Feeling as if he were thirteen again, prowling the halls in his invisibility cloak, Harry put his ear to the door and listened. A strange, mechanical sounding hum came from inside the classroom, but there were no shrieks or groans to indicate someone being eaten alive by carpet beetles or the like.
A rap on the door produced no change in the strange humming.
Knowing that he would regret this later, Harry slowly tried the knob. The door swung easily open.
The volume of the humming increased astronomically. The sound bounced off the dungeons' stone walls, making the vibration all the louder. It sounded rather like a special effect in a Muggle science fiction movie, like the mother ship's engine, Harry thought, feeling the noise reverberate through his bones.
Stepping into the deafeningly loud room, all Harry could see was a shifting, black, amorphous veil clouding the classroom. Eventually, as his vision adjusted to it, he could distinguish a couple dozen student benches, all littered with cauldrons, half-chopped ingredients, quills, parchments, and books – clear indications of a hasty departure – before his eyes snapped protectively closed as something large whizzed right at his face.
At the same time, a familiar, enraged voice barked, "Shut that door now!"
Harry instinctively followed the order. Something bumped into his left biceps and stayed there, startling him so much that he opened his eyes. Something else touched his head and settled there in his hair as well.
Stunned, Harry stared down at the enormous orange-eyed bug resting on the left arm of his teachers' robes. The insect was about three inches long, had a snubbed, black bullet shaped body and clear, dark-veined wings. As he watched, another landed on his arm and took up residence there. That shifting black veil he'd spied upon opening the door was apparently a mass of the insects.
His stomach lurched as he realized how many of them there were. They were all over everything – the workbenches, the walls, the floors, the windows, his robes . . . .
The Potions classroom was swarming with the things, Harry thought, taking in the sight of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of the strange insects swirling about the room in an almost drunken manner. It was the bugs that were responsible for the noise, he recognized, hearing the one on his arm take up the deafening chorus.
Harry looked around the classroom and caught sight of the incongruous image of Severus Snape with a green mesh butterfly net swiping at the bugs as they blundered around the Potions lab. Snape had a large black metal box floating patiently at his side that seemed to be charmed to allow the bugs to enter, but not leave. As he waved his net around him, Snape presented a strange picture with his black garb, pale skin, and the dark hair dangling in his eyes. He looked rather like a vampire on a butterfly hunt, Harry thought, resisting the impulse to laugh at the incongruous sight.
"What do you want, Potter?" Snape demanded. "As you can see, I am somewhat occupied at the moment."
Harry had to admire the other man's aplomb. Though annoyed, Snape sounded as though it were paper grading being interrupted rather than an attempt to thwart an insect invasion of biblical proportions. The affronted act might have gone over better if one of the red-eyed bugs hadn't landed on Snape's pronounced nose as soon as he finished speaking.
To his surprise, Snape neither flinched nor swatted at the creature. He simply reached up with his bare hand and carefully transferred the insect to the floating box.
Although his face was twitching with the need to grin, Harry knew it would be worth his life to show any amusement at a moment like this. He might have defeated Lord Voldemort nine years ago, but he had no illusions about how he'd fare against an enraged Snape.
"Are you here for a specific purpose or did you surmise that inflicting your presence upon me would be the perfect ending to the idyllic day I'm experiencing?" Snape snapped.
Knowing the perfect way to disarm Snape, Harry gave him the truth, "Actually, I came down to see how you were doing. Neville mentioned at dinner tonight that there had been some problem in the Potions lab."
As he'd expected, his explanation erased the sneer. Uneasiness and suspicion replaced the sour look. Harry couldn't decide which he preferred. A suspicious Snape wasn't any more appealing than a snarky Snape.
"As you can see, I am perfectly fine," Snape stiffly said. As if its timing had been staged, one of the drunkenly reeling insects collided with, rather than landed upon, Snape's right cheek at that exact moment.
Harry tried, he really did, but his laughter poured out at that.
With an audible sigh, Snape reached up to transfer the insect from his cheek to the black metal box.
"They don't bite, I take it?" Harry asked, finally stifling his laughter.
