Disclaimer: Nothing is mine; everything is J K Rowling's.
Number 82 is up... This one is a touch shorter than normal too, though really it's just the same length as all of the chapters used to be back in beginning. My free time continues to be greater than usual, and you all know what this means!
Chapter 82
Somehow the open, casual air of the classroom for Defence Against the Dark Arts had transitioned into the same gloomy, sinister environment the dungeons had been. The long, black curtains, still bearing the stains and scars of a decade beside the cauldrons now hung across windows that had seen Harry's favourite lessons. If he did not know better then Harry might have been tempted to believe some of the rumours of vampirism that haunted Snape's footsteps. As it was, the only things over their exchanged Professor's shoulder was a dubious, dark personal history, and Harry himself.
The sullen silence that pervaded the air before their potions lessons had come too. The Slytherin students looked uninterested, and bored, Malfoy was staring hard at the surface of his desk, ignoring a chattering Pansy, Hermione was searching for Snape in all the shadowy corners of the room, and Ron seemed to have decided to use the time get further ahead.
'Something tells me this is no longer going to be my best subject,' Neville groaned quietly.
'Herbology is your best subject,' Harry reminded him, scouring the shadows himself.
'It's not quite as useful in a war,' Neville shrugged.
Something rippled in the air in front of the board, a faint, shimmering haze that Harry recognised all too well.
He uses the disillusionment charm just for a dramatic entrance, Harry chuckled softly. Mine's better.
'Mr Weasley,' Snape appeared next Ron's desk snapping his book shut with a flick of his wand. 'While I am glad that you have finally learnt to read I have not told you to open your books; I wish for you to listen before you learn.'
'Ah,' Neville whispered, 'speech time.'
Harry grinned, catching Snape's eye when the professor narrowed his eyes towards their suspicious spot at the back of the classroom. There was no subtle touch of legilimency against his thoughts, the Death Eater knew better, but he didn't need the magic to see Harry's amusement.
Oddly, he didn't comment.
'This subject has been under the care of no fewer than five teachers during your stint at this school. Each with their own methods, matters, and manner. With such… inconsistency, it is small wonder that so few of you have achieved the necessary level to study the Dark Arts for your NEWT.'
I'm fairly sure we took Defence Against the Dark Arts, Harry smirked, and Hermione, ever attentive at the front, also noted Snape's choice of wording, twitching uncomfortably.
'I will not lessen the infinite complexity of this subject with poorly referenced metaphor, or simile, nor,' his eyes dipped to Hermione, 'will I ask that you commit entire tomes to memory. Neither is a viable approach to defend against something that evolves so swiftly, fluidly and dangerously as the Dark Arts do.'
Snape paused, moving back around from the front row of desks to behind his own.
'If you want to survive them,' he continued smoothly, 'you must become every bit as elegant, as subtle, as deadly, and as tenacious as they are.'
He whirled, summoning, from the cupboard on the far right, a handful of dead spiders, and dropping a diseased, crumpled arachnid on the desk before each of them. Ron, Harry noted with some amusement, looked none too pleased, but his chair remained firmly where it was.
'When it comes to the Dark Arts, no number of books, or words alone will truly help you understand what it is to face them, and,' Snape's mouth crooked in a small, vicious smirk, 'I believe in a practical approach.'
He flicked his wand upwards in a sharp, jerking motion, muttering something beneath his breath, and the spiders spasmed back to life.
Hermione gasped in shock.
'Imagine that each of these spiders is a true, human inferius,' Snape drawled, as the class dissolved into chaos. 'Deal with them as best you can, but try to avoid being bitten. They're mildly venomous.'
'Reducto,' Neville said firmly, blasting his to pieces before Harry could warn him.
The spider's legs sprayed across the desk, but, after a moment, glowed an eerie yellow and crept jerkily back together, and began to advance towards Neville more rapidly.
Harry let his creep across the desk, then pinned it to the surface with the tip of his wand to study.
It writhed furiously under the piece of ebony, but couldn't escape Harry's attention, and eventually it curled into a small ball of legs to wait for its release.
