Getting the Hang of Thursdays

Chapter 2 - Pete Fell In...

By Hayseed

Day Twelve

Something about today felt off to Severus. He reached automatically for the raspberry jam at breakfast, knowing before Albus even made the announcement that they were out of marmalade. Thirty seconds before Graham Pritchard dropped his vial of armadillo bile in his morning class (Slytherin and Ravenclaw fourth years), Severus handed the confused child a rag.

Either something was off about today, or something was off about him. More than usual, that is.

As he sat at his desk, watching his seventh year NEWT students assemble their Restorative Draughts, his skin practically itched.

Something was not right.

Severus glanced around the room. Longbottom was studying his textbook with a furrowed brow, several neat piles of unadded ingredients and the steaming cauldron on the table in front of him. Zabini was stirring his cauldron carefully in a clockwise motion -- he must have just added the mandrake. Malfoy was...

Malfoy was hissing something at Potter’s back.

Warning bells began ringing in Severus’ brain.

He watched with wide, expectant eyes as Potter turned and shoved Malfoy into Brocklehurst’s table. Malfoy’s hand went down, grabbed something, and a lidless glass jar went hurtling through the air.

“Everybody get out!” he shouted as the jar hit Longbottom’s workspace, not knowing why he felt so panicked.

There was a brief moment of hesitation.

“Now!” Severus bellowed.

The students practically jumped in unison, making a beeline for the door. As he watched Granger’s robes flounce through the exit, he felt oddly relieved. Severus followed his class, neatly closing the door in his wake, ignoring the furiously frothing potion.

“Oh!” Granger cried as the door latch slid home. Before Severus could even twitch, she ducked under his arm and into the classroom.

Here was the panic again. “Granger!” he barked.

“... just need to...” was her muffled reply.

Whatever he’d had in mind to tell her was cut off, however, as Longbottom’s cauldron promptly exploded and Granger screamed.

Day Seventeen

He knew. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew regardless.

“Everybody, get out,” he said, only half-aware of what he was saying. “Granger...”

The girl looked up from the cauldron she was tending, and her eyes widened as she took in the situation. “Professor?” she asked, a tremble in her voice.

Cauldron exploding, potion flying through the air, Severus didn’t even think as he launched himself at Granger, knocking her to the ground and covering her body with his. There was a strange tinkling sound as they fell that he could not immediately place. The burning contents of Longbottom’s cauldron splashed on his back. Gritting his teeth, he ignored the pain.

“Professor?” Granger asked again, sounding rather dazed.

Severus sighed, relieved that disaster seemed to be averted. “Are you all right, Granger?” he asked, very quietly.

She shifted a bit under his body. “I... I think so,” she said.

Sighing again, he eased himself off Granger and rested on his heels for a minute, watching her rise to a sitting position herself. As he did so, however, Potter stepped forward, ostensibly to see to Granger, and pushed him off-balance. Falling forward, Severus tried to keep from toppling back onto Granger, succeeding in flapping his robes in her face, sloshing the cooling remains of the potion all down her front.

Severus watched with horror as Granger’s robes began to smoke, and her eyes teared with pain.

Somehow, he’d known this was going to happen.

Day Twenty

With a frown, Severus watched young Draco Malfoy walk into the classroom and sidle up to the seat behind Harry Potter. His hands curled into fists under his desk as Malfoy began setting up his equipment.

“Malfoy!” he said sharply.

The boy looked relatively unfazed. “Yes, Professor?”

“Move away from Potter,” he said. “Over there.” Severus pointed at a seat on the opposite side of the classroom.

Potter looked confused and Malfoy disheartened, but he did as he was told, packing up his cauldron and taking it to the empty seat.

Severus relaxed, although he did not know why.

Class proceeded quietly from that point, the students assembling their Restorative Draughts with little difficulty -- he would have expected no less out of NEWT students. Right up until Malfoy grinned at Potter’s back and lobbed a jar at his head.

With a scowl, Severus was on his feet instantly, moving toward the jar. “Malfoy,” he reprimanded as he stretched out a hand to intercept it, “five points from Slytherin and a detention.”

His eyes widened with horror as he watched his own fingers fumble with the lidless jar and knock it into Longbottom’s waiting cauldron.

Day Twenty-Two

Severus threw a handful of Floo powder into his fireplace. “Albus Dumbledore,” he said as the flames flickered.

Albus’ head looked vaguely quizzical. “It’s rather early, Severus,” it said complacently.