"Would I be standing here with them crawling all over my face and hands if they did? Use your brain, Potter. Minerva assures me that you have one; although I've seen precious little evidence to support her claim during our fifteen year association."
Harry's smile broadened. "What are they?"
"Magicicada septendecim," Snape absently replied as he swung his net to fish another three passing insects from the air.
"Magic . . . ?"
This time Snape's sigh was louder. "Not magic. Magi-cicada. You do remember Latin, don't you?"
"Vaguely. It means . . . seventy -"
Clearly unwilling to suffer through his poor showing, Snape interrupted to explain, "It's the scientific name for the American seventeen year cicadas."
"What are they doing here?" Harry asked, shifting as about four more of the insects took up what seemed to be permanent residence on him. He realized that if he stood here long enough, he'd be cloaked in a living mass of the things like the victim in a Muggle horror movie.
"At the moment they are flying, landing, and attempting to attract a mate," Snape supplied.
Now it was Harry's turn to sigh. "What I meant was how did they get here? You didn't want them to swarm like this, did you?"
"Potter, that has to rate as the most cretinous question you have ever asked in a lifetime of cretinous questions. Of course, I didn't desire a biblical plague of locusts in the Potions classroom. And to spare myself the agony of having to suffer through your next painfully obvious inquiry, they are in this state because Mr. Viers felt the need to practice his Transfiguration homework in Potions class, while Miss Adair was simultaneously casting an equally inappropriate Impervious charm."
"Their spells crossed?" Harry asked after a horrified pause. Even a first year knew the danger of mixing spells. Not only were the results of such experimentation unpredictable, but they also tended to be irreversible. St. Mungo's was full of the victims of accidental magic.
Snape nodded. "Both spells hit the ingredients table at the exact moment. Had this been a homework assignment in which they'd been asked to combine their spells, the dolts would never have been able to manage it. But as it was the outcome of sheer ignorance, the combination of spells was perfectly executed. Their castings hit the Magicicada septendecim larvae at the same instant, transforming the immature, dormant cicadas to their adult states. You see the outcome before you."
"Er, why don't you just use a summoning charm to collect them?" Harry asked.
"Now, why didn't I think of that? Please, be my guest," Snape's long fingered hand made a sweeping gesture at the cloud of flying cicadas, many of whom had landed on his hair, chest, and shoulders as they spoke.
As Harry's hand moved towards his pocket, he saw Snape patiently remove each of the cicadas that were resting on him and transfer them to his box.
Suspicious of Snape's tone, Harry withdrew his holly wand from his pocket and cast a summoning charm on the cicadas that was strong enough to have summoned the bugs from Exeter had he so desired. The cicadas less than a foot away continued to stagger by in their graceless flights.
"It's not working," Harry said after a moment. He knew how much power he'd put into that charm. It should have worked.
"Congratulations for once again stating the bloody obvious, Potter," Snape sneered.
Harry ignored the tone and asked, "Why isn't it working?"
"I assume Miss Adair's Impervious charm has something to do with it."
Abruptly concerned with the fate of the two students who'd caused this mess, Harry eyed the swarm of bugs blundering almost blindly around the lab and voiced his worry, "Maggie and Adam aren't in with this lot, are they?"
"What?"
"Well, I can't imagine that you responded . . . well to this," Harry gestured at the bugs.
Snape gave a humourless chuckle. "I admit that I was tempted to curse the pair of them, but, no, the perpetrators of this plague are not amongst their creations. Mr. Viers and Miss Adair will, however, be serving detention with Jodfries for the remainder -"
"Of their lives?" Harry interrupted, another grin stealing over his face.
"Believe me, if I'd had the ability to -" Snape shut his mouth on whatever he'd been about to say just before another cicada blundered into his lips.
Harry watched him calmly collect this bug and add it to his box.
"Can't we just exterminate them?" Harry didn't have any insect phobias, but the swarm of red-eyed bugs was getting on his nerves. He couldn't imagine what this scenario would have done to Ron.
