"Now remember to be careful handling the solution after the third stir," Slughorn said with an elaborate, almost scripted, twinkle in his eye. "Because after that point, you see, is when it takes its first step towards becoming a love potion."

The class, as a whole, took a deep breath. There was an audible tension in the air, pressing down on the fourth years like a heavy sheet. Furtive, surreptitious glances were shot between classmates, enemies, and nearly all but the most platonic of friends. They all sent out vibes of irrational and unwarranted distrust throughout the room, distrust that whirled about the fumes from their cauldrons with elaborate, detailed imaginings and fears in their heads, steaming and boiling over. Slughorn was oblivious.

"Now, please put on your dragonskin gloves and collect a single ashwinder egg each," instructed the Potions master, pointing to the centre of the room where rested an old iron cauldron, which glowed from within with a soft orange light.

"You get it," Alice, one of the Gryffindors, hissed at her labmate, a gangly boy who had yet to grow into his height, both of them standing bolt-straight with tension.

"Me?" Clayton looked at her over his shoulder, face stricken. "I-It's your turn. I got the… t-the…" he looked down at the potion in front of him, suddenly realising he had completely forgotten the ingredients so far. "I… went to that git Josh Kiryu's birthday yesterday to keep you from being alone with all his Slytherins. Doesn't that count for something?"

"Oh, just get it," she said, unconsciously grinding her teeth. "It's just an egg."

"It's an egg that'll burn a hole through your hand and turns into a love potion. How on earth is that 'just an egg'?"

"Just do it, Clayton!"

He shook his head but his feet started moving anyways, and soon he found himself at the edge of the old cauldron, gloves on, staring inside at the strange cluster of soft, round balls. He reached in carefully and found the eggs were more delicate than he had expected. He pulled out two of them, and they rolled in his hand, so close to the edge that he had to cup the other in to catch it, and felt like he had almost squashed the two of them by the simple gesture. Carefully balancing the two of them, he stepped back towards his desk.

They were pretty little things, a soft translucent pink with a small crescent-shape blob in the middle of the yolk that glowed like the filament of a bulb, bent and amplified by the slim layer of magical frost that encased them. Its soft glow caught his eye and kept it strong, and he barely heard Slughorn as he walked.

"Now, you'll need to put the egg in its entirety. We will be dissolving the shell later on but for now it's too dangerous to break the freezing. Careful now!"

"Hey. Hey you."

Clayton looked up and saw Alice looking at him with a scowl. "Come on, stop staring at the things and let's get to work."

He nodded and turned towards her, handing her his egg and placing it in the previous prepared solution, all held in a clear glass vial with a long neck and a wide bottom until they were ready to be put under the heat of a cauldron.

"I think you'll all appreciate this if you wait for just a moment," their teacher said with a grin, as about the classroom decanters filled with a cloudy potion base were mingled with the viscous-even-when-frozen ashwinder eggs, which seemed to catch the cloudy base with their energy, such that slowly, gently, the entire set of potions began to glow. Slughorn gestured with his hands, dimming the torchlight about the room – anyone looking away from the potions would have noticed that he seemed unable to get them to snuff out entirely – and soon the room was lit by the radiant glowing potions in a brighter version of the orange that had come from the cauldron of eggs. Mesmerized yet again, Clayton carefully lifted up the glass container and held it up, where it lit the dark crevices of the ceiling and cast about the room, seemingly brighter than the others. Slughorn's smile was irrepressible.

"Ah, yes, and how very appropriate. It's like love itself, isn't it, spreading, filling every corner of the room, brightening the lives of those who look upon it," he waxed, and shaking his head as if at some happy memory, he turned his back to the class for just a moment to check the large potions book he kept on his desk. As if they had waited for him to look away, certain potions, including the one in Clayton's hand, began to glow even fiercer, and Alice and he and the rest of the class all watched open-mouthed as the growing spectacle. For a brief moment there was silence, broken only by the softest sound, not unlike an ashwinder itself, hissing.

And then the screaming started.

Slughorn wheeled to see Clayton drop the glass too late – the mostly empty glass. Before it hit the ground one could see the hole in its side, the red-hot edges where glass had been burnt away, and only a few drops of the mixture remained. Perhaps only Alice saw what had actually happened, seen the potion burn through and spurt out of the steaming hole in the glass like a fountain, but there was no one in the class that could not draw their own conclusion as other vials started to burst at their bottoms, their burning contents catching fire on the desks and slowly starting to sear through. All eyes, though, were on Clayton, who was on the floor, rolling in agony.

He screamed again and again before Alice came to her senses and dropped to her knees beside him. His gloved hands were at his face, they attacked his face, pulling and brushing and holding as he screamed through, by and past them, and she reached out to hold his wrist and stop his savage attack of his own face. As she pulled it away he met her eyes, his stretched wide with pain and terror, and she saw what he was trying to prevent. The ashwinder solution has struck him on the cheek after he hit the ground. He bled from the back of his head from the impact, but his face was covered in the stuff, and it burned like oil. It streaked across his features, around his nose and into his mouth, flames caught through his hair and across the impact wound, and as she pulled away his hands the air hit the flames and they shot up towards her, and she dropped the hands with a screech.

Then Slughorn was there, all at once. He caught his hands again and pulled out his wand when another student, one of the other Gryffindors, came to his side to help hold Clayton down. Alice saw it then, on his face, the small red spark, the embryonic ashwinder, caught in the midst of a harsh blue flame, its death throes terrible and ruinous.

