Although the start at Rowky Syke had been rocky—and not in the over-driven, turned-up-to-ten way that Harry had come to enjoy—Harry's presence in Mr. Fowler's class in the aftermath of his fight with Snowdrop Hill and Nicky Henderson was accepted, perhaps all the more, because he had proven in the yard that he wasn't the retiring sort, content to sit back while he was taken advantage of.

On the other hand, it also resulted in most of the other children avoiding him outright, which was far from ideal.

Harry did his level best to fade into the background of the class. He had a lot of experience with that from his years spent as Dudley's favoured target.

Things had only seemed to get worse for him after their first week's assignment, which was to be brought in the second Monday of term; Mr. Fowler having given his class the entirety of the weekend to get their submissions in ready order.

Harry hadn't quite known what to do with the prompt.

"Bring into class the best gift you've ever received."

In the end, after a full weekend of helping Severus to separate polyps from the intestines of nogtails, Harry had scrambled out the door on Monday morning the next week with Wheat's terrarium under one arm, for once glad to be as far away from the kitchen as he could reasonably manage.

The tarantula was beating a protest against the plastic wall with his four front legs, but Harry didn't have enough time to give much attention to the spider's prosaic concerns over being moved from the boy's bedroom. He'd barely had time to scarf down two hard boiled eggs on slightly stale bread before he was running out the door, determined not to be tardy.

He knew he'd not be able to run the entire distance, but whenever he was blessed to have the cracked pavements on his side, he kept up a brisk jog, knowing he was sweating though his uniform from the way the shorts and undershirt were beginning to cling like a second skin.

He was doing his best not to jiggle Wheat overmuch, and so far, the arachnid appeared to be bearing the ill treatment with grudging equanimity.

"I-I prom-promise you—eughh," Harry groaned to stifle his mounting queasiness, "h-half a dozen crickets, honest."

If a tarantula could sulk, undoubtedly that was what Wheat was doing. He'd covered himself in rushes at the far end of his enclosure. Perhaps to protect himself from the way that Harry was jostling him about.

The school was finally within sight, just up the cruel hill that taunted Harry with its steep pitch, when Harry's progress was halted against a solid, foul-smelling wall.

Falling backwards and rolling with his elbows caught in a cage-like formation to protect his pet, Harry managed to recover his footing with the quick agility that was the natural, God-given gift granted to so many victims of bullying.

His eyes darted all about, searching for the problem, before they landed on a pile of rags he must have missed when he'd been looking above toward the school, having anticipated his arrival to fall just within the bounds of what might reasonably be termed "on time."

The rags were stirring slightly, and Harry edged around them, realising that he'd tripped on a tramp that must have crawled from underneath one of the lean-tos that often populated the side of the River Leven.

"Sorry," he hissed, hoping he wouldn't have woken the man up, but even so feeling badly enough that he felt an apology was warranted. He made to step around the gently snorting heap.

He'd just trained his eyes back on the looming hill when he felt a hand at his ankle. Glancing down revealed a filthy, muck encrusted set of torn nails, set against skin that looked to have been rubbed with dirt. Every fold and crease in the gnarled appendage's hide was caked with grime.

When Harry yanked his leg away, his sock (though not, itself, a pristine white) came away with brown-black smudges where the fingers had gripped him.

His hand reached for the lapel pin Severus had entrusted to him in his panic, and he prepared himself to run—

A pale, bleary blue eye blinked up at him through a rheumy film of accumulated eye-gunk.

"The Dickins!? Amess, gadgey! Aa ain't no dike t'be lowpin'," the man at his feet yammered at him, his words tumbling forth from behind a mouthful of jumbled and misaligned teeth.

"Er... sorry...?" Harry murmured back, without the faintest clue what he was responding to.

"G'an then, l'al twat," the tramp grumbled, scowling at the boy with obvious annoyance.

Harry shook his head and held his hands up to signal that he hadn't the foggiest idea what the man might have been saying.

Snape had been right. Harry really didn't know the first thing about Cumbrian.

Thankfully, that was the end of it, and the man then rolled over so that the matted brown hair at the back of his head, which was plastered to his skull in some places and which stuck up on end in others, was facing Harry.