“Erm, yes,” he replied, trying to sound contrite. “I just... I wanted to let you know that I won’t be able to teach today, Albus. I’m... indisposed.”

The head lifted an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, faking a cough for good measure. “No way I can teach today, Albus. You’ll just have to cancel classes.”

“I doubt it will come to that,” the head said with a vague smile that gave Severus the impression that he didn’t believe Severus for an instant. “I’ll fill in for you today, my boy. You just get some rest.”

With a relieved sigh that he did not completely understand, Severus nodded and severed the Floo connection.

His day was quiet -- he lingered over his morning coffee, graded a few papers, walked down to the lake to watch the squid sunbathe, just enough activity to keep his mind occupied. Actually, he was contemplating turning in early -- he should take days off more often; he was feeling better than he had in two weeks at least.

But his good mood came crashing to the ground around three o’clock in the afternoon, when Albus summoned the entire staff to his office.

“I am afraid,” Albus said gravely, eyes dull and sad, “that one of our students has been taken from us today. Hermione Granger has been killed in an unfortunate Potions accident, just this afternoon. There was nothing any of us could do.”

Day Twenty-Seven

Severus was convinced that he was going mad.

Somehow, yesterday was today and today was yesterday, and he had no idea what the hell had happened to tomorrow.

The curious thing was -- nobody else seemed to have noticed what was apparently going on.

When Severus woke up this morning, he’d idly wondered how the robes he’d been wearing yesterday had been cleaned so quickly -- it generally took the house elves two or three days at the very least to do the laundry. But there were his robes, hanging neatly in his closet, nary a drop of Hermione Granger’s blood in sight.

And his papers had been reshuffled -- Severus distinctly remembered grading a stack of third-year essays yesterday and putting the scrolls in his case to return to the class. But this morning, they were all spread out over his desktop again, unmarked.

It wasn’t until breakfast that the confusion deepened into panic, however. He’d been surprised to see the same cheerful Great Hall as usual and simply decided that Albus had not made the announcement. But then he’d sat down at the table, chagrined to notice that they were still out of marmalade, and spotted a grinning Hermione Granger, alive and unburned, hitting Ron Weasley on the shoulder with a large book of some sort.

He was sure that if anyone had actually been looking up at him in that moment, they would have thought him a gibbering madman. He’d half-risen out of his chair, as if he was going to actually talk to Granger.

“Good morning, Severus,” Albus had said calmly on his right, startling him out of his shock. “I see you noticed that we’re out of marmalade.”

“Erm... yes...” he managed, eyes still locked on Granger, who was currently spearing a piece of toast with her fork. She was dead. He’d seen the body, had held her hand as her eyes slipped closed. She was supposed to be dead.

Albus was speaking again. “... this evening,” he heard.

Severus coughed and finally looked away from the chatting girl. “What?”

“I asked if you would be available for patrols an hour earlier this evening,” Albus said. “Severus, are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Albus,” he replied absently. “What day is it?”

His eyebrows rose and his forehead furrowed. “Thursday, of course. The twenty-fifth.”

“Huh...” Severus said. “I thought it was Friday.”

Day Twenty-Eight

Severus scrabbled about on his desk, searching through the parchment scrolls. Aha!

Tracy Hutchinson, a Hufflepuff third-year. Last night, a curious suspicion in his mind, Severus had picked her essay scroll out of the graded pile and systematically ripped it to shreds.

But here it sat, under a couple of other scrolls and opened books. Unmarked and unscathed.

What was going on?

Day Thirty

This was the fifth day that he could remember. Who knew how long it had been going on, though? Weeks, months...

Years?

Severus’ stomach twisted at the thought of having to relive the same day for years. An eternity of Thursdays stretched out in his mind, dizzying and dismaying.

He’d never heard of such a thing before. Certainly inanimate objects would sometimes get caught in a strange little pocket of time, replaying an event over and over, until entropy built up and the object simply broke down and dissolved. His old Defense professor had been in the possession of a shattering teacup caught in a time-loop more than a century ago -- the sight of the delicate thing, smashing, repairing itself, and smashing all over again, was disturbing to the young Severus, especially given that the teacup’s physical structure had been breaking down (it had been shattering itself for more than a century, after all), so there were these horrible, blinding spots of nothing along its rim where the space holding the teacup was simply... worn thin. These things happened -- it was an unfortunate result of mucking about with the universe.

But people?

It wasn’t possible.

