Begin Again (Severus Snape/Student Love Story)

Chapter Nine: This Solitary Existence

        Madam Pomfrey dismissed me early the following morning, clearing me to resume my regular schedule. Just as she had expected, I awoke feeling back to myself. The piercing pain that had shot across my head and behind my eyes the previous day had vanished completely, though when I raked my hands through my hair in attempt to rid it of the bedraggled appearance of sleep, I could feel the remnants of hardened blood, gluing the strands together in a matted clump over top of a small swollen lump.

Skipping breakfast, I'd rushed to the common room to clean myself up, and made it to Herbology with hardly a moment to spare. After Professor Sprout rattled off instructions for the day's lesson – preparing the Snargaluff plants, which had now grown more than forty inches tall and were drooping heavily under the weight of the nearly bludger-sized zucchini-colored pods, so that they can be juiced in next week's class – Neville leaned in to ask me quietly if I'd witnessed what happened to Katie Bell in Hogsmeade over the weekend.

"No?" I said with a tone of inquiry as we stood around our plant, assessing where to begin. "What do you mean? What happened?"

"You haven't even heard about it? It was all over the school yesterday!" Neville said, digging in his bag to retrieve his protective goggles and too-large gloves.

"I've been in the hospital wing since yesterday morning, remember? I have no idea what you're talking about," I said testily, and pulled my own pair of muggy goggles over my eyes. The straps stretched along the back of my head, chafing against the bump and making it throb slightly.

"Oh, right. How are you feeling by the way?" Neville said, expression morphing from bewilderment into comprehension as the memory clunked into place. Trimmers in hand, we both dove at the Snargaluff, and began wrestling with it to cut back the excess nettled branches. The vines squiggled and writhed, lashing at us while we snipped. Apparently, while a young Snargaluff is calmed by tickling, a mature one isn't so easily subdued.

"Perfectly fine, now. Just a little bump on my head. But – ow! - " one of the vines coiled around and whipped me in the shoulder. "- but what happened to Katie?"

Neville halted his pruning mid-clip to look around shiftily, as though checking to be sure we didn't have any eavesdroppers. "She got sent to St. Mungo's Hospital. She was cursed."

"Cursed? By who?" I asked, feeling startled.

"No one really knows for sure. Harry reckons it was... Malfoy...". He noiselessly mouthed Malfoy's name – not that anyone would have been able to hear his hushed tone over the ceaseless whipping sounds and grumpy howls of profanities.

I hadn't had much interaction with Draco Malfoy, a Slytherin who was in a few of my classes, but I'd seen and overheard enough to know that he was ill-mannered, disgustingly prejudiced against half-bloods and muggle-borns, and hung around with that grubby dimwit, Goyle. Despite his foul personality, he had seemed to me to be particularly favored by Snape, who gravitated around Malfoy quite often.

"How di – look out!" a particularly thorny branch had weaved its way down the side of the pot and begun curling around Neville's ankle. I jumped forward and stomped on the devious little miscreant, just as Professor Sprout made her way past us.

"Now, now – not paying attention, are we?" she said in a scolding voice, shaking her head with a disapproving tsk.

Neville paled slightly and I gave her a wan smile as she rushed on to assist the next pair: Padma Patil was screeching in pain while her hair was being tied into knots by the Snargaluff, and her partner, Terry Boot, was only making matters worse, having cast the severing charm and disastrously miscalculated his aim, slicing off a rather thick section of Padma's ebony locks.