"Miss Stone," he said to her, his voice half trembling, half commanding, "quickly, get Madame Pomfrey, hurry!" He turned back to Clayton, who thrashed more and more, a Slytherin holding down his left hand now. Alice's breath was caught in her throat; her feet clung to the floor. "Miss Stone!" he shouted when he found her there, and she ran to the door.

"Soffoquoi!" he heard Slughorn cry from behind, and the flash of his magic lit up the hall. But nothing happened, and there was still screaming. There was still screaming in the dungeon halls, on the stairs and for every step, screaming, screaming from far beyond where she could have possibly heard.

House Potter: Year 1

A Stopper in Death

In the upper floors of Hogwarts Castle, the dark of evening settled in, and students returned in various groups to their house common rooms before curfew. The picture-folk bade passers-bye good night, except for those who had gathered at the painting of Montalban the Six-Fingered, where a rousing game of Exploding Snap (1642 rules) had carried on far into the evening, and continued to go even after the painting had been shook to the ground by the game and was now face-down on the Hogwarts floor, leaving the players in the dark, and, by the sounds of things and the occasional burst-assisted hop of the painting a few inches into the air, still playing.

Elsewhere there was a general quiet. From the dungeons to the upper floors, from the Forbidden Forest to the hog-decorated gate, there was the gentle hum of a settling night. Hagrid was just finished with a large fire outside his hut, having dumped the remains of his meal into it before smothering it carefully, while the Dark Forest around his seemed almost to sleep for an hour before the creatures of the night awoke. In the Slytherin common rooms, the out-looking windows, charmed to show something better than the lake they rested beneath, settled into an enchanted moonlit sky. In Gryffindor Tower, the students settled around the fireplace for conversation and homework. And so it was about the school, from top to bottom and bottom to top.

Except just outside Ravenclaw Tower.

"You're going about this entirely wrong, how about you try thinking about it from the beginning?"

"How about you just let me in?"

Greg House paced back and forth in front of the hidden door to the Ravenclaw tower, his walking stick a harsh staccato beat against the sound of his footsteps, echoing in the quiet.

"Salamanders. Owl droppings. Magic… bedknobs… I don't know! What do you want from me?"

"The answer," replied the door knocker, in its never-endingly calm, irritating tone. "I can repeat the question if you'd—"

"Jack-o-lanterns!" bellowed the Muggle in defiant reply. "Pointy hats! Flying brooms! I can think of witch imagery all day, you know! Thumb screws, death by crushing, appearing butt naked in front of a sex-starved puritan tribunal so that they can 'look for birthmarks'!"

The knocker rolled its eyes. "Oh now you're just being crude."

"Candy corn?"

"Oh, now I'm afraid I don't follow."

House stormed back to his pacing, back and forth for almost another minute until Professor Flitwick came up the corridor.

"Oh! Good evening Mr. House!" said the diminutive Professor with a pleased look on his face, quite unrelated to the situation at hand, though he quickly took it in and leaned forward with a grin. "Having a little trouble with today's question, are we?"

"Not as much trouble as that thing's going to have if it doesn't let me in."

Flitwick just laughed. "Now, now, Mr. House, I'm sure violence isn't the answer. Urm, is it?"

"Hardly," said the knocker. "The question was 'What is the primary difference between Basic and Intermediate Transfiguration', and I gave him the hint 'As defined by Mrs. Hallia Dendren of Sussex, 1143, in her seminal work Shaypshyfting and Creayting.'"

"Which helped so very much," House added with a sneer.

Flitwick just shook his head. "The question's not very fair anyways. Ahem. The difference," he said to the Knocker, "as defined by Mrs. Dendren was that Intermediate transfiguration combines elements of creation and change, but it was proved irrelevant in 1877 when they discovered the two elements are, in fact, the same."

"Ah! Very good, professor! Either answer was acceptable." And with that, the door swung open and Flitwick, grin still plastered on his face, made his way through.

House followed, though he held back, wanting nothing to do with that smile, and proceeded only when the door threatened to shut him out yet again. When he finally made it through, squeezing through the half-shut door, he found himself in the Ravenclaw common room, looking up at the statue of the house's founder.

"You know, Mr. House, there's nothing about the knocker's riddles that even you couldn't solve with a little application." Flitwick looked up at the statue, rocking on his feet, because he knew even from limited experience that House was not going to look at him. "The rest of Ravenclaw House would be glad to help. After all, we have to work as a team, as a…" He was going to say "family" but trailed off when he remembered to whom he was speaking. "We all believe in you, the knocker is even giving you multiple guesses and I've never seen him so generous. You have great potential! But even if you're determined to pull through on your own, you'd probably be well served by studying up in the library. What you can't do without magical powers you can, after all, still learn!"

He smiled, and Rowena Ravenclaw's statue seemed to smile back down at him, and the common room, always bright and cozy, seemed so pleasant that it took him a few minutes to realise that House had walked away the moment he heard the word "help". It was possible that he left just as Flitwick said the word "help" out of sheer coincidence, though, as he had not really been listening in the first place.

House liked the Ravenclaw Common room, at least as far as it went before it filled up with children. There were the younger ones, griping and complaining about the teaching staff, the homework load and the occasional homesickness, and there were the teenagers, broken to the system but having invented their own set of problems to gripe about – relationships, mostly. House wanted none of it, but they gave him a wide berth anyways, so there were no real problems there. Except…

"Heya, Dr. House, I wondered where you went!"

