Two Months Later.
Severus let go of the student's hand, straightened, and looked at Pomfrey. The boy was lying on the bed in front of them, flushed, a rash spreading across his face and neck.
"The symptoms look like a fever: high temperature, rash, redness in the face and eyes. But something is off." He took a wooden stick from the jar on the side table, gently opened the patient's mouth, and produced a tiny flame that floated inside. Using the stick to press the tongue down slightly, he looked at the throat and found it tinted green. "Hm. This looks like a potion reaction. Someone poisoned him." He withdrew the stick, caught a sharp, acrid smell, and looked at the green residue on the tip. "Hound grass. Needle-leaf. Nightshade and mandrake root. Whoever brewed this had no idea what they were doing. I would remove their hands and find somewhere creative to put them."
"What was that?" Pomfrey asked, clearly amused by his response.
"Nothing important. The mandrake root dampened the effect," he said, tossing the stick into the bin. "Two days of rest and he will recover on his own. We do not strictly need to intervene. Though if we want to speed it up, an antidote based on mandrake root would work, since the potion has essentially degraded into a mild poison."
"Very good. You are moving quickly, Mr. Snape. I did not expect you to reach practical work this fast."
"I was lucky. This particular problem happened to sit in my area."
"Even so, very few students would have made this much progress in two months, and fewer still while studying potion-making in parallel. How is that going, by the way?" Pomfrey asked with a smile, returning to the desk. She brought out a teapot and two cups.
"I could put in for the gold cauldron, but it is too early for that. My goal is to reach black by the end of seventh year." At that, Pomfrey nearly missed the cup entirely. She set the teapot down and stared at him.
"Mr. Snape. You are genuinely alarming, in the best possible way."
"Thank you for the compliment." He sat across from her and took the cup she pushed toward him, inhaled the smell, took a sip, and narrowed his eyes with quiet pleasure. "What tea is this?"
"A friend brought it from China two weeks ago. I am no expert, I am afraid, so I could not tell you the name."
"China. I need to go there someday."
"I would recommend it highly. You will learn a great deal, particularly about medicine." She was quiet for a moment, and then looked at his collar. "You left your companion in your room today?"
"She found us boring, so I let her stay." More accurately, she had described the hospital wing as having the ambient atmosphere of a graveyard and declined to come.
"She is a remarkable snake. At times I almost thought she understood me." Pomfrey shook her head and took another sip, and then her expression shifted into something more considered. "I have a question for you. Your reaction earlier suggested you had some idea who might have done this to Mr. Kane. Am I right?"
Severus stroked his chin, thinking, and after a few seconds nodded.
"I have a suspicion. There is a group of four troublemakers from Gryffindor who are fond of this kind of thing."
"What makes you think it is them?"
"I can roughly reconstruct what they were trying to brew. If they had done it correctly, Mr. Kane would currently be spherical and floating near the ceiling of the Great Hall, and the effect would have worn off in an hour. What actually happened is that whoever made it got the proportions wrong, left it on the heat too long, and used far too much nightshade, so the mandrake could not counter it properly. I also happened to overhear two Gryffindors in the corridor discussing an argument between Mr. Potter and our patient from yesterday. I am not claiming it is definitely them: someone could have set them up. But whoever brewed this was working well below competence, and of that four, only Remus has acceptable marks, which fits." He took a sip. "The potion was made by someone who should not have been near a cauldron."
"I see." Pomfrey's expression was that of someone who had already reached their own conclusion. She stood. "I will be back shortly."
"Of course. I will keep an eye on things here."
She left. Severus settled back into the chair and opened a book.
The next day provided its own entertainment. From breakfast through dinner, Potter kept finding reasons to look at him, suspicious and sharp, evidently having decided that Severus was somehow responsible for the house being hauled up over the incident with Oliver Kane. Severus ignored it. He had more pressing things in his head.
After lessons he went to see Pomfrey with a handful of questions he had not been able to answer from books alone. When he opened the door, there was a new patient on one of the beds, dressed in green Quidditch robes, and Lucinda Talkalot standing beside him. The moment she saw Severus, something happened to her expression.
It was not a romantic complication. It was that one hundredth of a percent, which had turned out to involve a broom handle and a direct, unconditional, entirely one-sided victory for the broom handle.
Lucinda could not hold out against the look on Severus's face for more than a few seconds. She left the hospital wing very quickly, and from that day forward made a point of never quite meeting his eyes, a habit she maintained all the way to graduation.
That evening, after a session with Slughorn, who had recently developed the habit of praising Severus at every available opportunity in a way that was becoming slightly excessive, Severus and Nagini returned home.
He spent those two days working, as he generally did on weekends. First, he put together the paperwork he would need to move his educational proposal through the Ministry. The textbooks for each year were finished and had already been reviewed by a certain bearded headmaster, who had given them an excellent rating and offered several approving comments. If Dumbledore ever found out whose work he had praised, the results would be interesting, but Severus saw no reason to tell him. The most likely outcome was Dumbledore having a cardiac event and Severus ending up in Azkaban, which would benefit no one except Riddle, who would get rid of two problems in a single afternoon.
Getting anything new through the Ministry, especially during a war, was ordinarily close to impossible. They simply had no interest in educational proposals while the country was unsettled. But certain connections smoothed the path considerably, and within a day Severus had submitted everything for consideration without any real difficulty. The review would take about a month, and he was not worried about rejection. He had prepared too carefully for that. The remaining investment was a few thousand Galleons in materials, and within a couple of years, once the streets were calmer, wizards would stop dying so easily from things that did not need to be fatal.
Beyond that, he was working on a book about potion-making, drawing on knowledge from his previous life and putting it into writing properly. Every month he also contributed articles to newspapers and journals in the field, building a reputation one piece at a time.
Because of all of this, he had cancelled his Saturday meeting with Bellatrix. From that day on she had been more like herself again, with one difference: she was more open with him, and toward Voldemort, more careful. The old devotion had not vanished. It had simply weakened enough that the instinct for self-preservation, buried under years of conditioning, could finally find the surface.
Before, she had been capable of sitting beside Voldemort during his rages and leaning into them. Now she made a point of being as far from him as possible in those moments and avoiding his eyes. But feelings that have been pressed into a person's mind over years by active enchantment are not easily lifted. Everything depended on willpower and on what surrounded her.
Left alone, Bellatrix would have needed decades. Because of Severus's interference, constantly destabilising her and applying quiet magical pressure at the margins of her thinking, she was recovering far faster. A year or two instead of a decade, though even then the necklace's influence would never be fully gone.
So beyond their Saturday meetings, he also spoke with her on weekday evenings, mostly at weekends, through a mirror. She always performed indifference, but Bellatrix had no real talent for lying, and even through hundreds of kilometres of distance he could feel exactly what she actually felt.
Love was still a long way off. But something like genuine regard had appeared, and she had stopped objecting to being kissed, even if she always put on a performance of reluctance before returning it. In that, she reminded him of Nagini: saying one thing, thinking another, feeling something else entirely. In short, women.
Things were looking up, in their own complicated way. Exams were approaching, and after them three months of summer already mapped out and full.
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