A/N: I'm traveling this week and most of next week, so here's a bunch of chapters... pace yourselves!
Severus hadn't been at the Quidditch match, but he wished he had been. Not only had the Lovegood girl done the commentary, but Potter had spent most of the game shouting at his Keeper. Then the Keeper had commandeered a Beater's bat and sent a Bludger straight into Potter's face. He could've used a match like that.
Instead, he had run around the castle trying to corner Draco to no avail. Then, just after dinner, he'd been Summoned. It had been an informative but dull evening—Yaxley had been charged with infiltrating the Ministry but had not made much progress since the Aurors had tightened internal security, and thus it had been Yaxley that the Dark Lord had vented his frustrations on instead of Severus.
To top off the horrible day, he'd gone to Dumbledore's office to make his report and found the headmaster unconscious in his sitting room. It was obviously the curse. He'd rushed Dumbledore to the hospital wing, and he and Poppy had tried their best for almost a half an hour before the other Heads of House were called. The curse was in his blood and it was spreading, and Poppy said there was nothing to be done. They were treating symptoms, nothing more.
"Minerva," Severus said slowly. "I think you should go get Granger."
He glanced at Poppy, who nodded and sat down.
The Transfigurations Mistress looked up at him across the bed, her expression pinched. After a moment's hesitation, she nodded and left the ward.
"But what can Miss Granger do?" Flitwick asked, wringing his hands. The Charms professor had taken a seat in the chair by the bed. Poppy had the seat on the other side of the bed. The latest attempt had been something with a clever little charm to his shoulder, changing something in the way the headmaster's blood circulated; it hadn't worked, but it had tired the pair of them.
Severus didn't answer, turning to begin pacing instead. These two could keep a secret, certainly. He was more concerned about Hermione's reaction to the outing—she'd had enough trouble in his and Minerva's classes in the past month. It was difficult for Minerva not to treat her like a friend, and it was difficult for him to remember to cut her essays to shreds when all he really wanted to do was borrow her source material. She was a fair actress when it came to it, cutting off her spells halfway so she wouldn't appear too far ahead of the class in practical application.
But it was Dumbledore. They couldn't leave such a resource as her untapped. He'd sent her to Alexandria, after all. She'd studied curses and curse-breaking. And she was a Healer.
Hermione arrived in Minerva's wake, looking the very image of the model student. She had her student robes buttoned up over her weekend clothes, her hair loose around her shoulders. She looked as though she'd been doing homework in her common room, if the smudges of ink on her right hand were anything to go by.
What's happened? she asked him with a glance.
He's comatose. I found him in his office.
The curse?
Yes. It's spread up to his elbow now, but Poppy says it's getting into his blood.
So the timetable has shortened, then.
Yes. There is no way he will make it past August at the very latest. They'd been hoping for November, maybe even December. That would put Potter back in the school for his seventh year before things went to hell. Give them a better starting point, his being of age and therefore not as traceable by the Ministry (and the Death Eaters, since they very nearly controlled the Ministry, and definitely would do so once Dumbledore died).
Hermione cast her familiar diagnostics with a twitch of her hand, ignoring the confused professors.
"What have you done so far?" she asked Poppy. She pulled off the long black student robe, laying it over the foot of one of the beds. She had blue jeans and a white t-shirt on under the robes, clearly displaying the Cruciatus swirl in the crook of her elbow.
She usually maintained a Glamour to hide the little tells of her age, but she dropped it when she set the student robe aside. He felt something unclench in his guts; there she was. His wife. She didn't look like his wife so much in the student robes, with the Glamour in place and the false brightness in her eyes. It grated on his nerves. The blankness in her eyes now wasn't much better than the false innocence. He missed the Hermione that drank whiskey with him in his sitting room and then held him, cried with him.
It would've been better if she'd been able to take Polyjuice Potion made from her younger self's hair, but they'd never collected any.
"There isn't much to do," Poppy said, picking up the clipboard on the bedside table and looking it over. It listed the potions and charms they'd used, and the reactions from them. She handed it to Hermione, who looked it over, eyes scanning quickly, nodding as she went.
"And the initial point of contact was his finger, correct?" she asked him and Severus nodded. She had already known the answer to that; they'd spent hours debating the curse via letter over the fall term. They'd both wanted to research further, to test a few of Hermione's hypothesis developed after her studies in Alexandria, but the headmaster wouldn't hear of it.
