student!Snape keeping Lupin's secret (was Re: Sirius as a dog)

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 181177

Mike:
> But in one of the memories, Lily is talking about Sev's friends that
he's hanging around with during his fifth year. <snip canon> I think
canon tells us that Sev does still have friends around.

> Two possibilities - Sev was shown absentmindedly wandering outside 
with his nose in his DADA test. Who says his housemates even went
outside? Or maybe the rest of the Slytherins headed to their favorite
spot down by the Forbidden Forest, out of sight and out of earshot of
the beech tree where the attack happened.

Carol responds:
Right. I thought first of Hermione, who likes to study her exam
questions and mentally go over her answers--not a group activity even
though she has friends--and of Theo Nott, a loner who is nevertheless
not at odds with the other boys in his year and sometimes hangs out
with Draco if he has a reason (both their fathers have been arrested,
for example, or both have been shunned as members of the Slug Club
because of their fathers). So, just because he's alone on this
occacion doesn't mean that he doesn't have Slytherin friends even when
he's in fifth year, as the snipped canon illustrates.
> 
Mike:
> The other possibility - Avery, Mulciber, and most of *Sev's* crowd
were in a different year. I don't think that crowd was very big in 
the first place. And Sev already showed the propensity to impress and
become a "gang member" with an older crowd. I had the impression that
Avery and Mulciber were older than fifth year, and were using more
advanced spells. Therefore, I didn't think Snape had any mates around
at this time. <snip>

Carol:
I think you're right. Certainly, Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix and
Rodolphus were long gone. Probably Rabastan was as well, and I get the
impression that Macnair is about the same age as Lucius Malfoy. Wilkes
and Rosier may be older, too; Lily doesn't mention them. At any rate,
I've always thought that Lucius was a kind of mentor to Severus for
his first two years, and any remaining members of the Lucius/Bellatrix
gang continued to include the younger Severus as one of them because
he was so precocious--knowing all those hexes as a first-year and
inventing all those spells and clever porions improvements when he was
slightly older. I suspect that they regarded him first as a prodigy
and later as a genius. The students in the other Houses, OTOH, seem to
have associated him with the Dark Arts. Odd, since Langlock and the
Toe-nail hex and even Levicorpus (complete with its own countercurse)
are no worse than any other school-boy hexes, and Muffliato (a charm,
not a hex) is so useful that Hermione is still using it in DH as one
of their protections. 

We don't know what Regulus (who wasn't present in SWM because he was a
year or two younger) thought of Severus, but I suspect that they were
on reasonably friendly terms. But I think that Severus became more and
more of a loner as his older friends left Hogwarts. If Avery and
Mulciber were older, he might have been virtually alone (except for
Regulus) by his sixth and seventh years--all the more reason to want
to join the DEs and have friends again. Sigh.

Mike:
> Then, we've been shown that Sev made friends with older Slyths. All
the clues point to Lucius taking Sev under his wing from day one and 
that Snape aligned himself with the Malfoys enough for the "Lapdog" 
comment to be legitimate, if outdated at the time of its utterance.
This would also put him at an advantage over the Marauders in their 
early years. <snip>

> In Sev's later years, many of his friends having graduated, he was
more likely to be at a disadvantage numerically. And, yes, the 
Marauders have become bullies, I am forced to admit that with at 
least regards to Sev. 

Carol:
Right. I would add Bertram Aubrey and James's hexing people who
annoyed him in the hallway to this list. Also, Sirius Black's remark
to Wormtail in PoA that he always sought the protection of the biggest
bully on the playground is pretty much an admission of what he and
James were (as well as what Peter was).

Mike:
> But I find the clues of Sev's early years with the upper hand giving
the Marauders motivation for *getting back* at the "little oddball"
that bested them when they were younger.

Carol:
Yeah. I'll bet they regretted tripping him on the train and inventing
the epithet "Snivellus" at first! <eg>

Mike:
> BTW, I'll bet it was finally 4:1 by their seventh year, but it seems
Snape "never lost an oppurtunity to curse James" even then. <snip>

Carol:
Right, assuming that "four on one" isn't an exaggeration. Snape is
furious when he says it and has just falsely been accused of cowardice
by a boy who looks just like James, so his memories of James are at
their most subjective here. (Also, I'm pretty sure that the adult
Snape still thinks that all four Marauders, including Peter, were in
on the so-called Prank.)