Studying the magic that ran through the spider as if it were an enchantment Harry came to a handful of very interesting conclusions. Foremost among them was that Snape knew exactly how to create an inferius, and he knew it well enough to know how to modify the spell to make them less dangerous. The professor had stripped the spiders of the aggression that characterised the inferi, though he had left the magically enchanted strength, speed, and their limited ability to reassemble themselves.
Pansy Parkinson shrieked as her spider put itself back together unexpectedly in her lap, while small flickers of flame began to bathe most of the desks, crisping and blackening the animated arachnids until they fell still.
Most of the class were sporting several sore-looking red bites, and only a handful, Hermione, Ron, Malfoy, and Neville seemed to be unscathed. Pansy Parkinson was the worst off, her arms had been so badly ravaged by the animated insect that it looked like she had dipped her limbs into splotchy, red paint.
'Stop playing with it, Potter,' Snape drawled from the front. 'A true inferius will not stop just because you have touched it with your wand.'
Oh I beg to differ, professor, Harry grinned.
The spider crumbled silently into dust.
Snape, for once, looked both intrigued and impressed, not that he voiced either sentiment to the class.
'Were you facing an animated corpse, rather than a harmless insect,' Pansy sniffed loudly, and Snape gave the bite-covered girl a withering look, 'you would all, with a few exceptions like Mr Malfoy, likely be dead.'
The remains of the spiders vanished, and Ron relaxed ever so slightly over the unnecessarily dark scorch mark on his desk.
'The larger the creature animated the more magic is required,' Snape explained silkily. 'For something like a spider the increases in strength and speed are negligible, since so little magic is put into the spell, and for something like a dragon, the increases would also be negligible, since all the magic would be required just to animate it in the first place.'
Several members of the class paled at the suggestion of a dragon inferius.
'However a human corpse, or something of similar size, gives the best ratio of strength and speed gained with regards to the cost of the spell, which is why most inferi are humanoid. That, and the obvious psychological aspect of it.' Snape's eyes roved around the room. 'Mr Malfoy, perhaps you be so kind as to explain your tactics in defeating your opponent?'
'I used fire,' Malfoy scowled, clearly not happy at being singled out.
'Three words is not an explanation,' Snape reprimanded. 'What Mr Malfoy means, is that fire sufficiently destroys the physical body of the inferius to unravel the magic bound to it. There are other ways, but fire is amongst the most efficient.'
'Can we not just blast it to pieces?' Someone called out.
'I suspect, Smith, that any attempt made to cast that many powerful blasting curses before the inferius reaches you would fail spectacularly, and the corpse would tear you limb from limb, before its master added the remains of your foolish self to his collection inferi.' Smith recoiled, chastised and pale.
'Are there any other foolish questions?' The professor asked smoothly.
Nobody was brave enough to ask anything, not even Hermione.
'Good,' Snape snapped. 'Fortunately for all of you, there are very few wizards with the power to actually create and command more than a single inferius at a time, and you may rest assured that animating a magical creature like a dragon is all but impossible given its resistance to our spells.'
Harry's momentary regret at destroying the corpse of the basilisk faded alongside the tantalising image of unleashing the seventy foot serpent inferius upon an unsuspecting Snape.
'Are we likely to come across any inferi?' Ron asked, tapping his wand on the desk.
'The Dark Lord has been known to use them in the past,' Snape revealed, 'so it would be wise not to rule out their appearance in the future, and wiser still to expect and prepare for it. However, besides the Dark Lord few other wizards are capable of or inclined to create them.'
'I expect, on my desk at the start of our second lesson next week, fourteen inches on the characteristics of inferi and how to counter them. After that point we will move on to cover other dangerous creatures you are likely to encounter, recapping werewolves, giants and covering Lethifolds in more detail.'
Something tells me Dumbledore chose this curriculum carefully, Harry mused.
Not that he was objecting; it was the best decision the headmaster had made about the Defence Against the Dark Arts class in years. Though, given his track record of hiring Umbridge, Voldemort, Voldemort's followers, and the only teacher worse than Voldemort, Lockhart, Harry felt he hadn't been setting the bar very high to begin with.
