CHAPTER 28
Myrtle circled him in a slow, delighted spiral, staring.
"I cannot believe my eyes. You've changed completely." She stopped directly in front of him, looking him up and down with an expression caught somewhere between accusation and admiration.
Severus found, somewhat against his expectations, that he was mildly amused.
"People change."
"Ten centimetres taller and built like someone who actually eats, in three months."
"It's magic, Myrtle. Where have you been, by the way? Normally nothing short of a serious threat gets you out of here."
She brightened and began circling again.
"I've been helping my house with the first-years. And the Head of House asks me to assist with certain things."
"Good. I'm glad. Just don't wear yourself out, and if anyone gives you trouble, say so."
"I'm older than you, you know! I may look fourteen, but still!" She drew herself up with great dignity.
"Of course you are. So tell me what you did over the summer."
"You should be in class."
"Free period. I'm entirely at your disposal, Miss Myrtle."
"You're making fun of me," she said, pouting. Then her expression collapsed into a smile that was entirely genuine and lit up her whole face.
The rest of the day was, by a considerable margin, the hardest Severus had spent since arriving at Hogwarts, for the simple reason that he could barely keep his eyes open. He slept through one lesson entirely after casting an illusion of himself, and considered it a reasonable decision.
He couldn't have imagined that Divination could be taught so badly. When the professor predicted impotence for him by the age of fifty, he was briefly tempted to respond proportionally, but decided he was above it. He settled for a quiet curse instead, the sort that would have her appending "I am a charlatan, please spank me" to the end of every sentence for the rest of the day. It seemed proportionate.
Defence Against the Dark Arts was the lesson he slept through. Pure textbook, start to finish, delivered by a teacher who never once checked whether anyone was still conscious. The quality of the instruction confirmed what Severus had already suspected about the man's competence.
He didn't blame Dumbledore for the revolving-door problem with Defence teachers. Voldemort had apparently cursed the position, and no one held it for more than a year. The better candidates, aware of this, declined. That left whoever remained.
Apparition rounded out the day, taught by a Ministry instructor who spent the entire session on theory. Severus took notes and waited for it to end.
Toward nine in the evening, after dinner, he made his way to Slughorn's office. He knew the potions would work. He also knew that bringing Slughorn's opinion in made it official, and he had genuine respect for the man's expertise, even if it topped out at master level rather than higher. There was something about the professor that reminded him, in the particular way that very different people can remind you of the same person, of his teacher from his old life.
He was about ten metres from the office door when a gust of wind seized him bodily and pulled him through it.
Inside, standing in front of Slughorn's desk and wearing the professor's clothes, was a young man of roughly twenty-five with straw-coloured curly hair and a face that would have been perfectly pleasant under other circumstances. He was currently directing an extremely irritated stare at Severus.
"Severus, how do I reverse this potion?"
Severus looked at him.
Then he started laughing.
"Mr. Snape! Stop that! This is not remotely funny!"
"I'm — pff — sorry—" He coughed, trying to control himself, and failed.
"Severus, stop laughing and help me!"
"Professor," he said, making a genuine effort, "it can't be reversed. I haven't developed a counteragent yet. But it's temporary: twenty-four hours." He attempted a reassuring tone. Nagini had crawled out by this point, and her hissing, which bore a suspicious resemblance to laughter, wasn't helping Slughorn's dignity.
"Twenty-four hours?! I have classes tomorrow! How am I supposed to face students like this?!" Slughorn dropped into his chair and grabbed his hair, which was currently extremely lush and curly. "Why did I even drink it without testing it first?!"
"Why didn't you?"
"I tested it on a rat."
Severus put his palm over his face.
"A rat. Professor, pixies are considerably closer to humans for testing purposes. Fairies are better still." He shook his head. "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do. You'll have to wait it out." He decided a change of subject was in everyone's interest. "What did you think of the potions?"
"What do I think." Slughorn sighed, reached into his bag, and produced a turquoise-coloured vial. "I am impressed that you managed to create them. I'm also proud that I had some part in teaching you. And I want to curse you slightly." He held up the vial. "But I'm intrigued by this one. I worked on something similar years ago. I can identify about a dozen ingredients: fairy wings, morning dew, rose petal, dried cuff, unicorn hair, ginger root..."
"You're right on all of them. It's a beauty potion, but it works deeper than cosmetic ones: it affects the physical body directly, renewing it completely and maintaining it at peak condition for exactly one week, with no side effects. The advantage is that it replaces a dozen separate preparations entirely."
"Hm." Slughorn turned the vial in his fingers. "You're planning to put Madam Primpernel out of business."
"Professor, I'm one person. She has an established team, years of reputation, and a loyal client base." Severus waved the suggestion off, with the expression of a man being unjustly accused.
Nagini made a sound that was not remotely a laugh and returned to examining the bookshelf.
"I still can't quite believe you managed to produce this variety in three months."
"I had a good teacher."
"Flatterer."
"I learned from the best."
"So now I'm a sycophant?" Slughorn raised an eyebrow. Severus patted Nagini on the head and looked at him with serene defiance. "Fine. I'm in a generous mood. I'll let it go. Tell me how you arrived at the recipe for this one."
"Of course. When I got back to the Muggle world after school ended, I went to Diagon Alley the next day to buy ingredients for practice. And on the way, I passed a shop called Madam Primpernel's Rejuvenating Potions. I was curious, so I went in."
Five minutes before curfew, he said goodnight to Slughorn and left the office with the peculiar sensation of having forgotten something important. He ran through the day mentally as he walked, and couldn't place it.
At the same moment, a door opened at the end of the Slytherin corridor. Regulus Black came out, kicked the doorframe with real feeling, and walked toward the stairs under the puzzled gaze of several passing students.
You were the one who suggested meeting tonight. He pressed his lips together. If I run into him tomorrow.
The next day, strange stories moved through the castle: a new Potions teacher who had apparently caught the attention of a significant portion of the older female students, and a Divination teacher who had been removed to St. Mungo's after what witnesses were calling a terrible curse. Severus heard both and felt equally uninvested in either.
He spent most of the day in the library, which suited him. Apart from Charms, which actually covered technique and spell mechanics rather than theory alone, his timetable was almost entirely free. He used the time in the Restricted Section, working through every source on basilisks he could find.
There wasn't as much difference between the creatures in this world and the ones he knew as he'd half-expected: a lethal gaze that petrified anything it caught directly; venom; hide thick enough to deflect most magical attacks, though that last claim came from a single source drawing on an ancient manuscript rather than direct observation. Add to that the size, the speed, and the raw physical strength, and what you had was, essentially, a weapon designed specifically for use against wizards, which made its presence in a school of magic either the darkest kind of irony or confirmation of something Severus had already begun to suspect about its creator.
The more he thought about Salazar Slytherin, the more Severus came to the conclusion that the man's much-documented hatred of Muggle-borns had been, at least in part, a cover for something considerably more ambitious. Anyone intelligent enough to build a house around the qualities of cunning and strategy, and then hide a killing machine underneath it, was not primarily motivated by prejudice. What he was motivated by was a question Severus was increasingly interested in finding the answer to.
He had no particular warmth toward the students in this school, the teachers, or the institution itself, a few exceptions aside. But even by his standards, leaving something that could kill half the castle unsupervised beneath a children's bathroom was difficult to explain as anything other than deliberate.
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