A Means of Survival – Chapter 05 – How Hermione Granger Received Detention

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Chapter 5 – How Hermione Granger Received Detention

Severus Snape was loath to leave a classroom alone by itself, especially a classroom of 2nd year Gryffindors and Slytherins. Goodness knows that they got into enough trouble when he was there. Unfortunately, the boy-who-lived-but-might-not-live-too-longer was passed out cold in his arms, and he really didn’t have any better options.

Thinking quickly through his roster in regards to who he should leave in charge, he quickly pulled out a potentially formidable force and nodded to himself, finding that he had made his decision rather painlessly.

“Granger,” he barked out to the girl sitting closest to them.

“Sir?” She turned coolly towards him, her eyes glinting somewhat unnaturally in the dim light of the dungeon classroom.

“You’re in charge until I get back. Please try and keep anyone from dying until I return.” He said, turning smartly on his heel and heading towards the door at a brisk pace. He was aware that leaving the girl in charge of a class that contained her abuser was not the brightest idea that he’d ever had, but there just weren’t that many options available to him by that point. He knew that she was brave enough to face any problems head-on that would undoubtedly arise, and given her propensity for solving difficult problems, he was quite sure that she would handle them adequately, if not speedily.

Besides, it was a much smarter—not to mention safer—idea to leave her in the position of authority than one of those other dunderheads like Crabbe or Goyle. He shuddered lightly at the image of the destruction that would occur if they were to unexpectedly find themselves in charge.

He noticed with some discomfort that the boy did not look at all well as he hastily moved up the stairs towards the infirmary. It also worried him somewhat that the boy in his arms weighed less than he had when he had picked him up that previous weekend. He walked swiftly up the hallway and the subsequent stairs, shooting glares at anyone who bothered to look questioningly towards him or the boy in his arms.

Speaking of the boy in his arms, he was absolutely soaked through with sweat. Could he have been running a fever? The dungeons were not known for inducing sweat, although he and his classroom had caused such a reaction on more than one occasion.

He thought back to the class period in question. The boy had actually done surprisingly, particularly in comparison with his usually abysmal results.

He shifted the boy in his arms, with the intent of getting a hand somewhat free in hopes of feeling the boy’s forehead, but was brought up short by the sight of his blood covered hand. He looked uncomprehendingly at his hand and then made the connection, looking wonderingly at the shockingly pale boy in his arms. Truly, Potter’s pale visage was even more startling than his own lackluster pallor. Idly and indiscreetly, as he walked down the last hallway leading towards Poppy’s domain, he cast a warming charm over the cold clammy boy.

“Poppy!” He roughly called out, before he had even made his way fully into the main body of the Infirmary proper.

…

“Aw, did poor fwittle Potty hurt himself?” Draco said mockingly, as most of the other Slytherins joined in, laughing heartily at the fallen golden boy.

“Shut it,” Seamus warned him, raising a fist menacingly towards the thin pale boy.

“Why don’t you make me, you ridiculous excuse for an arse kisser,” Draco said, narrowing his eyes and taking a step forwards.

“Aren’t you going to stop them?” Ron turned and asked Hermione as he realized that the potential for a fight was seriously escalating. Ron was not particularly thrilled at the idea of Draco coming anywhere near him, regardless of the reason.

“All he said was make sure no one dies until he gets back. So if you hurt Seamus, Draco,” she said loudly, but in a hideously simpering sweet way, “I’ll kick your arse so hard you’ll be spitting out the dirt from the bottom of my shoes.” She glared at him as the class gasped at her words.

“On the other hand,” she said, appearing as though she were actually putting effort into thinking through the idea. “If Seamus hurts you, Draco, my darling butt kisser,” she said, not blinking at the onslaught of sudden glares she had from the Slytherin side of the room. “Then all I have to do is make sure you don’t die until your precious Professor Snape gets back. And then you can die and I won’t be held responsible, because those were his words.” She said, crossing her arms in a satisfied manner, and raising her eyebrow at Draco, as if to say, what?

Draco spluttered at her, apparently unaware of how stupid he had just been made to look. And that’s when she threw in the exclamation point onto her argument.

“Oh, and Draco?” She asked coyly.

Given that he seemed incapable of anything resembling speech, she didn’t wait for his answer.

“I just wanted you and the rest of the class to know–” she paused, turning to visually acknowledge everyone else who was waiting with wide eyes for what she was about to say to the prince of Slytherin.

“–that you have a really tiny dick.” She finished, proudly watching the Slytherin’s face turn from a pale pink into a bright burning red.

The rest of the class gasped a breath inward in amazement at the unseemly words of their class bookworm. For the Gryffindors, not only was this their second sudden gasp of the day, but it made it just that much more amazing that both out of character exclamations had been made by the same girl. Soon however, someone snorted, and shortly thereafter, the entire class, minus a specific few, was caught in wild runaway giggles.

