The Last Potion

Chapter Ten –


Justin Penny
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Justin Penny
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Back
to the Dungeons

 

“Very well,” I found myself saying. I raised
my eyebrows in a rather refined manner in a grave effort to distract him from
noticing the trembling of my hands. “When would you like to start?” I asked
him, expecting that he’d need considerable time to prepare a place for me to
work.

“Immediately,” he said quite seriously.

My suitcase nearly fell out of my grip.
“Immediately?” I repeated in disbelief.

“Is there a problem, Miss Chamberlain?” he
quizzed. “Or do you prefer to be acknowledged as the supposed wife of the
notorious wizard Daemon Svan?van?”

To be completely honest, I don’t think I
liked the sound of either name slithering off of his tongue. Hearing him speak
my maiden name again brought back all of those shameful memories of being
hopelessly infatuated with him, and he obviously knew Daemon and all that had
made him the notorious Death Eater he is. So I guess what it came down to was…
which is the lesser of two evils?

I decided to surrender to the foolishness of
marrying a moron rather than resorting back to the name of the girl he once
knew as the fool who’d fallen in love with him. “You may as well call me Ms.
Sullivan,” I told him. “My friends and colleagues call me Lizzie.zie.zie.”

I don’t know where that had come from. I
hardly expected him to retort to calling me by my nickname. Sure enough, just
as I had expected, he’d found some foul, mocking way to spit that back into my
face.

He looked at me with a sour expression on
his face as he began to lead me down the wide-open corridor. “Well I am
neither, Ms. Sullivan,” he assured. As I expected such a snide comment as that,
it was easy to ignore. “You may leave your belongings here,” he added. “One of
the house elves will return them to your new room.”

“My new room?” I repeated.

The heels of Professor Snape’s boots clicked
loudly as we began to descend down to the dungeons… the very dungeons I’d hoped
I’d never have to see again. “Unless of course you’d prefer to go back to your
less-than-adequate bunk bed.”

“No,” I said immediately. “The mattress was
hardly two inches thick. My back feels like it’s tied in a knot. I could use a
good sleep in a proper bed.”

He glanced over at me for a brief second but
turned away as soon as I let my eyes meet with his. We’d reached the bottom of
the staircase and I could immediately smell the musk and mildew seeping from
the walls and ceiling.

Professor Snape led me into his Potions
classroom and straight to the back where he’d already prepared an assembly line
of ingredients, half brewed potions and an entire apparatus of vials, test
tubes, beakers and three pewter cauldrons.

“I’ve already
begun the Appiccicarus,” Professor Snape told me as he sat down in front of the
largest of the three cauldrons, which looked like a nearly completed batch of
Appiccicarus – the strongest adhesive known to wizard-kind. “Here’s the list,”
he said and handed to me the tattered piece of parchment he’d shown me earlier.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d get a move on the Deappiccicarus first of all.”

I looked at
the ingredients again and checked the recipe for the anti-adhesive. Only a dose
of Deappiccicarus could separate two objects once they’d both come into contact
with Appiccicarus. I recalled that in one incident, an alchemist in Germany had
to wait nearly two days for someone to prepare Deappiccicarus after he’d
managed to bond his hand to his cauldron.

“Very well,” I
said and sat down at the station next to him. He was a bit more than an arm’s
length away from me, but I still felt unnecessarily close to him. It wasn’t a big
deal, I’d probably be completely preoccupied with the work ahead of me in now
time anyway. “Will you be having me test these after I’m done?” I quizzed with
a hint of humour in my voice. I remembered as a student that if a potion didn’t
look quite right, he had us test them ourselves.

Professor
Snape never answered me.

After a long
while, I began to notice how exceptionally quite the classroom had become.
Professor Snape had always been unusually silent, but now that we were alone
together I found it a little too quite for my taste. His hands worked
gracefully together to grate or dice his ingredients. The care and precision he
put into each individual task was actually quite remarkable.

“So,” I began
before I had really planned what I wanted to say to him. “Are you at all
acquainted with the Sullivan family I had the misfortune of becoming a part
of?” I’d asked him.

For a short
while it didn’t appear that he’d heard me. Of course, it was so quiet he’d have
heard a mouse scamper from one corner of the classroom to the next. Instead,
he’d just belated his answer and kept it to a simple, blasé answer.

“No.”

That was all
he said.

I rolled my
eyes and shook my head as I realized how useless it was to try and strike up a
conversation with him. He probably hated conversation as much as he
hated the prospect of wearing shorts in the heat of summer. Nevertheless, the
quite was almost too much for me to handle.

“Daemon was a
Durmstrang student,” I continued. “He graduated four years before I did. We met
during my first year at FIAMA. It was at a Halloween ball and he’d blown up
several pumpkins while trying to charm them into igniting orange flames each
time someone walked by. I happened to be the lucky one walking by when it all
happened.”

Professor
Snape didn’t exactly acknowledge that I was speaking to him. He just went oith ith his work and didn’t even look up at me. I didn’t really expect him to, but
obviously my conversation didn’t appear to disturb him. If he wanted to he
wouldn’t have hesitated to ask me to be silent. Since he didn’t, I took it upon
myself to carry on the one-way conversation.

“Charms wasn’t
really my specialty,” I continued. “My cousin had a knack for Charms, and
Transfigurations. You know, she once misplaced her butterfly wings when she was
making a love potion for her boyfriend as a Valentine’s Day gift and used a
dead housefly she found on the floor to transfigure into a butterfly. A few
weeks later after she’d given the potion to her boyfriend he’d begun to attract
the attention of nearly every butterfly he’d come in contact with. Silly, huh?”

“Hilarious,”
he answered, mockingly.

At that
distasteful remark, I slapped my knife back down to the counter and looked
angrily at him. “All right, I get the point. You’re in no mood for
conversation.”

He looked into
my eyes for a moment and then glanced down at the handle of the knife still
wrapped in my hand. “I’m trying to concentrate,” he told me.

“And you can’t
do that and talk at the same time?” I challenged him. “Some master you
are.”

“Ms. Sullivan,
if you’d have been a bit more attentive to your work rather than trying to talk
my ear off, you may have noticed that you’ve nearly sliced your finger off!” He
pointed his eyes down to my hands again.

I hadn’t even
felt it, but when I put the knife down – rather hastily – I must have brought
the blade down right on my finger. I looked in awe at the incision and then
rushed to press my thumb over the bleeding cut.

He stood up
from his seat and came over to me with his wand in hand. I could feel his robes
brush up against my back as he leaned over me and picked my bleeding hand up
into his own. He muttered a spell under his breath and waved his wand over my
hand. A moment later the cut disappeared and he pulled a handkerchief from his
robes and began dotting away the remaining blood. His hands pressed gently into
my skin as he cleansed my hand. I watched him carefully, noting how delicately
he moved.

His hands were
warm and a lot softer than I ever would have expected. Except for the evening
of my graduation, in all the years that I had known him, he’d never touched a
finger to me.

He never
wanted to.

If the same
thing had happened to me back when I was a student, I’m sure he would have
scolded me and sent me up to Madam Pomfrey. But now, as I looked up at him, he
didn’t look in any way prepared to start yelling at me for my carelessness.

I couldn’t
really describe how he looked.

 

* * *

 

Okso
so
you’re probably all wondering when this is all going to come together. Do some
of her old feelings still remain? Does he still resent her? Will the rating
pick up a notch? … All in the chapter ahead!