Harry waited for another ten seconds before pacing himself up the hill, arriving out of breath even as he'd attempted the slope at a more sedate speed than he'd taken on the way over from Severus' place.

When he skidded past Mrs. Murray, it was to her shrill shouts admonishing him over running in the halls, as well as a slightly contradictory proscription about how he ought not to be late.

He finally managed to place Wheat onto his desk and dropped his hind end into a seat exactly when the bell went off, and he endured a mildly exasperated look from Mr. Fowler before his teacher strode from his desk to begin the day's lessons.

"This morning we'll be working on compositions," he announced. "I had you all bring in something that you ought to be able to write about, if you followed the instructions I gave on Friday, and until the break I've set aside time for you all to journal about your choices."

Mr. Fowler turned and approached the blackboard, grabbing up a stub of chalk and drawing it squeakily across the surface. Each short mark he made produced a recognisable psst-and-click sound that carried on for several moments as he began to flesh out additional prompts.

Their teacher stood back, his torso facing the class as he looked over his shoulder at the board. He reached his hand out with the chalk and tapped several times underneath the writing.

"At least one hundred words, in a properly punctuated paragraph (or paragraphs), about why you chose the item you brought today. Include any details you think will interest the rest of the class about where the item came from, how long you've had it, and how you came to own it."

"After the break," Mr. Fowler announced, "You'll be reading your composition aloud while showing the rest of the class what you've brought in."

Worried murmurs accompanied this announcement, and Harry glanced around to see what kinds of things occupied the desks of the other children.

There were quite a few footballs. At least three by Harry's count. And some of the girls had brought in precious china dolls. One boy had a strange black contraption that was made of plastic. It reminded him a bit of Severus' tapedeck.

Then it came to him that he'd seen something of the like once in one of Dudley's magazines. It was some sort of gaming device that could be plugged into the telly.

Even Aunt Petunia had drawn the line at that.

Still more had pairs of ice-skates, sketch pads, and miniature yellow digger toys.

Not one other person had a live animal with them. And Harry's temporary desk mate was already attracting stares and grimaces from other students.

He pulled Wheat's terrarium against his chest, feeling protective of the spider.

At that moment, Wheat wasn't yet visible. All that anyone might see was but one fuzzy black leg poking out from beneath a pile of organic matter, but Harry had the distinct feeling that his pet wouldn't be well received.

In any case, the looming threat of having to present their work to the rest of the class eventually had everyone, including Harry himself, bending over their work and diligently applying themselves to the assignment at hand.

Harry really didn't think that writing one hundred words ought to have been as hard as it was proving to be. But then, as he worked through the initial stages of framing his paragraph, he encountered words he knew he wanted to use but which he couldn't spell, or he ran out of things to say that would fit the scope of the assignment.

Somehow, a piddly number like 'one hundred' required the entire hour and a half that Mr. Fowler had apportioned for the task. He then moved on to having them practise their times tables before the class was ushered out the door for their mid-morning break.

Which was, without contest, Harry's least favourite part of school.

Things had not improved since his first day at Rowky Syke, and he still didn't know exactly where he was supposed to park himself for thirty minutes before lunch.

For the other four days of the first week, he'd chosen a different spot each day. First, leaning up against the fence. That had left rust marks all over his jacket, and he'd been made to endure Severus' lecturing as the man blasted the scourges from the fabric with the tip of his wand.

On Wednesday, Harry had lingered by the door, but he was made to keep moving whenever anyone entered or left the building, barely managing to avoid being hit in the face when the door was swung too hard.

Thursday he'd tried to remain at his desk, and he'd almost made it to lunch in the empty classroom when Mr. Fowler had come back and scolded the boy over how he wasn't to sit unattended in classrooms while he was expected elsewhere.

Friday had seen Harry wandering all around the play yard, from one semi-isolated locale to another, enduring the sniggering and eye-rolling that he saw coming from both the park bench with the girls and the play gym packed with spectators.

