A Matter of Black and White

DISCLAIMER: This story is based upon the works of JK Rowling. Anything you recognize is hers. I’m making no money off this. I’m just having some fun adding my own little corner to the amazing world she has created.

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CHAPTER 6—THE KNOW-IT-ALL OTHERWISE KNOWN AS “HER”

“I’m going out, Pettigrew,” Snape called up to the tiny room at the top of the stairs.

The little rodent of a man poked his constantly working nose out the door. “Ooh, could you pick up some cheddar while you’re out?” He tapped his fingers together eagerly. “The good sort in a block, not the pre-sliced kind.”

“Get it yourself,” Snape snapped.

“But I can’t go out,” Pettigrew whined.

“Then I guess you’ll have to do without,” Snape answered with velvety nastiness.

He wasn’t sure whether the Dark Lord had set him to babysit Pettigrew or if the little rat was supposed to be spying on him. Either way, having an unwelcome houseguest had made this a very long summer at Spinner’s End. He had never been so eager to get back to the little dunderheads at Hogwarts.

Of course, returning to Hogwarts would also mean having to see more of Her. It was bad enough now, having to meet with her a few times a week. He could hardly imagine what it would be like having to suffer through all that false prettiness at the Staff Table three times a day. He would almost prefer dining with Potter over her.

Thinking of her by name was still impossible for Snape. Just the thought her name in his head sent him into a degree of sugar shock usually reserved for when Dumbledore force-fed him mouth-sealing treacle fudge to keep him from saying something offensive to the Board of Governors. (Come to think of it, Dumbledore was shoving Miss Sweetness down his throat in much the same way.) Snape wondered what self-respecting Death Eaters had given their child a name quite so fit to be decorated with icing flowers and carried home in a pink pastry box from Honeydukes. At least the Malfoys had had the decency to name their son after a dragon. (The little bastard had certainly burned Snape in the ass.) But to name a child after some pretty pink lights in the sky? Well, that did seem all the substance there was to that woman.

He was damned if he was going to call her “Professor Bernard” either. If she was going to take liberties using his given name, he certainly was not going to bestow her with the respect she failed to give him.

After their last lesson, it was no surprise to Snape that she thought she was entitled to calling him Severus. People like that thought they were entitled to everything. She had simply validated all his prior suspicions with that memory of her taunting a fellow student with all the rest of Beauxbaton’s Beautiful People. He had no doubt that, had she been in his class at Hogwarts, she would have been one of Potter and Black’s hangers-on.

At least a few in the Marauders’ crowd had had the decency to stand up for their victims. Who cared if she was ashamed of that moment now? (Snape had to admit that that was precisely the emotion he had read from that memory.) She hadn’t had the stones to speak up in the moment. Lily had had the courage to stand up for what she had believed in, up until her dying breath. Did this Beauxbaton’s debutante think she’d be able to act against a crowd of her parents’ oldest friends when the time really mattered?

No, thinking of the latest thorn in his side without any name at all was the best way of pretending like she didn’t exist. Someone without a name didn’t merit his attention, or at least any more of his attention than he was required to give.

Unfortunately, he was forced to bestow some of that attention upon her right now and on a day of heavy, opaque rain no less. With a beleaguered sigh, he drew his cloak up over his head and Apparated from the steps of Spinner’s End to the black-puddled street outside the Leaky Cauldron.

Upstairs above the pub, she greeted him in a disgustingly chipper mood. (She could at least have the decency to abhor these meetings as much as he did.) She also greeted him in French.

“Bonjour, Severus!” she chirped. “Il fait mauvais, non? Tant pis!”^1^

“Pardon?” he stuttered, and not in the French sense.

“Vous parlez français, non?”^2^ she asked with doe-eyed confusion.

“Considering that I am English and we are standing here in England,” Snape recovered, shaking water off his robes, “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Then how,” she asked much more aggressively, “did you understand what was said in my memories at our last lesson?”

Hmm, that was a good question, not to mention exponentially more astute than he had expected from a ditzy blonde. She also didn’t seem too keen on the idea that he had somehow pulled a fast one on her.

The fact of the matter was—and it pained Snape to admit this, even to himself—that he didn’t really know why he had understood what those little Beauxbatons brats had said. Quite frankly, the question had never even entered his mind.

Of course, there was no reason to let her know that.

“You speak French, don’t you?” he said simply. “French makes sense to your brain. I was in your thoughts. It follows that French made sense to me.”

Well, it sounded like a good explanation anyway. The fact of the matter was that he had never extracted a memory in a foreign language, so he didn’t really know how he had managed to follow that schoolyard drama.

She peered skeptically at him. Damn her if her one talent in espionage was being able to see through a bit of strategically conjectured B.S. Nevertheless, Snape had been in the spy business far longer than she, and he knew his best defense was to divert her attention.

“Now that we’ve established that your memories will not be protected by the language in which they occurred, I’d suggest you stop stalling and start practicing Occlumency.”

Snape glided over to the chair by the window. As much as he usually enjoyed being able to dominate with his height, he didn’t trust that his student had learned to harness her skills well enough to inadvertently cause him bodily injury. “I trust you are properly prepared to begin?” he asked sardonically. Let there be no more of those pitiful excuses today.

She settled herself on the edge of the bed. “Of course,” she sighed.

Snape had been wondering whether she was truly up to the task of learning Mentior Occlumency from him. Holdahexe intelligence be damned. For all he knew, she had joined up just because white was in season. His first order of business for the day was to learn whether she had been a know-it-all or a dunderhead when she hadn’t been passing her schooldays snickering over some klutz’s mishap in the Beauxbatons gardens.