Well now he's comatose. Severus thought petulantly. Hermione looked at him with a smirk in her eyes.
He can yell at us later.
She pulled the familiar wallet-sized fold of leather out of a pocket and returned it to its original size and shape, her satchel. She opened it and inserted her arm to the shoulder, searching for something. Flitwick cooed over the charms work from afar, curiosity thoroughly piqued. Sprout had spotted the swirl on her elbow and was frozen, staring.
Hermione extracted a total of four books, tossing the first three aside and quickly skimming through the index of the last one. Before long, she and Poppy were deep in a debate that went right over Severus's head, though he caught the general thread of it. They were talking about blood and blood vessels, mostly, and something about the magical components of bone marrow.
"Severus," Hermione said, spinning to pin him with a look. "Can you combine phoenix tears and ground bezoar without creating a poison?"
"Yes," he said, eyebrows drawn together. "There would need to be a—very specific—amount of hippogriff milk added as a base to counterbalance. The bezoar would need to be ground in gold with glass."
"My point was not that it couldn't be done, but that the counterbalance—hippogriff milk, apparently—would take more time than we have to calculate," Poppy said. She set the clipboard down on the bedside table with a clatter.
"We'd need to call Septima," Minerva said nervously. "And… the headmaster didn't want anybody to know about you anyway."
Hermione glanced at the Transfigurations professor only briefly before Summoning ink and parchment from her satchel, beginning to scribble. The Arithmantic nimbus began forming in front of her before she was done with the first line, wildly spinning, forming and reforming with each stroke of the quill. She paused, grabbed one of the books she'd discarded earlier, and flipped to a page somewhere in the middle, reading a few lines before going back to her scribbling.
Not five minutes later, the cascading nimbus had resolved into a perfect pyramid of lines and points. Each shining point was a glowing blue rune, the lines between the solid white of a balanced equation.
Hermione flicked her wand, dispelling the visual representation of the equation and handing the parchment to him. He could only vaguely follow the figures and formulas covering the page in her neat hand, but he knew enough to see that the work was absolutely correct.
"Four ounces," he read, looking at the bottom of the page.
"I told you," Hermione said. She had produced a hair elastic from somewhere and was ruthlessly tying her hair back into a bun. "Enough Arithmancy for a mastery, if he'd let me take the test." Her glance at the headmaster wasn't bitter, exactly, but it wasn't overly friendly either.
Severus shook his head, handing the parchment to Minerva so she could pretend to check the equation, too. Hermione began pulling ingredients out of her bag, standing her little black box of Healing potions and supplies on the bed by her discarded robes and opening its wings, rifling through the jars.
"I have bezoars somewhere," she muttered.
Severus Summoned his own kit from his chambers, walking over to Poppy's cabinets in the meantime to fetch the cauldron and other supplies he'd need. Grinding the bezoar would be tedious with a glass pestle, but it would reduce the likelihood of contamination that silver or pewter would introduce.
"Do you know if he was doing anything on his own to treat it?" Hermione asked. "Anything for the pain, even?"
"No," Severus said.
"No, he was very careful about what he was doing. He said he didn't want anything to fuddle with his brains," Poppy said. "He wasn't taking anything for the pain. Just the potion you made him, Severus, to keep it contained."
There was a numbing element in that potion for the pain specifically because the old man would never willingly take anything for it otherwise. Proud old fool.
His things arrived from his chambers, and Severus set to work in his impromptu Hospital Wing lab. He'd transfigured one of the beds into a work table.
The hippogriff milk would be the base. Then add the paste made from the ground bezoar and phoenix tears. That would have to simmer for awhile, until the whole concoction was the consistency of yogurt. Then he could start adding the rest.
"One or two?" Hermione asked, holding a vial up for Poppy's opinion.
"Two," the mediwitch said, resigned. Hermione merely nodded and took out a second vial. She was lining things up on the bed with her robes and satchel, giving them a clear, quick shot for Summoning. He recognized Blood Replenishing Potion and Essence of Dittany, among others. Poppy picked up the wide roll of felt and unwound it, revealing narrow tools with flat heads; cauterizing irons of varying sizes.
The potion wasn't that complex; the hardest part had been combining the bezoar and phoenix tears without them counteracting each other, and Hermione had neatly taken care of that. When it was finished, he turned to watch the two Healers at work.