He'd just about had it. Even in early September, it was far too hot for such nonsense, and the best place in the entire yard for him had been the spot he'd picked Monday, that first day.

As such, he returned to the relative protection of the trees, and dropped down into the underbrush, leaning his back against a trunk that wasn't the one where Snowdrop Hill sulked.

Enduring her glower, and acting as though she was beneath his notice entirely, Harry picked at the long grass that was going to seed around his legs and began to separate off the little, pellet-like seeds from the thick green stems.

He rolled them between his fingers.

Would grass seed be a good potions ingredient?

Ever since they'd spoken about the process of invention, Harry had made it his personal mission to bring any and every sundry would-be-ingredient he could to Severus' attention in the hopes that it might be Just-The-Thing that the man needed for his breakthrough.

Snape was, predictably, growing increasingly annoyed with him.

"Bloater paste is for toast, Potter—not one part of it would serve as a suitable base."

"No, I've not ever had any success at incorporating

rust into a brew. I can't imagine you would, either."

"Granted, earwigs and woodworms are 'gross,' but being gross is not the chief qualification for what makes an eligible ingredient."

"The only potion you'll ever manage to brew with petroleum jelly is a heavy-duty moisturiser."

Harry refused to give up. He'd brought other pocketful of ingredients home to the kitchen over the past week: plastic shavings he'd dug out from the crack in the pavement just before the bridge, paint chips that had sloughed off old signage that Severus had quickly disposed of, with the admonition that they probably contained lead, and dried up pots of paste he'd liberated from the art room.

Now, sitting as he was under the trees, Harry stashed the grass seeds he was collecting into his pocket, and made to gather up handfuls of immature acorns off of the sessile oak's lower branches.

From across the two meters that spanned to the yew, he saw some promising berries, ripening into an appealing red.

To gather the yew berries would mean speaking to Snowdrop Hill, however, who had commandeered the yew for herself on this day, and Harry heaved a great sigh.

It was for Severus. So that the man wouldn't have to worry anymore about supporting him when Harry'd made him give up his job.

Harry had no use at all for the likes of a snotty little girl that went around picking fights with the entire yard... but it could be that he'd have enormous use for the bounty of the tree she sat against.

For Severus? Harry felt quite certain that he'd have made every effort to lasso the moon for the dust alone if he thought for one second that the man could have made use of it somehow.

All he wanted in the entire world was for Snape to know how very grateful he was for the man saving his sorry hide, and if it was the last thing Harry got to do in his short life, he was determined to accomplish this if nothing else.

With that in mind, he pulled in a deep breath to blow up his torso and to straighten his spine, and he walked with what he hoped was a brisk and confident step over to the shadow of the yew.

Today, Snowdrop had forgone the bow, which likely had been forced on her against her will for the first day of school, and her short hair that seemed so terribly chopped was messier than Harry's own. Aside from this, however, her uniform was brand new where Harry's own was likely a few owners past second hand, and in pristine condition.

Or else... it had been when she'd arrived to break. She seemed to hate the cleanliness and order as much as Snowdrop Hill appeared to hate everyone and everything, for she was busying herself with gathering dirt into her palms and dribbling it through her fingers onto her legs and socks, allowing the filth to form mountainous ridges on her legs before it sloughed off when the pitch grew too high. Where it stained the white of her shirt and socks she seemed to take especial pains to rub it into the fibers with additional care.

Harry didn't think he'd ever seen anyone devote so much time and attention to being intentionally slovenly.

"Hill," Harry called, waiting for the girl to look up at him. When she did she wore a feral sort of snarl that stretched her rounded cheeks and exposed her gapped teeth.

Harry felt more than a little bit perturbed when the girl began to emit a low dog-like growl, which may have been purposefully animalistic. She didn't speak to him.

"You don't have to move or anything," Harry began, backing up one step in hopes of placating her, "only... I wanted some of those berries off that tree."

"Today this is my tree," she barked back, pressing herself more firmly against its base. "My tree—my berries."

"Come on, Hill. I just need like a few," Harry held out his palm to show the approximate amount he wanted.

He approached with all due caution, shuffling through the needles that carpeted the ground.