Therefore, not many saw it when Draco drew his wand to try and cast a vicious spell against the mudblood who dared try to embarrass him in such a hideously public manner.

Unfortunately for him, Hermione had been watching, and had been waiting for that very moment to release a spell of her own creation onto the sadistic boy who had taken her pride, in addition to peace of mind.

After Ron had found the silencing spell, she had continued thinking about the origins of that spell. In fact, her mind continued farther back into the reasons for childbirth to begin with, leaving her with images of lovemaking permeating her mind. Lovemaking was so far removed from the filth that Draco had forced on her. It just seemed right that she force some of Draco’s own filth back upon himself.

Besides, the little bugger tried to cast Crucio on her! He had yelled it out towards her, forcing her to neatly sidestep it while silently throwing her own curse directly back at him.

Morganocide!

Simply put – penis death.

“Hmm, not the smartest idea you’ve ever had,” she said, grinning maliciously at the boy who was now shrieking in an extremely high pitch upon the floor, while grasping futilely at his withering, and soon to be rotting, organ.

She was sure it must be a very painful experience, but she also found herself internally gleeful at the sight of his terror stricken squeals of pain. Furthermore, the use of Ron’s semi-broken wand had allowed a greater level of power in casting spells; the trade-off of course being a lesser amount of control, but she was confident in her skills as she had proved in that morning’s Transfiguration class.

“I suggest that we all take our seats and try to salvage our potions.” She announced calmly to the class then. She noticed that all of the boys of the room were quickest to comply, while the girls moved with decidedly more dignity. As a whole, the class regarded her much more respectfully now that she had reduced the so-called prince of Slytherin down to nothing more than a wheezing, hissing bag of shit on the cold, dirty floor of the dungeons.

Hmm, she mused to herself, adding the final touches to her nearly complete potion, if what they say about boys’ brains being linked to their penis’s, then this hissing, spitting state may be all that’s left for Draco.

…

Severus Snape was disturbed.

After Poppy had gotten the boy’s robes off, they had discovered that the white uniform shirt was nearly entirely soaked through with blood. Following that distressing discovery, she had closed the curtains and they had discovered that his body was crisscrossed in open and mostly still bleeding gouges of varying depths and degrees. His body was made nearly equally of open sores and skin; although, what skin was still present was swollen and feverish looking.

He’d seen healthier looking torture victims.

Hell, he’d been a healthier looking torture victim.

When he’d found him with Lucius, the boy had looked bad, but nothing like this. The healing potion that he had provided would have taken care of the injuries following the use of the riding crop against his open flesh.

It had been four days since the attack against the boy. What could have happened in four days?

…

“How?” He had breathed in dismay at Poppy upon her removal of his school uniform.

Poppy looked at him with sadness etched deeply in the corners of her eyes and face, making him realize that that in all the time he had known her, she had never really looked her age—until now.

“Tell me,” he had responded to her silent look of sadness.

When she had not answered, he had repeated his request, but more forcefully.

She tenderly lifted the boy into the air with her wand, so that they could look at his back. The scratches were still prolific, but for some reason they were nearly absent from the top middle of his back. With a soft motion, she set him gently back down upon the bed and looked back at him.

“He did this.” He had said unbelievingly. The words tumbled out of his mouth as his brain strove desperately to catch up.

“He wouldn’t have been able to reach that spot very well, the poor dear,” Poppy had said, daintily wiping away a tear with a lace edged hanky.

And then, she had been all business again, setting to the boy’s wounds with a renewed fervor of will and dedication to the life now in her care.

…

Now, having been securely kicked out of the hospital wing, he made his way back down into the darkness of his domain.

The initial sight of his room would normally have been a calming sight, but now, with what he had left behind him, finding his ex-prize student writhing in pain on the floor in a pool of his own blood-tinged vomit had somehow left him wanting.

He silently cursed the universe as he took large steps across to where Draco lay silently crying, his face tightly pinched with some kind of ongoing horrible pain.

Snape realized that he couldn’t leave this boy on the floor in such a state; however, he had no desire to add Draco’s vomit to Potter’s blood which was now drying on his robes. Given the volatile state of the two boys when separate, he could hardly see the good in adding their ingredients together in such an instable format. Besides, while Draco might have been the son of a cruel foppish prick, he was still the Slytherin son of a cruel foppish prick, and as such, he deserved better.

Thus, it was with little hesitation that he sent a Patronus message back to where he had just left in order to summon help.

…

It was not until after Poppy had left the room that he decided to find out the cause of this latest disturbance.

Maybe he would get lucky and the second years would kill each other off, leaving him with two extra free periods per week.

He sighed and glared around the room, as he realized that there were not enough leprechauns in the universe to allow him that kind of good fortune.

“Someone had better explain before I have Filch string the entire lot of you up by your toenails!” He growled viciously, sweeping from one side to the other as his eyes searched out for the guilty party.

