When Sherlock announced the true identity of the Half-Blood Prince, his friends were struck speechless.
"Impossible! Absolutely impossible!"
Ron waved his hands wildly, as if the gesture alone could convey the shock rattling through him.
Harry and Hermione looked no less stunned.
The Half-Blood Prince was Snape?
Surely this had to be some kind of joke.
Even Hermione who had never warmed to the Half-Blood Prince in the first place found the idea utterly absurd. She simply couldn't connect two people who seemed to have nothing to do with each other.
Still, her trust in Sherlock was, by now, close to unconditional. After a moment of silence, she asked,
"Sherlock, if you're saying this, you must have proof. Don't you?"
Harry and Ron turned to Sherlock as well, waiting to hear him explain.
"Obviously, my friend."
"Sherlock, please, I'm begging you—no more 'obviously' or 'elementary'!" Ron said, his face a picture of suffering. "I'll admit I'm an idiot. Just tell us the answer already!"
Seeing the state Ron had worked himself into, Sherlock gave a laugh.
"All right. Truth is, the moment I laid eyes on that handwriting, I'd already started thinking in this direction."
His eyes were bright now, his hands steepled beneath his chin, and he spoke in a rapid, animated rush.
"You all know that once I've seen a person's handwriting, I can recognize it again the next time I see it.
"Fortunately for us, the 'Half-Blood Prince' made no particular effort to disguise his hand.
So naturally, I was able to spot the connection.
Granted, this book dates from Snape's own school days. A person's handwriting does shift, if only slightly, as the years go by.
But to me, the link between them was as plain as common sense—sorry, Ron, I know you said not to say that, but I'm saying it anyway."
He flipped the book open at random and drew a line across the crowded, cramped little script.
"Look here—the ink pressure is uneven, and every downstroke leans very slightly to the right, barely noticeable.
And here—the opening stroke on 'asphodel root, powdered' has an almost invisible little loop at the start, and a very light final flick at the end, the kind of hesitation you get when a quill presses hard into the page and then suddenly releases.
If any of you had ever paid attention to Professor Snape's handwriting on the blackboard during Potions, you'd recognize this as one of his personal quirks. Even after all these years, these small habits are still there, still intact."
"Who on earth pays attention to something like that!" Ron burst out.
Harry and Hermione nodded along with him. Under normal circumstances, no one would.
"I would."
Sherlock's mouth curved into a small smile. "Don't forget how I used to get into the Restricted Section, back before Dumbledore gave me leave to go there whenever I liked."
Before Dumbledore had granted him that permission, Sherlock had forged more than a few professors' handwriting to slip past the guards.
Snape's included.
"But surely that alone is a bit of a leap?" Ron said, sounding uncertain.
"Fair point. So, when I first noticed the handwriting, it only gave me a line of thinking—a direction, if you like. What came next is what really confirmed it.
First, the paper itself. Judging by how worn it is, the book dates back roughly twenty years.
We all know Professor Snape's birthday is the ninth of January, nineteen sixty. Which puts this book's active use right around his sixth or seventh year at Hogwarts—"
"Er—we don't actually know his birthday," Ron said.
Harry and Hermione nodded along in agreement.
"While Harry was off fetching ingredients, I had a chance to flip through the book quickly, and I saw the marginal suggestions, along with the name written on the inside back cover. At that point I was already fairly confident it was Professor Snape's book."
"No wonder you were reading when I got back and told me to follow whatever the notes said," Harry said, a look of understanding on his face.
"Exactly!" Sherlock snapped his fingers. "And then came the verification stage.
"Just as I expected every single time Harry followed the book's instructions, it worked.
The handwriting, the age of the book, the exceptional skill with potions, the self-styled title of Half-Blood Prince... put that many clues in front of you, and if you still couldn't work out who the owner was, that would be the strange part."
"So that's how it is," Harry, Hermione, and Ron all said, understanding at last.
"Put like that, it really does sound simple."
"Because it is. That's simply how it is," said Sherlock, spreading his hands.