Harry's hands came up to show his lack of ill intent; he held them out in front of himself, hoping the gesture would calm her.

It wouldn't be necessary to get to the base of the tree to get to the berries. The slightly unripe clusters were all over the scoping branches. He just had to get close enough...

With each step he took, Snowdrop Hill's face fell into deeper and deeper creases, beginning to take on the appearance of a deeply offended bully breed dog.

His left hand remaining up to forestall her, Harry reached with his right hand to pluck at one of the nearest berry clusters, coming away with only perhaps three by the feel of it.

All he needed were enough to show Severus, in any case. He could always bring the man more if it turned out that they proved useful.

As it happened, Snowdrop Hill was capable of moving with all of the lithe precision of a lynx. She sprang forward, propelling herself by pushing off with her tiptoes against the gnarled trunk of the ancient yew, and toppled Harry over, prising one of the berries from his hand and gulping it down without bothering to chew.

Harry managed to retain his grasp on the other two berries and he hurriedly shoved them into his pocket along with the grass seed he'd collected earlier, shoving at Snowdrop's shoulder with his other hand to try and roll the girl off of him.

"Gerroff!"

"Gimme those! They're mine!"

"What are you?! Some kind of nutter?!" Harry managed to push the girl off and he scrambled to his feet, his hand pressing down against his pocket to protect its contents. He warded the girl's renewed attempts at attack off with one outstretched palm, managing to keep her at arm's length.

They struggled for a few moments more before the bell beckoned them back for lunch and Harry felt as though he might collapse with relief. He'd not supposed that the most difficult part of collecting likely ingredients would have been some little girl playing at being a mastiff.

Even so, Hill dogged his steps and came up behind him in the queue, butting her tray against his back and muttering invectives against him as Harry collected his food from the dinner nanny.

He was made to defend against her attempts to swipe the contents of his pocket the entire lunch period, and he only was offered a respite when they were seated away from one another in Mr. Fowler's class. She was seated on the other side of the room from him, and from the angle at which he was seated, he couldn't make out what it was that she'd brought in to fulfill the assignment.

One by one the class was called forward and Harry clapped politely after each student showed off their favourite gifts, offering short explanations of the items' origins.

Evidently, Snowdrop Hill was finding the proceedings tediously boring, as she was huffing and puffing with increasing levels of drama through each presentation. To the point where Harry caught Mr. Fowler shooting the wee girl a quelling look as she had made a particularly loud sigh during one boy's monologue on his special pair of Nike trainers.

He'd been paying such close attention to Snowdrop's escalating interruptions that when Harry himself was called up, he was surprised by it.

Wheat was still hiding when Harry toted his terrarium up to the front of the room, so when he arrived to the desk and placed the spider down, Harry was made to shuffle open his paper with one hand while he decided the best way to show off his pet.

Ultimately, after an awkward moment of indecision where he shifted from foot to foot, quite aware that he had almost nothing to show if his recalcitrant pet wasn't content to show himself, Harry pried the plastic top off and reached in to scoop Wheat into one hand, holding him in his left hand as he snapped the lined paper into a taunt smoothness with his right.

The loud noise startled the tarantula into jerking about against his fingers, and Harry winced as the short hairs of Wheat's many legs prickled at his fingers.

It was all quite overwhelming, the attention he was under, and managing a six inch spider, all while enduring the collective gasp of the students before him, mixed in with a few high-pitched squeals and exclamations of disgust.

"Erm... This is Wheat," Harry began, holding his hand aloft to try and display his small friend the best he could. "Wheat is a Brazilian Black Tarantula. I haven't had him very long, only since this summer." His pronouncements were stilted and faltering, reading as he was from the paper he'd filled with his unsteady writing.

"Severus brought me to Cokeworth this summer, and we went into town for good Flipino food," Harry explained, struggling over the word 'Filipino' as he often did, "And he needed stuff from the pet store. And the owner didn't want to sell him anything, 'cause he said he didn't want Severus to eat them, so Severus said Wheat was for me, and then he actually did it!" Harry ended with a mild exclamation and bounced once on his heels, still feeling a bit of excitement and residual happiness over the event, even though it had happened a full month and a half before.

