Chapter Seven – Prodding the Hornet’s Nest

The fifth-years did not have Potions that day, so Snape did not see Parr during class hours. She hadn't appeared at breakfast, she was nowhere to be seen at lunch, and sitting at dinner, Snape still couldn't see her. Perhaps she had been too ill. He hadn't heard anything to that effect, and normally, teachers were notified if a student was too ill to attend classes. He was curious enough to raise the matter with Dumbledore.

"Chara? I've not heard anything, Severus," Dumbledore responded, not noticing his food drop off his fork as he looked up to the ceiling of the Great Hall in thought. "You'd be best asking Filius. He's her Head of House."

Snape gawked at that comment. "Her what?"

"Her Head of House," Dumbledore repeated, forking up his dropped beans.

"I thought that the Sorting Hat was unable to assign her a house," Snape pointed out with a frown.

"Filius thought it would be nice if Chara had an adopted house." Dumbledore chewed his beans for a bit before noticing the silent disapproval radiating from the man seated next to him. "I saw no reason to deny him. I thought it was a nice gesture, actually."

"If inappropriate," Snape added under his breath.

"I would say it was more inappropriate for Chara not to have a house," Dumbledore answered mildly, chasing a Brussels sprout around his plate with his fork.

Bloody Flitwick. Ever the opportunist. Still, it gave Snape the chance to finally dock house points off of Parr when the next chance arose, as he knew it undoubtedly would. Docking Ravenclaw would prove almost as enjoyable as docking Gryffindor. Perhaps he'd get his chance tonight if Parr failed to turn up to detention. Without any notification of illness, he was well within his rights to do so. He finished his meal almost with a smile on his face.

Parr scuppered that idea by turning up. He hid his disappointment in his lack of acknowledgement of her presence and continued with his assessment of his NEWT students' latest practical efforts.

The evening passed surprisingly swiftly, and he'd only looked up once when Parr had slammed a cauldron on her table. He noticed that she wasn't looking as ill as she had the previous evening. The shadows still shrouded her eyes, but her face was no longer that greenish colour, and she wasn't sweating. He went back to his work.

The next time Snape looked up, Parr was standing in front of his desk with her eyes so narrowed that at first he thought they were actually closed. She'd put three flasks on his desk without him noticing, and even her work area was clean. It was starting to be a game for her to do things without him noticing. He sighed heavily. Admittedly, he did have a bad habit of leaning too close when marking students' work. It tended to cut his peripheral vision down significantly.

"Are you going to have this all finished by tomorrow?" he snapped at her.

Parr shifted her jaw slightly, eyes opening fully. "Except for the Wolfsbane Potion, yes," she replied in a slurred voice.

Snape's eyes travelled to the Ravenclaw crest on her school robes, the distaste on his face plainly obvious.

"Very well. You may go," he sighed with a blatantly disingenuous beneficence and didn't bother to watch her leave.

The next morning during class, he went out of his way to aggravate her. Coincidentally, the class he had assigned her to contained Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs, and she paired herself up with a Ravenclaw fifth-year called Opal Dian, who was as tall and dark as Parr was short and fair. Dian made Parr look like the younger of the two due to their disparate heights. Parr had decided to let Dian lead in their partnership, which surprised Snape considering how much of an unabashed know-it-all Parr seemed to be.

Still, it worked out well for him. He carped and sniped at them for the entire lesson, relentlessly haranguing any less than flawless effort they made in concocting a Dehydrator. Dian had been in tears by the end of the lesson, and the rest of the class had been pale and shaky since halfway through. Parr had tried her best to take over for Dian, as the girl had started to make increasingly noticeable mistakes, but the Dehydrator had suffered too much at the hands of the distracted and distressed student to be saved. The pronouncement of an Unacceptable grade had set Dian off into a morose puling that disgusted him sufficiently to dock house points from Ravenclaw for such a poor result. Dian had just cried harder, but Parr's face had gone stonily blank in defiance of his efforts to rattle her. Despite that, Snape considered it a great end to the teaching week.

He was rudely disabused of that conclusion at lunch when Flitwick proceeded to chew him out in the staff room. Snape couldn't have been more surprised if the table he had been standing next to had shouted at him. He'd never seen Flitwick so cross, which took the bite out of the Charms teacher's rant, because Snape was too wide-eyed with disbelief to really notice what Flitwick was saying. Even McGonagall was stunned. Sinistra had slipped out of the room the second Flitwick had started shouting, and Sprout and Hooch spent most of the five-minute diatribe over by the window, openly guffawing.

Snape had been too busy staring at the vein pulsing in Flitwick's forehead to hear the question.

"I'm sorry, Filius, I missed that," he admitted, shaking his head slightly, refocusing on the diminutive professor's face.

"I said what do you possibly hope to achieve by reducing a student to tears?" Flitwick repeated furiously, his hair in disarray and his stubby finger jabbing up at Snape.

"A much better effort next time," Snape replied mildly in stark contrast to Flitwick's temper. "It's never been my preference to coddle my students, Filius, and I'm not about to change that now."

