Disscrentus

Chapter One

Four weeks into an otherwise normal first term, Professor Snape showed up to sixth year Gryffindor/Slytherin double potions with a bit of a difference.

Harry and Hermione noticed first, followed closely by Malfoy, who dropped his decanter loudly, but luckily it had been charmed not to break and only rolled across his desk. The noise caused the rest of the class to look up at the professor in tandem.

"Oh, my," Hermione murmured, averting her eyes and deftly picking up her quill.

"Page two hundred and sixteen," Snape coolly instructed, looking completely oblivious to the class atmosphere. He flicked his wand at the blackboard and the morning's lesson appeared in tidy script.

Virtually no one in class could concentrate. Theodore Nott's fire kept going out, and every time Snape so much as looked at Malfoy's table, he and his goons visibly flinched back in their chairs. Gryffindor wasn't doing much better, and ended the lesson with a spectacular loss of eighty points.

"There's something strange going on here," Harry said to Ron and Hermione, once he'd predictably botched the day's lesson and was outside the classroom.

"I'll say," Ron agreed, casting suspicious glances in the direction of Snape's now empty classroom. "I always suspected..."

"What, that Snape was capable of bathing?" Disbelief colored Harry's tone.

They reached the Great Hall for lunch and passed through the doors, only somewhat aware of the mass of gossip pervading the tables. Snape was not at the head table, per his usual routine, and Hermione eyed his empty seat thoughtfully as the trio took their seats. "Don't tell me you don't know, Harry?" She uncannily managed to sound exasperated and distracted at the same time.

"Know what?" Harry asked, puzzled, just as Ron said:

"Why would he? He was raised as a Muggle, after all."

"Because it was in our third year curriculum?" she snapped. "Just before werewolves. Or should have been just before werewolves, if Professor Snape hadn't held such a grudge against Professor Lupin."

Harry tried to think as to what came before werewolves in their textbooks. "Snape's a unicorn?" Ron snorted. "Not bloody likely."

"He's a vampire, Harry. Honestly, don't either of you retain anything? I helped you two nights in a row on that essay, you were hopeless--"

"He's WHAT?"

"--But now that I think of it, vampires were only discussed in Defense. They didn't so much as have a page in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them!"

"It's because they're dead," Ron supplied.

"They're not dead, Ron."

"Undead, then. And they're not really beasts, are they? Or Hagrid would have stashed a few in his hut."

Harry laughed, but even Hermione couldn't fault Ron's logic. "Maybe so, but if merpeople and werewolves are classified as beasts, you'd think the Ministry would have the brains to stick vampires in there as well."

"You're telling me Snape's... undead? Immortal?"

Ron reached for a tea cake during Hermione's pause and Harry grabbed a sandwich wedge. "Vampires aren't immortal."

"Undead," Ron repeated around his cake.

Hermione glared at him. "Wizards live for a very long time, anyway. And vampires tend to look alike, especially if it's hereditary. Dark hair, lucent skin, drawn features..." She paused thoughtfully and took a drink of pumpkin juice. "He must have been making the Disscrentus potion."

"What's that do?" Ron asked, much to Hermione's irritation.

"It disguises him as a vampire, of course. Most vampires can't use it as it's ridiculously complicated and expensive to make, but because Professor Snape is a Potions Master, I imagine he had few problems making it."

"So this potion gets rid of his fangs and stuff?"

Hermione huffed and nearly choked on her food in the middle of doing so. "Harry. He doesn't have them all the time. There are several ways to disguise them, besides--"

"Okay, okay," Ron interrupted. "We get the picture. Basically Disscrentus stops him looking paste-white and freakish?"

She nodded. "Basically."

"Someone should have warned him it made him a greasy yellow git. I don't think that's much better, personally."

Harry laughed again while Hermione rolled her eyes. A quick glance at their table proved that most the other Gryffindors were either listening in on their conversation--as Hermione was pretty much the only one who knew anything extensive on vampires--or caught up in gossip of their own.

"The point we're missing here is why he's stopped taking the potion! It's not strictly physical; I've read it helps with the bloodlust dementia and other nasty by-products of vampirism."

Ron shrugged and pushed his plate away, clearly not as interested in the reasons why so much as the fact itself. "Maybe he ran out of money?"

"I'm sure that's not why." Hermione was biting the inside of her cheek, which Ron and Harry usually meant she was lost in brilliant Hermione-thoughts.

"Wait a minute. Snape can't be a vampire. I've seen him go outside, and he was around Quirrel when he had all that garlic on him."

Hermione looked like she was gearing up for a particularly long-winded rant. "That's what Disscrentus does, Harry! Stop thinking like a Muggle."

"But Harry's right," Dean suddenly interjected. "If Professor Snape's a vampire, how come we haven't heard about it before?"