"Well—if it's a book Snape used himself, then I suppose we don't need to worry about it being dangerous, do we?" Harry said, aiming the comment pointedly at Hermione before adding, "So the Half-Blood Prince—that refers to him being a half-blood wizard?"
"Not only that," Sherlock said, his voice going soft and thoughtful. "Snape's mother was a witch. Her name was Eileen Prince."
Harry and Ron didn't immediately follow, but Hermione caught up with Sherlock's train of thought at once.
"So 'Half-Blood Prince' is a double meaning—Snape being half-blood by parentage, and half-descended from the Prince family. Is that it?"
Hermione glanced at Harry and said, somewhat sharply.
"And who ever said Snape's textbook was necessarily safe, anyway? Harry, don't forget how you've described him yourself—you said he liked the Dark Arts.
"And there's also his past —"
"There's no need to be quite that alarmed."
Sherlock shook his head. "Just from the way he's refined these potion-brewing methods, this book doesn't read like something out of Tom Riddle's playbook. It reads more like a form of self-validation."
"Self-validation?"
"Precisely." Sherlock tapped the tabletop lightly with one finger. "I imagine you've all heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs?"
"Maslow's—what?"
"Hierarchy of what?"
"Mas-who?"
This time, even Hermione felt she'd wandered into unfamiliar territory.
"Put simply, it's an important theory from the humanistic school of psychology.
"I studied it, incidentally, because a great many criminal psychologies can be explained through it."
"Er—Sherlock, could you put that a little more simply?" Harry asked, glancing at Ron, who no longer had the nerve to ask the question himself.
"The American psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed that human needs fall into five levels, usually pictured as tiers of a pyramid.
From the bottom of the structure upward, the needs run. physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.
The lower the tier, the greater its force, the greater its potential. As you move up the hierarchy, that force weakens correspondingly. At the same time, the higher needs can't emerge until the lower ones are satisfied, or at least partly so.
In the evolution from animal to human, the higher needs appear much later. An infant has physiological and safety needs, but the need for self-actualization only emerges in adulthood.
Every living creature needs food and water. Only humans need self-actualization."
By the time Sherlock finished, Harry had already worked it out.
"Sherlock—you mean Snape was trying to satisfy his need for self-actualization by leaving notes in his Potions textbook."
"Exactly so." Sherlock snapped his fingers again. "You may not know his history as thoroughly as I do, but even with what little you do know, it's more than enough to draw that conclusion.
"So make good use of the book. Don't look at it through tinted glass just because it belonged to Snape. In fact—" Sherlock paused, letting out a long breath, "—precisely because it belonged to Snape, you ought to study it all the more carefully."
It was clear enough that in this little band not unlike the Marauders' group a generation before them—Sherlock was the one whose word settled things. Once he'd spoken like that, Hermione, naturally, had no further objections.
And with that, the matter was laid to rest.
Except that the free periods of sixth year turned out to be nothing like the leisurely stretches some students had been hoping for. Instead, they were swallowed up almost entirely by the sheer volume of homework the teachers were piling on.
The older years now had to work as hard as if they were sitting an exam every single day, and the coursework itself had grown considerably harder than before.
These days, more than half the class couldn't follow what Professor McGonagall was teaching. Even a top student like Hermione sometimes had to ask McGonagall to repeat something once or twice before it made sense.
Only someone like Sherlock—a genius among geniuses sailed through it all as effortlessly as ever, which only deepened Hermione's admiration for him.
As for Harry, with the Half-Blood Prince Snape's help, he'd shot up practically overnight into the rising star of Potions.
In the old days, this might have left Hermione seething with resentment. But after Sherlock had talked her round, she found she could look at the matter with something closer to equanimity.
Even once she knew the Half-Blood Prince was Snape himself, she no longer bristled the way she once had at the improvements he'd made throughout Advanced Potion-Making.
Still, like Sherlock, she preferred to simply watch Harry make use of the book rather than try any of it herself.
In the days that followed, it wasn't only Snape's Defence Against the Dark Arts lessons anymore—Charms and Transfiguration, too, began requiring them to cast spells silently.