Apparently not content to remain quiescent in his small palm, Wheat began to scale Harry's left arm, and as the spider crawled onto the back of his hand and then on to his sleeve, Harry held his hand out and open, attempting to remain still as his pet made a determined beeline for his shoulder.

Mr. Fowler was frowning and cleared his throat once behind his fist. "What was it he actually did?"

"He bought me Wheat! He was gonna go in there to... well... erm..." Harry realised with a sudden clarity that it would be a terrible decision to let the class in on what it was that Severus had initially planned upon entering the pet store.

Thankfully, it seemed as though Mr. Fowler had picked up on this from context alone, and he urged him along on his tale with a strange little uncomfortable cough.

Looking back down at his paper as the spider reached out one of his front legs to stroke against Harry's neck—to a chorus of 'Ewwww!' from the assembled students before him—Harry found his place and picked back up where he'd left off.

"And uh... Wheat likes to eat crickets, so Severus got me a bag of those too. Sometimes, he'll let me hold him, like he is now, and then sometimes he gets a bit cross and wants to be put down—"

There was a collective surge as many of the girls at the front of the room squealed and vacated their seats, backing up several paces, as though Wheat would jump from Harry's shoulder at any moment.

"Back to your seats!" Mr. Fowler ordered, "I'm sure Mr. Potter has his pet well in hand—haven't you?"

"He's ok," Harry agreed, looking down and to the left. Wheat's hairs weren't on end and he seemed content to nose under Harry's lapel for the moment.

"Just as well, perhaps it would be best if you returned your 'Wheat' back to his carrier."

Harry nodded and did as he was bid, trying to ignore the derisive noises coming from Snowdrop Hill's corner of the classroom.

She was being extraordinarily rude, even for her.

"Anything else, Mr. Potter?" His teacher asked, looking like he'd quite like to hurry the process along.

"Just one thing," Harry hastened to say, looking down at the remainder of his composition in order to remind himself, "Wheat is called wheat because I wanted to name him 'eight' but in a different language, and Severus said that in French, wheat means eight—only he says I say it wrong, and that when I say it it's like what flour's made of."

There was a beat of strained silence, which had Harry gulping a bit.

"Is that all?"

There was nothing else written on the paper, so Harry nodded and handed it over to be stacked with the other completed assignments for the day. He took his seat back and settled Wheat once more on his desk, patting the plastic terrarium in lieu of stroking the tarantula himself, as if to say that the arachnid had done a good job.

There were a couple more presentations before Snowdrop herself was called to the front of the classroom. It was well into the afternoon now, and she'd been bellyaching throughout the entire process, but it was with some annoyance that Harry wondered whether he ought not be concerned once the girl approached the front desk, looking as pale as chalk dust and with her face sweat slicked.

She teeter-tottered on her feet, swaying slightly even as she held onto the desk for balance, and it seemed she'd quite forgotten why it was she had been called to the front of the room at all.

Snowdrop didn't begin to speak when prompted by Mr. Fowler, and even when somewhere to Harry's left Nicky Henderson could be heard calling out "Hill...!" in a slightly concerned voice, she didn't do more than blink.

"I... I brought a... it's a—" She had settled the little porcelain bell on the desktop and stared at it, mouthing words that never materialised from past her lips.

Lips that were turning blue.

Harry felt a bolt of panic igniting in his breast. That couldn't possibly be normal...

The searing heat he felt in his chest as his terror crested was abruptly interrupted when Snowdrop Hill swooned and fell over, her head of mismatched-length brown locks colliding with the sharp edge of the desk. It blunted her descent, but also resulted in a small explosion of berry-red arcing out over the stacked student papers on the desktop. The bell she'd brought to show the class fell to the floor and shattered into a hundred pieces.

The class heaved, and the resulting surge would have been impossible to contain. From every corner came shrieks and yells, and while some students rose to try and approach the fallen girl, still more backed away like the tide letting out against the beach.

