The next morning Severus woke up early and slipped out of the dorm as quickly and quietly as he could.

The walk back to the common room had been oddly reminiscent of staff meetings in that he spent the entire time tuning out other people singing Potter’s praises. They must have resolved Potter’s issues at some point during the walk, because by the time they got back to the common room, thus prompting Severus to tune the conversation back in, they were talking about some assignment they’d had for Defense.

He’d planned to go and hide in their dorm room, but he’d felt vaguely pressured into spending time with Weasley, Potter, and Granger when he’d tried to leave. This was a far cry from when he’d felt like the only reason people spent time with him was out of obligation, but when the people in question were brainless children, the honor of the occasion was called into question.

He couldn’t quite believe that Potter had truly believed the that Severus thought he was a murderer. He must have pretended to believe it to use it as an attention seeking opportunity.

Severus more interested in the way Potter had seemed unwilling to expand upon what he’d said about people not apologizing to him. He was torn between his instinctual belief that this was because Potter had a habit of expecting apologies for absurd offenses and the quiet voice that insisted that this was unlikely.

The fact that Potter truly had seemed shocked when Severus had asked for forgiveness had only given power to that quiet voice. And even more shockingly, he had given Severus the forgiveness he had asked for.

And he hadn’t asked for any kind of penance to give it either.

Of course, Potter had believed that he’d been cursed into saying what he did. Regardless of what was going in Potter's mind, he still wasn’t sure how exactly the massive lapse of judgement that led to Severus calling Potter a murderer had occurred. And it hadn’t even been the only lapse of judgement, just the most serious and most recent one.

So now, Severus was heading to the library. This was no longer a couple isolated instances of poor impulse control, but a pattern of them, and Severus was determined to figure out what was wrong with him.

The pattern had started after he’d taken the deaging potion, so it stood to reason that the potion had something to do with the effects he was experiencing now. With this thought in mind, Severus made a beeline for the potions section once he got to the library.

He was glad that he was up early enough that there was practically no one in the library, because the new student whose appearance coincided conveniently with ‘Professor Snape’s’ disappearance researching deaging potions in the potions section would be horribly suspicious.

Thanks to his familiarity garnered over years of referencing this particular section of the library, Severus was able to quickly isolate a couple books that would possibly shed some light on the situation.

He settled in to read behind the privacy of an obscuring field. And nearly tossed the first book he read at the wall in his frustration. It was a book on the basics to know when deaging yourself, and one of the biggest things it stressed was understanding the differences in physiology between your current age and your target age. And Dumbledore had never considered that this was research that needed to be done before Severus deaged himself.

He was caught on a particular passage that said, “As we age we inevitably forget how it felt to be younger, and that while this was typically applied to the difference in emotional states, it also heavily applies to the differences in body and brain development”.

Severus skimmed the rest of the introductory chapter and the table of contents to confirm that this was the extent of the books usefulness. The books he had initially obtained had all focused on different academic fields of interest in deaging, and not on the actual experience of deaging.

He could not believe Dumbledore had allowed him to deage without researching the important minutiae involved. He could have done it himself, but really this whole thing had been Dumbledore’s idea so he should have done a better job preparing for it. At the very least, if he had been told to research deaging prior to doing it, he would have done it. Begrudgingly, yes, but he would have done it!

He snapped himself out of his anger and got up to search the library for books on human development.

The next book he found explained his problem, “Teenagers have underdeveloped frontal lobes, leading to poor decision making, impulsivity, and generally reckless behavior”. And because the potion he’d taken completely reverted his body to sixteen years old, he currently had an underdeveloped frontal lobe.

Severus then checked the time and saw that he was cutting it close to the end of breakfast. He hurriedly cast a spell to return all the books he’d pulled off the shelves back to where they belonged and rushed out of the library to the Great Hall.

He also now realized, thanks to his reading, that with a teenage boy’s metabolism, he was going to need to eat more than he had as an adult man. And while he did know why he was behaving so stupidly lately, he had no idea how to fix it. An underdeveloped brain was not exactly something that could be solved with Occlumency or a potion.

When he got to the Gryffindor table, he saw that the table was nearly deserted because he’d cut it so close to the end of breakfast. He ate as quickly as he could because he had Transfiguration first thing, and given how his last two interactions with McGonagall had gone, he had absolutely no desire to draw her wrath again.

Once he was done eating, he headed out to McGonagall’s classroom. He was only slightly slower than he had been the night before when he was seeking her advice.

He arrived outside her classroom to find a crowd of Gryffindors and Ravenclaws clustered in groups outside her door. Severus knew that he ought to join the tight cluster of students that Potter was at the center of, but he was rather distracted by his nerves regarding this coming class.

“There you are, Eli,” Weasley said entirely too loudly, beckoning enthusiastically.

Severus reluctantly tore his thoughts from the anxious spiral his brain had been gearing up to go down and made his way over to the group. He should have known they wouldn’t let him stand on his own, especially since no progress had been made on finding his ‘attacker’.

