Chapter 46: Don't Look Around
After Tamara had planted the Weasley twins in the snow, Hogwarts acquired a new and deeply stupid fashion.
Snowball fights were no longer content with snowballs.
Now they ended with people buried headfirst in drifts.
The result was predictable. By the end of the week, the Hospital Wing was full of students sniffling, coughing, and swearing revenge.
"Harry, can you believe it?" Ron complained bitterly on the way to Potions. "Fred and George called it a snowball fight, then stuffed me into a snowbank up to my knees. Headfirst. Headfirst, Harry."
Harry gave him an awkward look that was half sympathy and half badly suppressed laughter.
"They said it was traditional now."
"They're deranged," Ron muttered darkly. "Absolutely deranged."
The two boys stepped into the Potions classroom one after the other.
The dungeon was as cold and joyless as ever. Sulphur hung in the air beneath the bitter tang of wormwood, and the rows of cauldrons reflected the torchlight in dull black circles. Somewhere a knife chopped too fast. Somewhere else a student muttered an incantation under their breath. The entire room smelled like burnt herbs, damp stone, and failure.
At the front, Professor Severus Snape drifted through the classroom like an ill tempered phantom.
Today's lesson was Forgetfulness Potion.
That meant nervous hands, measured stirring, and a hundred opportunities for Snape to remind his students that most of them were disappointments.
"Longbottom," Snape said in a low, silky voice that somehow carried to every corner of the room, "if one more drop of your sweat falls into that cauldron, I will force you to drink the entire batch."
Neville jerked so violently that he nearly knocked over his mortar.
A few tables away, Snape leaned over Harry's cauldron, peered into the murky brew, and looked as though he had discovered a corpse in it.
"Potter, your valerian has been boiled into sludge. Five points from Gryffindor for your utter inability to grasp the concept of timing."
Harry glared at him, jaw tight, but kept his mouth shut.
Snape let out a soft, contemptuous snort and moved on.
Then he crossed into Slytherin territory.
The moment he stopped beside Tamara Riddle's desk, something in him tightened.
Tamara was working in complete silence. Her sleeves were neatly pinned back, her silver knife moved with precise economy, and every ingredient was prepared exactly as it should be. She did not hurry. She did not hesitate. Her motions were calm, elegant, and infuriatingly perfect.
Snape watched her longer than usual.
Her potion gave off a clean pale vapor. The surface shimmered with just the right clarity. There was not the slightest hint of curdling, over reduction, or imbalance.
He found nothing wrong with it.
Nothing.
"...Passable," he said at last, though the word sounded dragged from him by force.
Ordinarily, that would have been the end of it. He would have swept away and directed his displeasure at an easier target. But this time he remained where he was, black robes motionless, eyes fixed on the girl beside the cauldron.
Ever since that day Tamara had mentioned the injury on his leg, the suspicion in Snape's mind had been growing like poison ivy. Every small detail about her grated against his reason. Her knowledge. Her tone. Her timing. That gaze. That appalling, impossible familiarity.
And beneath all of it, a compulsion had taken root.
He needed to know.
Tamara, apparently focused on trimming mistletoe berries, did not look up. But she felt his stare as clearly as if he had pressed a wand to the back of her neck.
Snape's eyes narrowed.
Without speaking, without moving, he reached outward with the subtle, invasive pressure of Legilimency.
It was not a full assault. It was a brush. A probe. Just enough to catch an edge of thought, a flicker of memory, a hidden intention.
The moment that invisible force touched the threshold of Tamara's mind, the system exploded awake.
[Ding! High level mental intrusion detected!]
[System firewall automatically activated.]
[Defense strategy: Reverse Mental Pollution.]
Snape recoiled.
Not physically at first. Mentally.
He had expected secrets. A mask slipping. Darkness. Calculation. Perhaps the cold architecture of ambition.
Instead, he was hit by pink.
An absurd, suffocating flood of saccharine scenes burst across his vision with all the force of a magical concussion.
Tamara stepping in front of Harry while Draco sneered.
Tamara wrapping a scarf around Hannah Abbott with chilly tenderness.
Tamara patting Fang at Hagrid's hut while sunlight poured through the window in some revolting picture of domestic warmth.
Tamara shielding Hermione from danger with heroic calm.
Tamara smiling in the snow while "playing" with the Weasley twins.
And then, most unforgivable of all, Tamara standing beneath a field of warm spring light, clapping her hands and singing with a saintly expression.
"Little swallow, wearing your bright spring clothes, returning with the season..."
The image blurred with impossible sweetness. Her face was all kindness, all radiance, all innocence.
Then she tilted her head, smiled, and said coolly, "The swallow says none of your business."
Snape staggered backward as if struck.
He hit the edge of a nearby table hard enough to rattle several vials. His face had gone chalk pale.