'For those of you who were... unable to handle your spider,' Snape's upper lip curled in contempt, 'Madam Pomfrey will be able to get rid of the rashes in a few seconds. I suggest a brief trip to the hospital wing, else you will spend the rest of the in discomfort.'
Pansy, who was busy applying every cosmetic charm Harry had ever seen or heard of, and a good few he had not, to her face and arms, looked utterly relieved, almost as relieved as Malfoy, who had realised that meant he would not have to listen to her for a short while.
'Why are you all still here?' Snape drawled.
'Good question,' Neville muttered, packing up his stuff swiftly. 'I have a free period now, so I'll be in the common room listening to Parvati and Lavender gossip about Hermione's nightmares again. I'll see you after you've endured Advanced Arithmancy.'
Harry lingered when the rest of the class dispersed. He needed Snape's permission to take the subject early, and thought it best to get it now, before the Death Eater suffered a horrible accident of some sort.
'I don't remember asking to speak with you, Potter,' Snape remarked curiously.
'Professor Dumbledore had offered me the opportunity to take my NEWTs early, should I have written permission from the subject's professor,' Harry explained.
'And you expect me to grant this permission?' Snape's sneer crept back, no doubt provoked by what he assumed to be arrogance.
'I can demonstrate if you like, sir,' Harry grinned. He would be more than happy to demonstrate his capabilities with combative magic on Snape.
'Very well,' Snape mused, 'I will indulge your suggestion. I will cast a jinx at you, and you will block it, silently.'
Snape's wand was out of his robes before Harry could react, casting three, distinctly dangerous looking curses.
Fortunately Harry did not need to be more than touching his wand to cast the Shield Charm, and the trio of yellow spells fizzled out against brilliant, blinding, wall of silver light.
'That's enough, Harry,' Snape gritted. 'I do not want to have to have Madam Pomfrey fix my eyesight because of a simple shield charm.'
He would have pushed a little more magic into it at that, but he was so surprised at the use of his first name that the shield collapsed anyway.
'It seems that I was mistaken to warn you last year that the Dark Lord had taken your boasting seriously,' Snape continued when the light had faded, 'perhaps I would have done better to warn the Headmaster that you were taking him seriously.'
'Did you?' Harry asked, curious as to whether Dumbledore was aware who was responsible for the deaths of three Death Eaters.
'No,' Snape said curtly. 'You will find, Harry, that unless you yourself are the utmost extreme of opinion you must make do living in between others' ideas. Dumbledore would be devastated to learn that you had marred yourself by casting the Killing Curse. He suspects you are not so innocent as you appear, but he still clings to the hope that you are not irredeemable.'
'Nobody, no matter the nature of their crimes, seems irredeemable in his eyes,' Harry said, with soft, deliberate malice.
'So you know,' Snape said calmly. The Death Eater was many things, but he was not stupid, nor unobservant. 'He told you, I presume.'
'Dumbledore did,' Harry confirmed.
'I will not ask for your forgiveness, Harry, nor do I expect you to forget,' Snape's stoic countenance crumbled into something hollow for a fraction of a second, 'you're the only person who lost more than I did that night.'
You lost nothing you did not deserve to lose, Harry wanted to hiss, but he couldn't, not without raising suspicion.
Instead he kept his face blank. 'My NEWT exam, sir?'
'You have my permission,' Snape said slowly. 'I will write a brief note to the headmaster. Do you intend to attempt your other subjects early as well?'
'I do,' Harry admitted, wondering whether the professor would begrudge him his talent, or mistake it for conceit.
'Good,' Snape murmured softly, the corner of his mouth crooking ever so slightly into a genuine smile. 'Your mother was a dedicated, brilliant witch; one who would have been ashamed of the talent you have until recently been squandering.'
Harry said nothing. All the words that sprang to his tongue were inflammatory and furious, so he swallowed them bitterly, and hid his outrage that the friend who had condemned his mother to death could dare to speak of what she would be ashamed of.
'Professor McGonagall will not think twice about allowing you,' Snape voiced aloud, 'and neither will Professor Flitwick, but I don't think you will convince Professor Vector, and nor will you manage to sway Professor Slughorn as you are.'
Does he mean to help me? Harry wondered. Is this how intends to assuage his guilt?
