Dinner was a quiet affair, considering. Ron and Hermione had run over to ask Snape if Harry could join them in the library to study with them until seven o’clock. Snape had made Harry explain to them about the spell as well. They both understood immediately. Apparently Hermione had read about the spell while doing research for Charms. Ron had a more practical knowledge, having experienced it first hand on many occasions.

"Fred and George practically lived under that spell for a whole year before they came to Hogwarts,” he grinned. “We’ve got a detention tonight anyway. Hermione’s mad about it, but it was her idea.”

“It was not my idea!” Hermione hit Ron on the arm with the back of her hand.

Harry felt Snape square his shoulders behind him.

“Who from?”

“McGonagall caught us on our way back through the portrait hole.” Ron said. “We had the pot with us and everything. How about you, you had the cloak on, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but apparently Snape has about eight senses.” Harry muttered quietly.

“And hearing is one of them.” Snape said, in a loud voice. The Slytherins and Hufflepuffs who had been eavesdropping on the conversation sniggered.

The man pushed himself up off the bench and started walking out of the room. Harry said a hurried goodbye to his friends and started off after the professor.

He tripped and whacked his elbow hard on the stone floor.

Snape didn’t notice. He kept walking away and though he did seem to feel some sort of resistance from the spell, he just kept going. Probably, he thought that Harry was just spending too long with his friends.

In reality, Harry was being dragged along the floor of the Great Hall. He tried to stand up but he instantly tripped again.

“Wait,” he called, trying to catch his breath and avoid a Slytherin’s foot at the same time.

“Professor!” Cedric Diggory had noticed what was happening from further down the Hufflepuff table. He stood up in front of Snape to stop him from moving. Diggory pointed out that Harry was still on the floor. Snape turned around, irritated, to see why.

“Potter, can you not just pay attention to where we are going?”

“Someone tied my shoes together!” Harry said, defensively.

Snape snorted, “You probably did it yourself, insisting on using the muggle way to do everything.”

“My trainers have Velcro, not laces. Do you think they just appeared out of thin air?”

Snape raised an eyebrow. “That is rather how conjuring works, Mr Potter.”

Harry glared up at the man while tying the laces over the top of the Velcro straps. He would have to work out how to get rid of the stupid things later on. He got to his feet and stalked out ahead of Snape who just shook his head and followed.

Once through the green door leading to the dungeons, Harry stopped and leaned against the wall, clutching his right arm and gritting his teeth. Snape looked at him with surprise.

“Are you injured?” he asked.

Harry scoffed, but was prevented from replying with a caustic remark by Snape continuing.

“You just stood up in the Hall, so I assumed you were fine.” He frowned, “You might have said something before we got all the way down here, Potter. Now we will have to go all of the way back up to the Hospital Wing.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Harry hissed.

Snape ignored him, reaching out and taking Harry’s arm, one hand on his wrist and the other above the elbow. He twisted the boy’s wrist so that his palm pointed at the ceiling and then down towards the floor. Then he bent the arm up so that Harry’s fingers were moving towards his shoulder. Harry groaned from the pain of it, and twisted away so that Snape had to let go.

“Okay, it’s broken,” he said.

“And how would you know that?” Snape asked.

“I’ve done it before. I, uh, fell off a fence when I was eight.”

It had been one of the many times Dudley and his gang had chased Harry at school. Harry had been backed into a corner and made a last ditch attempt at climbing over the eight foot fence which surrounded the playground. Dudley had grabbed hold of his ankle and tugged and a class helper walked up just in time to see Harry fall from the top.

The headmistress gave Harry a telling off for climbing about and called Aunt Petunia. His aunt was furious about being brought into school and with her there, there was no way Harry could blame Dudley for the incident. The Dursley’s had shut him in his cupboard for a week for embarrassing them and it wasn’t until Harry’s teacher called them to say that he couldn’t write that they felt the need to take him to the hospital.

“Potter!” Snape shook Harry by his good arm. “Wake up, we are going to see Madam Pomfrey.”

Harry just nodded and trotted out through the dreaded green door after the professor. They had to wait as a group of Slytherins walked past them towards their common room.

“Only you would manage to break your arm from a simple trip,” Snape grumbled. “How on earth do you survive all of your ridiculous escapades?”

“He is the Boy Who Lived, Snape.” Snape turned his sneer on the newcomer. It was Professor Moody, stomping towards them. “It seems to be what he does best. He’s not the only one who makes a habit of wriggling out of sticky situations either.”

Moody’s eye jerked wildly, taking in Snape’s expression and flicking quickly to where the man’s wand was stowed inside his cloak.

“Indeed,” Snape drew out the two syllables. “Well Moody, not all of us have the tenacity required to persist when a fight is obviously lost.”