She gritted her teeth with great effort. "The same reason we didn't hear about Professor Lupin's lycanthropy, Dean. They're allowed to keep it under wraps so long as no one is in danger."

Several voices started in with questions at the same time, but Hermione silenced them by slamming down her fork. "That's it!" She stood up and smoothed out imaginary wrinkles from her skirt. "This isn't storytime. Go to the library if you're so anxious to theorize."

A collective groan went up as Hermione walked from the table; no one was going to bother looking up the finer points of vampirism on their own, and everyone knew it.

"Bloody great," Ron muttered, stabbing fitfully at his peas. "I might know a bloke in Ravenclaw who can tell us."

Harry shook his head and made to get up from the table. "Don't bother, it's not important." At least not important enough to worry about yet.

Dean and Ron both laughed at him incredulously. "Are you kidding? Anything that makes Slytherin *squirm* is important." Ron turned to Dean, tossing him an apple.

Harry left the hall.

---

Hermione followed through in the end. She handed a second-year Care of Magical Creatures text to him while he was playing Exploding Snap with Ron (who was winning by a landslide). He gratefully turned away from the game, deaf to Ron's loud protests, and thumbed through the pages until he caught the section on vampires.

Unfortunately, it told him nothing he didn't already know or anything he'd like to know, although Ron had a good time imitating Snape "seducing" victims as the book described. Neville had to wrench Ron away from his neck and ask Hermione for a handkerchief to wipe away the spit.

"Ten points from Gryffindor," Ron managed to howl in a gong-like voice. "For not being my vampire love slave!"

"Honestly, Ronald!" Hermione shrieked. She cast a cleaning charm on her handkerchief after Neville handed it back, glowering the whole time. "When he or one of the other professors catches you acting like an idiot, I'm going to LAUGH when they expel you."

"You always say that," Ron chuckled breathlessly, slumping into a chair in front of the fireplace. "I'm not an idiot." Neville and Hermione both made protesting noises. Harry turned a page with overdone concentration and smirked in his direction. "Not like *that,* anyway. I wouldn't do it in front of the professors. Especially Snape." He shuddered.

Harry closed the book and handed it back to Hermione, who tucked it inside of her satchel.

---

"This term, we'll be having a project."

Professor Marks' assignment killed a little of Harry's love for Defense class. An in-depth research project on dark creatures? Even Hermione looked horrified when she found out how much of their grade it was worth.

It was only when Harry looked over at Dean's desk and saw his sloppily transcribed Potions' notes when genius struck and his fear faded. He told them about it over dinner.

"Are you insane?" Ron yelled, fork clattering to his plate.

Hermione spent the next five minutes scolding him for his foolishness, but eventually changed tactics when Harry proved to be indifferent. "I'm not sure it fits the requirements," she tried desperately.

"I already checked with Professor Marks. He said I'll have great results since my subject is so 'readily available'." Harry tried to quell the insane urge to grin but didn't manage it completely.

Hermione scowled. Ron blinked at him. Then he started to laugh. Hermione attempted to talk around his banging the table. "You don't know the first thing about vampires, Harry! Or Snape."

"That's the point though, isn't it?" Well, that and a hearty helping of revenge. But Hermione didn't need to know that.

And how hard could it be, really?

---

Snape had acquired an odd habit of pushing back his hair with his hands. He never did it before, and Harry often wondered why. Maybe his hair used to be too greasy? Maybe it was a vampire thing? He didn't know.

He wanted to approach the desk where Snape was sitting, pushing back his hair. The professor was reading over essays and grimacing between dashes of his quill and the hair-fiddling. "Professor?" Harry asked, already heading to the desk.

"What is it, Potter?" He thrust a hand through his hair a final time and glowered. It made him look squinty now, instead of awe-inspiringly scary.

"I'm taking Defense Against the Dark Arts." Snape stared at him. Harry imagined there must have been more to this train of thought but couldn't seem to recall it, as the professor's habit of not blinking at fucking all kind of distracted him. "Er."

"Very good, Potter. To the best of my knowledge you are also taking Potions. And Herbology. Maybe even Quidditch. How exciting your life is; one would think you attended school."

Harry flushed and started picking at a split in Snape's desk with his fingernail. "Professor Marks set us a term project to do." He swallowed. "On dark creatures."

Snape leaned back in his chair quite suddenly, crossing his arms over his chest. He continued to stare at Harry, but now with some rough appraisal. "I see."

"Well, on a famous dark creature, really. Like, Ron picked that werewolf from London, and Hermione picked that goblin shape-shifter. We had a list we could choose from of easy subjects, but I... I picked you?" His voice squeaked without his permission at the end. Harry hastily disguised it with a shaky, dry cough.

It seemed to take the professor some long, shocked moments to process Harry's statement. "Absolutely not, Potter!"

