A/N: Dedicated to Erica (hey, you've won the Easter-egg hunt!) Totally disclaimed and not my intellectual property. Follow my example and don't use this to make money (it won't work anyway).

So Help Him – Table of Contents

I – Prologueishly Concerns Introductions and Semantics

II – Advanced Potions

III – Advanced Defence Against the Dark Arts

IV – Mrs Snape's Box

V – Slughorn's Protégées

VI – Midnight Brewery

VII – The Trick

VIII – Trifling Disciplinary Issues

IX – A Dormitory Altogether Overcrowded and Insomniac

X – The Send-Off

---

So Help Him

I – Prologueishly Concerns Introductions and Semantics

"So do any witches wear corsets anymore, or have they all gone, you know – "

"Muggle. With their whatsits."

"Yeah. Right."

Snape wanted to roll his eyes or say something scathing, but upon a moment's reflection he found that he didn't know what they were called either, and decided to instead turn his page.

What a hellish journey the Hogwarts Express was. Avery seemed recently to have picked up some additional worthless groupies – he had really let himself go ever since Evan and Roland had left two years ago. Stuck in a compartment with Avery, Moon, Macmillan, Eames, and Whittle was not how Snape wanted to waste eight hours. Not that he didn't think questions of the female anatomy very interesting in general, but he hated how disgusting that lot could make it sound.

And was it worth it? It's not as though you suffered and were then rewarded. You suffered, and you arrived at Hogwarts, which was only a smidgen better than what you had left behind. This year, in fact, Hogwarts would be worse. Snape had wanted to hide out at Spinner's End forever. Take independent study, apprentice himself to a Knockturn Alley apothecary, throw himself on Lucius Malfoy's patronage, wait out the two years and then go seek out the Knights of Walpurgis – any wild scheme by which he might avoid going to Hogwarts ever again. Yet here he was. Cloistered with the idiots of the school for protection, who were forcing him to think about, of all things, underwear. Snape went miserably red behind his book every so often as a memory he was trying to suppress got loose.

Richard Macmillan spoke up: "Most witches have – you know. Gone Muggle."

Incredulity all around.

"And how would YOU know, Macmillan?" demanded Avery, with a snigger.

"My sister," said Macmillan, unperturbed.

"Oh, right, I forgot," said Henry Moon good-naturedly. "You've one of those sorts of families."

"What's that supposed to mean?" demanded Macmillan, voice going unflatteringly high.

"You know," said Moon, but Macmillan evidently didn't, so Moon helped him out: "All spoony. Sitting down all together 'round a table for dinner, barging into each others rooms, inviting all the cousins over for holidays. You know. Sickening."

This bit of spot-on, home-driven oratory didn't really require improvement, but Spurius Whittle provided it anyway: "All lovey-dovey and everything."

Even Snape had to speak up: "It would be very claustrophobic."

"Yeah," agreed Avery, who had not the faintest idea of what claustrophobic meant. They all five of them looked at Macmillan pityingly.

Three would have murdered several people within five years. And Moon and Eames would, at any rate, be flirting with drinking problems.

It was a gorgeous day when more energetic sixteen-year-old boys might feel itchy, contained inside a train for the best eight hours of the day. The sun beamed in pale but visible rays that looked something off a holy card. Snape, who was having trouble concentrating on his book anyway, had to shield his eyes so that the whiteness of the pages reflecting the sun didn't dazzle him. He scowled long and deep as he did so.

"So what's up, Sev?" Avery had broken away from the conversation to perch at his elbow. "You've looked bent out of shape all day." When Snape didn't immediately answer, he ventured: "Trouble with Florence?"

He only wished. No, he was pretty certain that the final days of last term had effectively warded off any girl troubles for the rest of his Hogwarts life. His stomach curdled yet again. He had physical indigestion of his breakfast and mental indigestion of his ignominy. When the Express stopped he would have to leave the relative safety of this compartment and face them all – all their hidden and blatant laughter, everyone looking at him at seeing him upside-down by the lake.

When Snape shook his head, Avery shrugged, looking both good-natured and stupid. He swung his feet around and kicked his heels against the seat for a bit. Snape was about to scream in annoyance. Couldn't he just be left alone with his book?

Fifteen minutes later Avery said out of the blue: "You know, Portia Stubblebine and Dale Fawcett broke up last week in Diagon Alley."

"Really."

"Yeah." A pause, and then, just when Snape was feeling comfortable enough to take up his reading again – "And evidently the other day Peeves managed to startle the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher into shattering some cursed Arabian mirror and she's in St Mungo's tonight. Clive Moon told me so."