Flitwick balled his tiny fists and pressed them to his temples. "I've defended you so many times, Severus, that I've lost count! I don't agree with the way you treat your students, but I've never said anything against it, no matter how many Ravenclaws I've had to console after one of your hissy fits. But the next time I have a student arrive at my class in the state you pushed Miss Dian into, I won't hesitate to go to the Headmaster and make a formal complaint. And if you don't like that, then do everyone a favour and try taking your balls out of the door that someone has obviously slammed them into!"

Flitwick flounced angrily out of the room, nearly knocking Hagrid over as he was coming in.

Snape had no idea when Flitwick had done it, but it took him nearly ten minutes to unstick his feet from the floor, which made him late for his first afternoon class. The fact that the other faculty members present made no effort to help him, with some actually laughing at his predicament, put him in such a bad mood that he gave a Slytherin first-year detention for stuffing half a Flobberworm down the back of a Gryffindor girl's blouse whilst his back was turned.

Parr had seemed mildly surprised at Shiffley's presence during her detention. Her eyebrows were raised and her mouth set in a pout as she watched the sandy-haired Slytherin boy struggle with gutting thirty brace of rock quails and separating the entrails into jars. Her silver knife spun in her hand as she watched him for some minutes, botching the job quite seriously by accidentally nicking the intestines and contaminating the other organs. She turned back to her own detention with a rueful shake of her head and starting writing something down on a scrap of parchment.

Snape had busied himself with a paper he had been writing on bark-based tinctures for a medical journal and so had only occasionally looked up to check on both Shiffley and Parr. It might've been the third time he looked up that he noticed that Shiffley was handling the gutting significantly better than before. Snape looked suspiciously at Parr, who in turn was watching Shiffley out of the corner of her eye, a slight smile on her face. Had he not been looking up at that moment, he wouldn't have seen Shiffley look at Parr with a questioning expression, and her answering nod. Sly. She must have shown Shiffley how to gut the birds properly when Snape wasn't looking.

He threw down his quill and resolved to watch them for the rest of the detention in the hopes he could catch another exchange between them, but it seemed he'd missed his opportunity as the detention finished with no other contact between the two students. Shiffley noticed Parr cleaning her equipment by hand and looked at the wand in his hand dubiously, trying to figure out if he was allowed to use it. His inherent laziness won out.

Both students brought their evening's efforts up to him. Snape dismissed Shiffley and left Parr standing where she was. He stared at her, running the tips of his fingers along the edge of his desk. She stared back blankly.

"I find it interesting that Shiffley manifested such talent at gutting fowl, Miss Parr," he said after some time.

Parr tilted her head slightly and continued to stare back.

"I find myself wondering where he learned such a technique," he mused with a sneer on his face, tapping the edge of the table lightly with his long fingers.

Parr squinted at him.

"Twenty points from Ravenclaw for insinuating yourself into another student's detention," he determined, favouring her with a tight smile. "I am neither stupid nor unobservant."

Whatever reaction he hoped to get from Parr didn't eventuate. She just continued to squint at him. It was maddening! Did anything rile her?

"Get out of my sight before I decide that twenty points isn't enough," he snapped at her, scowling. He waited until she was at the door before adding: "And you can start the Wolfsbane Potion again, from scratch. The quality is insufficient."

Parr paused on the threshold. Yes, he could imagine that she wouldn't like that very much considering that the potion normally took a month to mature. He was about to find out just how little.

She dropped her bucket with a loud clang and swung the heavy door with a tremendous heave, slamming it into its frame with such force that a crack spidered its way straight down the middle. The momentum of her action turned her around to face him, robes swirling around her legs and her hair following suit around her shoulders.

"I think it's time you and I had a little chat, Professor," she announced quietly as the echo of the door-slam dissipated in his ears. There was a flush of colour high on her cheeks and her eyes narrowed under her drawn-down brows. Curiously, her hands were held in front of her with the first two fingers of each hand pointed horizontally at each other and overlapping. Snape had never seen a gesture like that before. Was it rude? He confessed to being ignorant of the fluidly changing gestures and insults that younger people swapped amongst themselves.

"I beg your pardon?" he responded snottily. "I'm really not interested in hearing your temper tantrum, glorious though I'm sure you intend it to be."

"No, I can't imagine you would be when the sound of your own voice carping on so obviously titillates you," she snarled back, teeth bared. Her hands dropped to her sides, the foreign gesture having done whatever mysterious job required of it. "That being said, I'm looking forward to hearing the reasons behind your rather reprehensible behaviour. I'm certain you'll couch it in quite an aureate fashion to disguise the malignant intent behind it, but I'm very good at sniffing out bullshit, so I like a good challenge!"

"Yes, I'm sure you can't wait to run to the Headmaster, bewailing your mistreatment and seeking absolution for your total lack of self control," Snape jeered at her, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms.

