Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author.
Many thanks to AmyLouise for beta-ing this chapter for me.
Antidote, defined as a substance that can counteract the effects of poisoning.
The room was cold, save for the flame flickering slightly just beneath the cauldron. The cellar was cold, as it was beneath ground level—the perfect place for a potions laboratory. And yet, Snape did not care a whit for the potion, or how cold or hot the temperature of the room was. His mind was far away in a different part of London. His frown creased his brow heavily.
It had been two weeks since the day he had run into Harry Potter and Hermione Granger in the Leaky Cauldron, and ever since that day, there had barely been a moment in which he had not thought of Granger and the way she had looked. He had never seen the girl so thin before—her cheekbones were far too prominent, and the dark circles beneath her eyes gave her a haunted look, aging her incredibly. She was tired, weak, thin, and frail. But the thing that stood out to Snape the most was the knowledge that Hermione Granger was under the influence of something.
Snape knew exactly what it was like to be addicted to one substance or another, and how could he not, after all of his long years working in potions? He was a Potions master after all. Everything was at his disposal, and he knew how to brew just about every potion that had ever been created. In his youth, Snape recalled doing a great many foolish things, the least of which had involved abusing his person with drugs on a fairly regular basis.
And to him, Miss Granger looked like she'd had a run in with a junkie and decided to try on a new lifestyle.
The only thing that was left for him to decide now was what to do with this knowledge. If he was more responsible, or perhaps even an arse-kissing Ministry lackey, he might have reported her to them. As it was, he had no love for politicians, and a moral compass that was oddly in favour of not dobbing Granger in. It was lucky for her. One word from him and she would likely be expelled from her college studies, lose her apprenticeship, and likely end up a patient in the mental ward at St. Mungo's.
The thing that confused him most about this situation that he now found himself in were his own motives in keeping this information to himself. He had done much thinking, and the only conclusion he was able to draw was that a part of him actually did care about what happened to the Granger girl. He was certain that it was just the residual caring a teacher usually felt towards a student they believed had promise.
Or perhaps it was something more tangible than that, and something in him felt an undeniable kinship and similarity between the two of them. Just the fact that she was an intelligent woman who had obviously made a few poor decisions in her life made him feel like there was more in common between the two of them than he would have imagined.
Sighing heavily, he sat on the stool beside his workbench and rested his head on his arms, propped on the table top.
All of this thinking about the girl was making him feel a responsibility for her that he knew was influenced heavily by his own life. He was unsure how to approach the situation. Perhaps telling the great Harry Potter about it and letting him deal with the girl was the best option. Snape snorted to himself. As if Potter needed another thing on his checklist to feed his seemingly insatiable ego. He certainly could not see himself approaching Ronald Weasley. The red-haired buffoon wouldn't know what to do with that information. No, Snape thought, he would not be able to rely on the Weasley boy.
He considered Minerva McGonagall for a moment. If he were to tell her this in confidence and recruit her to assist him and liaise with Granger on his behalf, he could almost see the girl getting proper help. That plan would eliminate the social interaction element of helping the girl. He shook his head. What he needed to do was find a way to help her before she destroyed herself.
The logical part of him begged him to reconsider this plan. What in Merlin's name was wrong with him? What was Granger to him anyway? She hadn't been his student in years, and he couldn't think of all that many reasons why he should still feel obligated towards her.
He could only imagine, however, the reaction of the wizarding world if anyone were to discover Granger's condition. He knew the girl was unlikely to be receptive to any help from him. If he were to help her, he would require the assistance of someone whom she trusted. From his list of possible people, however, Harry Potter was the only logical choice. He was Granger's best friend, and of the two oafs she called friend, was the more intelligent of them. He would need Potter to engage with her emotionally and offer her support, while he figured out how to ween her off her drug before extracting it from her life completely.
He huffed and put a stasis charm on his potion, having made his decision. He cleaned the workbench, (and) placed the cauldron on a shelf along the back of the room, then made his way upstairs to his study. Summoning a folder of records, he opened it and revealed a motley of newspaper clippings and recorded conversations.
If the sources were to be believed, Granger had had a rough time of things both during and after the war. He was not fool enough to compare her struggles with his own, but he could certainly sympathise. She had lost a great many friends, had been badly injured in the final battle, her parents' minds had been wiped irreversibly of all memories of her existence, and nobody, as yet, had been able to retrieve them. Not even Miss Granger herself. This information did not make him like the girl, but he could understand her plight.
'Miss Granger,' he mused out loud to himself. 'Miss Hermione Granger.'
He shook his head and looked up from the news clippings in his hand. He hated the media, but had still kept every relevant scrap of information he could get his hands on about the first war with the Dark Lord, his fall, his return and his eventual demise. There was over 20 years of history, all kept within a sizeable black box. He sighed heavily and placed the clippings back into the folder, and went to return it to its storage space in the box beneath his desk. Leaving the study, he began to pace up and down the hallway, going from room to room, pondering this dilemma.
