She had been late upon entering- she had known it was so when she had glanced about the other students who already sat in their seats and had obediently begun with the assignment written upon the chalkboard at the far end of the greenhouse. She had also known of the ways students were punished for arriving to a class later than its scheduled time, and it was for this reason exactly that the young Ravenclaw should have been able to foresee detention as a possibility. Instead, however, Nerissa’s fleshy pink lower lip had fallen a millimeter or so upon hearing the older man’s words, parting from her upper lip to create the expression of shock upon her face. Her eyes, once dull and indifferent, held an odd pain within them; a pain that would have made it seem to anyone who entered the Greenhouse at that very moment, as if Herbology’s newest professor had risen his hand and had stuck Nerissa Hatts across the cheek- though the students around her knew he had done nothing of the sort.
“And what of my wand?” came the soft-spoken words of a mouse who cowered in her seat, gripping at the edges of the table before her in order to steady herself as she began to sway; her vision had begun to blur, and she could have sworn that the ground was growing nearer… The very thought of having her wand stolen from her by an angry, impatient professor made her feel as if she would never inhale oxygen correctly again- and yet she managed to force another sentence from her drying lips, “I would not live correctly without it, sir! With that wand I can do much more than the professors who have taught this class prior to your arrival, I swear of it! I simply can not imagine the pain I would experience if separated from it…”
There was stillness after her words, save the movements of her chest as her heart beat rapidly thudded against her ribcage, rattling the bones beneath the skin that clung to them, as though the blood-thirsty thing were threatening to break each of her brittle bones. That fear of never having her wand returned to her when she had left the small piece of wood at the front of the class, what she had dismissed as yet another episode of paranoia…
She would have been wise to heed said warning, for the professor before her was a savage man if he could snatch the wand of young children from their frail little fingers without so much as a shudder.