Chapter Three: 19th Nervous Breakdown
Prince's Potions, Wizarding Liverpool, 2000
I: Hermione
Remus Lupin's counsellor, whom Albus had compelled her to go and see, at least once, had suggested that, during the time she studied for finals Hermione do something to get her mind off the upcoming tests.
He did not consider the hour or so she spent at Snape's watching telly with Ron and Harry enough.
Hermione thought the man was an idiot, but she had to visit him four times, to satisfy the conditions of her being allowed to commence her apprenticeship, following what she considered a minor hiccup in her mental health, and everyone else seemed to think of as a psychotic break with reality.
Hermione really didn't see why she needed psychological counselling, at all.
After this final, she'd be right as rain, after all.
So what if she had a panic attack, every night, at precisely three-thirty?
And if the most recent ones had been a bit more extreme, well that was because the most important event of her whole entire life was on the horizon, and that fucking miserable old Scouser bastard Snape was in charge of it.
Mr. Hornswoggle, that was the wizard's name, of all things, he seemed quite concerned.
Especially after she admitted to him that for the last month all she had eaten was chicken soup, yogurt, bananas, rice and turkey sandwiches, which was not bad in and of itself, but, coupled with the fact that during her last panic attack her whole body had gone numb and her heart was pounding so fast that in the morning when she woke up all her muscles were stiff and sore and her chest ached, he was quite upset.
He was quite upset?
He wasn't the one who thought he was having a heart attack at 21, and he didn't have to suffer the embarrassment of being rushed to St. Mungo's by Albus Dumbledore and then diagnosed with anxiety.
Hornswoggle's came to see her at St. Mungo's, where she was being kept overnight for observation, and he expressed the opinion that Hermione already knew everything she might need to know, and for the sake of her health and her sanity, she should get out of her room and away from her books and the Hogwarts labs, indeed, away from Hogwarts, altogether.
Hermione took his advice, and went home to Liverpool, to her concerned parents.
Out of her room, away from her books, and into the lab at Prince's Potions.
However, Severus Prince trumped her attempt to continue to obsess over the final, and sent her upstairs to man the counter and take care of customers, with Snape's mother, Eileen, keeping an eye on her.
Hermione, however, was not the type to work in retail, so Eileen sent her to the stockroom, where she was given the task to supervise the stockboys.
The stockboys turned out to be aa familiar duo she hadn't seen for a few years.
Vince Crabbe and Greg Goyle.
When she got to the stockroom, on the day before the dreaded event, they were both sitting around a packing crate, wearing smart overalls that had their names printed on one breast pocket and "Prince's Potions" on the other, along with matching flat caps.
They were having tea.
She had to admit, it was probably the best possible job for both of them.
It didn't take a lot of brains, they wore the same thing every day, it gave them the opportunity to get a lot of exercise, and either their former housemaster or a member of his family was around to keep an eye on them at all times.
"'Ermione! I heard you went urf your nut! Wotchu doin' ere?" Crabbe asked.
"Just helping out around the shop. I'm supposed to supervise you two."
"Oh. Well this is out tea-break. Union says so. Do we call you Ms. Granger, then?" Goyle replied.
"No, Hermione's fine. Let's see, here. According to this manifest, you're to unload six barrels of dragon's blood in tincture of wolfsbane after tea, and then you're to re-arrange the herb stock so the boxes expiring first are in the front. I suppose I'm just supposed to sit at this desk and watch you."
"Yeah. That's wot supervisors do."
Hermione sat at the desk, with a large ledger in front of her.
She worked out all the maths quite quickly, and opened the desk.
There was a magazine inside it, a copy of Gay Grimoire that was probably Goyle's.
Hermione stuck it inside the ledger.
One thing about these gay boys magazines, they always featured really good looking blokes in unbelievable states of arousal.
And since Snape was still having some kind of snit, she wasn't getting any.
She was thinking, in the back of her mind, about what the hell it was Snape could possibly have cooked up for tomorrow.
Then, she began to get engrossed in the dirty magazine.
Nothing like sex to get your mind off of everything else, especially when you're really feeling randy.
"…Ermione?"
Hermione realised Goyle was standing right behind her, and she closed the ledger with a bang.
"WHAT?"
He chuckled.
"Old Snape cut yer off, 'eh? Draco's like that. Has his snits. With me an' Pansy. We figure, bollocks, you'll not get the best of me. Me, I just crawl under the desk. What's 'e gonna do? Ask me to stop?"