By all indications, though, it was. Severus had found himself in a living, breathing example.

And it had been going on for a while. The fact that Severus had realized what was happening indicated that energy was already accumulating, stretching space. His mental barriers, which should have kept him shielded from the trauma that such understanding would induce -- had induced, was inducing -- were giving way. He wondered what else was breaking down and thought about those spots of twisted space around the worn-out teacup.

The Ministry had ways of dealing with time-loops. The ones that consisted of inanimate objects, anyway. But how to alert them? If they were inside the loop, well, then, they could do about as much as Severus could. And if they were not...

He was fairly certain that whatever -- whomever -- was confined to the loop, stayed in the loop. His suspicions were more or less confirmed when the owl carrying his carefully addressed letter to the Russian Ministry of Magic (a harmless query to one of the Potions Masters he knew working in one of their more obscure departments) returned within the morning, circling the castle forlornly and settling back on the perch in Severus’ office with a clearly chagrined look on its face and the letter still bound to its leg.

Severus didn’t know what to do. Hell, he didn’t even know where to begin. He didn’t know what caused the time-loop, he didn’t know what effects were perpetuating the time-loop, and -- perhaps most importantly -- he didn’t know how to break the time-loop.

He did know, however, that if he had to watch Hermione Granger die in front of him one more time, he was either going to go mad or break down in a fit of tears. Maybe both. One probably did preclude the other.

That look in her eyes as she died. That pleading. He hated it even as it tugged at something within his chest.

While Severus did not consider himself actively attached at all to Granger, he did not wish death on her. He didn’t wish such a fate, such a death, on anyone -- not Potter, not even Lucius Malfoy.

And he knew that while the time-loop condemned him and whoever else was trapped within it to replay the same snatch of time again and again, it did not necessarily condemn them to repeating it. Some things, he’d noticed lately, changed.

The today before this today -- did that make it yesterday? he wondered briefly -- he’d happened onto a second-year Gryffindor boy hexing a first-year Slytherin as he made his way from breakfast back to his office. He’d broken up the minor scuffle, docked points, and sent the Slytherin along to the Infirmary to have the boils removed. Today, however -- this today -- his walk through the corridors between the Great Hall and the dungeon revealed no such thing. On a whim, he’d Flooed Poppy in between morning classes and asked after the injured Slytherin, only to learn that the event apparently had not happened. The second-year Gryffindor, oddly enough, had apparently been by, nursing a bloody nose and a black eye that Poppy refused to elaborate on.

So some things were different. Some things could change. Maybe...

The only people in the classroom when Severus strode in were Mandy Brocklehurst and -- unsurprisingly -- Hermione Granger. He tried to keep his expression neutral as he made his way to the front of the room and picked up a piece of chalk. “Afternoon classes are canceled,” he said, writing an announcement to that effect on the board as he spoke. “Some of the necessary ingredients for your assignment have been contaminated, and we are not equipped to begin the next potion on your syllabus. Good day to you both, ladies,” he continued in a half-mocking voice, resisting the urge to sketch a sarcastic little bow as he finished.

Brocklehurst just began packing up her equipment, head down, but Granger looked positively scandalized. “Professor...” she began hesitantly.

Blowing an exasperated sigh out through his nose, Severus stopped writing. “Class is canceled, Granger,” he said, not bothering to turn around. “Good day.”

“But maybe I could just--”

Now he did turn around, leveling his gaze with hers and giving her a sour look. “Granger, what part of ‘class is canceled’ do you not understand? Read your textbook, pretend to brew today’s assignment, wave your hand around in the air if you must, I don’t care, but you will not do any of those things here. Are we clear, Miss Granger?”

Her eyes were murderous as she carelessly dropped her potions kit into her cauldron. “Yes, Professor,” she said tightly, stalking out of the room.

Rolling his eyes, Severus turned back to the blackboard and finished scribbling out the announcement. He heard a couple of rustles indicating more students walking into the classroom, but when he turned away from the board again, the room was empty.

Good.

“Class is canceled?” he heard a male voice ask loudly, just outside the classroom, probably.

“Did I stutter?” a female countered irritably from the same location.

“That’s brilliant, Hermione,” the male, who Severus now recognized as Potter, replied. “We can go out on the pitch or something. It’s a beautiful day.”

“I should study...” Granger said in a hesitant voice.