But something was oddly off in the class. The students, both Gryffindors and Slytherins, were remarkably silent; in addition, they all seemed excessively intent on finishing the brewing of their pitiful potions, rather than paying attention to his ever increasing wrath.

This disturbed him.

“Longbottom!” He shouted in a voice normally guaranteed to cause the child to break into tears.

“Yes sir?” Longbottom asked, not looking away from his sludgy excuse for a potion. He was still a trifle fearful, but far too collected given the state of his excessively irate potions master.

“Who is the cause of the deplorable state of Mr. Malfoy and subsequently the putrid mess on the floor?!?” He shouted at the poor hapless boy in a way designed to make the boy piss his pants.

Longbottom barely twitched.

“I don’t know sir. I was working on my potion.” He replied nearly completely calmly, looking at his worthless bucket of slop as though it held all of the answers of the universe.

What the hell was going on here?

“Fifteen points from Gryffindor for blatantly lying to a professor,” he ground out, before changing tactics.

“Zabini!” Snape called out, turning on his heel to stride over to that side of the increasingly icy classroom.

“Sir?” His student asked him, staring resolutely into his potion with the same level of determination present on his face that he had seen with Longbottom.

“Tell me the truth about who caused this insanity,” he demanded, leaning in closely to the young Slytherin boy.

“The truth sir?” The boy asked carefully, still not looking up.

Snape considered his answer carefully. For Slytherins, asking for the truth was nearly laughable, considering how many varieties of truths one could find in any given situation.

“Yes Zabini,” he said, making the boy’s name sound like a curse, “I want your truthful account of everything that happened to Malfoy while I was out of the classroom.”

“Yes sir. “ Zabini speedily answered. “He got up from his desk, spoke insultingly about Potter, threatened Finnigan, wheezed, turned bright red, tried to use the Crucio curse on Granger, and then he fell down and started screaming, sir.”

Snape actually felt the urge to roll his eyes at Zabini’s one-sided account of what had happened to Malfoy. That is, at least until the words “Crucio curse” made it into the deeper levels of the grey matter of his brain.

“Did you say Crucio Curse?” Snape asked the boy in a deep, rough whisper of disbelief.

“Yes sir,” the boy answered smartly, still looking steadily in his cauldron.

Snape clenched his teeth together hard before turning back to the other side of the classroom to confront Granger.

“Granger,” he said, standing dangerously close to her side, fully intending to threaten her non-verbally with just the proximity of his body.

“Sir?” She asked, and like the others, she spoke to him as though his head were in the cauldron instead of being part of the body that currently stood glowering over her.

“Malfoy cast the Crucio curse on you?” He asked in his very softest, most dangerous voice. It was the voice that had, on more than one occasion in the past, reduced grown death eaters to tears within moments of hearing the just the sound of it.

Therefore he was a bit surprised to hear her answer in the negative to his question.

“Explain,” he said, dropping his voice even quieter, so that no one could hear him except this damnable girl.

“He didn’t cast it on me, because he missed me,” she said, pausing and then adding, “sir,” on to the end as an afterthought.

Ah. That explained absolutely nothing about the situation.

“Would you say that you are responsible for his current deplorable state?” He asked, crouching farther down into her space.

She impressed him. She did not flinch, nor did she deign to look at him.

“It depends on your definition of ‘responsible,’ sir.” She said, purposely ignoring the obvious danger she was currently working in.

Gods, how this child wreaked havoc upon his life!

He decided to let her know that she had wasted enough of his time with her idiotic defiance games.

“50 points from Gryffindor for irreparably disrupting the inner workings of my classroom, Ms. Granger; in addition, I shall see you tonight after dinner for the first of your month long detentions.” He said briskly, standing up and making his way over the front of the classroom. He half expected to hear them gasp at his announcement of a month of detentions for her, but it seemed his lot in life to continually experience disappointment.

“Moreover, I expect 2 feet on what happened in today’s class while I was otherwise occupied outside its room. This will be due next week. Furthermore,” he said with exaggerated emphasis, “anyone who depicts Granger as the guilty party will earn 10 points towards their affiliated house, regardless of whether they are Slytherin or Gryffindor.”

There, that ought to shock them.

“Ms. Granger,” he said, turning and glaring at her still bowed head, “you will stay after class to clean up the mess that Malfoy made, as well as your classmate’s potions. As for everyone else,” he said, pausing and then dropping his voice a full octave, “you are to get the hell out!” He growled, in an effort at unleashing some of his bottled up fury over that afternoon’s less that successful turn of events.

He got a reaction that time. Everyone grabbed their stuff and with nary a glance backwards, took off out of the classroom.

It wasn’t until they were all gone that he opted to stare down at the girl who had caused the beginnings of an epic headache in his lower right temple. Unfortunately, the headache only got worse when she looked at him and fixed him with a glare of her own.

Merlin, he needed a drink.

A Means of Survival – Chapter 06 – Ron Makes A Mistake