Potions
The dungeons had the specific atmosphere they always had — the cool and the dark and the smell of things that were not yet what they were going to become, the particular quality of a room where process was the point and carelessness was immediately punished.
Snape entered with the quality he always had: the controlled, deliberate movement of someone who had been walking into rooms and making them aware of his presence since before most of the people in those rooms had been born. He looked at the third-years with the assessing eye of someone reviewing inventory, moving across the faces with the smooth, unhurried efficiency of someone who had already formed his opinions and was confirming rather than revising.
His gaze passed over Ron with no particular pause.
Ron noted this and returned his attention to setting up his workspace, because the correct response to Snape's gaze passing over you was to have your workspace correctly set up.
The lesson was the Shrinking Solution — a third-year standard that required precise ingredient preparation, patience in the brewing stages, and a specific sequence of temperature adjustments that most students would get wrong at least once on the first attempt. He had brewed it twice in the potions room at the Burrow over the summer, working from the instructions in the third-year text with the methodical attention he brought to any process that had specific requirements. He knew the sequence and he knew the adjustments and he knew the specific colour the solution should be at each stage, because he had made it and watched the colour change and corrected it when the change was wrong and understood why the correction worked.
His solution was the correct shade at every stage.
He did not look around to check this against his neighbours' cauldrons. He looked at his own cauldron with the focused attention that the work required and he did the work.
Snape paused beside his workspace midway through the lesson. He looked at the cauldron the way someone looked when they were searching for something to critique. He looked at Ron. He said nothing.
He moved on.
Ron returned his attention to the temperature adjustment for the third reduction stage, which required lowering the heat until the simmer slowed to a single bubble every four to five seconds, and which he had calibrated correctly on the first attempt because he had done it before.
Two stations down, Neville was managing the temperature adjustment with the focused anxiety of someone for whom Potions was the subject where the anxiety reliably produced the most direct damage — the specific quality of someone who knew what could go wrong and was so aware of it that the awareness was the thing going wrong. His solution had the slight orange tinge at the edge of the cauldron that indicated the reduction was running too fast.
Snape arrived at Neville's station with the particular attention he reserved for Neville, which was a thing Ron had read about and was watching happen with the particular attention of someone who found it more instructive than the potion.
Neville's solution turned, under the specific combination of anxiety and Snape's proximity, a shade darker than it should have.
Snape looked at it. The comment he made was precise and brief and accurate in its identification of the error and useful to no one, because useful was not the function it was serving. He moved on.
Ron looked at Neville's cauldron and then at his own and thought about the dormitory, later, and the specific fifteen-minute conversation about temperature calibration that was going to happen there, and whether he could frame it in a way that would be useful rather than patronising, and decided that the way to frame it was simply to have brewed it wrong at some point — which he had, the first time, before he corrected it — and to talk about what he had done to fix it.
After class, he cleaned his workspace with the efficient thoroughness of someone who did not leave things for other people to manage, packed his bag, and left the dungeons without particular expression.
He had not lost Gryffindor any points.
He counted that, for the first lesson with Snape in a new year, as extraordinary.
History
History of Magic was with Binns, and he had made his peace with this.
The content was genuinely interesting. The delivery was the specific kind of monotone that operated on the borderline of audibility and had the effect of making the content inaccessible through the mechanism of its conveyance. He had decided that the correct approach was not to resist the classroom experience but to use it — one part of his attention for the ambient content, in case Binns said something useful, and the remaining attention for the organised thinking that required a certain quality of low-stakes background noise.
He attended every History of Magic class with his notes from the previous session open in front of him, and he listened at a level that would allow him to answer a direct question accurately, and he spent the class working through problems in the margins — the specific, knotty questions about Goblin Rebellions and their long-term implications that Binns triggered by not answering them and that required independent library work to address properly.
He wrote three such questions in the margins on Thursday and went to the library on Friday and found answers that were more interesting than the questions, which was the usual result, and added the new questions those answers produced to the list.
It was an acceptable system.