"Erm, yes. Good point. Well, look at the clock! I see it's quitting time. Here's your magazine back. Erm…sorry."
"Naw, you keep it. Take yer mind urf your troubles."
She inspected their work, and got a cheerful goodbye, and with the magazine Goyle had so generously given her, went back to her house.
Hermione and the skin mag were having a lovely evening when there came a heavy and insistent pounding on her door.
"WHAT?" she cried.
The magazine flew from her hands, she shoved it under her mattress, and then straightened out her clothes and squirted a whole bunch of that hand sanitizer stuff her mother had gallon jugs of everywhere into her hands, and cleaned herself up.
"I'll be right there!"
Her caller, however, was so rude as to just let himself in.
And Hermione had told her mother and father and even Winky that the last person she wanted to see the night before her final was Severus Tobias Snape.
"Granger, I want you to spend the night at my house." He insisted.
Hermione didn't appreciate his manner.
"Look, Snape, right now, I'm not your student, I'm not your apprentice, and depending on how your suddenly tender feelings are resting, I'm not your bird, either. That gives you absolutely zero say on where I go or what I do, so fuck off."
"Look, Granger, I have already accepted you as me apprentice, and you'll quit being my bird when I tell you that you have and not before it! Furthermore, I fucking well know you, don't I? You'll spend half the night worrying, forget to eat, and end up at that lab table at three in the morning so exhausted you'll blow something up and have to spend the rest of the night cleaning up. Couldn't you just , oh, for once not give me your usual GBH on the ears and say yes?"
"Fuck off." Hermione reiterated.
"I'll sack you!"
"Without cause? I'd like to see you try it!"
"What do you want me to do, Granger? Ask nicely? Beg? Speak with a posh accent? You're more fucking trouble than you're worth!"
"If I have to tell you what I want you to do, then you are getting old." Hermione sniffed.
Snape narrowed his eyes at her and sneered, his gold teeth glinting piratically in the soft light of the candelabra chandeliers.
Hermione considered a quick divesto, and then taking Goyle's advice.
But, them Snape delivered his next shot across the bow.
"Oh, right. It's about your IPD, then."
"My what? What's IPD?"
"Itchy Pussy Disease! That's your problem, Granger. If you're not so far into your own head that you've got it stuffed right up your arse, then you're being led around by your pussy. You'd think someone with a brain like yours would be a bit smarter, but not you!"
For a moment, Hermione was gobsmacked by the sheer hypocrisy of Snape's words.
Then, she locked the door, warded it, cast a quick Silencing Spell, and commenced to howl in outrage.
"Me! You manky old Scouser git! You fucking hypocrite! You first got your greens before you came to Hogwarts first year,, and you've devoted much of the rest of your misspent life too keeping your big neb right in it! You're a fucking Third Degree Sex Magus, and you personally founded a cabal for the sole purpose of getting high and shagging! Sure, maybe the lot of you 70's burnouts don't get high anymore, but when's the last time you missed an Order of the Satyr meeting? An' you could 'ardly 'elp being led around by your cock, could you? I mean, it's a wonder you don't pass out when you get it up; there's no blood in your brain, then, for sure, so I know what you're thinking with! You've got a lot of fucking nerve, Snape!"
"Being a Sex Magus is a time-honoured and complicated discipline, concerned with the most elemental and powerful kinds of magickal forces." Snape protested, with as much dignity as he could muster.
"Yeah. And I suppose so is rumping Narcissa Malfoy or Sibyl Trelawney with a preposterous pair of horns and a silly mask on with Led Zeppelin records on in the background, while Remus Lupin talks to Luke Mlafoy about the Good Old Days whilst Malfoy's shagging whichever of said two witches that you haven't got your dick in and Arabella Baxter gives Loony Moony a blowjob! Oh, right, I'm sure that's all quite powerfully fucking elemental! You fucking tosser! You bleedin' hypocrite! What kind of a fool d'you take me for? Now, listen, you! This is how it's going to be, Sev. If you want me to come play housie-housie with you, so you can see I'm all tucked up snuggy-warm in beddie-bye the night before the unspeakably fucking torturous litany of despair of a final I'm sure you've dreamed up for me, then you're going to have to come across, aren't you? And you had better make it elemental and powerful, by the gods, because I'm not prepared on a night like this to accept disappointment!"
"You've put a lot of thought into what goes on at Order of the Satyr meetings, haven't you, Granger?"
"Why not? Since you've all the sudden developed tender feelings, thinking is all I've been able to do!"
