~Pov Snape~
Severus Snape had taught students for the better part of a decade, and in that time he had developed a fairly reliable method for sorting them within the first ten minutes of contact: those who would waste his time, and those who would waste his time and a dangerous quantity of ingredients along with it, and the rare few who would, eventually, stop being entirely useless. It was not generous. But it had rarely needed revision.
Aegeus Granger had not fit cleanly into any of the three categories, which was itself the first thing Snape noted about him.
He would run his usual scan across the room within the first few minutes, the habit was integrated in him so deep that it barely registered as an effort— a passive skim across the surface of thirty-odd minds, gathering nothing specific, just who is going to give him trouble and when.
Today, the skim caught nothing unusual— just the normal anxiety, specifically from a girl near the back, who had clearly read ahead and was now terrified of being called on to prove it.
Granger's mind, when the scan passed over him, gave back almost nothing. It was not resistance— resistance had its own texture. This was closer to stillness. A mind occupied entirely with the board in front of him. Snape had noted it, and moved on. Unusual focus was not, on its own, interesting. He'd seen focus before. It rarely survived a really difficult potion.
And when he heard his question. He rebuked him as he would do for any arrogant Gryffindor who thought reading a couple of books amounted to anything.
A week passed before the second interruption came, and it arrived with something attached to it. The question itself was minor, the kind of thing he would have docked ten points for from anyone else without a second thought, but this time, when the boy held his gaze, he felt something brush against his mind— a faint probe, fainter than anything a trained Legilimens would have bothered attempting.
It was the magical equivalent of a broken whisper. But even an attempt this pathetic can't come from a first-year student, much less a first-year student still in his first month.
What struck Snape as downright ludicrous was the aftermath: the boy was negotiating with him! Using one of the most demanding, delicate branches of magic to haggle over the price of a question.
Snape found the entire display utterly absurd. Yet, he humored the impudent brat anyway. Talent of this caliber had its uses— and Dumbledore may have a design for the boy— so he settled on ten points and let the matter rest.
It was the Forgetfulness Potion class, several weeks later, that changed things.
He'd expected, when he paused at the boy's station that week, another version of the same pattern— the boy asks a question, he answers it, he deducts points. He expected it rather less than usual, if he was honest with himself.
When he had corrected Aegeus in the previous class, he had been deliberately cruel. The boy's theory was ridiculous, and Snape had corrected it without any particular gentleness, in front of the whole class.
He'd assumed, not unreasonably, that it would finally teach the boy the difference between insight and overreach. He'd half expected some lingering grievance over it too, given the corridor business with Bletchley the same week, which had left even Snape's own house docked points. A normal boy his age, especially a reckless Gryffindor, might have let either one sour into the next lesson.
And when no question came, he asked anyway, with a trace of satisfaction. "No interruption today, Mr. Granger?"
But he actually knew the reason.
Until that moment, Snape had filed the boy's competence under the memorization category. A sharp memory dressed up convincingly as understanding was common enough among clever children— they absorbed an explanation once, repeated it back with enough confidence to be mistaken for insight.
But they quickly collapse the instant the problem shifted even slightly from the one they had memorized.
The previous class had, if anything, supported that theory— a child overreaching past what he actually understood, dressing a guess up as certainty. The Legilimency, startling as it was, hadn't overturned the theory either; some wizards had strange advantages, but it didn't prove they were truly talented.
This did.
It was not, on its own, a remarkable insight— Snape had explained the underlying principle to the boy explicitly, weeks earlier.
But the boy had taken that single explanation, corrected his own recent misapplication of it, and generalized it correctly across an entirely different potion, arriving without further instruction at a conclusion Snape had spent years refining through trial, failure, and more expensive supply of ingredients than that he cared to remember.
Small as the insight was, it was still an insight— Snape had long believed it was considerably harder to fake that, especially from someone this young.
He had said, at the time, that the boy was not entirely helpless. was the highest form of praise he was willing to give.
He thought back to other professors' reports that had reached him in passing. Flitwick's open delight, which Snape had assumed was simply Flitwick, a man constitutionally incapable of moderate enthusiasm about anything; McGonagall's uncharacteristically generous remarks about how rigorous his theoretical grasp was.
Even Vance, who Snape privately considered had rather too much tolerance for showmanship, had said something in the staff room that he had dismissed at the time as an old soldier's fondness for a promising recruit.
He had assumed, in each case, some degree of exaggeration. His colleagues were prone to it, particularly early in a term, particularly with a student whose circumstances— Muggle-born, self-taught, arriving already reading ahead of his year. It made for a more interesting story than the more ordinary truth usually justified.
He revised that assumption as well, with the reluctance he revised for people he already decided not to like.
It did not improve his opinion of the boy, precisely. Talent didn't mean fondness, not for someone who cared little enough about students' futures to begin with. But he found himself, while marking his stack of essays later that evening, that his patience for the task had shifted slightly when reading his work.
He thought little more of it until mid-December, when Dumbledore offhandedly mentioned catching the boy testing that same technique on passing students in the corridors.
Snape failed to see the amusement in this; as someone thoroughly familiar with the Dark Arts himself, he understood exactly what this tendency signified.
Dumbledore had, predictably, offered to mentor him directly rather than let an unrestrained Legilimens run wild in the school.
He did not intervene. It was not, strictly, his place— the boy's education in the finer points of consent and restraint— was a task better suited to someone with a far greater tendency to preach, someone like the headmaster himself.
It is going to be a long seven years, Snape reflected.
_________________________________________________________________________
TO BE CONTINUED
If you like the story, please leave a stone.
And if you can, leave a review; it doesn't have to be 5 stars, just share your honest opinion.
Support link: www.patr eon.com/n740
15 advance chapters