.

The kitchen was bare and dark, not at all like he was used to seeing it. It was also frightfully still, ass if even the air was frozen in shock. He snarled, and paced back to the hallway, and, spying the gnomes peeking in at him through the windows, back into the living room. Molly was just waving the last of her things into the bag, and impatiently, he snatched it up. “Idiots, the lot of you,” he grumbled as he extended a hand for the woman grasp. When she stumbled, he sent the bag through the Floo ahead of im, and caught the woman more firmly. He said nothing, but the glare Molly saw on his face when she looked up at him was enough. Meekly, she allowed herself to be led through the Floo, and never saw the worried backward glance Severus shot at the room before they spun away.

And neither of them saw the sole, dirty gnome standing in the hallway.

*&^*

Severus Snape strode purposefully down the hallways, feeling tired, irritated and spread a bit too thin. Molly Weasley was enduring the lecture of her life at the ands of the school’s mediwitch, Ginny Weasley was fast asleep and recovering nicely, he had just summoned Sirius and Draco to the Slytherin common room, and Remus, well, Sirius was supposed to et a hold of him. He was currently on his way to the Gryffindor common room; he had a certain green-eyed menace to fetch.

But there, sitting on the stairs outside the tower, was her. The Granger. He felt his wand hand twitch. Oh, what he wouldn’t give to be able to hex the hair off the little know-it-all’s inflated head.

‘Come, now, mate. Let’s think about this for a minute.´ Two tried to reason. ‘If you hex the girl, Dumbledore will fire you win a heartbeat, remember? It’s in your contract, not hurting the students and what not…’

‘I can modify her memory. No one would ever know who did it.’ He thought back, standing there, unaware that he looked like a rather creepy creeper, watching a teenage girl so intensely.

However, Three took it upon herself to inform him.

‘Severus! Stop staring at her that way! You look exactly like the man she accused you of being yesterday!’

And then, Severus was livid. How dare that voice, her voice, address him by his first name in his head! The impertinent brat! Before he knew it, he was stalking forward, his robes whipping around his legs, intent on giving the girl a bitter piece of his mind.

“Granger!”

The frightened girl jumped up, whipping out her wand and looking around. While at first he was pleased tat she at least had learned the importance of always being ready, in the deepest part of his mind, of course, he was further irritated that she would see him as a threat.

“Well, what have we here?” he asked silkily, stepping close to glare down on the much shorter student. “Someone practicing magic in the hallways? I do believe that that is against the school rules.”

The child had the audacity to square her shoulders. “No, sir, I was not.”

His nostrils flared. “Of course you weren’t,” he conceded mockingly. “You were actually just waiting, weren’t you? But for whom?” he asked curiously, circling the girl like a predator with live prey. “Who on earth would Little Miss Good-two-Shoes want to curse, so badly?”

“I wasn’t going to curse – “

“You will be silent.”

But apparently, she would not.

“You horrible man!” Hermione all but shrieked. “How dare you walk around accusing people of doing horrible things without any proof, you – “

“Why, Ms. Granger,” Severus said softly, holding the girl’s gaze. “I could ask you the very. Same. Thing.”

The girl paled, but held her ground. “I don’t need proof,” she whispered fiercely.

“No?” Severus asked, raising one dark eyebrow. “How so?”

“Because Harry loves you now, when three days ago he hated you. Feelings don’t just change that way for no good reason.”

“And your ‘good reason’ would be that I molested him?” His voice was dangerously low, and only sheer will power kept him standing stock still, when he wanted to reach out and strangle the girl.

“What else could possibly have him singing your praises, Professor?” she spat. The venom in the word surprised even him, though he didn’t show it. “Harry has always looked up to you, even when he claimed to hate you. Any decent person could look at him and tell he’d been mistreated, and then you come around, feed him a bit of twisted affection and viola, Harry loves you.”

“Well done, you incredibly dense child. Once again you have managed to come to the wrong conclusion with a multitude of facts.” He paused, taking a deep breath. “Have you talked to Harry this summer?” he asked, ignoring the way she took offense with him using the boy’s first name. “Have you bothered to ask him what happened between he and I yesterday?”

“Yes, I di – “

“Has it ever occurred to you that you were wrong, and that I simply helped the boy? That molestation and magic of the like are so very, very vile – “

“Don’t talk to me about vile. You were a Death Eater – “

“Yes,” he growled, at the end of his patience and unable to prevent a sliver of his magic from escaping his control and fizzling in the air around them. “And you would do well to remember that, Ms. Granger.”

He was standing so close the girl’s trembling disturbed his robes. Giving her a polite nod that was anything but, Severus strode up the tower staircase, intent on collecting his ward.