Snape's face broke into a wry smile.
"Granger, you are cold, calculating, cruel, insulting, disrespectful, snarky and obsessed with shagging. You're a right nasty little piece of work. You really should have been in Slytherin."
"There's only one snake I'm interested in, Snape, and you've got it right here."
From the look on his face, Hermione could see that Snape didn't believe she had just upped and grabbed hold of the ol' cobra right in her parents house, but then again, Hermione couldn't believe she had, either.
"Granger! For fuck's sake, leave it out! You'll get to keep it in a box, forever, if your father catches me using it on you, He'll chop it off and eve me bleed to death on the landing!" Snape protested.
Hermione let him go, but it was far too late.
"Uh-oh. The snake's awake." Hermione laughed.
Good for the old tosser, let him be embarrassed.
Snape untucked his shirt, and started pulling it down.
"That's not going to work. Try thinking of something disgusting."
He gave her one of his angriest looks, and Hermione came very close to slamming him against the door, unzipping his flies and going down faster than the Titanic.
"Go downstairs and get me coat. Then we'll go."
"Are we agreed?"
Snape thought about what he had in mind for the final, or at least that's what Hermione assumed he was thinking of, due to the diabolical way he grinned.
"We're agreed."
Snape's House, West Darby, Liverpool. Just About Midnight.
Hermione struggled for breath the way a drowning woman would, what breaths she had coming in pants and explosive gasps.
Be careful what you wish for, Hermione, because, fuck, are you getting it.
The hard way.
Her arms and her legs almost ached from holding Sev so tight against her; but she was so far from anything resembling pain that someone could have hit her with a board and she wouldn't have felt it.
The sheets were twisted, they were soaked with sweat; they had sweated straight through to the mattress, and Sev's breath was coming in harsh gasps in time with his rhythm, with their rhythm as they moved together, in furious and fluid motion.
Propulsive.
Beads of sweat in fat drops rolled from the tendrils of Snape's hair and dropped onto Hermoine's face and her chest, a few onto her lips, warm and salty.
Her eyes flew open because she couldn't keep them closed, and there was a sound, a rattling, pounding sound, it was Snape, beating his fist against the wall.
Something was about to overtake her.
It was, of course something like an orgasm, but it was nothing like one, on the other hand, and it very well could have been either unconsciousness or death.
She started to cry out for him.
"Sev! Sev!"
Snape pulled her up off the mattress and clasped her against his thin, broad-shouldered, wiry chest; she could feel his heart hammering against her breastbone, writhing against the mat of hair and tattoos on his chest.
"Hermione!" he gasped.
She opened her eyes, again, and the horns were there.
That was when the approaching something arrived, and Hermione cried out.
It wasn't death, it was indeed an orgasm, but they were going to have to invent another word for it, because that little word and the short but happy moment of pleasure it denoted was nothing compared to the wave, the force, the emotion that was breaking over Hermione.
This was what the atom felt like as it was being split; this was the moment of nuclear annihilation; the joy of Armageddon.
No, that was too nihilistic.
What was it she had once thought?
A great golden copulation; like the one that had happened at the beginning of time.
Slowly, Hermione slid through time and space and a thousand millennia later she was lying on her back on the disordered bed, and Sev was lying beside her.
"Sev, what the…"
"Don't say anything, Hermione. Go to sleep."
Hogwarts School of Wirchcraft and Wizardry, Snape's Dungeon Lab, the next day.
I: Hermione
The night before, Hermione slept like a dead person, and all morning the rosy glow of the absolute best lay she'd ever had clung to her.
Now, however, with her Merlin School apprentice candidate's robes on, in Snape's lab, panic had set in, and was crawling around in her guts and her belly like an ever-dividing virus.
They were alone, completely alone, and Hermione rubbed her sweaty palms on her still faintly mouldy-smelling robe as Snape locked and warded the doors using a spell in Old Elvish that she didn't know.
"Are you ready, Granger?' she asked.
"I'm ready. Snape." She replied.
Cooly, Snape reached into the pockets of his robe, and pulled out a small leather pouch.
He unfastened the tie around it, put it to his lips, and drank the contents.
The empty pouch sat in his hand.
"Incendio." He said, and with a bright flash of blue flame, it burnt to a pile of ashes that he blew into the air to disperse.
Then, to Hermione's great horror, his black eyes became narrow points of panic, and bulged out of his head as he clutched at his chest and fell to his knees.
"Snape!"
Hermione rushed to catch him.
"Granger…I have just poisoned meself…you have three hours to save my life. Begin."