House heaved a sigh as hard as he could and then continued walking, refusing to turn to face the voice behind him.

"Dr. House," it said again, and its owner ran up beside him: four and some feet of chirpy energy that House had, despite substantial efforts to the contrary, learned was named Toby. "Dr. House, I just…" it had to give a burst of speed to keep up, as House had begun to walk away. "I just heard that Sam Armstrong… In Hufflepuff… has had… a runny nose… for almost two days now! Dr. House!" It called after him, as House had headed up a set of stairs, and it paused a moment before starting to follow. "Don't you think that's just a little, tiny bit…?"

House clenched his teeth. He would have barely blinked if Sammy Armstrong had sprouted six arms that started to wrestle over who got to strangle their owner to death. It was late, he was tired, and when he slammed his dorm's door on the thing's face it stopped making sounds, which House found far closer to his personal ideal.

House liked his dorm. He liked his dorm because his dorm mates made a specific point of never being there. He was not actually even sure that they slept there, at least not since a few days after he took up residence, what with the dragging of furniture and the one-sided exchange of insults.

The last two months had been fairly good to House. No clinic duty stood out about at the top of his list. By and large he was enjoying the freedom of no work, no responsibilities, and the convenience of Wilson not being able to drive away from him if he was bored made it all worthwhile. He even had enough Vicodin stashed throughout his belongings to last him more than the year. Only in his belongings, that was, after the ones he had been hiding throughout the grounds had all but disappeared as if the school itself was trying to keep the two of them apart.

Still, there was something about Flitwick's speech, something that had been picked up at the edge of his hearing, which intrigued him. He lay for a while on his bed, Vicodin from the bottle hidden inside his old socks just starting to take effect, pondering the limited possibilities of how to spend an uninterrupted evening with himself and his own two hands, before rolling over almost to his own surprise, picking up his cane and shuffling across the room to the only suitcase his dorm mates had left within his reach. It was a simple Muggle suitcase and House had no trouble popping the lock to reveal the mess of clothing and knick knacks within. Among a handful of knuts (which he pocketed), a stick of gum (which he chewed for a while before he realized that it set off small popping explosions of light in his mouth) and clothing, House found the student's Potions book. Grabbing the sickle he found beneath it, he took the book back to his bed and began to read. After all, there was nothing better to do.

"Pass me the bandages, Mr. Wilson."

Poppy Pomfrey did not trust James Wilson with a wand. Nor did she trust him with a cauldron, nor with her medicinal herbs, nor, in the end, with her patients. It was not that he was an untrustworthy person, nor was it the strange feelings she got when she considered the life he had spent treating patients with the brutal methods of the Muggles. No, in the end, Madame Pomfrey did not trust James Wilson because he was useless.

He was trying, of course, trying as hard as he could manage to try, but in the end he was still useless. Professor Flitwick had only just begun the students' proper spell education with the traditional Wingardium Leviosa, and while some of the other young Wizards had set their feathers alight, worked the spell in reverse, slammed the feather through the desk and slightly into the floor, or, in one memorable case that very year, turned the feather into an airborne, feather-shaped collection of razor blades, James Wilson's feather did nothing at all. It was going to take a long time for him to get over his Squib nature, and until that day, however long away it might be, he fetched bandages.

"How's he doing today?" the man asked her as he passed the bandages and she started to re-bandage the scarred face of their patient until he was covered by them again, only patches of skin poking through.

"Oh, same as yesterday, otherwise I'd have had him out of here, wouldn't I?" she shook her head, biting her lower lip as she worked, a nasty habit she had had even when she was a student at Hogwarts. "Shallow breathing, no natural healing…"

"No consciousness," he filled in the blank. She nodded gravely.

Clayton Tanner had been unconscious for four days now, four days since Madame Pomfery had pushed her young apprentice healer out of the room as he came in. She needed the space, and Professor McGonagall needed the space to badger her Potions Master to produce a coherent sequence of events. Wilson had found himself in the hallway with Alice Stone, herself terrified to the point of silence, and it was only after the sun went down when the Headmaster bustled out of the room and shooed them back to their dorms. Wilson could tell, as he stood uselessly beside his teacher, that this was another of those situations.

"Don't you have anything to be studying, Mr. Wilson?" asked the irate healer of Hogwarts the very moment the thought occurred to him. Giving her a nod he backed out of the room, past the bench where Alice Stone, once again, sat diligently waiting for good news, and began to wander the halls before finding himself outside the Great Hall. He thought of Clayton for only a moment of the walk before his thoughts were filled with the complicated Transfiguration homework Professor Leda had assigned just that morning, and was already writing it in his head as he took his seat at the Hogwarts table.

As the time for dinner finally arrived a few minutes later, the school began to file in: students to their tables, staff to theirs, and House to make a scene of leaning over the Hufflepuff tables and saying something that actually made two of them flinch visibly from across the room. Wilson sat at the edge of the Hogwarts House table, where he had sat on his first day, close to the Slytherin table. Next to him sat Marie, the curly haired girl that had also been there on their very first day, though "next to" was subjective as Marie made a definite point of sitting as far away from him as she could manage. One the opposite side of the table, however, was a far more amiable neighbour.