'I'm a competent brewer,' Harry defended, more curious now than anything else.
'Competent certainly,' Snape agreed smoothly, 'but Professor Slughorn will only let you risk escaping his influence early if you are truly exceptional, or already indebted to him. He is a consummate Slytherin,' the smirk returned to his lips, 'much like yourself, though in a different vein.'
'I have no intention of being indebted to Professor Slughorn,' Harry warned.
'And nor should you,' Snape seemed to thoroughly approve of Harry's caution. 'No, my intention was to make you appear as a prodigious potioneer, one at a level few others have reached at your age.'
'More extra lessons,' Harry realised, tempted. It would give him far more access to Snape should he decide to finally dispense with the slippery, self-serving spy and take his revenge before Voldemort forced his follower to make a more direct contribution to his attempt to kill Katie.
'A few tips, here and there,' the professor corrected smoothly, looking down his hooked nose at Harry with uncharacteristically soft eyes.
'I would be a fool to pass them up,' Harry replied simply. No matter how much he loathed the man for all the damage he had done to his life he couldn't deny he was a gifted wizard, both at potions, and evidently with the so labelled Dark Arts.
'Yes, you would,' Snape agreed, silently summoning a glass goblet from within his office, and pouring himself a drink of very dark red, almost black wine. 'Blackberry,' he said, noting Harry's look, sipping gently. 'I enjoy a glass from time to time during the day; it eases the frustration of marking, and teaching, amongst other things.'
Other things being spying for both Dumbledore and Voldemort, the guilt from betraying your only friend to her death, and the regret at almost sacrificing students to theirs.
Harry did, however, make a note of the tidy row of glass goblets he could glimpse through the open door to Snape's office. They sat in sparkling line on the top shelf, over the assortment of jars and small chests that he had brought up from the dungeons, and a softly bubbling cauldron that was spewing thick, white mist across the surfaces and onto the floor.
'For now,' Snape continued, 'the basic principles of true brewing will serve you best. It requires innate talent to truly grasp any branch of magic, an intuitive understanding of how things work is simply essential. I teach you by providing an adequate process you may copy; it will produce a serviceable potion, but there are many ways in which it can be enhanced. To do so, however, requires you to step away from the crutch of my recipe and try things for yourself.'
'That's why I only ever got an E,' Harry realised.
'You perfectly followed instructions,' Snape nodded, 'just as Miss Granger, Mr Malfoy, and a handful of others have, but you never considered how you might improve upon the process. There are plenty of ways to increase the potency of a potion, extracting the ingredients more efficiently is the most basic, but often a couple of extra ingredients can prove invaluable should you know what you are doing.'
'And if you don't?' Harry was honest enough to concede that he had no innate grasp of the subject.
'A brief study of the properties of the most common ingredients will serve you well,' Snape advised. 'Professor Slughorn will not teach you as I have done, he prefers to provide processes that require a touch of intuition to perfect, rather than recipes for improvement, but the principle remains the same.' Snape finished his goblet of wine, setting the glass cup neatly down on his desk. 'Impress him enough and he will go out of his way to favour you, and in so doing, later favour himself.'
'Thank you, sir,' Harry said politely.
'That spell you used to destroy the spider,' Snape began, his eyes suddenly calculating, 'what was it?'
'A creation of my own,' Harry revealed with a touch of pride. Fleur was rubbing off on him. 'It does not work upon living things, but an inferius is not alive.'
'You do not want to let a real inferius get so close,' the professor warned, but he seemed to approve of Harry designing his own spells. He did not voice the sentiment, but the same, slightly soft gleam entered his dark eyes.
'I have no intention to,' Harry agreed, he enjoyed his limbs as they were; attached to his body. 'There are many ways to completely destroy something.'
Fiendfyre would be his first choice, especially against many inferi, but his imbued butterflies might prove equally effective, and less dangerous to anyone else around him.
'You are late, Harry,' Snape reminded him silkily. 'Professor Vector is unlikely to let you take her subject early anyway, but you're not helping your case with her.'
Harry nodded, turning to leave while he mulled over what he had learnt from the two-faced wizard. If Snape was right, then Harry needed him to ensure he could take his crucial, fourth NEWT early.