“Good morning,” Severus greeted them.

“Where’d you go this morning? You were gone before we even got up and then you never turned up for breakfast,” Weasley asked.

Severus was a little irritated that his movements were being scrutinized, but he supposed he had said he’d been attacked yesterday, so they were at least a bit justified to ask him that. He responded, “I spent most of the morning in the library doing some reading and then I just grabbed a quick bite before rushing here.”

Potter nudged Weasley with his elbow, “See, I told you we have another Hermione in our midst.” To Severus, he said, “Hermione tends to run off to the library without warning or explanation.”

Hermione smiled and rolled her eyes at this.

Then McGonagall finally showed up, saving Severus from having to figure out how to respond to this. He followed the pack of Gryffindors into the classroom and looked around curiously. He hadn’t been in her classroom in years, possibly since his own days as a student since he had little reason to go into her classroom as a professor.

Not much had changed about the classroom. A few of the diagrams depicting transfiguration concepts looked as though they were too new to have been there when Severus was a student, but he didn’t remember precisely what had been on the walls to say for sure.

He quietly took a desk behind Potter and Weasley, vaguely hoping that they would distract from his presence with Potter’s fame and their incompetence, allowing Severus to make it out of the lecture unscathed.

What followed was quite possibly the worst Transfiguration lecture Severus had ever attended.

It started with McGonagall taking roll call and the surprised looks the students exchanged at this immediately set Severus on edge.

When she got to just before Eli’s name, she paused. Then she said, “Eli Hopkins.” McGonagall looked up from the sheet she was marking the attendance on to make sharp eye contact with Severus, and finished, “Our… new student.”

She moved on to the next name, but Severus had a vivid flashback to Potter’s first potions class. He instinctively knew she was referencing that interaction, but he had no idea how she would have known what had happened, or why she was only now acting on the information.

McGonagall kept singling him out for demonstrations or to answer questions, to the exclusion of everyone else in the class. He could hardly remember all the specifics she was asking him for since it had been over 20 years since he’d taken this class, and he could feel himself withdrawing throughout the class. He could still feel some lingering disappointment from his school days spent as a teacher’s pet. Then there was the public shame of the experience and the way he could tell that McGonagall genuinely meant to target him that were together incredibly impactful.

By the time class was coming to a close, she was drawing dirty looks from the other Gryffindors and confused ones from the Ravenclaws. And if Severus had been in the state of mind he’d been in before McGonagall had harassed him for an entire class period, he would have been better able to enjoy having peers be defensive on his behalf.

Finally class ended, and McGonagall interrupted him while he was halfway to his feet and asked him to stay after. He sank back heavily into his seat. With the class he’d just sat through, he really should have expected this, but he’d fooled himself into thinking he could make a quick escape.

“Tough luck, mate,” Weasley said and had the audacity to pat him on the back on his way out.

He was still reeling from this when Potter said, “I’ll wait for you in the hall.”

Once everyone was gone, McGonagall called him to the front of the room. Severus reluctantly got to his feet and came to a stop in front of her desk.

“I take it you didn’t like how class today went?” McGonagall said smugly.

All of Severus’s shame and discomfort became anger with a thunderous roar. “No,” he ground out, looking anywhere but at McGonagall.

“Did you not like how I singled you out and asked you difficult questions considering your circumstances? Was that uncomfortable for you?” she continued.

Severus’s bad feeling from after the roll call returned, but he still had no idea how she would know to do this.

“When Albus decided to take such drastic measures to mend the rift between you and Mr. Potter, I decided to do my own research into what precisely caused it. I didn’t get a chance to get very far into my research because of time constraints, but I did find a portrait to describe your first class together. And I decided to perform my own social experiment of sorts. You could also call it karma, if you like,” McGonagall said, then paused for a long moment.

Severus kept his silence, unwilling to respond to this, sure that if he opened his mouth, he’d say something to truly get him in trouble.

“Besides, based on how the rest of my Gryffindors reacted, you now have several people willing to defend you. It should make bonding with them, and especially Mr. Potter, significantly easier.”

Severus finally looked at her and could only stare in shock at her completely serious expression. He stared at her for longer than was polite before he finally managed to say, “Professor- how much time have you been spending around Dumbledore?”

McGonagall frowned at him and said, “What does that have to do with anything?”

Severus was truly concerned for her sanity if she couldn’t see it, and thankfully for her, she continued, “Oh no, he’s rubbing off on me, isn’t he?”

Severus nodded mutely in response.

McGonagall leaned back and seemed to think about this. “Well,” she said eventually, “I stand by my actions today, but in the future I will return to my normal teaching style. And, I think I will discuss a vacation with Florence.”

“Please do. May I go now?” Severus asked, desperate to get away from this version of McGonagall.

“Yes, yes you’re dismissed,” McGonagall said, still sounding absentminded.

Severus gratefully made his escape from the classroom.