"Wotcher, James," said Ian as he took his seat with his friend David. Wilson was starting to get used to people calling him 'James'. "How's the Tanner kid?"

"The same," he said over his steak.

"That's a shame. Poor kid's had such rotten luck he's just bound to wake up just in time for the exams."

Wilson held back a smile, not really wanting to encourage him. "So did you get your Astronomy homework done?"

"Yeah," said David, selecting a few items from the centre of the table. "But just barely. McBoot-Camp here wasn't gonna let me come."

Ian lowered his eyes. "Oi, now do you wanna be an auror or not?"

"We're first year!"

"So?"

David snapped a piece of celery in half. "So you don't even need Astronomy to be an auror!" He shook his head as he chewed. "And then he has me mixing up Swelling Solution. 'It's important too', he says while we're both pulling puffer fish quills out of our arms. How'm I gonna fight Dark Wizards by making their arms bloat?" He shook his head and took for a moment to his drink before looking up and saying "Evening, Dr. House."

Wilson turned to see his friend hovering behind him and Marie twisting away from both of them, like a piece of metal pushed away from two magnets at once. House lowered his eyes at David, but said nothing to him. Butting Wilson with his walking stick, House gave a jerk of his head towards the far wall. "We need to talk."

Wilson tried to make his face as innocently blank as possible. "We are talking."

"We need to talk about something important."

Wilson shrugged and turned back to his food. "So talk."

House balked. "Here? In front of the larvae?"

Wilson choked a bit and scanned the faces of his classmates as he turned back to House. Surprisingly, only Marie seemed to have caught the remark, and she responded with a look of shock. Wilson was barely sure how to respond, himself.

"Yes?"

House gestured towards the teachers table with two small pieces of paper clutched in his hand. "Your friend in the motorboard? Tell him to stop calling me 'Gregory'." He emphasized each syllable.

Wilson looked. "What, Slughorn? Tell him yourself. What am I, your mother?"

"Ah, but you're going to be seeing him tomorrow night, whereas I plan to never be in the same room as him again if I have to."

Wilson screwed up his face. "Tomorrow night? I had my last Potions class this week the other day."

House flipped one of the two pieces of paper directly into Wilson's Salisbury steak. Before the gravy soaked in, Wilson was able to make out the "Come to Celebrate—"

"That's a Slug Club invite!" Ian said, leaning over his plate. "My brother was talking about it a few days ago. He said Slughorn was raving about the invitations not coming back from the printer so he couldn't invite anyone new for the past few weeks."

"He's a little over the top, that one," David added.

"So what's the Slug Club?" Wilson asked the group.

"You'll have to tell me," House said, starting to walk away, before stopping a few steps down and pivoting. "Except don't, because I don't actually care."

"No, I knew what you meant."

"Good."

House started to walk away again when Ian got up and called after him, drawing the suspicious eye of more than a few teachers. "Dr. House! What do you think about the Tanner case?"

House stopped, dead, near the edge of the Slytherin table before turning slowly and going straight to Wilson. "You have a case? You have a case and you didn't tell me? Do you have any idea how bored I've been?"

"Not bored enough to go to a party?"

"Well not that bored, no." House shoved his way onto the bench, pushing Wilson into Marie into the girl next to her until the entire row was upset. "Well, fill me in."

"Mr. House," Professor McGonagall said in the aggravated, tired voice she had come to use around House. "Would you please return to the Ravenclaw table?"

"Talking to my partner," he replied, and McGonagall shook her head and tried to ignore him. Wilson was impressed. "So c'mon," House prodded, both in voice and with a light rap of his stick. Wilson tried to concentrate on his steak.

"I didn't tell you because there's nothing you can do."

"Try me."

Wilson tried to keep focused so House couldn't see his face. "You want the symptoms?"

"Yeah."

"Okay: unconsciousness, cessation of natural healing, and catching on fire both after being doused in a magical potion containing an ashwinder egg."

"A what in a what-what?"

"Exactly."

"Hmm…"

Then the strangest thing happened. House simply stood up and walked away. Wilson watched him leave, a perplexed expression on his face.

"Did we miss something?" Ian asked between bites of his food.

Wilson shook his head to clear the fog. "I was wondering the same thing."

They all missed the look of intense concentration that had taken over House's face as he had turned away.

"Good morning, class, good morning!"

The first year History of Magic class woke with a start as the cheerful, peppy voice of Professor Sprout greeted them at the start of class instead of that of Professor Binns. They passed one another looks, confused, drowsy looks, with no idea in the least as to what could be going on. Was this right?

Wilson remembered meeting her on his first day of school. "I just couldn't turn away from Minerva and Albus' Hogwarts House idea, I suppose," she had told him as she had escorted the first years to their new, interim common room. "If you ask me, it's the most Hufflepuff-ish idea either of them have ever had, and I'd be darned if I wasn't a part of it. So I guess I'm in a slow retirement – slower than old Horace, anyways. I just tend to the first years and poke my head into the greenhouses in case Professor Longbottom needs an extra pair of hands. But this is my last year, it's been fun but it's far past time for me and the husband to settle in and grow a garden of our own. Now I remember a time when—"

"Professor," he had interrupted when he noticed the same painting go by on the wall for a second time. "Aren't we going in a circle?"

"Oh, nonsense, James, just keep following me."

