Change the Future

HBP 4

Ron looked a little uncomfortable and began playing with the Fanged Frisbee Hermione had taken from the fourth-year student. It zoomed around the common room, snarling and attempting to take bites of the tapestry. Crookshanks's yellow eyes followed it and he hissed when it came too close. An hour later they reluctantly left the sunlit common room for the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom four floors below. Hermione was already queuing outside, carrying an armful of heavy books and looking put-upon.

"We got so much homework for Runes," she said anxiously, when Harry and Ron joined her. "A fifteen-inch essay, two translations, and I've got to read these by Wednesday!"

"Shame," yawned Ron.

"I love how you just don't care Ron" Rory smiles at him.

"You wait," she said resentfully. "I bet Snape gives us loads." The classroom door opened as she spoke, and Snape stepped into the corridor, his sallow face framed as ever by two curtains of greasy black hair. Silence fell over the queue immediately.

"Oh look he finally got to teach Defence" Barty Crouch Jr laughs as Snape glares at him.

"Inside," he said.Harry looked around as they entered. Snape had imposed his personality upon the room already; it was gloomier than usual, as curtains had been drawn over the windows, and was lit by candlelight. New pictures adorned the walls, many of them showing people who appeared to be in pain, sporting grisly injuries or strangely contorted body parts. Nobody spoke as they settled down, looking around at the shadowy, gruesome pictures "I have not asked you to take out your books," Snape said, closing the door and moving to face the class from behind his desk. Hermione hastily dropped her copy of Confronting the Faceless back into her bag and stowed it under her chair. "I wish to speak to you, and I want your fullest attention."

"I'm so glad I didn't have to deal with him for defence" Rory says looking at George.

His black eyes roved over their upturned faces, lingering for a fraction of a second longer on Harry's than anyone else's. 

"You have had five teachers in this subject so far, I believe."

"You're the reason the best one left you grease bat" Rory said glaring at Snape. 

"Naturally, these teachers will all have had their own methods and priorities. Given this confusion I am surprised so many of you scraped an O.W.L. in this subject. I shall be even more surprised if all of you manage to keep up with the N.E.W.T. work, which will be much more advanced." Snape set off around the edge of the room, speaking now in a lower voice; the class craned their necks to keep him in view. "The Dark Arts," Snape said, "are many, varied, ever-changing, and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster, which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before. You are fighting that which is unfixed, mutating, indestructible. Your defences," Snape said, a little louder, "must therefore be as flexible and inventive as the arts you seek to undo. These pictures" he indicated a few of them as he swept past "give a fair representation of what happens to those who suffer, for instance, the Cruciatus Curse" he waved a hand toward a witch who was clearly shrieking in agony.

Rory looks at Charlie who wraps his arms around her tightly.

"feel the Dementor's Kiss" a wizard lying huddled and blank-eyed, slumped against a wall "or provoke the aggression of the Inferius" a bloody mass upon the ground. 

"Has an Inferius been seen, then?" said Parvati Patil in a highpitched voice. "Is it definite, is he using them?"

"The Dark Lord has used Inferi in the past," Snape said, "which means you would be well advised to assume he might use them again. Now" He set off again around the other side of the classroom toward his desk, and again, they watched him as he walked, his dark robes billowing behind him. "you are, I believe, complete novices in the use of nonverbal spells. What is the advantage of a nonverbal spell?" Hermione's hand shot into the air. Snape took his time looking around at everybody else, making sure he had no choice, before saying curtly, "Very well Miss Granger?"