They had stripped Dumbledore to the waist and tucked his beard out of the way over one shoulder, revealing a pale, skinny torso, hairless, darkened by bruising that spread from his right shoulder. It was clear to see that the dark of the curse ended just above his right elbow, but he was bruised with reaction to the curse all the way up his arm, solid gray and purples, then faded bruises in greens and yellows across his chest. The curse was spreading, turning his veins black as it went. The black veins shot out from the darkness at his elbow, snaking down his forearm and making his hand look like a piece of stone.
"When was he last conscious?" Hermione asked, flicking her wand over his hand, repeating a complex movement several times until a ghostly representation of what looked like his circulatory system appeared over the hand, then over the rest of the arm, then over his chest and head. They could see his blood pumping, too slowly, and the movement all the more sluggish in his cursed limb. (Severus couldn't be sure if that was a result of the earlier charms or of the curse itself.)
"Three hours, twelve minutes ago," Poppy said, consulting one of her old diagnostic charms still floating near his head.
"Do you have any undiluted Dittany?" Hermione asked, glancing from Poppy to Severus and back.
"I do," Sprout said. Severus nodded to her; he didn't have any, which meant that Poppy didn't either. The Herbologist flicked her wand, Summoning the required medicine. A minute later, the small vial of what looked like mucus-y gruel was in hand.
"I just want to confirm that I'm understanding correctly," Minerva said hesitantly. Hermione had borrowed one of Poppy's aprons and was tying it around her waist, finally looking her age. Poppy had taken an Invigorating Draught and adjusted the pins in her hair. "You're… removing the cursed area?"
"We're amputating his arm right here, yes," Hermione said, indicating a point halfway down his upper arm, several inches above the solid black-gray. Sprout looked like she might be sick. Flitwick looked like he'd never seen any of them before in his life. "It's the best chance of his regaining consciousness."
"I warned him it would come to this months ago," Poppy said, her annoyance clear in her tone.
Hermione pulled another bezoar out of her kit and placed it on the bed next to her other things, then squared her shoulders. Severus's guts were rolling around inside him, and he couldn't imagine she or Poppy was feeling any better about what would happen.
"The curse that started in his hand has hit his bloodstream. That's why he's showing pain in other places in his body, I think," Hermione said, indicating something in the floating diagnostics, presumably pain. Severus had never been good at interpreting them; he was usually the one in pain and didn't need a diagnostic to tell him where it hurt. "We can remove the arm and buy him some time. Maybe a few months if we're lucky."
His colleagues looked resigned, sad. Poppy looked stricken, exhausted. Hermione was just blank. He reached out to her with his mind, but she was Occluding and his mind slid off hers like oil and water.
"You don't have to, Poppy," Hermione said softly into the silence that had followed her last statement. "I'll do it. It's alright."
She eased the mediwitch to the chair next to Flitwick, then took her place on the opposite side of the bed near the cursed arm.
"Does anybody have anything to say before I begin?" Hermione asked. Severus slammed his own Occlumency shields up. It wouldn't do for the others to see any of his emotion now, not if they were to believe he had betrayed them later. He kept forgetting that he would have to do that. He really didn't want to do it.
What would happen if Dumbledore died now? Died from a mysterious curse he wouldn't tell anybody about before he could be murdered. What would they do, then?
Hermione nodded, and then she flicked her wand. The bed turned from a bed into a surgery table, raising up to a more workable height for Hermione. The sheets and mattress were gone in favor of a metallic slab, wider than the bed had been. Hermione used the extra space to lay the arm out.
Severus stood at the foot of the surgical table, thinking of all the times he'd lay on a table under Hermione's wand. He had always come out the better for it, at least. She was quite good. Calm, collected, knowledgeable.
Hermione conjured a strip of cloth and tied off his arm below the shoulder, twisting it tighter and tighter before securing the tourniquet. She did the same just above his elbow. Then, she probed the arm with her fingers, watching the glowing representation of the circulatory system as she did. He didn't see any change, but Poppy was nodding and Hermione seemed pleased with the result (or lack thereof). Then she took a deep breath and jabbed her wand, casting a Slicing Hex. She had to cast it once more to cut through the bone, and then the arm fell onto the table with a thunk. Sprout gagged.
Hermione burned the arm away to nothing with what could have been a regular Incendio, but Severus knew better. Fiendfyre was one of her specialties. He wondered if anybody else would notice.
With her workspace clear of the arm, she began moving more quickly. Constantly looking up to check the circulatory representation, to glance at the other diagnostics hovering in place by Dumbledore's head. She had charmed gauze floating nearby, darting in to swab away the blood from her field of view and replacing themselves with fresh gauze as they became saturated.