There was no way through that Harry could see, but there was a terrible compulsion to move toward the collapsed child he'd goaded earlier that same day. From what little he could see of her where she lay on the laminate floor, she was shuddering and convulsing as Mr. Fowler attempted to rein in the situation. Without knowing what else to do, and boxed in on all sides by other students, Harry leapt onto his neighbor's desk—knocking a Beatles memorabilia figurine to the ground as he did so—and began frog-hop from table to table, ignoring the other students clawing at his jacket to hold him back.

He was nearly to the front...

Mr. Fowler was now shouting instructions to those who were near enough to help, "Sharp! Sharp—run for the nurse! Tell her to phone 999! Ward, go for Ms. Shaw!" Their teacher was on his knees near Snowdrop's head. She'd stopped convulsing and he seemed to be attempting to find a pulse, looking more panicked by the minute.

As soon as Joshua Sharp—a quick-on-his-feet lad a few inches taller than Harry himself—made it to the door, he fell back onto his bum, having been thrown away from the entrance when the door opened inward, seemingly on its own, and with violent force.

From around the white-washed door, Harry saw the briefest flash of black, before the lanky shadow stepped into the middle of the fracas near the front of the classroom.

"Who're you!?" Mr. Fowler demanded in a shrill voice, even as he was ostensibly still concerned with managing his fallen student. "How did you get in the building?"

Harry could have cried, and he very nearly collapsed off of the desk he'd made it to in the second row. Before him was Severus, craning his neck and searching out the classroom from back to front until his eyes landed on Harry himself.

"Potter!" Snape yelled at the top of his voice, ignoring the situation at the front entirely, "You're alright?"

The boy scrambled down from the desk and ran toward his custodian, his small hands yanking the man down and over until he'd pulled him toward the girl lying prostrate on the floor.

"Severus! Severus, it's Hill! Hill's... Hill's dead!" the younger wizard blathered, feeling his breaths coming in terrified gasps as his gaze lingered longer and longer on the prone, lifeless form.

Snape fell to his knees beside Mr. Fowler and the other child and nudged the teacher away, swatting impatiently at his hands. His black eyes swept over her face and with gentle movements he made to peel back the lids of her eyes, which were half-opened already.

"Who in the devil do you think you are!?" Fowler spat, shoving at Snape and attempting to tear his hands from his charge. "I'll have the police in here quick as you can say Jack Robinson!"

Sitting back on his heels for a moment, Snape looked as though he dearly wished to grab for his wand, which Harry knew to be stashed somewhere up his unseasonably long sleeves, but instead Snape swore an oath and pushed his hair back from where it had fallen into his face.

"There's little time for this girl left, so it seems to me you have a choice," Severus ground out, sounding as though he were chewing gravel between his molars. "Continue to play act the imbecile or allow a trained professional to assess her needs before she succumbs to the poison."

"P-poison?" Harry's teacher asked, his eyes rounding in their sockets.

Harry felt the roil of nausea stirring in his belly at the pronouncement and he gripped at his shirt, twisting it between his sweating palms.

"Severus—Severus, will she be alright?"

"Shh, Harry." Snape reached back, unseeing, and pushed his charge back further with an open palm as he bent over the girl, checking inside her mouth and turning her head this way and that with a critical eye.

Not knowing how else to help, Harry hovered over the man's shoulder, watching as Snape pulled a drawstring pouch from the pocket of his jeans. From the tiny leather purse, he shook out into his hand what appeared to be a smooth, brown stone.

"Help me get her up," he commanded the man next to him, grabbing at one of Snowdrop's arms.

Even though Mr. Fowler followed the instruction, using the leverage from the girl's other arm in order to hoist her up so that she could be leaned against the side of the desk, he apparently had enough cheek to question the strange person who'd come in and assumed control of his classroom. "To what end?"

Snape ignored this query outright and instead squeezed the girl's rodent-like cheeks in order to pop her mouth open. He poked the stone into her mouth, behind her bottom teeth, and then leaned her forward enough that her head could be tilted all the way back and her throat brought into alignment with her oesophagus.

It took a whole minute to coax her to swallow, and once she had they watched her for another full minute before Snape sat back on his heels with a frown.