This was where it started to get tricky. Harry straightened himself out and tried to look somewhere in the vicinity of Snape's creepy unblinking eyes. He was like a Muggle picture that watched everything you did no matter where you were in the room. "I'm going to do the essay with or without your permission, sir. And I just thought... maybe. Maybe if you could help me with it --- you know, give some interviews and tell me about the Disscrentus potion and stuff like that... Maybe it would be better than me writing whatever the hell I want. I guarantee you wouldn't like it if I did that."

Snape's lips parted. Harry thought maybe he was jaw-dropped-shocked and felt a tiny bit smug inside. Then Snape's lips curled and he was snarling ferociously. Even without fangs it made Harry want to die. "Is that your idea of Slytherin blackmail, Mr. Potter?"

"We're going to read them to the class, sir," he babbled. "Professor Marks said the good ones get in the Quibbler." Well, that was a lie, but Harry could imagine the headline about Tortured Vampires at Wizarding Boarding Schools (by Harry Potter, no less) in his head. If Snape's rapidly fading fury was any indication, he probably could too. "I just thought you'd rather be involved, that's all."

The professor looked torn. Torn between strangling Harry or drinking his blood, Harry wasn't sure which. He had an image of Snape swooning over his blood-leaking corpse and made a mental note to check if vampires were lusty all the time or just during feeding. Frightening thoughts. "And I thought you were a noble Gryffindor. Apologies."

Harry shrugged, although he didn't feel too casual. Snape's eyes were still on him, unfathomable and black as ever. "I only want to do my project."

"Indeed. Very well, Mr. Potter. This may be the singular experience in my life I will live to regret above all others, but you may do the project." As if Snape had a choice. Losing probably wasn't easy to reconcile for a Slytherin. Denial, river in Egypt, all that. "See me after last class on Friday."

---

Harry, a bit dazed, recounted his earlier conversation with Snape when Neville and Dean had fallen asleep. Ron whooped with victory as if Harry'd caught the snitch and danced a kind of manic jig on his bed. Dobby must have given him chocolate.

"Shut it, you fucking twits," Seamus requested kindly.

Harry cast a privacy spell and tried to figure out what he was supposed to do next. At a total loss, he told Ron as much.

"It's not going to be that hard. Though Snape might make your life living hell. Oh, but it'll be worth it. The look on his face..." He put on a prissy, Percy-ish expression and started to talk with a voice to match. "'Professor Snape, please describe your vampire mating dance of lust for me. No, really. I am so fascinated. Go into particular detail on how you molest their neck with your tongue before you---'"

Harry cut him off with a yelp of disgust, looking green. "He'd kill me. Then he'd make me his... undead successor just so he could keep me around and torture me for all eternity. Ministry laws or no."

"I wonder if you could ask him if vampires wear pants," Ron speculated, like Harry hadn't spoken. "I mean, in the interests of science."

"The project is supposed to be biographical, Ron. Somehow I doubt I'm going to fit in the state of Professor Snape's pants." At once he was reminded of the graying, nasty underpants and skinny legs. "I'm pretty sure I don't want to know, either."

Ron started chattering away about recording spells and embarrassing Snape with Ministry-sanctioned vampire strip searches. Harry tuned him out.

---

Friday's "last class" happened to be Quidditch practice. Harry showed up at Snape's office door unbelievably sweaty and gross. Even his spectacles were fogged up.

"You could have stopped long enough to use the showers, Potter," Snape remarked, immediately upon swinging the door open. The book Harry had thumbed through the night before said something about uncannily good senses. The very idea was troubling.

"Sorry, sir, I just didn't want to keep you waiting---"

"No matter." Snape cast a viciously strong cleaning spell and backed inside, leaving the door open but giving no Harry invitation to come in.

Harry waited on the threshold for a moment or two but knew from past lack of hospitality that Snape was not the kind to take coats and gather drink preferences. He wandered inside and closed the door behind him, finding Snape had already sat down at his desk. There was a student's chair pulled in front of it; the layout was very similar to the stern "interventions" McGonagall occasionally gave failing students.

"Take your seat." Snape waved snidely towards the chair. Harry sat. "You may begin assaulting me with your various questions, Potter."

Harry cleared his throat and bent over to rustle in his sack for the sheet of questions and topics he, Hermione, and Ron had compiled that morning. He scanned the list quickly, bypassing some of the obvious ones and some of the more abstract (like Hermione's one hundred variations of "paradox morality, or lack thereof" on the Disscrentus potion, and its brewing techniques). A few questions towards the end of the list seemed benign enough, so he started to pull ideas from there.

"Professor, when were you transformed?"

"I was born a vampire."

Harry blinked. "Oh. So. Your parents are vampires, too?"