There was blood everywhere.
She Summoned the bezoar and shoved it in the headmaster's mouth, massaging his throat until he swallowed. The headmaster looked less gray, but he was beginning to go pale from blood loss.
Hermione cleaned the wound with a saline solution, then applied a butter-yellow cream to the rawness. Dumbledore began convulsing, but Hermione just gritted her teeth and kept working. Poppy sat up, holding the headmaster's chest and head still to keep him from hurting himself. His legs twitched, but feebly, like he didn't have the energy for a proper seizure.
Hermione applied more of the cream, then began chanting. One of the books from her bag was hovering near her and she was reading off the chant, drawing a precise zigzag pattern in the air near the wound in time with the words.
Black globs began trickling out of the wound. It looked like clots, or maybe reddish-black slugs. They were too dense, though. Oily. They had a sheen to them that made Severus glad he didn't have to touch them. Hermione incinerated them as they fell to the table.
Finally, there appeared to be no more globs. She let the book drop to the floor, the slam of it startling a squeak out of Flitwick, and Summoned a Blood Replenishing Potion. She poured it slowly down Dumbledore's throat. His color didn't get better so much as stop getting worse.
Hermione chose the smallest cauterizing iron, heating it with a word, then set to work with iron and wand. She was doing something delicate with the blood vessels, sealing them. The longer she was at it with the iron, the less the gauze shot down to swab away the blood.
Hermione looked at her diagnostics and the circulatory representation again, nodding to herself, ignoring everything in the room but Dumbledore and her tools. She was bloody up to her elbows, and it was splattered across the borrowed apron. Her hair had begun to escape from its bun, but it wasn't in her way yet.
She cast several spells on the stump, then Summoned the potion Severus had mixed earlier. She'd had gauze soaking in it as it had cooled. Hermione packed the site with the treated gauze, then wrapped the whole thing in clean bandages. She cast spell after spell on the stump, the bandages, then dribbled half the second vial of Blood Replenisher down Dumbledore's throat.
Finally, Hermione cancelled all the diagnostic spells and recast them, glaring at them as though they held the secrets of the universe. She Summoned her parchment from earlier, flipped it over, and used the blank side to write out a few more calculations. She got blood all over her quill and the parchment, but she didn't seem to notice.
Hermione nodded at long last, setting parchment, quill and ink aside. She Summoned the last of the potions from the bed, slowly coaxing the headmaster into swallowing them down. Severus recognized them—that one to keep him from going into shock, those two to prevent infection, that one for the pain, that one to speed up healing, the last half bottle of Blood Replenisher.
And then she stepped away. She flicked her wand at the table, removing the blood and then returning it to its bed form. A few more moves of her wand and the empty potion bottles were in the closest sink washing themselves. His brewing equipment was doing similarly, except for the little gold mortar that had to be cleaned by hand.
"If everything worked the way I think it should have," Hermione said, glancing at the second page of arithmantic equations, "he should wake up inside an hour."
She walked away then, going to the second sink and beginning to scrub the blood off her hands and arms. The room was quiet while she did so, scrubbing roughly with the brush to get it from under her fingernails, then turning the brush on her wand. She removed the bloody apron, spelling it back to its usual pristine state, and then she looked as though nothing had happened.
Severus looked at the others in the room, trying not to feel—proud—of his wife. Or at least not let it show.
Sprout was crying, eyes following Hermione as she came back down the ward to them. Flitwick was staring at the headmaster, deep in thought. Poppy was tidying things, fussing over the headmaster, pulling his blanket up and smoothing his beard down his chest, collecting the potions—more Blood Replenisher, something for the pain, Dreamless Sleep (though he wouldn't take that one)—for later. Minerva was sitting on the bed Hermione had used as a work table, watching all of them the way Severus was; their eyes met and they shared a weak smile.
Since it was done, Severus let himself relax, dropping his shields. He leaned back against the bed across the aisle from Dumbledore, not surprised when Hermione settled next to him mirroring his stance. Their shoulders touched.
Nobody seemed to know what to say. They all watched the headmaster.
Dumbledore stirred not two minutes later. He blinked, peering around, seeing his lack of an arm and then searching the faces around them until they came to rest on Hermione. He might have smiled, but it was hard to tell.
"I knew sending you back for that was worth it," he said, quite as clear as if they had been sitting in his office having a nice conversation about it. And then he dozed off, snoring lightly.