Mike: 
> Some point to the detention file of Sirius and James as proof of 
their bulllying. <snip> Snape picked the Sirius and James files and we
see none of the others from that era. <snip>

Carol:
Did he? I think he picked the files for a particular year, perhaps the
fifth, when James's and Sirius's bullying were at their worst, or when
they got the greatest number of detentions. But, surely, the
detentions can't all have been earned by MWPP or PP (meaning Prongs
and Padfoot, not Peter Pettigrew), or the "regular jolt in the
stomach" that Harry feels when he pulls out a card with their names on
it would quickly stop happening. (The rest of the time, Harry
perceives the task as "useless, boring work"--he doesn't care about
anyone else's detentions, and evidently doesn't find any for his
mother or Snape. Also, Snape starts him of with "boxes one thousand
and twelve to one thousand and fifty-six" (forty-four *boxes*, not
forty-four cards). Surely, not even the Marauders could have earned
forty-four boxes worth of detentions all by themselves. And these are
only the detentions assigned by Filch (HBP Am. ed. 532). Harry works
for three and a half hours (from ten a.m. till half past one) and is
assigned to Saturday detentions of about the same length for the rest
of the term. Whether the boxes are for a single year or for the seven
years that MWPP and Severus spent at Hogwarts, they certainly include
many detentions for students other than the Marauders. Snape, however,
confidently and correctly anticipates that Harry will find many of his
father's detentions among them.

Mike:
I > do not buy Sev's innocence in the Prank <snip>
I find him the most culpable in the whole affair. Nobody lured him
there, he seems to have been proposing the Lupin werewolf scenario for
some time to at least Lily, he knew it was the full moon, he's seen
Poppy taking Remus out there and evidently seen the other three
Marauders go in there too. 

Carol responds:
So making it possible for him to go into a tunnel and encounter a
werewolf with no protection other than his wand and tempting him to do
it isn't reckless endangerment? Suppose that I handed you a loaded gun
with one bullet in it and dared you to play Russian roulette? Wouldn't
I be at fault for endangering you if you were stupid enough to take
the bait? Or would your death, which would not have happened had I not
dared you and tempted you to prove that you were immortal, be all your
own fault? 

Severus *suspects* that Remus is a werewolf, but he doesn't *know* it.
what he does know is that the Marauders can get into the tunnel to see
him and come out again alive. Maybe he thinks that the werewolf, as
dangerous as any tiger or other wild animal in a zoo, will be caged.
What Sirius doesn't tell him is that he and his friends are in no
danger because they're Animagi. Instead, he says, in essence, "Here's
how you get in. Go and see what's there." He *knows* that Severus will
not only be terrified but wholly unprotected. (I don't think you can
Stun a transformed werewolf.) Both DD and Snape himself state that
James saved Snape's life. That being the case, Sirius *endangered* it,
and Severus would have either died or been bitten had James not
rescued him). (How he did so without revealing himself as an Animagus
I can't guess.)
> 
Mike:
> As I said before, I think he took the "if they can do it, I can do
it" attitude. That's the ONLY way I could fathom Sev listening to
Sirius. Sev confronting Sirius with "I know where you go on full moon
nights" and Sirius in due course responding with "Get a branch, push 
the knot, if you're so tough" type of challenge. Of course Sirius 
leaves out the Animagi angle, which James evidently found a little 
unfair. <eg>

Carol:
I agree with you that it's one teenage boy daring another to show he's
not afraid and tempting him with bait he can't refuse. But *Sirius
knows what's in there*--a fully grown werewolf who is not restrained
in any way--and *he knows how to encounter the werewolf safely*, which
Severus doesn't. So it's even worse than handing someone a gun with
one bullet and daring him to shoot himself. Russian roulette has only
one in six chances of being fatal, and the kid who takes the dare
knows what he's facing and what the odds are. An encounter with a
werewolf, if you're not an Animagus, will either kill you or transform
you into a werewolf yourself.

So, stupid as Severus was to take the bait, he expected to *see* a
werewolf and prove his theory. He did not expect to be in mortal
peril. As you say, if the Marauders could do it, he could do it. Or so
he thought.

Sirius was worse than thoughtless or reckless. If it weren't for
James, he'd have blood on his hands--not to mention the consequences
to Remus Lupin had he bitten Severus (expulsion and imprisonment and
lifelong psychological problems if not having his soul sucked by a
Dementor). And DD and Madam Pomfrey might well have been fired for
endangering the students.

Carol, agreeing with Mike for the first half of this post but not
about to let Sirius off the hook for this piece of adolescent stupidity