"Any curse we might try putting on them would be deflected as easily as the summoning charm you just tried," Snape answered.
"There are Muggle pest controls we could use," Harry suggested.
"Potter, the larvae had to be imported from the States and were exorbitantly expensive. These cicadas are only available every seventeen years. Due to their natural cycle, it will be twelve more years before I can replace them. I'm not going to destroy these valuable insects."
"Well, what are you going to do with them?"
"At the moment, my goal is capturing them," Snape said, accentuating his words with a swipe at a few more drifting cicadas.
"That will take hours, maybe even days."
"Then I'd best get back to it, hadn't I?" Snape said.
Harry took a moment, well several moments, to rid himself of the cicadas resting on him. Their squirming feet against the skin of his palms made him nauseous.
Staring at the thick cloud of bugs swarming through the classroom, Harry thought Snape's goal a Herculean task. Unwilling to leave anyone, even Snape, alone with so daunting a job, he picked up an abandoned quill off the nearest student desk and transfigured it into a net like Snape's.
"What are you doing?" Snape asked as Harry fished a few cicadas out of the air before they could join their friends resting on him.
"You'll be at this all night if you do it alone," Harry said, moving to the box and beginning the tricky process of transferring the cicadas from the net to the bespelled opening slot in the top of the box. The insects' legs were so fine that they kept catching in the net's mesh. The bugs felt strangely warm in his hand. Every time they moved their legs while he was transferring them to the box, his stomach lurched in revulsion. Looking down into the container, Harry could see hundreds of the cicadas crawling all over each other inside.
Snape stiffened. "I didn't ask for your assistance."
"I know that. Are you refusing it?" Harry replied, meeting and holding Snape's gaze.
Those seemingly bottomless dark eyes moved from him to the cloud of bugs, then back again, before Snape voiced a reluctant, "No."
Stifling his grin at the ill-graced concession to necessity, Harry said, "Fine."
Harry was turning to set to work collecting more of the bugs when he noticed the number of cicadas that had lighted on Snape's back. "Hold still a moment. They're all over you."
Stepping up to his companion, Harry picked the cicadas off Snape's black robes and transferred them to the box. His vantage point gave him a side view of that closed in face as he worked. The profile was sharp and harsh, but not ugly as he'd thought it in boyhood. It was the kind of strong-featured face that you saw on Greek statues in the Louvre, he realized.
As if intent on reinforcing that statue imagery, Snape stood still as stone while Harry worked, appearing incredibly uncomfortable as he was debugged. Noticing one of the cicadas trying to blend into the dark hair at Snape's neck, Harry moved a step in front of Snape to reach for it. The cicada's six bristly legs clung tenaciously to the thick locks, lifting the hair as he tried to extract the bug without any painful tugging.
Harry was surprised by how soft that hair felt against his fingers as he coaxed the cicada free. As the long, startlingly clean black length fell back against Snape's neck, the other man visibly tensed, his back stiffening to ramrod straightness.
Their eyes met and locked. Snape's profile might have been like stone, but his gaze was anything but. Harry had never seen anything as human as the shocked pleasure Snape so quickly masked.
That fleeting emotion was only visible for a few heartbeats, but in that instant, Harry's breath caught in his chest and he was rocked by an unexpected sense of . . . intimacy. Instinctively, he knew that that quickly squelched pleasure was something that very few people had seen, and, as with any rare occurrence, there was a certain excitement to experiencing it.
If nothing else, the reaction answered a question that had always perplexed him. For the last fifteen years, he'd wondered why Snape kept his hair so unfashionably long. With his dour, ascetic manner and Victorian wardrobe, a military, no-nonsense crew cut would have been more appropriate for Snape's style and yet the man had worn this long, stringy cut for as long as Harry had known him. Now Harry knew why. Severus Snape, the nasty, untouchable Potions master of his childhood, enjoyed having his hair played with. The concept was utterly shocking.
Following close on the heels of that revelation was an even more inappropriate musing. As he watched Snape blank all emotion from his eyes and face, Harry couldn't help but wonder who played with that hair. Just who did Severus Snape allow to touch him?