Snape convulsed, managed a grin, and slipped into unconsciouness.
A viscous green liquid began to drain from his mouth, eyes and nostrils, his body convulsed, and then he was quite still.
So, she thought, that explains last night; the old boy knew there was a chance he was having his last shag, so he wanted to make it a good one.
Well, if he lives through this, I'll show him, I'll fuck his IQ ten points lower, I'll screw so far into next week that he'll end up in last month.
Following these completely irrational thoughts, the first thing Hermione did was to lower Snape gently to the ground, and then proceed to completely shit herself.
For a moment, as she rushed to the door and began pounding on it and screaming, her heart smashing brutally against her ribs, Hermione very nearly shit herself, literally.
She screamed for help, and for Dumbledore, and for Great Thor and Mother Danu and Father Zeus and Gentle Jesus and God, God, God and just about anyone else who came to mind before she realised that there was going to be no help, and if she wanted to ever see Snape alive again, let alone graduate from the Merlin School or become Snape's Apprentice, it was all up to her.
She picked up a quill and a piece of parchment.
"Right. Well, no point in going through all this shit. Now, the old tosser he burnt up the vial, so I can't analyse it. I'll just have to make some observations. That's all. Now. Subject is a white male, forty years of age. Long history of drug and alcohol abuse, ending when subject was in his early twenties. He is approximately six feet and one inch tall, weighs about. 12 stone. Subject has exuded greenish mucous from most of his orifices…let me check… all of his orifices. Poisoning was accompanied by classic shock symptoms, chest pain, shortness of breath, and heart palpitations. Also mild seizure. It has been about….five minutes since poisoning. Subject's respiration is shallow, pulse is sluggish. Greenish mucus has stopped, but subject has swelled up, considerably and has turned black."
Having made her observations, Hermione got several vials from the lab table, and a box of cotton swabs.
She took samples of the green muck from all the places it had come out of, and skin samples from four places, and also a swab from Snape's tongue.
She went into his former bedroom, got a pillow, and put it under his head, then went to work, talking to herself as she worked, in case Snape had a recording spell of device in use.
"I will be running the usual procedure on each of the samples using the Elementals Test. I will begin with combing each of the thirteen samples of poisoned skin and mucus, and the saliva sample subject with all the traditional alchemical reagents antimony, arsenic, copper, gold, iron, lead, magnesium, phosphorus, platinum, silver, sulphur, tin, and zinc, in separate vials."
It took Hermione the better part of an hour to arrange 168 reagent experiments, which, she noted, just in case, was also Snape's body weight, 168 pounds.
She checked on Snape.
His condition was unchanged.
"Now I will subject each reagent experiment to the four elements. I will use dragon's blood and a butane flame for Fire, riverwater from the muddy Mersey for Water, soil from Stonehenge for Earth, and for Air, when necessary, I'll take a deep breath and blow."
Another hour passed as Hermione completed the tests, and carefully examined the results of 168 vials.
Chewing her lower lip, Hermione began to write, and speak.
"Now we are getting somewhere. The only tests that were conclusive were the green mucus with Fire and copper, as well as Earth and platinum and the black skin samples with gold and Water and lead and air. Now, according to Caglilostro's First Law, the correspondence of Earth, Water, Air and Fire in these proportions with the metals copper, platinum gold and lead are a signatory of Old Elvish magic. On further examination of the separated elements of the green mucus, I have detected the presence of mithril, or, as it is known in modern times, adamantium. In its solid form, adamantium is the world's strongest metal, but it is very rarely used, because it is highly unstable and toxic in its liquid form. It is useful as an alloy only with platinum or titanium, which the Elves made use of in the past and still do to make their adamantium-alloy weapons, which are also known as mithril. Due to this analysis, I can say with almost absolute certainty that Professor Snape has ingested a vial of pure liquid adamantium. He is suffering from mithrilliasis, which will become fatal in one hour. There is no known cure."
Hermione chewed on the end of the quill.
Then it hit her.
The long shot.
She quit writing, quit trying to keep the lab looking neat.
She had three mithril mixing cauldrons bubbling at once.
In one was melting platinum.
In the other were athelas leaves in a solution of wolfsbane and orange oil.
In the third, and most foul smelling was a piece of the skin of Nagini boiling in the snake's hot and liquefying fat, with a pinch of bitter green wormwood rapidly dissolving.