"My mother was." Snape's voice sounded like ice. It was a fair bet his mother was a subject he didn't feel like touching on. He flexed his fingers from where they sat like a dormant spider on his armrest. "Male vampires don't pass it on."

Harry figured he should have known this beforehand but pressed on. "Do you have any siblings that are vampires?" He quickly amended the question. "Er, any other vampire relatives?"

"I am an only child, Mr. Potter. My mother and I... are the only two in the Snape line."

Something about the answer seemed incomplete but Harry couldn't put his finger on it. Whatever Snape may have been hiding, it was perfectly clear how much he hated the questions. Harry didn't even want to consider looking at the professor's face. This was not exactly the brilliant scheme he thought it was going to be. "Ummm. Let's see..." Scrolling down the list guided by his finger, he found where he had left off. "Ah. Does blood make you ra--- what the fu---" Choking, Harry noticed Ron's distinctive handwriting; "does blood make him randy enough to wank off??????????," along with an almost indecipherable stick figure of what Harry assumed was Snape smiling manically with fangs down to his chin and----

"Enough delay," Snape barked.

"Right," Harry agreed, casually trying to shield that part of the paper from Snape's potential gaze. "Um. How about... your senses? When you were taking the Disscrentus potion, were they magnified like they... are?"

The look on Snape's face seemed to suggest surprise at Harry's asking a legitimate question, despite the rambling. "No," he bit, glaring with a bit more wariness than before. "Although at times I was hyper-aware of spilled blood, but that was only if I was overdue for a feeding."

Harry's hand stilled as he took notes. "How often did you have to... you know?"

"Once a month," Snape said, the words quiet enough to sound like a sigh. "Without the potion the number is... significantly higher."

He looked up, but still not meeting Snape's eyes. "You're not taking the potion anymore, right?" he asked, just to clarify.

"Not as such. The Ministry is quick to suspect subterfuge. With the Dark Lord recruiting beats they... imposed a bevy of restrictions."

"Is that why you're all..." He gesticulated helplessly in Snape's direction. "Vampiric-looking now? Because you stopped taking the potion?" Well, it certainly made more sense than what Harry and the others had speculated.

"All dark creatures, as classified by the Ministry, must establish themselves within the rules of the new regulations. We must register, we must be in plain sight, we must stop any and all measures to conceal our true identity." From the dry, cruel tone Harry got the feeling Snape was quoting something.

"I... er." He wracked his brain to think of an appropriate response. None came. Instead of stuttering around something to say, he looked back to his list of questions. "If you only needed to drink blood once a month on the potion, I assume you can eat normal foods other times?" Snape appeared to favor beef and spicy foods at dinner. But maybe that was a trick.

"I'm perfectly capable of eating. In fact, it serves to take the edge off of my usual... cravings."

Harry found himself curious. "Meats and things, I'd wager?"

"The one item I've found particularly effective..." Snape's hand strayed to his desk without warning. Harry watched it move with the kind of abject horror muggles have for car crashes. He slid open a drawer and fished around inside. Something crackled. "These."

"Blood lollies?" From Honeydukes, unmistakably. Two of them were displayed in Snape's hand, which was almost imperceptibly shaking. A sickening feeling in Harry's stomach speculated talking about blood must have brought it on.

Snape nodded. He made to put them back in the desk but hesitated, finally dropping one back in but unwrapping the second. He slipped it between his lips without comment and stared blankly at the wall behind Harry's head. Like a fix, Harry's brain supplied. A drug addict with a fix.

Watching Snape eat the lolly, along with the knowledge of why he had to, made Harry claustrophobically uncomfortable. All of the mischief behind the idea originally--the thought he would have some measure of control over his git of a teacher, some blackmail, some revenge--faded. Now he only felt sick.

They hadn't argued once, not once, not since Harry's fifth year and those disgusting Occlumency lessons. Harry had previously credited Dumbledore for the silent, forced truce, but now nothing made sense. Aside from the habitual barb, Snape said nothing inappropriate. It was horrible and Harry hated it. He was never sure how he was supposed to act, and it was hard to hold on to one-sided fury.

Snape's teeth nosily cracked the candy. It reminded Harry how white his teeth were of late. Disscrentus. He chewed with stoic, inappropriate refinement. Odd to see the evil Potions professor with a sweet, no matter how dark the connotations. "It helps," Snape remarked after removing the now candy-less stick from his mouth.

Harry spied the tell-tale shine of red on his lower lip, besides lingering on the white of the stick. Realization occurred; Snape basically just... ate blood in front of him. His hands had stopped shaking, Harry saw, as they spelled away the waste.

"It's almost dinner," Harry blurted, already shoving his list of questions and notes from their pitiful interview into his sack where they belonged. "I've got to go."

"See me Monday, Potter." Something funny in Snape's tone again, something awkward.

He left without looking back.