He had, and the rest of the class followed him, back and forth down a hallway until, suddenly, there was a door on a wall where there hadn't been a door before. The Professor opened it into a cozy little room with two fireplaces and the Hogwarts crest woven into a soft rug on the floor. As the students hobbled in after them, Professor Sprout just smiled.

"This is an important room, Dr. Wilson, you have no idea. And perfect for dormitory duty. No one who doesn't belong here will ever be able to find it. That's what we asked it to do and that's what it'll do. And besides," she said, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial tone. "We thought it'd be better if we kept a firm hand on the disappearing rooms instead of letting the students have them, don't you think?"

Since Professor Sprout had made it clear she was only still at Hogwarts to babysit them as their Head of House, they were naturally surprised when same came into the room and took to the lectern at the front, along with a pile of thin, hardcover books.

Ian, having kept his surprise under control, raised an eyebrow. "What's the matter, ma'am? I hope the Professor isn't sick or something."

Sprout swatted a hand at the air in his direction. "If Professor Binns is sick with anything it's not learning new material." She waved her wand at the pile of books, which flipped themselves across the classroom to land directly on each student's desks. The book, with a cover design that looked surprisingly more modern than the rest of the textbooks Wilson had brought with him, read "Recent Wizarding History".

"We found out about four years ago that Professor Binns either cannot – or refuses to – teach anything that happened after Grogan Stump stopped being Minister for Magic almost two hundred years ago. We figured it was time to step in."

"You're sacking him?" asked David, a little too enthusiastically.

"Oh, my goodness, no." A few students groaned. "No, for the next two weeks, I'm going to be assisting Professor Binns by teaching you—" she held up the book and repeated "recent wizarding history. From the 1800s to today."

There was a sudden bustle of sound as the students began trying to out talk one another to get each of their questions to Professor Sprout. Wilson found, as he often did, that only he – and Marie, cowering in her desk almost as usual – were the only quiet ones. Somehow, it seemed, Professor Sprout pieced through them.

"Yes, yes, children, we will be learning about Lord Volde— Lord Volder—… oh, bother, I guess old habits do die hard." She collected herself. "Yes, we will be covering the rise of both Grindelwald and You-Know-Who in due time." There was a collective groan this time. "In the meantime, please open your textbook to its first chapter, 'A Hundred and Three Defining Events of 1807'."

Before Professor Sprout could put the finishing nail the coffin of hopes in an interesting History of Magic class, Wilson was rescued by a frantic, breathless second year boy at the door.

"I'm sorry… Professor Sprout… but Madame Pomfrey wants to see Dr. Wilson in the hospital wing immediately!"

Wilson looked to Professor Sprout, whose surprised face nodded once, and he was off, down the halls, zig-zagging through staircases towards the slowly elevating sound of an enraged voice.

"James!" she shouted the moment he entered. "Stop him immediately!"

Wilson surveyed the room. Madame Pomfrey's cheeks were puffed and red from all the shouting and not far from her was House, leaning over Clayton Tanner's unconscious body, a tongue depressor in the boy's mouth. House looked up.

"Wilson, would you shut her up? She's bothering me."

Wilson suppressed a sigh as he went to House's side to remove his arm. "It's all right, Madame Pomfrey, he's just pushing his tongue out of the way to look at his throat."

Her eyes seemed to bulge. "He has no right to… stick things into my patients! He… he…" Wilson took his friend's arm and ushered him towards the door. House grinned at Madame Pomfrey and gave her a little wave. "I never want to see you in here again you savage…thing!"

Wilson shut the door behind him.

"Well," he said to House, "not every day you get kicked out of a hospital for being a 'savage thing'."

House blinked and looked at Wilson closely. "Are you sure you've met me?"

Wilson rolled his eyes. "Right. Anyways, didn't I warn you about—"

"The burns don't stop at his face, you know." Wilson stopped mid-sentence, surprised, and House continued. "He looks like the world's worst fire-eater in there."

"I thought you wouldn't care,"

"Are you kidding? You throw a handful of technobabble at me and expect me to just walk away from the mummy in there?"

"Would you please?" said an angry voice just slightly down the hall. There, sitting on a bench, the two doctors found Alice Stone, who looked like she had been crying.

"Ah, yes, the girlfriend," House said as he hobbled towards her.

"Excuse me?" Alice managed indignantly as she wiped her eyes.

"Oh, pardon me," House said as he came to a stop. "You know school gossip. Teenagers have such a bad habit of misinterpreting people who cry by injured people's doorstops for days at a time like a lost puppy."

"I wasn't—" she started before a sniff caught her off. "It's my faul—look, what do you want?"

"Is it possible that your totally-not-boyfriend got any of the potion into his mouth before it roasted his face like an overcooked… Wilson, do they eat turkeys here in England?"

"House…"

Alice, gathering her strength bit by bit, put on a stronger face. "Why should I tell you?"

"I'm his doctor," House replied.

Wilson coughed and turned away. "Not any more you're not."

House closed his eyes. "Madame Pomfrey and I are having a disagreement on procedure."

"Actually, I don't think you were ever his—"

House wedged himself onto the bench beside Alice between words. "Are you one of those wizards that freak out when I tell them I've reached inside of a human body before and cut into the intestines and fun stuff like that?" He smiled broadly. "Because that's never going to get old."

Alice pulled back a bit. "No… My parents are Muggles, I have a doctor back home."