His biggest problem was the idea of having to involve himself with any of her friends. Hell, if there were a way to avoid her, he probably would. It wasn't as if he had anything against Granger as an individual, but his general dislike for social interaction meant that he didn't spend all that much time out in public, or talking to other people. However, the scared, vulnerable look in Granger's eyes that day when she had noticed him staring at her prevented him from giving her up as a casualty of the war and a lost cause.
Despite everything he had already sacrificed for the wizarding world, he felt that there was still some debt to be repaid for the ill he had committed. He felt that he owed it to Dumbledore, and everything the blasted, sympathetic old man believed in. He frowned and made his way back downstairs to his laboratory to work on his potion. He needed to get Granger out of his head for a while before she drove him round the bend.
He marched in and immediately flicked his wand in the direction of the bench to light the flame, and levitated his cauldron back over to the workstation also. As his potion base set itself up on the bench, he went into the storeroom and began pulling out herbs and roots to continue his work. He returned to the bench and first began adding sesame leaves, finely shredded, to the brew, noting the colour change to a dark, forest green. Over the course of that afternoon, he split the potion into three separate cauldrons and began adding different stimulants to each of the potions.
He added gotu kola and Vietnamese mint to the first cauldron. Many eastern Asian doctors had found that gotu kola was beneficial for assisting with concentration, mental performance, and increasingly good memory storage and recollection. To the second, he added peppermint and ginko biloba, to restore blood flow to the brain to allow improved use of oxygen, and for clarity of the mind once the physical facilities had been restored. In the third cauldron he added brahmi to improve impaired mental capacity, and yerba mate to act as an anti-depressant and increase concentration.
Once all of the cauldrons had been stirred properly, he lowered the heat beneath all of them so that they would simmer. Labelling the cauldrons carefully, he put separate protective wards around each of them. It would be a few hours until he saw any results, and he didn't want any inter-cauldron contamination. After making his notes, he headed back up the stairs and sat down in his study once more, picking up the Ars Alchemica and opening it to the last page he had been reading.
As he read the article, he felt a vague sense of familiarity in the writing style. It was an article detailing the different uses of dandelion extract and ginseng in medicinal potions, and how they were extremely beneficial. Skipping down to the bottom of the essay, he was not surprised to find that the author was none other than H. Granger. He closed his eyes and groaned. Every time he managed to stop thinking about the girl, she managed to worm her way back in shortly thereafter.
'There is no bloody escape!' he exclaimed loudly to the empty room. 'I barely even see or think about the know-it-all in over two years, and now it's like she's back with a vengeance, worming her way into everything.'
He slumped in his chair then, and after a few minutes, he acknowledged to himself how ridiculous it was even to be talking to himself as though there were some other person in the room. Tired and feeling the beginnings of a headache forming, Snape summoned a blanket from his bedroom, walked over to the chaise lounge near the empty fireplace and lay down to take a nap. He set himself an alarm to wake him before the potions needed to be attended to, and after a few minutes, the warmth of the blanket surrounding him lured him into a fitful sleep.
He dreamt of Albus and all of the people he knew who had died in place of him, watching himself wander through the dream as he came upon each of them, reaching out to him and asking him why they had died. His alarm woke him two hours later. He was slightly disgruntled from the dreams that had plagued him and all that they reminded him of—that he was alive, and people whom he considered far better than he, had perished.
He forcibly shook off the feeling and made his way down to the cellar to check on the potions. His thoughts would simply have to wait until later. Removing the protection charms around the first cauldron, he examined the contents carefully and ladled a sample into a flask to examine it. The colour had changed to an insipid chalky yellow and had a slightly thickened consistency. He was displeased with the result, and when he used his hand to waft the scent towards him, he could smell a slight hint of toothpaste.
He made a note of this in his journal and moved on to the second cauldron.
Taking down the protective spells, he repeated the process of ladling a sample and noted the continued see-through green colour of the brew with, again, a slightly minty scent. He felt that this was closer to the result he wanted, and put a stasis on the potion before levitating it to the shelf at the back of the room for storage. After repeating the process with the third, he found the colour was a dark blue, but the consistency was as liquid as the second potion had been. He kept this potion also, making notes in his journal in his neat but spikey hand, and began to clear away the contents of the first cauldron.
He rolled up his sleeves to keep them dry and grabbed a bristly brush to begin manually scrubbing the cauldron clean. As he scrubbed, the rest of the room magically set itself to rights with a quick, unspoken organisation spell from Snape, and he allowed his thoughts to wander once more. It returned immediately to the issue that was Hermione Granger. He knew his main objection to helping her revolved around her friends being something of a 'part and parcel' of the deal. If Potter and Weasley had not been the banes of his very existence for several years at Hogwarts, he would have significantly less to object to.
Stepping back from the sink, he cast a drying spell on the cauldron and returned it to its regular storage shelf.
Once everything was clean and tidy in the lab, he went upstairs to his study, and before he could give himself another chance to think or change his mind, he grabbed a handful of Floo powder from a jar on the mantle, and tossed it into the empty grate. Green flames sprang up from the logs resting in the clean fireplace, and he watched as the flames licked at the wood but did not burn it.
Kneeling down on the ground before it, he took a deep breath before plunging his head into the flames and making a call.
To be continued.