For one ghastly moment, he could not even sort what he had seen. It was not simply memory. It was contamination. A moral fever dream. And worse, when he tried to recall the details, they slipped away into a sticky haze of blurred impressions and pastel colored nightmare.
The room noticed.
Tamara looked up at once, genuine surprise flickering across her face.
"Professor?"
Inside, she was suspicious.
What did the system show him?
She demanded an answer at once, but the system adopted the tone of a falsely innocent child.
[Nothing at all. Just some very ordinary things.]
That reassurance did not reassure her in the slightest.
On the outside, however, Tamara's expression softened. She blinked, and the passive effect of [Harmless] slipped neatly into place, rounding the hard edges of her gaze into something mild and concerned.
"Are you unwell?" she asked. "Is your old injury troubling you again?"
Snape stared at her.
The urge to suspect warred violently with the after image of that unbearable mental detonation. His temples throbbed. His vision still felt faintly stained with pink.
At that moment he could not summon even a clean thread of hostility. Not because he trusted her, but because his mind was too busy rejecting whatever infernal thing it had just been forced to swallow.
"...I am fine," he said through clenched teeth.
His voice was rougher than usual, drier, edged with strain.
"Continue your potion, Riddle."
"Yes, Professor."
Snape remained there a moment longer, eyes fixed on her with an intensity that would have unnerved almost anyone.
Tamara, naturally, interpreted it in the only sensible way.
It pleased her.
Look at that gaze, she thought with private satisfaction. The loyalty is practically overflowing. He is so moved by my brilliance he can barely keep his footing.
If her former servant needed reassurance, then she could be generous.
Tamara turned back to her cauldron and picked up her silver knife again.
"Professor," she said lightly, as though inviting his professional opinion, "regarding the finishing stage of Forgetfulness Potion..."
She lifted the bowl of mistletoe berries.
A student following the textbook would have added four whole berries.
Tamara did not.
With crisp, controlled movements, she split two berries open, crushed them, and let only the clear juice drip into the potion. The remaining pulp she discarded with a flick of her wrist. The other two berries she left untouched.
It was a refinement not found in any school text. The flesh dulled the effect. Only the distilled juice mattered.
The change was immediate.
The dull gray vapor rising from the cauldron vanished. The potion cleared at once into a perfect transparent shimmer, like memory itself dissolving. A faint calming fragrance rose from the surface, subtle and clean.
Snape's pupils contracted sharply.
There it was again.
The same instinctive precision. The same deviation from the formal method toward something more exact. More dangerous. More intimate.
His gaze snapped from the cauldron to her face.
Tamara turned toward him and smiled. Not widely. Just enough.
"What do you think, Professor?"
The question was polite.
The implication was not.
Snape looked from the flawless potion to the eleven year old girl beside it, and for the first time in many years felt something close to genuine vertigo.
His reason screamed that there was something wrong here. Something profoundly wrong. This child knew too much. Moved too cleanly. Observed too sharply. Resembled too much.
And yet another part of him, the part polluted by that cursed mental backlash and undermined by his own uncertainty, whispered a different possibility.
Perhaps she was simply a genius.
A monstrous one, yes. An unsettling one. But only that.
Perhaps he was seeing patterns because he feared them. Perhaps he had become so haunted by the past that any shadow shaped remotely like it now made his blood run cold.
The contradiction split his thoughts cleanly in two.
In the end, he did the only thing he could.
"...Well done," Snape said.
He forced the words out as though they tasted bitter.
"Ten points to Slytherin."
Then he turned so abruptly his robes flared behind him and strode away to safer prey.
"Longbottom!" he barked a second later, voice cracking through the dungeon like a whip. "Are you attempting to blow up the classroom, or is catastrophic incompetence simply your natural state?"
Neville gave a small, strangled noise and grabbed for his cauldron.
Tamara extinguished the flame beneath her potion with a satisfied flick.
Across the room, Snape was already unloading his fury on Neville with renewed venom, but Tamara watched his retreating figure with quiet approval.
He needs time, she thought. That is all.
Such devotion could not be rushed. First concern. Then understanding. Then distance from the crippled fragment clinging to Quirrell's skull. When the time was right, Severus Snape would know where true power sat.
And when that day came, Tamara thought with serene certainty, he would kneel again. Properly this time. Not for a shattered remnant, but for the one worthy of his loyalty.
Meanwhile, Snape, looming over Neville's cauldron and savaging him for crimes against potion making, felt an inexplicable chill creep down his spine.
It was the sensation of something vast and patient leaning over his shoulder.
Almost unconsciously, he touched the Dark Mark beneath his sleeve.
It remained silent.
Cold.
Dead.
That did not comfort him.
No, Snape thought grimly, staring into Longbottom's bubbling disaster while his mind refused to settle. This has gone far enough.
Perhaps it is time I spoke to Dumbledore.
.....
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