His own dark eyes lingered pointedly over Mad Eye’s scarred face and dropped down to take in the man’s stump of a leg as well. Moody fumbled a little as he took a long swig from his hipflask. Snape’s lip curled in distaste.

“Some of us believe in things like bravery and loyalty. Potter here can tell you about that.” Moody said gruffly, stomping away towards the marble staircase.

Snape made a noise deep in his throat which Harry couldn’t identify.

“Do hurry up, Potter.” 

Harry gulped as a circle of angry eyes surrounded him. He was boxed in, his every move scrutinised. He kept his head bent to look at the parchment before him, trying to ignore them.

He couldn’t believe Snape had abandoned him here. After watching him all day, the old bat had just up and left him! It would have been alright if the man hadn’t decided it would be best to leave Harry under supervision.

Which meant that he had left the Gryffindor in the Slytherin common room. Which was full of Slytherins. All of them looked like they wanted to kill him.

So what if the man had left orders that Harry couldn’t be attacked? What were his two bodyguards supposed to do if the room turned on him? What if the two prefects joined in?

Harry glanced up again, as he had been doing every minute or so for the last hellish hour. Instantly the four people who had been watching him looked away, feigning disinterest. He could see them all, together in little groups, plotting revenge. They were all speaking in low voices, gathered around sheets of parchment.

“Potter, you are making a mess.”

It was the Slytherin prefect with the red hair. The boy was frowning at the puddle of ink which had formed while Harry had been looking around the room. Harry hurried to wipe it up with his sleeve and the older boy watched him with disgust.

The girl looked up from where she was trying to transfigure a Knut into a pair of earrings. Every time she got one as she liked it, she had to try and change the other to match and she was getting more and more frustrated with trying to get them identical.

“They aren’t going to do anything, they’re all in their study groups. And anyway, the Professor threatened to put anyone who causes trouble in the same room as you until Monday. That’s enough to put anybody off.”

Harry rolled his eyes, “You’re hilarious. And I’m not worried.”

The girl stretched her hands up through her hair, pulling it back behind her shoulders, out of the way. “So you won’t mind if Blackfort and I go for a little stroll around the dungeons, then?”

Harry glanced around and saw that a few people had looked up with interest when she said that. “Uh, Snape might not like it if you disappeared off. He did say you had to stay here. What if I decide to start a riot or something?”

“It would not be you starting the riot, Potter.” Blackfort said. “But don’t worry, we will be here to protect you from the big, bad Slytherins.”

“It’s usually the little ones you have to look out for.”

The three of them jumped, Harry would have fallen off the sofa if Blackfort next to him hadn’t reached over to steady him.

“Sir?” The girl said, her voice surprisingly steady.

Professor Snape smirked down at them, “Don’t you agree? It’s all well and good to fill our quiddich team with our muscle, but it’s the brains behind it all that you have to watch out for.”

“Not when your entire game plan is ‘flatten the other team’” Harry muttered.

Snape had the attention of the room now that his house had realised he was standing there. A lot of them stood up out of respect, waiting to see if he had anything to say to them.

“Good evening, I hope you are all getting on with your studying for today.” He was scanning the room, eyes resting on certain students. A group of third year girls went bright red and tried to unobtrusively hide a packet of Exploding Snap cards under their Charms homework. “Potions Club is starting in a few minutes. If you are coming, then get a move on. Potter, get up.”

“What? Why do I have to go?”

“Because you still owe me two copies of those potion instructions from this morning, because your two minders are coming and most importantly, because I am telling you to and we teachers have a little thing called ‘authority’.”

Harry scowled and got up, collecting his work for McGonagall into a messy pile. He had already completed the stuff which Professor Sprout had sent down with one of her Hufflepuffs in fourth period, and now he was back to the same problems he had been stuck on all afternoon. And now there were huge smudges of ink all over it too.

Snape paused for a moment before they left and brandished his wand. There were groans of dismay as a pack of cards soared gently through the air and into Snape’s outstretched hand. Harry felt a bit sorry for the girls, McGonagall would never have said anything if they had been Gryffindors.

‘Potions Club’ looked more interesting than Harry had expected, although that wasn’t saying much. Instead of Snape stalking around the room, insulting people, he wandered around insulting people. It was a subtle change, but there was a different atmosphere to it all.

The Weasley twins were there, and they were taking the brunt of Snape’s irritation. Harry thought they might be doing it on purpose, to distract the man from picking away at Harry, which was what tended to happen whenever the man walked past.

The twins were brewing some sort of cream coloured paste, and they were refusing to tell Snape what its effects were going to be. They had a bag with them as well with a huge pile of biscuits sealed inside. Snape was examining the remains of the ingredients they had already put in, and one of the twins passed him the method which they were writing with meticulous care. The other twin was busy measuring sugar out onto the most precise scale in the dungeon.

