With Mondays being Mondays, so a day of intended gloom and misery, it could only be expected that the day be heralded by the worst lessons the week could throw at them. None of the Ravenclaw gang were particularly surprised, then (though that didn’t stop them being horrified) when Professor Flitwick handed out their timetables and Double Potions rested in the Monday morning slot.

“NOOOOOOO!” Dale cried from across the room in a voice so loud it might have reached Botswana with little difficulty.

Professor Flitwick gave him a reproachful look, “Now, Dale, be a little less obvious in your enthusiasm, please.”

The common room chuckled whilst Dale suddenly became so pallid that Matt and Richard were soon standing by his sides, ready to catch him if he fainted; “Not one,” Dale muttered, his eyes wide with terror, “No, not just one Potions lesson, but two, TWO in a ROW! And - that’s not the worse of it - it’s on a Monday morning! How are the weekends ever gonna be fun again when we have the greasy git meeting us the moment we step back into the classroom?!”

A group of first years laughed at Dale, who was making a performance that any thespian would be proud of, but Professor Flitwick was not impressed; “I’m very sorry, Dale, but I cannot allow you to talk about members of the faculty in such a way - 10 points from you… as soon as the House earns any.”

“Dale!” the entire chamber chorused, their house already in debt of points before the term had even begun.

“He has a point, though…” Joanne nodded quietly, turning her back to Professor Flitwick and lowering her voice to Catherine.

“No, he lost a point,” Darren corrected her, “Ten, to be precise.”

Joanna threw him her haughtiest glare, “Ha - ha,” she grunted curtly, before she turned back to Catherine and continued, “How are we going to survive Mondays with that? It’s like being put on permanent detention for the rest of the year…”

Cat shrugged, “We’ll have to manage - at least we’re with the Hufflepuffs. I’d hate to be in there with the Slytherins. We all know how much Snape loves his darling serpents…”

“Maybe we should just boycott Potions?” Darren suggested, “He might not notice…”

Cat and Jo laughed.

“I wasn’t joking,” Darren added.

Joanne blinked, “I knew you were dense, Daz, but, c’mon! I think he might be a bit suspicious when not a single Ravenclaw turns up to his class on a Monday morning.”

“It’ll save both of us the trouble…” Darren continued with a vain piece of hope.

“Forget it, Daz,” Catherine stated, “I think we’re better off facing the consequences of going to lessons rather than those of not going.”

“She’s right,” interrupted a sixth year, Jeremy Stretton, from behind them, “It’s been done before.”

“Really? What happened?” Darren enquired.

Stretton gulped, fearing the memory alone, “Well, have you ever seen a whole class of Ravenclaws scrub the Great Hall’s floor with tooth brushes - sans magic?”

The trio shook their heads.

“We were there a week,” Jeremy recollected, “They had to suspend the house tables in the air above us until we’d finished. And I was the one scrubbing under the Slytherin table during meal times - you can imagine the amount of rubbish that got thrown down at me, I‘m sure!”

“Looks like you’re going to class, then…” Jo nodded.

“Hey, but what if we scrubbed really slowly? We might miss all the lessons for the rest of the year!” Darren grinned. Cat hit him with her school bag.

~~

And so we enter the Potions Master, Severus Snape. He was infamous just as much for his strict and merciless regime of teaching as he was for his greasy, long hair. He was a lean, creepy-looking character, whose eyes were deep abysses of nothingness and whose skin was as ashen as it comes. He looked like a person who’d never gotten enough sunlight, and one would think that he suffered from malnutrition if his adeptness in the duelling department wasn’t taken into consideration. He was head of the Slytherin House, and it was all too obvious some of the time… His pupils were often treated with much higher regard by the professor than those from the other three houses, and the Slytherins were rumoured to be the only students who actually got points from him - the rest only ever got them taken away.

Cat squinted into her cauldron as they entered the dungeons and prepared for their double lesson; “Oh, fiddlesticks…” she muttered, scooping up some ooze from the bottom of it, “Someone forgot to clean my cauldron out over summer.”

