Reasoning, Confrontation, and Parseltongue (3)

"Why?!" Ron exploded again.

"Defaming a professor, talking back to a professor." Every word from Severus Snape seemed to have been hauled out of an ice cellar. "Another twenty points deducted. Gryffindor loses forty points."

Ron shut his mouth. Hermione's face went pale. Harry clenched his fists until his knuckles turned white.

Snape's gaze shifted from Ron to Harry. He looked at Harry's face—that face so much like James Potter's, yet with his mother's eyes.

He looked at the anger on that face, the defiance on that face, that Gryffindor-style, self-righteous stubbornness that said, "I'm going to get justice for my friends."

He remembered another Gryffindor. One who had looked at him with those same eyes. A Gryffindor who had chased after him, hung him upside down, and stripped off his trousers in public. A Gryffindor who had laughed as he watched him humiliated before everyone, yet had never apologized for it.

That Gryffindor's name was James Potter.

The corner of Snape's mouth twitched. It was the spasm of a muscle when an old wound in his heart had been touched.

"Professor McGonagall." He turned his head, looking neither at Harry, Ron, nor Hermione, but only in McGonagall's direction. His voice returned to its usual metallic coldness. "Please keep a close watch on your House's students. Do not let them run around making themselves hated with nothing but fantasies and speculation. After all, Dumbledore is not here to clean up after them."

He turned away, his black robes carving a sharp arc through the air. Cass followed behind him. As he passed Harry, he paused and turned his head slightly. Those black eyes rested on Harry's face for a second. There was no expression, no word. Then he caught up with Snape. The two left the office one after the