Hill remained unconscious, Mr. Fowler was still sputtering inquiries, the students were an ever hovering mass of whispers and squeaks, and Harry had stayed where he'd stood behind Severus, feeling quite ready to tear his hair out at the root.

"What did you do? Will it work?" He asked, knowing that the other wizard would likely snap at him for interrupting yet again.

Indeed, Severus did turn to glare at him over his shoulder. "Without knowing what she was poisoned by, it is difficult to say. What I've just given her ought to work against the broadest spectrum of possible poisons and toxins without imperiling her further. I wouldn't give her anything more specific unless I knew what it was I was attempting to counteract."

"She ate a cheese toastie today for lunch, same as me." Harry informed him.

"And you ate exactly what she ate today?"

Harry shrugged, looking closely into Snowdrop's face and watching for any change. "It was from the same serving tray—"

Snape turned to him and gripped his chin in a punishing grip, turning his head from side to side and glancing at his eyes—not for eye-contact, but as though he were searching for signs of something. "How are you feeling?"

"I feel fine, Severus, honest."

Snape released him then with a sharp nod.

"Miss Hill was exhibiting signs of what I would perhaps call laboured breathing before her collapse," Mr. Fowler added from beside them. "I had thought it was merely her attempt to be disruptive—she's a history of that, I'm sad to inform—and from experience it is often the best practise to ignore her when she is doing her best to interrupt class. With the benefit of hindsight..."

Fowler shrugged, looking desperately uncomfortable.

Snape pinned him with a dark glare. "For how long?"

"Since we got back from lunch," Harry answered for him, "and she was fine during break. She—" he broke off then, as he remembered what had led to the girl having followed him to his seat at the lunch table.

"Severus, we fought at break today—" Harry announced, feeling slightly breathless.

"Potter, I believe I made it abundantly clear that I'd not tolerate hearing of any more schoolyard fights from you—" Snape's eyes were flashing dangerously.

"No! No, see? It wasn't a proper fight! I only meant that I needed some berries from the tree where Hill was sitting, and when I went to grab some, she tried to take them back. She only managed to get the one, but she ate it—"

Snape's voice emerged deadly soft. "What. Kind. Of. Berries?"

Rather than answering, Harry shoved a hand into his pocket and emerged with two underripe specimens he'd stashed away for later, handing them over to the Potions Master with a small sense of pride and hope.

Snape's thumb rolled the ball-shaped berries around in his palm, his gaze having widened with alarm as he looked them over. He had paled immediately upon seeing them, the sallowness of his skin causing his black hair and eyes to appear all the more stark and foreboding. "Pray tell what you thought you were doing collecting toxic yew berries during your break, Potter."

"I...er... I thought you might find them useful?"

"USEFUL!" Snape thundered, the shock of loud noise enough to startle the boy into falling back a step. "The seeds in the centre of the yew's berries are used in some of the worst poti-poisons known to mankind!

"There oughtn't to even be one on the grounds!" He yelled, looking slightly crazed. Here he'd rounded on the teacher and de facto representative for the school in the absence of anyone else. "Why's it not been cut down!?"

"T-the trees have been there for... for years, man. They're older than the school building—" Fowler gulped and shook his head. "I've not known of any students who venture out to sit under them, they're technically considered out of bounds."

"Yet no one ever bothered to check?" Snape snarled. "No one ever patrolled there during the breaks to see that students didn't loiter where they oughtn't be in the first place?"

"The... the yew's not exactly visible from the yard." Fowler answered, looking nervous. "If one were to walk around the trunk of the oak, he'd be hard to catch sight of."

Whatever Snape might have hoped to reply with was interrupted when Snowdrop pitched forward and vomited with the kind of force that might have put a geyser to shame. The contents of her stomach spewed forth and splattered against Snape's shirt and jeans, and some made it to his face and into his hair.

The shock of the moment held everyone motionless for several seconds until Snowdrop broke the tension by breaking down into terrified, hoarse cries that echoed throughout the silent classroom.

As soon as chaos regained its foothold, Harry was able to breathe a sigh of relief.

Snowdrop Hill would live to frustrate him another day.