Defense Against The Dark Arts

The Mouldy Aesthetic of the Snake Pit

1st February 2023

Sorry it's late! I have excuses! *checks smudged handwrititing on hand* well I'm sure they're here somewhere. anyway. according to my notes this was 'such a hard chatepr to write ohm ygod'. There is a hidden Paramore reference in this, and also warning for language, (Does that even need a warning though?)

On Tuesday evening (Tuesday, because like hell we were going to deal with our Slytheriny problem on the weekend, and Mondays are already difficult enough), Percy and I make our way to the Great Hall. We time it so we get to the hall just as dinner is ending, and go up to the teacher's table at the front, ignoring the few stares we get, as it isn't often we go into the great Hall at dinner time, and it's even weirder that we would go in when dinner had ended.

As usual, Snape is sitting on one of the chairs at the end, closest to the Slytherin table, which is good, because it means that not as many nosy teachers will be listening in to what we need to say to him.

"Do we call him Snape? Severus? Sir?" Percy hisses in a panic as we get closer to the front of the hall.

"Well, I'm definitely not calling him Sir," I say, and by then, we're at the front, and there isn't any time left to panic about what we should address him by. We should have thought through our plan a lot more.

"Severus? Can we speak to you please?" I ask, instantly regretting calling him Severus. I should have stuck with surnames.

He raises his eyebrows, but nods, and the three of us go out of the hall to speak more privately to the interest of the few Slytherins that had heard me.

"What do you want to speak to me about?" He asks us curtly, and for some reason, that makes me think about how we've managed to not speak (avoid) him since he had us tied up in a chair in Grimmauld Place.

"Well, it's not exactly you we want to speak to, it's more Slytherin house. The quidditch match on Thursday, and what they were singing made us realise that this school has a large, unspoken issue that should be brought up."

"So you're saying you want to talk to my Slytherins about some harmless banter at a sports event? And you think that counts as bullying?"

"I wouldn't call it harmless banter, Snape," I say. Calling him by his last name, I find, is much less personal. "The Weasley family certainly wouldn't call it that. I don't think Molly or Arthur would be happy to find out no one is going unpunished for your Slytherins harassment."

He blinks. From what I've heard about him from Harry, Ron, and even Hermione is that he runs his class through controlling the students in harsh and unfair ways, and being biassed towards certain students. If he is as big as a bully as they think, then it's no wonder he doesn't see it happening in his own house.

"Alright," He says after a moment. "I will let you speak to them. In some ways, I do agree that the song took it too far, though I don't know if my students will see it that way."

"It's not just the song we were going to speak to them about," Percy replies. "It's also about Hogwarts in general. We were speaking to the Weasley twins last Thursday, and we came to the conclusion that Hogwarts isn't run as well as it could be when it comes to the welfare of the students. We want to speak to your Slytherins about how they have the power to change the way the school views them as the 'evil' house."

"I'll be honest," Snape says, "I think it's going to take a lot more than a speech to change that much in this school. Many of my Slytherins don't see being viewed as evil as a bad thing, which, I suppose did lead to many of them becoming Death Eaters. I'll let you do your speech, and let you try and change the school. I won't help, but you can know that I agree with what you are saying."