Parr's grin widened to display a rather impressive set of teeth. "Unlike the rest of your students, I am not a teenager who is cowed easily by your idiosyncratic sarcasm and vindictive attitude. I am also capable of dealing with my own problems without outside assistance, thank you very much." She spread her arms wide. "So consider this a carte blanche opportunity to let rip without the snide gloss. What's said in here, stays in here. Unless you feel the need for... outside assistance," she finished calmly with a smile that dimpled her cheeks.

"Do you suffer from some kind of delusion that you can say and do as you please whilst attending this school?" Snape barked back at her, his hackles rising swiftly. "It impresses me not one iota that you are able to flout rules that other students are required to obey!"

"Ah, so that's why you've got your knickers in a twist!" Parr trumpeted with a gleam in her eyes. "You don't like to see me getting away with something."

"Favouritism is a bastion for the spoiled and incompetent," he sneered back. "I fail to see why you should be afforded such graces when others who are more deserving have to work for theirs."

Parr actually grinned gleefully in the face of his accusation. "Yes, I can't imagine you favouring anyone from Slytherin over the other three houses, not when they're so clearly a studious, well-mannered and even-tempered bunch."

"Despite what you've been told, you are in my class under my sufferance," he parried smoothly, slouching back further into his chair with an air of insouciance. "It wouldn't bother me in the slightest to tell the Headmaster that you are incapable of functioning adequately as a student in my subject."

"No, I'm sure the lie would come quite easily," Parr replied with equal indifference. "After all, you had no trouble neglecting to inform me that you had changed what class I was allocated to until I'd missed the lesson yesterday. Very smooth."

"Physically injuring another student alone could get you expelled," Snape pointed out in a silky tone.

"Then why am I still here?" Parr countered and leaned back against the cracked door, her eyes narrowed shrewdly.

"Keep up this kind of insolent behaviour and you won't be," Snape retorted smugly.

"Ah, that's going to be the winning card you'll threaten to play, is it?" Parr realised, folding her arms. "The thing you fail to understand is that if I were to be expelled, it wouldn't make a jot of difference to me. Others would be more... disappointed."

"It doesn't bother you that you'll embarrass those who petitioned for your enrolment? How typically impudent of a Muggle."

Parr laughed out loud. "Oh, this is wonderful! So not only is it about favouritism but about prejudice as well!" She clapped her hands together once and raised her eyes to the ceiling. "What a magnificent duo!" She fixed him with a piercing gaze. "Sure there's nothing else? Misogyny? Bigotry? A short person kick you in the arse when you were little? Might as well get it out now while you have the chance. I've dealt with prejudice all my life, so nothing you can say would surprise me in the slightest."

"I think you'll find that any perceived prejudice against you comes from your shocking display of disrespect to authority and your lack of common courtesy to others," he informed her, looking down his large nose at her.

Parr's face went white. "I'll be sure to remember that the next time someone spits in my face with no provocation, underpays me for services rendered, or burns my home to the ground in the dead of night for my 'disrespect' and 'rudeness'."

Snape blinked at the bitterness in her voice and the paleness of her face.

"This is how it's going to work," she continued in that same acidic tone. "I will continue as a student in your subject until you can prove that I am more disruptive, incapable or dangerous than any other of your fifth-year students. Until that time, you will stop harassing any student I am paired with in your class simply because they are my partner. I also am neither stupid nor unobservant, Professor. If you have a problem with what I'm doing, you will say it straight out without dressing it up in snide remarks. If you have a problem with my work, be sure it's not misplaced antipathy for my lack of magical ability. I don't claim to be perfect, and I am here to learn, but if I think you are disadvantaging me or those around me based on your personal dislike of who or what I am, then I will not pause in saying so right to your face in front of other students. I will not be a punching bag for your vitriol."

Snape pushed himself back upright in his chair, leant on his desk and let her have it.

"Then let me be equally clear, Miss Parr. I have no need to seek recourse in my personal dislike of you in critiquing your abilities as a student. If you make any disparaging comments in my direction, you will be resoundingly punished. If you hesitate in doing anything that I tell you to do in my class, the house points will fall away from Ravenclaw so fast that you'll be a pariah amongst your housemates before a week has gone by. If you fail to achieve less than an Acceptable grade in any task or assignment, I shall push you down to second-year level. My tongue is faster, sharper and nastier than yours could ever hope to be, and whilst it's still in my head, I will use it as I see fit." He spat out the last words like poisoned seeds. "Now, I believe that chat time is over. Try leaving my classroom without breaking anything else, including the boundaries of my tolerance."

Parr gazed at him with an assessing air for some moments, completely unruffled by his retort. Then, with studied sedateness, she pushed herself away from the door and brought her hands together in that odd gesture again, but this time she swivelled her hands so that her crossed fingers pointed to the ground. With that, she picked up her bucket, opened the door, and walked out.

"That's twenty points from Ravenclaw for breaking my door," Snape called after her nastily. The door smashed closed, sending another large crack alongside the first.

"I think we'll make that fifty," he said to himself as a jagged panel of wood fell away from the door and hit the floor with a clatter.