The Tigress Lily

So many thanks to Corazon!! My wonderful Beta!! I love your work so much!! Thank you!! Read ALL of her stories....go! now! wait...read my story first. Then review it, then read all of Corazon\'s stories!!

Disclaimer: I don\'t own anything but the idea for this story. If you recognize it.... then it doesn\'t belong to me. Not making any money...if you sue you are most likely to end up with a car that runs half the time and sits on the street the other half.
Much love,
Tigress

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‘I have a strange life,’ thought Severus, ‘I always have and always will.’

Severus Snape, feared potions master of Hogwarts, sat back in his favorite chair to rest. The day had been tiring and he was glad to be done. He was also in a very contemplative mood tonight. It was the night before the autumn equinox and he had been preparing all day for this rare phenomena. On the night of the eqx thx the orange tigress lily would bloom, something that happened only once every ten years, and he was preparer thr the harves Th The orange tigress had many properties in potion making and it was so rare an ingredient that when it finally did bloom he took full advantage of it. The tigress had to be carefully preserved otherwise it would lose its magical properties. Severus had been worried because with Professor Sprout away on an errand for Dumbledore he had feared that he would be unable to find an assistant for the harvest. He had finally decided that he would have to choose a student, perhaps two, to assist in the gathering of the precious lily. But who to choose?

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Hermione Granger was fuming. She had been through one of the most rotten days of her life. It had started out during Herbology. With Professor Sprout gone, Dumbledore had ased ned none other that Professor Trelawney to teach. The ‘good’ Professor had spent the entire lesson confusing the class beyond belief. She had tried to explain to the class the different uses of bitter sap root, unfortunately none of the uses the professor had explained were correct. The woman infuriaHermHermione to no end. And when she had tried to explain to the Professor that curing broken bones was NOT one of the many properties of bitter sap root, the professor had taken ten points from Gryffindor, telling Hermione to bto be such a know-it-all. God, the woman was quoting professor Snape now.
Then she had gone to potions, her least and most favorite class. The precise nature of potions and the vast amount of information appealed to Hermione a great deal, but no matter how she tried she could never seem to please professor Snape. ‘Why do I even care?’ Hermione asked herself, not for the first time. He was an angry, bitter man who seemed to like nothing better than to torment her.
The potions class had started out like any other but five minutes in Professor Snape had decided to assign new lab partners. She had been assigned to none other than Draco Malfoy. True, Draco had mellowed quite a bit since the downfall of the Dark Lord; he no longer called her “mudblood” or tormented her in the halls. There was, however, a great deal of competition between the two, being that they stood numbers one and two in class rank. Hermione was currently top student but Draco seemed determined to become number one.
Draco and Hermione had been working on a menial task that Snape had laid out. Because they had both already completed the potion the class was working on, Snape had set them to slicing and organizing potion ingredients. Twenty minutes before the class was to let ohe phe professor had shouted at both of them…

“Malfoy! Granger! Did did did I not say that the mandrake was to be sliced lengthwise? Well? Detention for both of you! Tonight at nine sharp! And if I hear one word for either of you it will be fifty points…from each of your houses!”

And so it had began…