As each small cauldron reached their boiling points, Hermione combined them in one large cauldron, and mixed, repeating over and over again the same spell that Snape used with his Elvish ointments to erase the wounds of sectumsempra, and to erase the marks of particularly nasty hexes that his students in Slythern house sometimes threw at each other.
She stirred and stirred until she ended with a pot full of a thick greenish paste that smelled of wormwood and oranges.
Hermione hefted the cauldron off the table, took a little of the paste and brought it to a boil.
Once it liquefied, she put it into a syringe and injected it into the crook of Snape's arm, right in the scar left by his years of drug abuse.
The swelling left his body, and his skin resumed its normal color.
Then, she quickly undressed him, and all the while saying the spell, she rubbed every bit of the ointment all over him, from head to foot, leaving no part of his body uncovered.
She even rubbed it in his hair, from root to tip.
Snape opened his eyes.
And not while she was rubbing the ointment into his hair, either.
"Good. You figured it out." He said.
"I hate you, you fucking old tosser!" Hermione told him.
She didn't however, hate him enough to let go of what she had hold of.
"Granger, the recording spell is still in effect."
"Is it? Well, then what you are going to submit to the Merlin School's board of regents is about to get very fucking interesting."
For, as Snape had returned to the land of the living, just as it did when he awoke from a long sleep, that part of the body which Harry referred to as "the Firebolt" and Snape was prone to call "the Cobra" also awaoke, happy to greet this bright new moment of rejuvenation, especially considering the familiar ministrations of a pair of hands the snake knew very well.
Moving aside her ceremonial robes and her less than ceremonial cotton knickers, Hermione, as they say in the Quidditch locker rooms, hopped on the broomstick.
Snape gasped.
So did Hermione.
"Shut your gob, you! Lie back and take it like a man, you asked for it."
"Can I say one more thing?"
"Go ahead."
The Potions Master took a deep breath in his regenerated lungs.
"DIVESTO!"
Albus Dumbledore's Office. Evening
II: Snape
"Remarkable. Completely remarkable. Let me get this right. You poisoned yourself with pure liquid mithril, and Miss Granger recreated your family's secret restorative ointment, purely through her work in these three hours, and restored you to full health."
"Yes. By my standards, then, she passed the test. I would show you with sound, Balthazar, but that would reveal the family secret. And that is something that the Princes only divulge to apprentices, children, husbands and wives. You understand." Snape explained.
"Yes, quite. Well, We'll be glad to have Hermione walk with her class at the matriculation ceremonies on May Day. As Valedictorian. Giving the valedictory speech, you know."
"Certainly, Balthazar. Well, Severus and I have an apprenticeship ceremony to plan, so if you will excuse us?"
"Of course, Albus. I have to be getting back to the school, anyway."
Balthazar McTeague, Headmaster of the Merlin School left Albus Dumbledore's office to make his way to the public apparition point and return to his school.
Leaving Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape alone in the Headmaster's office.
"Severus, I have to ask you, did you have some kind of back-up plan, in case Hermione failed to pass your test?"
"I didn't need one. I found out during the Second Wizarding War that I could trust Granger with me life. I was right, wasn't I? I had four hours to live, I gave Granger three, and she finished the job in two and a half hours." Snape proudly reported.
Albus didn't know whether to laugh, or cry, or scream at his foster son.
"You do realise you're mad!"
"Well…the door would have opened in three hours, and Hermione would have run screaming for help, and you and I both know that It would have taken me another half hour to suffer permanent damage, and up to another hour to actually die."
"Severus, you could have died at any time."
"Well, I didn't, Albus, now did I?"
Dumbledore sighed.
If Severus had anything else up his sleeve, he wasn't telling.
"How did Hermione do it?"
Snape re-activated the Thought Box
"Deductive reasoning. Experience. And taking a shot in the dark. Watch this part. She realised that the ointment is the cure, not the spell. As you know, the spell is just the Old Elvish translation of the ingredients, but spelt backwards. And there she is writing the words down. And now she's starting to make the ointment."
They watched through again until Hermione began undressing Snape so that she could revive him, and then the transmission abruptly cut off.
Albus blue eyes twinkled devilishly over his glasses at his son by law and magical bond.
"Well, Severus, that Thought Box transmission terminated rather abruptly, didn't it?" he said.
"Yes, it did. And if Granger ever really gets me pissed off, I'll send the excised portion off to the Tattler and the Daily Prophet." Snape chuckled.
He returned to his lap to find Treacher and Kreacher cleaning up the floor, and Harry cleaning the cauldrons and vials.
The place was a mess.