In the common room, or at mealtimes, it became a common sight. sixth-years with their faces turning red, straining silently against themselves, looking for all the world as though they were constipated—when in truth they were simply struggling to make magic work without saying the incantation aloud.
It was only once they stepped out to the greenhouses that everyone finally got to breathe easy again.
The plants in Herbology were more dangerous these days than they'd ever been, but at least when a Mandrake's poisonous tendril grabbed you unexpectedly from behind, you were allowed to shout the counter-curse at the top of your lungs.
It was the only class left that didn't demand silence from them.
There was one more thing, too. Rubeus Hagrid, professor of Care of Magical Creatures and the very first friend Harry had made in the wizarding world, hadn't shown up at the staff table to eat in a long while.
Worse than that—whenever Harry ran into him in the corridors or out on the grounds, Hagrid seemed to pretend he hadn't seen him at all.
Even when Harry, Hermione, and Ron went out of their way to greet him, he acted as though he hadn't heard a word.
It was, quite clearly, not a good sign.
"Sherlock, I don't think we can keep letting this go on," Harry finally said, unable to hold it in any longer.
Hermione nodded. "He's right. We really ought to go and explain things to Hagrid."
"But there's Quidditch try-outs this morning!" Ron objected, unwilling to agree with Harry and Hermione. He said, quite bluntly.
"And besides, we've got Flitwick's Aguamenti Charm to practice!
"Anyway, what is there even to explain? We can hardly tell him we hate his ridiculous class!"
"But we don't hate Hagrid," Hermione said miserably though notably, she didn't dispute Ron's point about hating the class itself.
"That's easy for you to say. I haven't forgotten the Blast-Ended Skrewts. Or that eight-eyed giant spider." Ron looked thoroughly miserable. "I'll tell you the truth—we're lucky to have gotten out of that class alive.
"Didn't you hear the way he talks about that idiot brother of his? If we'd kept going, we'd probably be teaching Grawp how to tie his shoelaces by now."
"I really don't want to be not speaking to Hagrid," Hermione said, a little sadly.
At that, all three of them turned, as one, to look at Sherlock.
It had become something of a habit by now whenever the friends couldn't agree, it was always Sherlock who ended up making the call.
"Hermione's right. Not wanting to sit through Care of Magical Creatures and cutting Hagrid out of your life are two entirely different things."
"Then we'll go see him after Quidditch try-outs," Harry said quickly. It had been his idea to go find Hagrid in the first place, but on this particular point, he found himself agreeing with Ron completely better to avoid Grawp for the rest of one's natural life, if at all possible. Just hearing Sherlock describe him had been more than enough to make that clear.
"Sherlock, what do you think?" Harry asked, turning to him, since he'd already asked Sherlock beforehand to come along and watch the try-outs.
Thinking about the first real test he'd face as captain, Harry couldn't help feeling a flicker of nerves.
"I hadn't expected quite this many people to sign up. The try-outs might take all morning.
"I can't imagine why the team's suddenly become so popular—"
Sherlock couldn't help laughing as he said it.
"Sherlock, what's so funny?" Ron asked, curious.
"I was thinking of something amusing."
"What's that?"
"It isn't the Gryffindor Quidditch team that's popular. It's the captain."
"What?"
Harry and Ron exchanged a glance, neither of them quite following.
"Sherlock's already put it plainly enough—you still don't get it?" Hermione said, not bothering to hide her exasperation.
"Right now, the two most famous people in the entire wizarding world are standing right here—the Boy Who Lived, Harry Potter, and the great detective, Sherlock Holmes. Because the two of you are the only ones who've ever cost the Dark Lord anything—one of you is the reason he fell in the first place, and the other saw straight through his scheme.
"Sherlock's not exactly easy to get close to, so signing up for Quidditch try-outs makes for a very convenient excuse.
"And there's something else—" Hermione paused, glancing between Sherlock and Harry.
"You two both grew a good inch over the summer. People are bound to notice that."
"What about me!" Ron cut in at once. "I grew taller too, you know."
"Except no one's likely to notice that but Miss Lavender Brown," Sherlock said mildly.
Ron. (╯°□°）╯
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