"So?" Snape hadn't meant to snarl, but really! Insomnia, nerves, a compartmentful of idiots, and now petty he-said she-did gossip – how much could one be expected to take?

"Well, I mean, that's going to be on everyone's minds. It's what, you know, they'll be talking about and stuff." Avery tried to look meaningfully at Snape, but when Avery tried to look meaningful he typically just looked bug-eyed, and Snape was none the wiser.

"Is the crash course over now, Edward?" he demanded. That was something of a slap to the face. Unkindred souls called him Avery; acquaintances called him Edward; but his friends normally dropped a syllable for a cosy "Av'ry."

But Avery did not immediately turn back to the more congenial talk of Moon, Macmillan, and Co. Though looking rather hurt, he persisted after a few more minutes: "So what'd you think of that Exhauriat Curse at the Harpies-Kestrels match? Thought of you first thing when I heard of that."

It was calculated to cheer Snape up; he loved nothing better than an audience to expound on his impressive knowledge of Dark Arts. And it did clear his head a little. He did something very unSnapeish: he sighed.

"I only wish it had been me," he whispered, with a common sort of longing that, for a moment, made him sound for once just like everybody else.

It was Eugene Eames's fellow Ravenclaw Kealy Quirke coming in with an old Evening Prophet that finally soothed Snape.

The editorial had been written to savage the hundredth anniversary of the official change of Hogwarts's Dark Arts course into Defence Against the Dark Arts, which three additional words had caused a disproportionate amount of mayhem. Snape nodded approvingly at some points in the editorial, which pointed out that this particular anniversary commemorated only semantics: the course had ceased to sport any Dark magic of note long before the name was actually changed; in fact at the time of all the controversy the course's content had differed little from its modern content: minor jinxes, theoretical knowledge of artifacts and creatures, some practical defencive magic (increasing emphasis on the lattermost since). And this was of more than mere academic interest. For Hogwarts – the only school of wizardry that really mattered in all of Britain – was entrusted with passing on all the community's interests and traditions, and it was using its power to stigmatise the Dark Arts, which had gotten their modern name because they were the magics of the hidden, the oppressed; pureblooded scions utilising such magic common-sensically had preserved all of Wizard-kind from the critical threat of Muggle witch-hunters.

Snape tried to explain all this to Avery and Eames as the sky darkened as they rattled very near Hogwarts.

"Yeah, but that's not why you like them," said Avery dismissively, pulling on a jumper. "You just like them 'cause they're fun."

"Stop talking about it," said Eames. "I've heard this all about a billion times from my father."

---

It was very unfortunate that on the carriage ride to the castle Snape overheard one girl point him out to a friend: "Remember last year during OWLs?" and her friend giggled. They were assuredly the only ones to have thought about it at all, but Snape stalked off behind taller Avery for cover and pursued his Evening Prophet relentlessly during dinner, both shutting out the Slytherin chatter behind him and straining to hear…

The next night in Slytherin common room Gunther Shortreed started heckling him. Snape had exchanged the other Prophet for a new edition. Shortreed went over to Snape in his armchair and pretended to read over his shoulder, although it's doubtful Shortreed himself ever read a word in his life.

"Go away," said Snape, after a moment of this.

"Now that's not very nice. Let's have a chat, what say you?"

Snape did not look up. "Er… I'm reading," he said, without enough bite to stop Shortreed, who bounded over to crouch before him, forcing their eyes to meet. Snape looked at him and his earnest expression warily.

"Now, don't overwork yourself there, halfling."

The "halfling" did it. They'd already had this… conversation, but evidently Shortreed was the type you could never jinx too often. Snape flared.

"Do you like having two functional eyes?"

His voice betrayed him by squeaking in his anger. Snape had gone through no part of adolescence gracefully.

"Easy there, Sev." Shortreed leaned in and tweaked his nose. Snape went purple.

"Don't call me 'Sev.'"

"Why?" Shortreed threw himself back upon a chair, arms expanded. "You prefer 'Snivellus' now, do you?"

Many onlookers had to scramble to control their expressions as Snape's eyes darted around the room to see who betrayed amusement. Snape was one of those still upholding the fine old tradition, of respectably strong Slytherinish flavour, concerning the compiling and endless revising of enemy lists.

Others weren't amused at all.

"Hey," said Henry Moon, prefectorially, or as prefectorially as anyone can be who has not quite conquered a Nottingham accent. "We're all Slytherins here. If you have a problem with Severus keep outsiders' immature insults out of it."