She managed to let him in on the second try. Old habits seemed to die hard for this one. The first academic memory he came across was of her Leaving. Madame Maxime called her up to the front of a chandeliered chamber with powder-blue banners bearing the Beauxbatons crest. The girls beamed and a few boys sent catcalls her way as she accepted the prize for Ancient Runes.

Well, that was her field after all.

Then the Headmistress called her up again for the prize in something called “Languages of the Magical World.”

Not surprising. She had lived in quite a few places. She was bound to pick up a few foreign tongues.

Then she was called up yet again for the prize in History.

Alright, she was a bloody know-it-all.

Snape had seen enough of that memory—he imagined she was all too happy to show it to him—and moved on to something a bit more practical.

She was at the back of a Potions lab with a girl with closely cropped dark curls. The two of them were flipping through a magazine of shirtless wizards holding guitars and winking provocatively at their readers. Two flaxen-haired girls behind them were straining over their worktables to giggle at the pictures as well.

A wizened witch with leathery skin and shorn white hair interrupted their teenage lust-fest. “Mademoiselle Moreaux,” she barked, “what is the next ingredient we will be adding?”

The girl with the short dark curls thrust the magazine behind her cauldron. “Um...”

“We’ll be adding scarab beetles next, Madame Flétri,” Moreaux’s little blonde friend piped up.

“Mademoiselle Bernard,” Madame Flétri said impatiently, “if I had wanted your answer, I would have asked for it. Don’t think I haven’t seen you doing all the work back there. Just because you can carry the rest of your friends doesn’t mean that you should.”

Snape thought he rather liked this Madame Flétri.

“Now, Moreaux, would you care to tell me how many times you will be stirring the scarabs that Mademoiselle Bernard will no doubt be adding?”

“Ten?” Moreaux quite blatantly guessed.

“Incorrect,” Madame Flétri snapped. “Obviously your reading material does not contain potions receipts.” She Accioed the magazine across the room. “You will make a copy of this week’s potions instructions so that you have something more instructive to which to refer. Then you can write me an essay on the proper brewing of each assignment. Mademoiselle Bernard, since you apparently do not have enough to do, you can do the same for the rest of the month.”

Yes, Snape felt rather fond of dear old Madame Flétri. At least she wasn’t coddling that blasted blonde know-it-all. There was nothing worse than a student who was both intelligent and popular. They were so confident in their abilities and so oblivious to their friends’ deficiencies that their little larks caused more distractions than half a room full of Longbottoms.

It was time, Snape decided, to take a page from Madame Flétri and deflate his student’s ego a bit as well. He broke off his connection with her to ask snidely, “Were you planning on using Occlumency, or did you want me to see your entire school career?”

The impertinent witch remained unruffled. “Oh, I thought we might stop after you had seen at least a couple of years. The Beauxbatons Halloween Ball is something you don’t want to miss.”

“For someone with so many book-smarts,” Snape said dangerously, “you are remarkably foolish.”

“So I’ve been told,” she answered conversationally.

“Have you or have you not been practicing?” he demanded.

“Why, Severus,” she said with saccharine innocence, “you made it quite clear last time that Occlumency can only be practiced if someone is performing Legilimency. Since the Leaky Cauldron doesn’t have a Legilimens in residence at the moment, I’m afraid I’ve been flat out of luck.”

Snape glared at her. It was time to stop being Mr. Nice Wizard. Even know-it-alls had their off days, and he plunged back into her mind without warning to find one.

She was in a typical desks-and-blackboard classroom now. (Snape noticed that “typical” at Beauxbatons was still a hell of a lot more gilded than anything at Hogwarts.) She and Moreaux were up at the front while the rest of the class looked on. A middle-aged man with wire-rimmed glasses and a receding hairline leaned against the back wall.

“Tarantallegra, if you please, Mademoiselle Bernard.”

She looked hesitantly at Moreaux, who nodded reassuringly. She bit her lip and directed her wand at her sparring partner but faltered.

“Go on,” Moreaux hissed.

“Any day now,” the professor drawled.

With a half-hearted motion in the wrist, she mumbled, “Tarantallegra.”

Snape didn’t have to be a Defense Against the Dark Arts professor to know her technique would make the spell fail. Sure enough, her feeble casting couldn’t even escape her wand. Instead it backfired so that her feet were suddenly flying in ten directions at once, causing the rest of the class to break out in peals of laughter. Snape found the show quite amusing as well, but he didn’t have much time to appreciate it, for he suddenly had to shake his head clear as his own magic failed and his Legilimens fell away.

“Are you planning on teaching me something or are you just going to go fishing in my brain?” the witch on the bed asked, much more testily than she had spoken before.

“Are you ever planning on diverting my Legilimens?”

“That’s an idea!” More dryly she added, “Care to tell me how to do that?”

Damn it, hadn’t she been listening in their last lesson? All she had to do was shield the first memory and divert him to the next. Shield and divert…how difficult was that? “Don’t play the fool with me,” Snape breathed. “All those precious school prizes prove you are above that.” Then a nastily wonderful thought came to him. “…Unless, of course, your only talents lie in books and theories. Are all of your practical spells as bad as your Tarantallegra?”

He had something there. He knew it. That little jerk of her bloody dimpled chin said volumes. Leaving her with that thought seemed the worst punishment he could impose, and so he gathered up the still-damp hems of his robes and made his exit from the Leaky Cauldron.

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FOOTNOTES:
^1^ Hello, Severus…It’s bad weather, isn’t it? Too bad.
^2^ You speak French, don’t you?

AN: I think that Snape's students fall into two distinct categories--know-it-alls and dunderheads--with little room in between. Despite his wish to put her in the much larger latter category, he can't do that, but I don't think she's as much of an extreme know-it-all as Hermione Granger. She's smart, but she can't do everything perfectly, and she's more interested in her friends than in impressing the teachers. Maybe there's hope yet.