"Oh." House looked disappointed but then suddenly, so fast it was disarming for Wilson as well as Alice, snapped back to crude, sharp and strictly demanding, hand gesturing towards her face: "Did he get any of the potion in his mouth?"

Alice's eyes went panicked and her hands went to her temple. "I don't know! I don't know, it was all so sudden and then he was on the ground with his hands on his face and maybe…" she caught her breath. "Maybe one of his hands was on his mouth."

House took to his feet and walked away at as fast a pace as he could manage, and Wilson looked back and forth between the distraught girl and the purposeful cripple before following the latter.

"What was that all about?" he asked as he caught up.

"Your voodoo priestess says the mummy-man should be on his feet by now, right?"

"Madame Pomfrey isn't a voodoo—"

"So I say he's still unconscious because he drank some kind of magic potion."

Wilson stopped suddenly at the force of House saying something sensible for the first time in months – since long before the Hogwarts adventure had begun. What if something in Clayton's potion had put him to sleep? It certainly did not seem like the behaviour of a love potion but maybe… House was walking away fast.

"Where are you going?" he called after him. House turned.

"This is a school, isn't it?" House pursed his lips and looked around innocently as if to make sure. "I'm going to study!" And then he turned a corner and was gone.

If he hadn't have been living at Hogwarts for the past few months, House would have been impressed by Professor Slughorn's party arrangements, but meal after meal served across five exquisite banquet tables left any other arrangement of food paling in comparison. Still, Slughorn had tried his best, and there was a large table layered with food on multi-tired silver platters and an elaborate fountain centerpiece that spouted a red juice. Juice. Not wine, House ruminated. He could dream, but he knew better than that. Across the wall behind the table was a banner that read "HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANISHA". More curious, however, was the spread itself: a set of dishes almost entirely taken from Indian cuisine. House, having long missed the strip of restaurants and pubs not far from Plainsboro, had a plate full of tandoori chicken in his hand and a jaebi in his mouth before anyone seemed to notice him at all.

"Doctor House!" came Slughorn's voice from the back. House had attended a grand total of one class with the old man and had met outside only the one time, but it was a voice you did not forget. "So good you could make it! We've already lost Miss Stone, it wouldn't help to lose another, would it?" House, still with his back turned to the other, raised an eyebrow. From Wilson's description of him, House had expected Slughorn to ignore him as a talentless Muggle, but he wondered if the "expert diagnostician" thing had gotten out.

"I see you're enjoying some of our food. Excellent! The Slug Club has been spending the past few birthdays this year enjoying bits of our heritage through food and song!" House, for the first time, realised that a highly traditional Indian tune was ambient in the room, as if without source. His eyes instinctively scanned the room to find a speaker. "I hope you or Dr. Wilson would be so kind as to join us on one of your birthdays so we can share in a little of the American experience!"

House's wandering eyes settled on Anisha Waldron, whom he knew through the ramblings of his tail-like talking appendage (Toby) to be Hogwarts' newest Quidditch prodigy and Gryffindor team captain, responsible for their 175-45 victory over Slytherin in the season opener. While she was visibly of Indian descent – House felt fairly confident he could guess what region her family had once lived but that would just be showing off – House managed to catch her look of disbelief in Slughorn's direction and mild confusion towards her plate, shaking her head and muttering "My parents are from Surrey! I don't even know what these are!" Slughorn neither seemed to notice or care, more intent on having a good, if irrationally themed, party, and House was perfectly content to join in. More food for him, after all.

The professor had returned to whatever he had been saying when House had entered the room. House recognized a few of the people around him from a few of his Ravenclaw/Slytherin doubles classes: Sasha Dashkov, whose parents worked for the Department of Sports and Games after lengthy and highly decorated careers in international Quidditch. Joshua Kiryu, the first member of his family to leave Honshu (on the back of a huge wad of cash from his father, an executive for Mitsubishi, who was absolutely determined to get him into "the best wizarding school in the world"). Then there was Nathaniel Marsh, a spirited nobody with enough talent and business acumen that everyone knew he would one day transform his personal savings of three galleons, four knuts into a fortune to rival that of his two classmates. Obviously, Slughorn had taken a liking to them. House had too. House liked all the Slytherins.

"I think it was Christmas '72," the old professor was saying. "During Dumbledore's fanged mistletoe phase, of course. That was when the late Headmaster would line the halls with mistletoe plants that would pursue any couple that refused to share a kiss under them. It's a long story, but in the end Minerva managed to talk him out of it. That was the day I knew he would grow to be someone of great importance. True Minister of Magic material, that boy, and I knew it the moment he grabbed one of the wretched things out of mid air in his fist. In fact, I think that little incident highlights Minister Shacklebolt's political style as much as it does his tenure as an auror. Naturally, he would have never had made it to the auror's department without my help on his potions work, and while he's never exactly said thank you, I'm certain that—"

House had gritted through most of the speech because his mouth was full, but after he had had a bite or two of each item he realised just how little more he could take of this. He cut immediately to the chase:

"How can an embryonic ashwinder survive being immersed in a liquid solution consisting partially of absorbent?"

More than a few students looked up at him, Wilson among them, though House was certain at least two of them slunk further into sleep. Slughorn stopped dead mid-sentence.

"P-pardon?"

House grinned inwardly at the social spotlight he had just seized. "The burns on Clayton Tanner's face were caused by a fertilized ashwinder egg."