"Yeah," said Avery, cheerfully. "Think up your own. Gunther."

Shortreed stalked off to fritter away some more of his worthless life. It took Snape a long while to recover from this, the first time anyone had mentioned the incident to him all year, and the last time anyone did so unsolicited.

He tried to continue pursuing the Prophet to take his mind off things. It proved singularly unhelpful. After the obligatory one hundred years' privacy, the list of which of the staff and school board had voted what on the "Defence Against" question had at last been published. Two names struck Snape: Y. A. Binns of History of Magic had voted against the change. Binns, though dead, was still teaching. He must have been something of a defeatist, thought Snape, no one would ever have expected where he'd come down on that question. And an R. J. Lupin of Astronomy had voted yes. At this Snape felt another headache going on. One of the contemporaneous Lupins was one of their groupies, their kept prefect. How bloody typical. He didn't know a single other thing about Lupin, and so had nothing to focus on except his abominable connections. Between thoughts of Shortreed and what Potter and Black were planning for him even now he spent another insomniatic night, and he gave up picking up a Prophet for the rest of the year.

---

What Avery had meant was this:

James and Sirius hadn't planned a single thing for Snape until the next morning. Before then they hadn't even mentioned him, except in passing on the Express, when James was explaining that he had missed the Harpies-Kestrels match because his parents had gotten an owl from the lake incident and had grounded him for a month. In the end the sentence had been commuted to four days. James had been attempting to complain about it, not explain the leniency. If he had done the latter it would have been this: the elder Potters were not used to flexing their disciplinary muscles. And they had been astonished and guiltily relieved when they thus avoided their son winding up in St Mungo's that night after the attack, with plenty others who had attended, shorn of his magic.

Point being it was 3 September before they spared much of a thought for Snape and where their serial war had left off. In fact it was Peter who had to first remind them. Otherwise they might cheerfully have talked Gryffindor Quidditch and after-hours outings and perhaps even the Corset Question for quite some time. And even Peter only brought it up because he was thinking of his first Advanced Potions lesson later that afternoon.

The effect on Sirius was significant. One moment he was all vibrancy, full of joyous charm and good-will that term was back in again, and that he wouldn't even have to think about Grimmauld Place for months. Peter mentioned Snape, and Sirius immediately darkened. He didn't notice it himself – didn't know that all the sudden his energy evaporated as a certain sickly suspicion replaced laughter in his expression.

Only James seemed unaffected, spirits still high. "Ha! Do you suppose he'll be feeling vengeful after last June?" he asked. It was a sincere question. "Maybe we'd better get the first shot in to be on the safe side."

"Yeah, you know, he just might be," said Sirius, dead-pan. "You may be on to something there."

Peter winced and regretted what he had wrought. Sirius sarcastic was deadly; Sirius sarcastic to his much-adored James was frankly worrisome.

"Did any of you lot get one of those Ministry brochures?" James went on oblivious. "Those self-defence spells? We should try them out, you know."

"Sure we should," agreed Sirius. He could never remain scornful of James for any length of time.

"Our civic duty," said James, warming to his rationalisation. "Because one fine day we may be ambushed by Knights of Walpurgis – with several green-eyed witches looking to our protection – and where would we be if all we had was the memory of a couple of incantations we had never even tested out before? Snape should be honoured we're practising on him."

Dryly, Sirius said, "Funny how none of these lovely witches accompanying us seems to have her own – " Sirius broke off, glance travelling across the table. James's gaze followed.

Remus had his eyes shut tight. Cautiously and cleverly he was reaching between sundry goblets to feel for the syrup. He actually managed to pick it up without incident, but that didn't make the behaviour any more normal.

"Moony? The hell are you doing?"

"Don't see it, don't have to report it," chanted Remus, still with his eyes shut. "Don't see it, don't have to report it."

"Works for me," said Sirius, exchanging a look with James. He didn't quite roll his eyes, but it took an effort not to. "Anyway. Maybe we should try one of the ones that animates something nearby. I'd kind of like to set an ax-wielding suit of armor on him."

"Nah, I liked the sound of the first one. You know, the one that only works Fridays."

"The Tridecimo one?"

"It's Tredecim, actually. It blinds."

"Well, wonderful. If we were first-years I might agree that's really great, but I'm thinking something more – "

James interrupted swearing. Remus had knocked over a pitcher of milk and had at last opened his eyes to apologise between laughs to their Housemates to whom the lake was spreading.

---