The Enemy of my Enemy

The Detention with Snape

This chapter includes flashbacks

Teddie sighed and rolled over. The time on her watch, which lay on the bedside table, read 3:30am. It was late, or early, depending on one's perspective, but she couldn't sleep either way. Her mind raced with images of her detention with Professor Snape.

It had started like every other detention...

"Enter," Snape's silky voice echoed from behind the classroom door. Teddie sighed and pushed it open. This wasn't the first time she had been in the Potions classroom after hours, throughout her five years at Hogwarts she had been here more than once, it was common knowledge that she had detention often with Snape – always for fighting with Malfoy.

Snape sat at his desk, his head down and grading Potion essays. He muttered to himself about how much of a dunder head his students where, as if they couldn't follow basic instructions and explain the simplest of tasks that he set them.

"Maybe if you weren't such a tyrant student wouldn't be so afraid of you and could actually concentrate on what they are doing for homework," said Teddie, taking a seat on the front desk. She had brought her dragon hide gloves in case.

Snape paused in his marking and glanced up. "If you all paid attention to what is in front of you, and not on what's around you then maybe you would know what I expect in your homework," he said.

"Can you blame us for being curious when she is in the room?"

"She is here to monitor me."

"You think we don't know that?"

Snape narrowed his eyes. "You will do well to watch your tongue, Miss Green," he said. "Professor Umbridge is not a person you want to get on the wrong side of. The control she has –"

"Is what?" Teddie interrupted. "Scary? Intimidating? I think we all figured that out when she got the Minister to appoint her to the position of High Inquisitor. We aren't as stupid as you think, Professor, we know why she is here."

Snape put down his quill and placed his fingertips together, touching the tips of them to his lips. "You think you know everything?" he asked. "You know nothing."

"I never said we knew everything," said Teddie, shaking her head. "I said we knew something's. We know there is something going on at the Ministry, we know that Fudge has sent Umbridge here to spy on the school, on Dumbledore. Mo confirmed the other night that Fudge thinks Dumbledore is forming an army to take on the Ministry – we know they're afraid."

"Indeed," said Snape. "We live in fearful times."

Teddie stopped short and stared at him. She licked her lips and cast her gaze away. "What do you want me to do for this detention?" she asked. "Clean cauldrons? Rearrange the stock cupboard? Tell me, and I'll do it. I just want to get back to the common room."

"I have nothing for you to do," said Snape.

"Then why give me detention tonight?"

"Because there is one thing that we need to discuss," said Snape. "One thing that you have been avoiding for the last three months."

Teddie felt her mouth go dry. She swallowed, hard, and closed her eyes. She didn't want to do this now. She wasn't ready.

"Please don't," Teddie whispered.

Snape remained silent, staring at her. "You cannot avoid it forever, Miss Green," he told her. "You have to deal with it eventually. Or you are, just like the Ministry, sweeping aside what happened."