Wilson's face was a look of surprise but House could tell he was slowly losing the other students. Slughorn's face fell. "Yes, as far as I can tell. They only live an hour, it's not like they're built to lay eggs unfertilized."

"But burns don't explain the unconsciousness," House jibbed back, "which is why I've been spending the past few hours researching potions. Now, again, how does an embryonic ashwinder survive a solution consisting partially of magical absorbent?"

Wilson tried to shake away his confused stupor. "House, what are you talking about?"

House rolled his eyes. "Wilson… if you put something that's alive… into liquid… it drowns. You're not much of a doctor, are you?" Some of the students who were still looking gave him a half-shocked look and he groaned aloud. "Oh come on you pansies. When you use animal parts in a potion, they usually have to die first. That's what happens when someone plucks off your tail and puts it in their Sleeping Draught."

Slughorn's eyes were locked on House in a peculiar way, the edges of his mouth twitching, slowly, upwards. "Ah-ah, but an ashwinder—"

House held out a hand to silence him. "An ashwinder can't die of anything but old age and birth pains unless its fire is quenched, which—which!!" His hand snapped up again as Slughorn moved to interrupt him. "Which does not apply to a potion solution as a love potion is a 'Hot' solution according to Wu Xing-Greco combined potion theory, so its ingredients are designed to foster instead of douse heat and flames." Wilson's head hurt, and he rubbed at his temple as Slughorn moved again. "BUT! But, the absorbent I mentioned – when I started talking – would drain away the magic of the fire into the potion, killing the ashwinder unless the fire was unbelievably strong, which doesn't seem likely for a baby."

"House…" Wilson was sure he was getting a migraine from all this. "House, what does any of this…"

But Slughorn was on his feet, beaming like a kid on Christmas morning. "Excellent, Dr. House! Excellent! I say, who gave you the recipe for the potion we were making in class that day?"

House scratched at the back of his head. "No one did. I had to use Kleiner's formulas to reverse engineer most of it. Seemed faster than checking all seventeen Love Potions in Magical Drafts and Potions."

Slughorn's jaw slowly fell agape as Wilson's face screwed up and he mouthed "What?" to House, whose grin grew even larger. "Kleiner's formulas!" spouted the Potions Master, slapping House hard on the shoulder. "I waste half of the fifth year getting students to remember the formulas in time for the OWLs and I'm lucky if one of them even starts to comprehend them in time for sixth year." House looked disappointedly at the hand on his shoulder and said nothing. "Ah! Come, come!" Slughorn gestured the two of them to his desk and the party, such as it was, revived around their bubble as Slughorn began to talk over his food.

"You're very right, Doctors. The ashwinder that attacked Mr. Tanner should have died after it was put in the solution, but I'm afraid you may have over-researched the subject. I'm afraid most of Kleiner's fomulas don't apply to this situation. Here." He took a scrap of well-worn but quality parchment from his desk and handed it to House.

"'Potion Base'?" House read aloud, and Wilson leaned over his shoulder.

"Oh, right. You taught us this just last week, didn't you sir?"

Slughorn nodded. "You see, Dr. Wilson, Kleiner and Lurich's formulas are cornerstones of Potioncraft. They're the keys to understanding how to balance the ingredients of even the simplest potions. But like I said, even a fifth year student can't seem to choke down why we would have to change the Sprite Powder in a Pepperup Potion to Beetle Eggs just because they want to use Green Peppers instead of Red!" House scoffed and Slughorn chuckled, and Wilson just watched them with a raised eyebrow and a look of disbelief. "So you see my dilemma. Instead of trying to change the impossible, I – and my compatriots in all the magical schools I know of – use Potion Base until the students reach NEWT level and have to start creating their own recipes."

House returned to the paper and nodded. "This would cover most A to R level potions." He tossed it onto the desk. "But they'd have the shelf life of a… well, an ashwinder."

Slughorn grunted. "Normally I can grade a class worth of potions in under an hour of prep time, but…" He reached behind him to a shelf built into the wall, and withdrew a vial filled with a semi-solid green sludge that seemed to be growing boils, each topped with a small tuft of blond hair. "Mr. Nasen," he said with a cough as he dropped the thing to the table, "submitted his assignment more than a little late."

Wilson pulled back from the vial, covering his nose as the whole thing smelled like rotten meat, but House leaned forward, looked at it from a few perspectives, and then asked "Wit-Sharpening Solution?"

"Ironically enough."

House nodded. He seemed almost completely satisfied with what he had found and took what time was left in the conversation to tie up one last loose end. "Then just to count it out: there's no way anyone could have poisoned the potion deliberately?"

Slughorn shook his head. "Certainly not, you learn to keep a close eye on what goes into the vials when a class full of students is armed with potential explosives. Even when my back is turned I'm perfectly aware of what goes on in my classroom."

Wilson raised an eyebrow at that, but there was a satisfied pause between the two of the other two, which was broken when House abruptly stood up, took the Potion Base ingredients list, and started to leave.

"What?" Wilson was the one who spoke first. "House, where are you going?"

He held up the list. "I got what I wanted."

Slughorn, who had stood up just as Wilson spoke, sat down to his chair with a satisfied "Ah yes…" House saluted him a bit too enthusiastically with the paper and left.

"Still confused, Mr. Wilson?" Slughorn asked, and gestured to him to sit down, which he did only slowly and reluctantly.