“Yeah, I wonder who that was…?” Joanne retorted, rolling her eyes,

Cat suppressed a sheepish grin, the slightest sign of happiness often causing the Potions Master some kind of offence - or at least a reason to strip points from you; “I’m sooooo gonna get it this lesson…”

“Just try and clean it up before he gets here,” Joanne whispered.

Cat scraped madly at the innards of her cauldron with a handkerchief, but it seemed to yield little progress.

“Damn…” she snarled, throwing her hankie to the floor and folding her arms.

“We shall have no cursing in this class, Miss Madison.”

Cat wanted to shrink inside the neck of her robes, but only managed to slip down her stool and lose half the colouring in her face. She continued to curse ‘Damn, damn, damn’ inside her head, which didn‘t seem to help things for, by the look on Snape’s face, he seemed to know what she was thinking, as well.

“Sorry, sir…” she murmured, “I didn’t mean to.”

“I’m sure,” he muttered, casting his eyes across all the other students in his class sporting the Ravenclaw crest, “Clearly, some of you Ravenclaws need to practise a bit of ‘self-restraint’ on your tongues.”

“And someone else needs to practise self-restraint on stripping house points,” muttered Dale from the bench behind Jo and Cat.

Snape rapidly threw Dale a look of disgust, “Ten points from Ravenclaw, Mr. Wilding,” he sneered.

Dale’s mouth dropped a mile whilst the Ravenclaws scowled at him - their house now had minus twenty points.

“If Dale keeps this up, we’re gonna have to depend on the Ravens in the other years for points this term,” muttered Jo so that she was sure only Cat could hear her.

Cat nodded in return, feeling a hot flush climb up her neck as she noticed the Professor begin to inspect her cauldron; “Well, well, well… it would seem that some Ravenclaws are also bone idle as well as foul mouthed. What have you been doing all holiday that explains the disgusting state of your cauldron, Miss Madison?”

Cat felt all eyes on her in the dungeon classroom; “I …er… I forgot to clean it.”

Snape’s eyebrow rose a fraction as he let Catherine suffer in the lull, “You forgot?” he drawled slowly.

Cat shifted in her seat, unable to sink down any lower, “Yes, sir…” she mumbled.

“I beg your pardon?”

She straightened up a little, “Yes, sir.”

He turned, beginning to creep around the class with an expression of feigned surprise on his countenance, his hands clasped at the small of his back, “You forgot to clean your cauldron? You’ve had several weeks away from school and, in all that time, you were so busy revising your school topics from last year, that you…ahem… forgot to clean your cauldron?”

A couple of Hufflepuffs chuckled at the back of the class.

“Silence, Lloyd, Gwain,” Snape spat at them, sweeping about the dungeon and coming up behind them, staring down his nose into their cauldrons, “Yours are little better.” His black eyes shot onto Cat again, “Do you have an excuse worth my hearing?”

Cat swallowed, “My parents are Muggles - I can’t exactly have my cauldron out on display at home, and -”

“A lame excuse - your parents are fully aware of your status and would surely give you leave to clean your apparatus - and even so, if you had known that this would be a problem, you could have cleaned it before you left last term, or after you’d arrived yesterday.”

A small flame of hatred began to burn Cat’s innards as she watched Snape stare at her, his face asking her to continue with a struggle that he would never let her win. She swallowed, trying to retain her composure, knowing that she must not let him triumph; “I’m sorry, sir. I will make sure it is cleaned tonight.”

“ ‘Tonight’ is a bit too late, Miss Madison,” he returned, “Perhaps this afternoon would be a more appropriate time?”

Jo glanced between Cat and Snape, suspicious of this seemingly lightweight offering of clemency.

“Yes, sir…” Cat quietly agreed, her brow furrowed with uncertainty as she signed this bargain with the devil.

“Excellent. I’ll see you in my Office at five, then,” he said, throwing her a curt smirk, before turning to his blackboard, “And, before I waste any more time on some of you worthless toe rags, please get out your ingredients” (he tapped the blackboard with his wand and a recipe appeared for some new weird and wonderful concoction) “And we shall begin.”