Two Weeks Before O.W.L.s, 1984


Slouched in her usual seat, Adoxa sulked behind her rusty cauldron. It was Slytherin lab, the class she dreaded most. With nowhere to hide, the failed efforts of Adoxa Muir would be on display for all to see.


Sighing, she pulled out her notebook, painstakingly-mended, and resumed an old sketch.


The image featured her dear House Master, seated in a comfortable armchair, the top four buttons of his waistcoat daringly undone.


Adoxa had no sooner touched up a shadow where his coat draped against the base of the chair when the shade himself burst into the room, robes a flurry of motion.


“Silence,” Snape bellowed, “class is now in session. Today,” he continued in his sinister tone, “you will concoct a sample of Living Death. While I do not anticipate wide-spread success, I do expect a concerted effort from all.”


A chorus of moans, whimpers and excited chatter rippled across the classroom.


“Enough! You will begin now. The necessary reagents may be found there.” Snape gestured to a work table laden with supplies.


“Living Death,” Adoxa mouthed, artlessly lighting her cauldron and returning to her notebook under the pretence of letting the copper vessel preheat.


Adoxa leafed through her book, landing on a panorama illustration of skeletons as bearers of the bubonic plague.


Giggling, she set the book down and leaned back contentedly on her stool, appreciating the irony.


A furious Professor Snape manifested in front of her and snatched up the book, skeletons scattering across the page to avoid the crushing grip of his long fingers.


“How dare you!” he spat. “How dare you make a mockery of my lesson!”


Adoxa stared up into his furious eyes, utterly undone.


“I … I …” she stammered.


“Get out!” Snape raged. “Right! Now!”


Abandoning her cauldron and textbook, Adoxa ran for the door, barely making it out of the classroom before thick tears began pouring down her burning cheeks.


Shaking his head with disappointment, Professor Snape returned to the front of the classroom, dropping Adoxa's notebook into the catch-all junk drawer in his desk, where it came to rest next to a toothless flying disk, stale sweets and notes confiscated from errant students, long since forgotten.

---

Thirteen Years Later
End of Summer Term, 1996


Professor Snape smirked to himself as he watched the last student leave his dungeon classroom.


“Finally,” he sighed.


Suppressing a most uncharacteristic urge to whistle, the Potions Master approached his desk, surveying the surface.


“No more papers, no more books ...” he said, recalling the schoolboy rhyme. “No more students' dirty looks.”


Professor Snape pulled out his black leather satchel from beneath the desk and packed his quill and pots of both red and black ink. From the main drawer, he withdrew his ledger, scanned the class roll one last time and tossed it into the fireplace, where it burst into green flames with a satisfying crackle. Before closing the top drawer, he removed his personal journal: a small, black, leather-bound book, and slipped it into the satchel.


With a squeak, the top drawer closed. For a moment, Snape hesitated before opening the lower drawer of his desk.


Shaking his head, he found it bursting with many of the illicit items he had confiscated from students during the tyrannical reign of Dolores Umbridge. Merlin, how he loathed that woman!


Professor Snape grabbed the waste paper basket and began discarding the contents of the drawer. Crumbled notes, a few stray Every Flavour Beans from a box half-eaten. Jokes and gags galore.


“Those Weasley twins certainly made quite an exit.” He smirked, tossing out the remains of a spent firecracker.


Wading through the contraband accumulated over the years, Snape's fingers brushed against something firm and leathery. No ordinary exercise book, that. He freed the tome from beneath an empty tube of Muggle lipstick and a badly-torn copy of Playwizard, dated 1985.


Gripping the tome, Snape blinked as he felt its latent power ripple beneath his fingers.


“What ...?” he breathed, closing his eyes.


In a flash, the memories played out in his mind's eye. That girl. A Slytherin. Forever scribbling in her infernal book.


Snape blinked.


She left. Not that day, when he had confiscated the book, but shortly after. She sat her O.W.L.s first, then promptly disappeared.


Shaking his head, the Potions Master tucked the strange book into his satchel and snapped the clasps shut.


“I ought to have followed up on that girl,” Snape mused. “She was in my House, after all.”


He dumped the remaining contents from the bottom of the junk drawer into the waste paper basket and from there, into the fireplace.


Scanning the classroom one last time, Professor Snape headed for the door.


“Nox,” he intoned, stepping into the draughty hallway and warding the door behind.