"It's a simple second year concept, Dr. Wilson," he began. "Until a potion meets a certain, balanced level of ingredients, each with their own traits like 'absorbents' and 'preservatives' and…" seeing he was losing his audience, Slughorn shifted gears.

"I won't expect you to understand the details. The point is, until the proper balance is reached, a potion is just… a bunch of things floating in water! No magical properties at all. But if you add the right things – or the wrong things – it suddenly becomes a quite magical bunch of things floating in water. They keep their old properties – honey is still sweet, and so on, but they gain new ones, like the power to levitate whoever drinks it, or so forth. Sometimes the power doesn't come in the ways you expected. Like when your friend David's Strengthening Solution became lighter than air and floated out the window."

Wilson nodded once, then twice, slower, as it started to come to him. "So House thinks that Clayton added something to the potion base that made a… different potion? One that knocked him out?"

Slughorn nodded again and Wilson gritted his teeth, scowling.

"What's the matter?" the potions master asked.

"It's just House. House having to be… arrgh, having to be House!"

House paced about the Ravenclaw common room (the password was "What combination of tallow and sweetgrass produces a growth solution that is still considered appetising?" almost threw him until he realised it was another in a line of trick questions and that there was only one combination of tallow and sweetgrass that produced a growth solution at all. He wondered how on earth he had had trouble with these things before.). His face was constantly in a book – potions books, bestiaries, spellbooks – none of them his. While he normally simply stole the books from his studying classmates, he did, at least once, read over the shoulder of a fellow student who happened to be on the right page at the right time, until he out-read her and started turning pages. Toby followed in his wake, but kept a safe distance.

Finally, after four hours in which he seemed to gain more than a few wrinkles and had popped at least seven vicodin, he stamped his good foot on the floor and shouted at Rowena Ravenclaw. "What the hell kind of love potion knocks people out?" He set his teeth into a grimace. "What did it turn into?"

There was a deafening pause in the room, but he kept his death stare on the statue. Then, in a small, half-hearted voice, someone said "Sleeping Draught?"

House's eyes moved first, then the eyebrows, then the head, before he gave a sharp jolt of a turn and shook his cane arm dismissively. "You couldn't strengthen that recipe enough if you milked every Doxy from here to New York."

Another pause. "Petrification Dram?" suggested Toby, who had heard about it in Defence Against the Dark Arts. "It would keep him still, at least…"

"Oh, right, I forgot to check his skin to make sure it hadn't turned into granite. Very helpful."

"What about the Draught of Living Death?" said another.

"Oh please. You don't know what that does!"

"What about a Calming Draught, or the Draught of Peace?"

House stopped, then crossed the room to a group of fifth year girls. One of them, a girl a hand shorter than the others, spoke again.

"You're trying to figure out what happened to Clayton Tanner, aren't you?"

"What about them?" he said, pointing at her potions book.

"Well you were talking about strengthening a sleeping potion, and I thought that if everyone's looking for sleeping potions, wouldn't strengthening something sort of… like a sleeping potion it work too? So I thought about relaxing potions and…"

House snatched the fifth year Potions book from the girl next to him – earlier in the night he had taken one from one of her friends but had discarded it haphazardly into the middle of a group of second years – and began to skim the pages. To the girl's disappointment, he shook his head. "Calming Draught's stabilising ingredients would mess with the Potion Base/ashwinder mix and turn it into a… magical Superball." He turned a few more pages, and then settled on another page. He read for quite a while, eyes lowering. "There might be something to the Draught of Peace, though…" He looked up at her. "What does an ashwinder produce to power its fires? If it's an activator or maybe an enhancer for sleep medicines we might have something to go on."

She gave him the same befuddled look as Wilson had hours ago and his patience evaporated. Turning around, he found Toby and snapped his fingers at him. The boy looked confused and House prompted "Ashwinders!" Still confused. "Fourth year!"

Toby looked around, first out of panic and then… he snatched a fourth year Care of Magical Creatures textbook from a surprised classmate. The book lunged at him and there was quite a bit of a scene as the fifth-year girl had to rescue him from the wild tome before it did any permanent damage. House sighed.

"Forget it!" he said once Toby was back on his feet. "I've already read that thing's section on Ashwinders three times. Go to the professor and ask him." The three of them (the students and the book) stared at him like animals stuck in a headlight.

"N…now?"

"Yes now! What, is there a problem?"

Toby couldn't help but look around at the common room full of students staring at them. "I-it's almost midnight! It's against the rules!"

House scoffed. "Please. You, how old are you? What, sixteen?"

The girl blinked. "Fifteen."

"Good for you. Now come on, you can't expect me to believe you've never snuck out to meet some Gryffindor boyfriend or…" he looked around, as if remembering where he was, "…to visit the library or whatever it is you people do." She looked a little red in the cheeks but said nothing.

"Look," House said, draping his arm over their shoulders and slowly motioning them out of the room. "You do this and you'll be helping out a very sick person, and maybe if you're quick, I'll make you something as a thank you."

"Really?" Toby asked, perhaps a little too surprised.

"No!" House said with a gleeful, overacted smile, before shutting the door and leaving them outside in the hall.

Don't stop there! The rest of the chapter has already been uploaded and is just ahead!

By the way, that Fanged Mistletoe thing? It's obviously a reference to The Shoebox Project (which is a fairly popular HP fanfic, if you've never heard of it), and I figured I'd point that out here instead of in my author's notes at the end!