Hermione snorted, standing up and crossing to the other bed. She packed her things back into her kit, then into her satchel. She pulled her robe on; once she had the latches done up on the front, and with her Glamour back in place, she looked just as she had the previous morning taking notes in his Defense lecture.
It was likely the headmaster would sleep for a few hours, and then be back up and around as if nothing had happened. That was his way. If he had further instructions, they would come in their own time.
"That's ridiculously unfair, you know," Minerva said, her amused tone surprising Severus. He looked up at the deputy and saw her focused on Hermione, her expression matching her tone.
"Professor?" Hermione asked in a passable imitation of her younger self. Swotty, confused, eager to right whatever wrong she had caused. Minerva shook her head, now smiling outright.
"I could not have passed for sixteen at your age," Minerva said.
"It's the robes," Hermione said, indicating the uniform. "They nicely hide the scars, and, really, who would be trying to look past what they expect to see?"
Severus rolled his eyes. Those were the exact words the headmaster had fed her when he'd told her the plan. She had not been amused. Except for the part where they were sometimes able to sneak kisses in at the end of a class or in a dark alcove every few nights, there were very few benefits to pretending to be a student.
Hermione left them in the quiet, then, disappearing from the curtained-off area by the headmaster's bed and silently making her way past her sleeping friends in their beds down the ward. Severus hoped she would go straight to his sitting room and wait for him.
\\
"What is it?" she asked, her voice husky as she leaned into him. She was his reward for Dumbledore's amputation. The Dark Lord assumed that the amputation had been a drastic, unnecessary measure suggested by his spy. It was more than a month past now, but he was still reaping his rewards.
"Contraceptive," Severus murmured back, smirking suggestively at her. She grinned, tipping the potion down her throat and falling back on the sofa with a happy groan.
Severus stepped back, resisting the urge to wipe his hands on his robes. Her name was Marcella and she was a Death Eater groupie. Her father was a half-blood and her mother was a Muggle born; Severus suspected Marcella's sympathy with the Death Eaters stemmed from her mother's abandonment, leaving her father for a Muggle man when Marcella was a teenager. He didn't know the exact details; she'd been a few years behind him at Hogwarts.
The potion wasn't really contraceptive, of course. He called it Liquid Quickie, mostly because he'd been eighteen when he developed it and hadn't bothered to think of a better name since. It was what it sounded like; a potion that put the drinker into a trance state while they went through sex in their mind with the man or woman they expected to be having sex with.
"Oh, Severus," Marcella groaned from the sofa, her hips twitching. He sneered at her, disgusted.
He'd come up with the potion to make his fantasies of time with Lily feel more real, but it hadn't quite worked. He'd been able to work himself into the proper state of self-delusion that she was the one who featured in his potion-induced experiences, but it had felt too much like rape. He'd used the potion recreationally in his twenties, but it was a bit depressing after awhile. Now, he never left the house without it on his person just for this reason.
Severus had absolutely no desire to have sex with any of the Death Eaters or the other hangers-on like Marcella. The Dark Lord fostered an environment of reward and punishment—if somebody did well, they were given fifteen minutes in the back sitting room with the person he felt they'd like best; if somebody did poorly, they spent fifteen minutes on the floor at his feet suffering whatever curse he liked best. Severus couldn't do much about the punishment, but the pleasure was a different matter. Hold the woman close, whisper in her ear that he was giving her an aphrodisiac or contraceptive, and she got ten minutes of whatever her imagination could conjure of him. He had worked out the kinks (heh) of the potion over the years, making the women more vocal to further promote the story for those listening at the other side of the door, making the images in their minds more vivid.
Disgusted with the situation in a detached sort of way, Severus unbuttoned his robes and untucked his shirt, running his fingers through his hair until it was properly disheveled. A flick of his wand, and Marcella's hair and clothes were similarly messy. He Summoned her knickers, letting them fall to the floor near the sofa rather than touching them.
She was close to coming now, if her little whimpers were anything to go by. He sighed, getting ready for her to come out of it. He stood close to the sofa. When she screamed her climax, he gave a low groan for the listeners, locking his expression into a satisfied smirk to keep from giving anything away; he could hear the whoops of their audience on the other side of the door.
Her eyelids fluttered open, and she grinned up at him. "Well aren't you something," she said, breathless. He swallowed the bile that had risen to his throat and continued smirking. She smirked back at him.