He smiled wryly as he made his way along the corridors towards Arithmancy.
Perhaps helping me realise that was his intention all along.
A wizard like Snape did not survive very long by becoming useless to those who might prefer him dead, but Harry suspected, and hoped, that he was simply trying to assist Lily Evans' son now he recognised her in him.
Otherwise he already had an inkling of his fate, and would be that much harder to harm.
'Just on time, Harry,' Professor Vector announced, as he slipped quietly in. 'I was just starting to go over our material for the year.'
'Sorry, Professor Vector,' Harry apologised. 'I needed to speak with Professor Snape about my NEWTs.'
'Ah,' Vector nodded sympathetically. 'I've heard rumour of this. I'm afraid, Harry, that this winter is altogether too early for you to be taking a subject this complex, however, should you prove yourself capable, I might be open to letting you take it this summer instead.'
'Thank you, professor,' Harry replied, taking the seat next to Hermione; the only remaining one. She was staring at him in disbelief, likely horrified at the thought of anyone even trying to take their NEWTs so quickly and throwing away so much time that they could have spent learning just for the sake of it.
So I need Snape, he frowned, realising the wizard's assumptions had been correct.
The Death Eater turned spy's comeuppance would have to wait, it seemed, at least until Harry had a way of buttering up Slughorn on his own. It was irritating. Harry had been hoping to remove the potentially troublesome link between Voldemort and Dumbledore, the two sides to the vice within which he found himself, and take his vengeance quickly. Preferably before Snape could tell either side anything about him he didn't want them to know, but it looked like he would have to be patient, and either trust to hope, or earn the spy's confidence in their little tip sessions.
The fact that he had not yet been called to speak with Professor Dumbledore was both relieving and alarming. Snape had said that the old wizard believed Harry capable of redemption, which presumably meant Dumbledore thought there was a way to lead him back onto the path to sacrifice, but without speaking to the headmaster, and hearing it for himself, Harry couldn't be sure what it was, and he very much disliked not knowing part of Dumbledore's plan. He had survived the man until now because he was capable of appearing close to what the wizard expected, and hoped, to see. Harry couldn't do that anymore until he met with him again, and he knew that the headmaster would be watching his every visible action in the meantime.
At the front of the class Professor Vector was sketching four dimensional matrices, and equations to help them visualise, and study the shape and structure of magic upon an imagined plane of reality in the air in bright, green fire. The shimmering, viridescent numbers, and ellipses were almost hypnotic, and it was hard to look past and see more than their shape and colour.
I prefer purple, he noted absentmindedly, then blinked, and frowned.
He needed to focus for this. It wasn't even close to easy, and most of the class looked like they were already beginning to regret their choice. Hermione, on the other hand, looked positively riveted, and had already covered two sheets of parchment in neat, close scripted notes.
He sighed, and began to write himself, missing the times when he'd managed to get so far ahead alone that he had not needed to pay attention during classes.
This is Fleur's area of expertise, not mine, he decided.
Wards and enchanting were the area Advanced Arithmancy was most applicable, though Harry would touch on it when undergoing rituals, and there was no possibility of him ever managing to outstrip his partner in her own field.
The subject was interesting, Harry would give it that much, but it was huge step up from the OWL level work they had been doing, and difficult within only a few minutes of starting the year. Judging from the faces of a few around him, including Terry Boot, this was a subject that might lose a few students over the coming week or so before schedules were finalised.
Quietly grateful that his request to take this subject early had been denied, and resigning himself to some long, exhaustingly complex homework in the near future he settled down to write, tuning out his thoughts to the scratching of quills.
AN: Please read and review, thanks to all those who do!
Oh, and a brief note to those who are curious; I have finally chosen one of the three endings I've been torn between since first coming up with the idea of this fic back in September. Since we've now completely passed the point at which it gives anything away, and there are those of you who think Katie might make a better partner, it might interest you to know that one of the endings did involve Fleur leaving Harry over the summer, and Katie picking up the pieces as the year begins, before things progressed on in a roughly similar manner for around the next ten chapters. Obviously that hasn't happened over the summer, so no spoilers!