There were pools of green goo, and congealed ointments and gods only knew what else all over the floor, mucked in with ripped pieces of clothes, and the whole lab looked like a bomb had hit it, and was in disarray, with crusty cauldrons and goo and dirt and burnt up, soggy or filthy bits of potions and reagents everywhere.
The House Elves hard at work didn't dismay Snape, but since when did his son become Helpful Harry?
The Potions Master was immediately suspicious.
"Alright, Harry, what's the job? Did you and A Clockwork Weasley break your waterbed, again, and flood the whole house?"
"No job, Da. I mean, you've had a big day, and so has Hermione, so Kreacher and Treacher and I decided to tidy up the place for you. I mean, I was worried stupid about you all day. You might have died, you know. So, how was it?"
"Unbelivably painful and horrible. But I was unconscious very quickly."
"When did you come to?"
"While Granger was rubbing the restorative ointment on the ol' King Cobra. Don't worry about me, Harry."
Harry laughed, and he and Snape shared some conspiratorial nods, winks, nudges and obscene hand-gestures.
"That would have woke me up, alright. But how did the ointment get all over the floor?"
"Ask your crazy little mate, Granger. You know, I think what she did to me may actually constitute some kind of fucking crime."
"Bollocks, Da. You can't rape the willing."
"See. I told you that was some of what we was cleaning up." Treacher told Kreacher.
"Kreacher knows. You forget little brother, I work for the son. The apple has not fallen far from the tree. Very difficult, the laundry."
"Yes. Quite." Treacher agreed.
"I suppose I can trust you lot to clean up me lab. Mind you, if there's one thing out of place in the morning, I'll be putting me boot up all your arses. Now, if you'll excuse me. I'm knackered. I've a bed to catch."
Having had such a big day, Snape didn't bother walking to Hermione's cosy tower, he apparated there, and didn't care a monkey's if his action was illegal.
Hermione was tucked up in her bed, asleep, and after taking the third of three long, hot showers that day, Snape gratefully slid between the green and black sheets, happily finding the familiar comfort of nestling against Hermione Granger's nice warm bum.
"Snape?" she said, sleepily.
"I 'ope you weren't expecting anyone else."
"I wasn't."
She was about to roll over but he stopped her.
"Stay where you are, Granger. All I could think of when I swallowed that poison was that I'd be sleeping snug and safe curled up against your nice warm arse by night-time, so leave it right where it is."
"Did you have a back-up plan, Snape?"
"No."
"So you risked your life, for no reason?"
"No, Granger. I showed you that I trusted you enough to become my Apprentice by placing my life in your hands. And I devised the only test difficult enough for you to really demonstrate what your skills are. Beisdes, you know me. I am a wicked old screw. D'you think I would have risked my life if I wasn't sure you'd be able to pass my test?"
"You're mad, Snape. Completely over the fucking moon. You know, you almost killed me, fucking giving me a turn like that! Still, I expect we should be square, now. I mean, things ought to be alright between us, if you can put your life in me hands."
"Well, I suppose they are. But I'm still like as not going to be a real berk the next six months."
"You're always a real berk, Snape."
Snape was almost asleep when Granger spoke to him, again.
"Yunno, I don't know what it is I can't get me mind around. That you quite literally trust me with your life, or that I managed to pass that test. What if I hadn't? What would I have done if you'd died?"
"I wasn't going to die, Granger. It takes about four and a half hours for mithrilosis to do permanent damage, and five for it to kill you. If the door opened in three, that would have been plenty of time for you to run screaming to Albus, and for him to send for me Mum or me grandfather, and they would have brought the ointment."
"But, Snape, mitrillosis can be fatal within five minutes just as much as in five hours."
"What, after I've been fucking about with mithril cauldrons and Old Elvish potions that always have tincture of mithril in them? Kill me that quick? I knew it wasn't bloody likely."
"It was still a crazy, stupid thing to do. What if I'd failed? Then what?"
"I was going to poison you with something that would take three hours to kill you, and have you figure that out."
"I wish you would have. Better me than you, Snape. It was me own final, wasn't it."
Snape was rather surprised that the idea didn't seem to bother her, but he was too tired for further conversation.
Of course, a few minutes after he fell asleep, it struck Hermione that he expected her to risk death itself just to be his fucking apprentice, and she became furious, but she decided to let the old tosser sleep.
After all, they were going to have the next two years to bicker, fight, disagree and argue, and he had, in a way, almost killed himself on her account, today, so Hermione let it go.
For now.