Harry was looking around the room to see what everyone else was up to and caught the eye of Cedric Diggory at the bench behind him.

“How’s it going, Harry?” The Hufflepuff smiled. “Still in one piece?”

“Just about.” Harry replied a bit stiffly. “Thanks for earlier by the way.”

There was an awkward silence and Diggory calmly added another ingredient to his potion.

“I’m surprised so many people are here.” Harry said when the other boy looked back up.

“Your friend Granger is usually here too, but I think she’s got a detention for whatever you guys did to the Slytherins. She was in the library sorting books at top speed, and Weasley was with her. Poor kid looked quite lost.”

Harry felt bad for his friends, but it was to be expected that if Harry had been caught then the others would be implicated too. It was quite a funny idea too; Hermione would be annoyed because she would be around all these people who were studying and she wasn’t allowed to, and Ron was terrible at finding anything in the library to begin with.

“They’ll kill each other by the end of the night.” Harry said, Cedric grinned back at him.

One of the older Slytherins walked down the middle aisle to speak to Snape, who looked up from the Weasley’s cauldron reluctantly.

“What is it?”

“Sir, I’m supposed to Speak with Professor McGonagall about something, can I go up now? I’ve tidied everything away already.”

“Well you’d be useless if I made you stay here then, go on.”

The girl smiled and left. Harry remembered that his Transfiguration work was due in about half an hour and sprinted out after her, ignoring Snape’s shout for him to come back.

“Wait up!” he shouted to her. She turned around with an irritated look.

“What is it, Potter? I’m busy.”

“Sorry, It’s just I heard you were going to see McGonagall, and I’m supposed to hand this in. And, well, I can’t exactly get out of the dungeons at the moment. Please?”

The girl stared at him for a moment, trying to work out what he had blurted out. Then her eyes slid to the handful of scrunched up papers Harry was holding up. She reached out slowly and took hold of them between her forefinger and thumb.

“I’ll take them away.” She said, holding them as far away from her robes as possible.

“Thank you.” Harry said, sincerely. The girl walked around the corner with ther nose pointed up in the air.

“Potter?”

“Yeah?” Harry turned around. Blackfort, the Slytherin from earlier was jogging towards him.

“Come on back. The Professor’s in a right mood because you disappeared like that. He said I’d find you here.”

“Yeah, he seems to have some crazy bat sense going on.”

“Yeah, well he also said that if you didn’t come I could use any minor jinxes I want to convince you to get back there. So get a move on or I might have a practice of a good tap-dancing one I came across the other day.”

Harry rolled his eyes, fairly sure it was an empty threat.

Snape ignored Harry when he came back into the room, instead he was focussed on helping Fowley with his potion. The Slytherin looked defensive and a little petulant, but the potion seemed to be going pretty well. At least they didn’t seem to be fighting, Harry got the definite impression that the two didn’t get on very well.

Snape seemed to guide the child through the difficult step they were on and called one of the prefects over to keep an eye on it.

He stalked up to the front of the room.

“Come.”

Harry did, hurrying through to the man’s office. Snape waited for him to enter the room first and then shut the door firmly behind himself.

“Sit.” Snape pointed to the hardwood chair in front of his desk. Snape stood with his arms folded.

“Well?”

“What?”

“Potter, how is it you become confused even when I use words even a dog could understand? Why did you think it would be appropriate to disappear without my permission?”

Harry blinked, “I was literally just down the corridor. You knew where I was.”

“Yes, I knew you chased one of my students out of the room and that you then stayed where you were. How was I to know you hadn’t tried to attack her, or been attacked yourself.”

Harry frowned, “I don’t go around picking fights with everyone, you know.”

“Do you remember breaking your arm this afternoon? I take it you did not intend to do that to yourself. You really do have concept of self-preservation, do you?”

Harry rolled his eyes. Snape’s eyes narrowed dangerously across from him.

“And there is this matter of how disrespectful you are being. It is not acceptable, do you understand? You will remain here until I come to escort you back to your room.”

Harry suppressed a sigh of annoyance. “And what d’you want me to do?”

Snape stared at him for a moment. “You can write me an essay.”

Oh great, Harry thought, more potions work.

“I want you to write three feet on ‘the smoke inside a remembrall’.”

“What?”

“Do you have any idea how annoying it is to have to repeat everything, Potter? You have about an hour and a half until I return.” Snape took out everything Harry would need to write. He took out his wand and extended a side table so it was at the right height for the boy to use.

“And Potter, if you gnaw on that quill like you do your own, you are paying for a new set.”

Snape left.

Harry looked at the door blankly, then stared down at the yellowed page in front of him. He didn’t have the first idea what to write. He knew absolutely nothing about remembralls. He groaned and let his head thud into the desk.