There was a scuffling noise and a snort. “Come on, Hermione,” Potter said. “You have the rest of your life to study and be boring and all of that. Come outside... it’d be a shame to spend the afternoon cooped up in the castle when we don’t have to.”

“Oh... all right,” Granger said, conceding to Potter’s enthusiasm.

More scuffling noises, followed by silence. They had gone away -- Severus let out a great sigh of relief.

Four hours later, however, he felt an ominous twitch in his gut as Albus’ head appeared in his fireplace. Severus laid the essay he was marking -- why was he marking essays? he wondered; it didn’t appear as if he was ever going to be able to return them -- to the side and studied the headmaster’s expression. “Yes, Albus?”

“Emergency staff meeting, Severus,” he said.

The twitch intensifying to a twist, Severus stood. “All right,” he said. “I’m coming through.”

He landed on Albus’ hearthrug with an audible thump. Picking himself up and trying to look dignified as he brushed soot off of his robes -- Albus’ flue was never clean -- Severus glanced around and saw at least a dozen professors crowded into the room, all wearing equal looks of confusion mixed with concern.

“There has been an accident,” Albus said without preamble as Severus finished collecting himself. “This afternoon, out on the Quidditch pitch, Hermione Granger fell off of her broomstick from a height of...” He coughed and Minerva McGonagall jumped visibly. “Miss Granger is dead.”

Day Thirty-Two

“Miss Granger,” Severus said abruptly, glancing down at his watch.

The girl looked up, a question in her eyes. “Yes, Professor?”

He held out a parchment scroll. “Take this to Professor McGonagall, Granger. It cannot wait.”

Frowning, she gave her cauldron a nervous stir. “But my potion, sir...”

“It’ll keep, girl,” he snapped, giving the scroll an impatient rattle. “This will not, however. Ten points from Gryffindor if you do not follow my instructions immediately.”

With a suppressed sigh that Severus tactfully ignored, Granger came forward and took the scroll from his hand. “To Professor McGonagall?” she asked in a surly voice.

Again, he ignored it. “Quickly, Granger. Malfoy!” he barked as he looked over her shoulder, causing about three-quarters of the class to jump. “Put that down, now!”

Shamefaced, Malfoy sat the jar he’d been aiming at the back of Potter’s head back down on his workbench.

“Go on, now, Granger,” Severus said, not entirely unkindly.

Obviously confused now, Granger nodded slightly and walked out of the room. Severus felt himself relax.

Not a full minute later, there was a loud banging noise out in the corridor, and a sudden scream. Potter’s Gryffindor impulses got the better of him and he dashed out of the classroom, wand in his hands, before Severus could even begin to think about docking points.

A flurry of footsteps, and then, “Oh, God... Hermione!” Shocked, high-pitched, but unmistakably Potter.

Severus’ eyes flew open. “Damn it,” he swore, sotto-voce, leaving the classroom swiftly. “None of you move,” he tossed over his shoulder to the rest of the class as he retreated.

Potter was hunched over at the foot of the staircase, his hands held over Granger’s unmoving body, nearly touching her. At least the boy wasn’t a complete fool. Hearing Severus’ approach, Potter looked up at him, tears streaming from his eyes. “She’s not moving, Professor,” he said.

Clearly, Severus very nearly said, catching himself before it could tumble off his tongue. “Move back, Potter,” he told the distraught boy, putting a hand on his shoulder and pushing him away to get a closer look at the scene.

It did not look good. Granger was sprawled out on the floor, her legs awkwardly propped on the first couple of stairs. Her face was pale and her eyes closed; Severus noticed a few shards of broken glass in her hair.

Worst of all, her neck was twisted at an awkward, impossible angle, her head lolling against her left shoulder in a grotesque fashion. Severus dropped to one knee and stretched out a cautious hand, laying his fingers against Granger’s contorted neck.

Nothing.

Damn it, he thought viciously. Wake up, Granger!

“Potter,” he said into the silence of the corridor, “fetch Madam Pomfrey. And the headmaster.”

The boy’s voice was tremulous and Severus had a perverse urge to smack him. “Is she--?”

Wordlessly, Severus just shook his head.

Day Thirty-Five

Some things could be changed.

But some things could not.

Severus could drink coffee or tea with his morning toast. He could mark the third years’ essays or he could ignore them. He could throw Malfoy out of his afternoon class or he could give Potter a dozen detentions.

But Granger would still die, at exactly two thirty-four in the afternoon.

And for whatever, reason, Graham Pritchard would always knock over his armadillo bile four hours before.