Marauder's Daughter (Eventual Tom Riddle X OC)

Chapter 13: Truce

"Class dismissed." Snape drawls out at the end of the lesson about a week after the mooncalves quidditch match. We all start to pack up our materials. I was proud, I just successfully made a Strengthening potion, and I was excited to try out the bit of it I stored in a flask when Snape wasn't looking. "Ms. Black, stay behind." He adds as I was almost to the door. I grimace to my friends who shoot me a worried look, then turn around and walk back to the front desk.

"Yes, professor?" I ask him neutrally.

"Very clever, using mooncalves. Though you would of course have an affinity with creatures out during the full moon, wouldn't you?" Snape sneers at me lowly once it's just the two of us.

"Don't know what you're talking about." I reply innocently, then feel a tug in the back of my mind. I bolster up my Occlumency barriers, and make sure he can't get in. "Trying to find something, sir?" I ask him arrogantly. I guess he's never used legilimency on me before if this tugging is what it feels like.

"Don't know what you're talking about." He replies sarcastically, quoting my own words. He then sighs out tiredly. "You may go." I raise a curious eyebrow, wondering if that was all he wanted to say, and then shrug and turn to leave. I get to the door before he adds on quietly, "Option two, Ms. Black."

I pause and turn a confused look to him, not immediately recognizing the context. Then I remember, I gave him two options, one was to be exactly like my father to him, and the other was to be more like Lily. That was the two options. 

I smile genuinely at him, "Yes, professor." I turn and leave then. 

I've been arrogant and annoying and snarky in his class all year, and have been targeting him especially with my pranks. I can see he's been growing tired of it. He's also seen the quality of my work, and can't find a way to fault it at all usually. He did take marks off my papers when I accidentally misspelled 'color' on a paper though. I can't help it, in England it's spelled colour, but I'm not used to the added 'u' in my mind. But in almost seven months of being his student and that's the only mistake I've made, I'll take it.

Potions from then on got better. It wasn't necessarily bad before, but he's not spending his extra time trying to find an error in what I'm doing, and isn't docking points off me if any of the Gryffindors manages to mess up. I've also calmed down my sass, but can't entirely get rid of it, it's a part of who I am. I did however get a chance to ask him a question on a better method to store certain potion ingredients so they stayed potent longer, and he dryly answered me back. Before, he would have just sent me away and told me to figure it out myself. I feel our truce is tenuous, but it works.

I also had the twins lay off targeting Snape so much on our pranks. They were confused at first, but I just pointed them to a new target. I didn't know that Quirrell was a professor here at the school before he took the Defense position. He was hard to spot, he just looked like an average wizard. He didn't wear a turban yet, instead he just had wavy sandy brown hair neatly parted to one side. He was evidently the Muggle studies professor, and I heard about him from Percy in the common room as he was talking about an assignment. Since I didn't know much about Quirrell as a person, I decided to get to know him, in the funnest way possible. By having the twins, Lee and I turn our pranks on him.

We found we rather had fun pranking Quirrell. He was actually a good sport about it, and found our pranks humorous. It took some of the fun out of it for me, I was hoping to torment him, not entertain him. We even filled his classroom with magical water balloons that when popped, would spread a bright colored gas that would stain the poppers' skin that color. 

That was an interesting spell Fred, George and I crafted together. We found a plant in the greenhouses that produced a similar staining gas, and took some in a vial and tried adding different things until we figured out the right materials to make it colorful. Beet root made the gas pink, and there was a small blue magical flower that turned it pastel blue. Professor Sprout just thought we were doing extra research, so she happily told us all about the plants when we asked. She had no idea she was an unwitting accomplice to the entire set of 5th years walking around looking like pink and blue aliens for two weeks until Pomphrey found a counter to the prank spell.