Connivance of Silence: First Impressions

Chapter 2

It didn't take long at all for Sev to settle into the daily routine of life at Hogwarts. He, naturally enough, excelled in all his lessons, finding a lot of the early exercises painfully simple. However, he was careful to avoid being first to complete things all the time. Generally he would finish second or third - far enough down the list not to get noticed, but not so far down people started thinking he was stupid.

James Potter usually came in first, although he wouldn't have done so if Snape had been working to the best of his ability. His best friend Sirius was also very bright, but the teachers had extreme difficulty getting him to settle down long enough to do anything. He would much rather be poking and prodding things with his wand or setting off Dungbombs.

The one lesson where Sev couldn't disguise his expertise was Potions. He was light-years ahead of the other students, already nearly on a level with their teacher, Professor Fennel.

Saxius Fennel was a handsome, dark-haired man with olive skin. He was a cold, harsh man, slow to offer praise, but that didn't bother Snape.

Other, more sensitive and less brilliant students had a lot of trouble with him. Remus struggled mightily with his Potions, and Lily was just plain hopeless - despite the fact that she had an excellent memory for detail and was always quick to understand. She knew exactly what she was supposed to be doing... she just couldn't make it work.

Lily was one of Lucius Malfoy's favourite targets. Malfoy had a very sharp tongue and an instinct for how to wound, and he wasn't afraid to use them. He and his gang picked on Peter Pettigrew for his nervousness and poor grades in class, but they reserved the worst of their venom for the 'mudbloods'.

All of the Slytherins came from long-established wizarding families. So did most of the others, but since Dumbledore had been made headmaster, there had been more and more students flooding in who had no magic in their family tree whatsoever. Snape had seen first-hand that this had absolutely no bearing on how well they did at school, but Lucius wasn't interested in such trifling little details.

Potions was the class where the worst of the infighting went on, because Fennel seemed completely deaf to such things when it suited him. Slytherin shared Potions with Gryffindor, which gave Malfoy Peter, Lily, and two other mudbloods, Jade Creevy and Jerry James, to pick on.

Not all the Gryffindors were easy targets, however. James Potter was fiercely protective of all his housemates, and Sirius Black would take any excuse for a fight. And Lily herself had little patience for bullying - she seemed like a sweet little thing, but she had a biting wit and a no-nonsense attitude.

Snape himself couldn't care less about the fighting one way or the other. In his opinion, Lily was one of the least objectionable people in the class. She seemed to understand his personality fairly instinctively, knowing that his impassive coolness was completely different from Malfoy's sneering superiority.

Black and Potter had no such powers of distinction. So far as they were concerned, the fact that he was a Slytherin and that he didn't actively speak out against Malfoy made him part of the gang.

If either of them had as much brains as their test scores suggested, they would have realised that to do so, had he wanted to, would have been to make the next seven years of his life hell. Malfoy, however unpleasant to what he considered his 'inferiors', was a born leader. All the Slytherins in their year had coalesced around him, following his lead and becoming his gang. Snape wasn't actively a part of that... but he wasn't stupid enough to try and set himself apart.

Somewhere inside, though, Snape found himself somewhat... disturbed by Lucius Malfoy. Oh, not by his antics and his attitude - that was standard schoolboy bullying in anyone's book. But there was something behind the sneer at times that worried him a little.