He wanted to do a squirmy disgusted dance like a little girl whose brother has just shoved a worm in her face, but instead he held the door open for her. They went out, returning to the Dark Lord and the room beyond. The meeting had continued in their absence; a few had already left. That was a good sign.
Marcella pinched his bum as goodbye, going through the far door to whatever it was she did when she wasn't spreading her legs for Death Eaters. He continued to look self-satisfied and well laid, wondering idly how Lucius was rewarded for a job well done; the Dark Lord surely didn't dictate when he and his wife had sex…
The Dark Lord spoke for awhile, still high on the idea of Dumbledore walking around with only one arm. Severus stood in his place, back straight and eyes on the Dark Lord's hem.
"You may go," Voldemort finally said, and they went. Even those of them currently in favor didn't dare linger.
He got a few slaps on the back from the men as he left the room, and a seriously nauseating look from Bellatrix. He'd never been stupid enough to go with Bellatrix, even when she had been younger and less crazy.
He Apparated to the castle gates, buttoning his coat with a flick of his wand. It had been a meeting with the inner circle, so there had been no cloaks and masks, luckily. He had a weird paranoia that he would Apparate back to the castle in full Death Eater regalia only to be witnessed by a student, or worse, a colleague who didn't know he was a spy.
"Alrigh, Perfessor?" Hagrid called. The half-giant emerged from the forest, his daft hound leaping around in the snow behind him. Severus smiled; he really did genuinely like Rubeus Hagrid.
"More or less," he replied. Hagrid had found him near unconscious at the gates more than once in the last few years. He'd carried Severus to the hospital wing and waited for him to wake up. "And you? Out in the forest tonight?"
"Yep," Hagrid said, holding out a handful of unicorn hair. "I's the easies' time fer collectin' the hair off the bushes an' such. Catches the moonlight, see."
And he did see. The unicorn hair shimmered prettily in the moonlight. Severus smiled, shaking his head. Hagrid was probably the only person in Britain who found it so easy to collect unicorn hairs. They were practically priceless for all their uses—wand cores, potions ingredients, not to mention the simple strength of them when incorporated into rope or similar. Hagrid always had a hank of it tied to one of his rafters.
"Got time fer tea?"
"Not tonight, I'm afraid," Severus said, pulling his cloak closer around him. "I need to speak to the headmaster before bed."
They walked up the path together. Severus wondered if Hagrid hadn't been out waiting for him, and the unicorn hair had just been an added bonus.
It was moments like this one that made what was coming all the harder to think on. He hadn't made any headway with Draco, which meant another botched attempt was imminent, and it was all leading to… No. He wouldn't think about it now. Not tonight.
"Goodnight, Hagrid," he said when they reached the point where the path split.
"Night, Perfessor."
Severus hurried up the path and into the castle through one of many side entrances. The castle was quiet. That was the best part about late nights in early March at Hogwarts. It was cold outside, and cold in the halls. Students and staff alike tended to stay in the warm dormitories and personal quarters rather than getting up to mischief.
Severus made his way quickly through the familiar halls, nodding to a few of the portraits that liked him as he passed. He wanted a very long, very hot shower, and his strongest bar of soap. Usually he would go straight to Dumbledore and tell him about the meeting, even if it was all banalities as it had been this night. The Liquid Quickie made him feel like a bastard, though, bringing back the missteps of his youth in full force.
He had been—well, he wouldn't say addicted. He'd experimented with recreational potions quite a lot when he was young. It had made him very popular with the other young Death Eaters, so much that it had cemented his alliance with Lucius Malfoy. He still had most of those old favorites on hand, even indulged in them occasionally, as he had with Hermione on his birthday, but he mostly kept them so he wouldn't have to brew illicit potions on school grounds. The others requested their preferences every so often, and the last thing he wanted to do was explain to somebody at Grimmauld Place why he was brewing a potion in their cellar that made the whole area stink of marijuana (or worse).
His meeting with Dumbledore was quick. Severus made his report, hair damp from the shower— he informed the headmaster that he was still in favor, left out the bit about his reward, and talked over the trivialities until the old man finally waved him off with his remaining hand.
A/N: And one last note, because I couldn't not say THANK YOU for all the reviews and follows over the weekend. I was out of town (because that's how I'm spending April this year, apparently), and when I checked my email this afternoon I had 31 updates related to this story, then got 6 more while I was reading the first round. It made for a really nice afternoon!
Cheers!
—M