{Disclaimer: The Harry Potter Universe was created by J.K. Rowling and rights are owned by, but not limited to Warner Brothers and Scholastic Books. I, therefore, own no parts of this.}
Toreen, you rock! Thanks again!
Chapter 8
Clashing Interests
"Well," Hermione decided to continue the conversation since Severus was unlikely to. "The first stanza is self-explanatory from what I can tell. All it basically says is that a man and a woman must work together to create the potion and that the potion is used to restore Hogwarts." She jotted that down in her notebook, finding that her position on the couch was not the best to write with. "Would you mind if I sat on the floor? It would be easier for me to take notes that way."
"Go right ahead."
"Alright," she slid down the floor where she could use the coffee table to steady her notebook. "Alright…step one."
Snape read aloud the first few lines. "Set Mulberry Leaves on the altar for a night/ Use them before the morning's first light/ Protected with a black candle they shall be/ Until brewed into a strong tea/ Here Athena you must invoke/ Or the potion will start to smoke."
"That seems simple enough. Does it say anything about when the Mulberry leaves must be gathered?"
"Just before sunset. They are more potent when picked fresh."
"Good. So step one would be to gather the," she consulted the parchment for the amount, "twelve Mulberry leaves just before the sun sets. We will have to create an altar for them to be placed on for a night and we will need a black candle to burn next to them. They have to be used around dawn by brewing them into a tea. Anything else?"
"We have to invoke the goddess Athena as we make the tea," he added and Hermione wrote it down.
"So that's step one. What's next?"
Severus read the next few lines to himself. "The next step would be to add two ounces of Fennel seeds gathered at Summer Solstice and stir counter clockwise seven times." He waited until she was done writing before continuing. "The potion must brew until midnight, when eight blossoms of Lucerne are needed. These must be gathered at the full moon and dried before being burned so the ashes can be placed in the mixture. It then must be stirred six times with a rod of Witch Hazel."
Hermione looked up at him. "Does it mention the direction?"
"No, it does not. We will have to experiment with that part."
She noted what he said in the margin by the third step. "Next?"
"We will have to visit Helga Hufflepuff's personal gardens."
"What for?" Hermione asked as her colleague paused momentarily.
"Mandrake root," he stated dully.
"Is that a problem?"
"The type of Mandrake it requires is called True Mandrake. It has been extinct for centuries and before that it was extremely rare."
"Oh," she thought about it. "Is there anything we can substitute for it?"
"We will have to find something."
She added a question mark near the step about the Mandrake root. "What else has to be done with it?"
"Stir it four times clockwise and wait for eighty-six hours. Then add five full heads of Angelica flowers, letting it sit until Mid-Summer's Eve."
"That gives us a long amount of time to figure other parts out. It didn't say when were supposed to start this, did it?"
Severus scanned the parchment again, becoming agitated when it did not have an answer to his query. "It makes no mention of it. At a minimum we would have to start four days and fourteen hours before Mid-Summer's Eve. I would suggest beginning soon since it states that the potion must sit until that date."
Hermione nodded. "So we see what we need to figure out before starting it and that will give us some time. What do we do once Mid-Summer's Eve comes around?"
"We go back to Hufflepuff's garden and pick four fiddleheads of Bracken fern, three Vervain flowers and one white water lily. The fiddleheads are added first. After a day, the Vervain is added along with one agate, one opal, and six drops of liquid Mercury."
"Does it specify the type of agate or opal?"
"A small one," he snapped back. Did this girl honestly think he had all the answers? What they were working with had no specifications or exact details, hence why it would take a while to comprehend it completely.
Hermione took his comment as Snape simply being his snarky self. "I was wondering because they come in different colors, like a white opal verses a fire opal. They have different qualities attached to them and I was thinking about how they would affect the potion's outcome."
"I fully realize that. I've worked with temperamental ingredients longer than you have been alive in this world."
"I'm just trying to help."
"You would help more by keeping your comments to yourself and letting me handle this."
"We're supposed to be working together."
"'Supposed to' is the key term. If I had it my way, I would be doing this alone."
"Except you can't because it is specified that it needs both a man and a woman to work together in order for the potion to be effective. So if you want Hogwarts to survive, you're going to have to deal with me."
"I could deal with you better if you would stop asking so many bloody questions!"
"Fine, have it your way!" Hermione threw her notebook on the table as she stormed out through the door. That man was being impossible to deal with. Again. She ran up the stairs, having no certain destination in mind. Somehow she found an exit to the outside and found herself in a lush garden. Even though it was November, the plants still bloomed in their summer glory. Rosebushes dotted a plot to her right in carefully planted precision. In front of her stood a stand of fruit trees and to the left was a bed of various herbs. She could smell the heady scents of lavender, basil, and rosemary heavy in the air. Spotting an open area under a cherry tree, she sat down, just needing a place to stop and think.
Severus watched her stomp out from his room in a fury. He didn't understand what he did to make her get that upset at him. She obviously did not understand how frustrating it was to have a list of ingredients and not know the specifics about types, or times, or the duration it would take to brew. There were too many variables and too many things that could go wrong. He had encountered such potions like this one before, but none as complex, none in which the fate of something important rested upon being able to brew it correctly.
To make things worse, he knew that he would have to deal with her for the entire duration of the project, which if he was correct in his computation, would not be completed until sometime in September. If they started out at each other's throats, the next ten months would not be pleasant for either of them and if he wanted to survive past the end of the project, they would be forced to get along.
The Slytherin sighed to himself as he stood up and stretched. He supposed he would have to go find the girl before she got herself into more trouble than she could handle. Women were always more difficult than they should be and it was always the men who had to deal with them.
Whatever happened, he would not apologize. She would have to learn her place. He had the experience and knowledge needed to lead this project and she would learn it best to listen to his decisions. Her questions had always irked him to no end. No matter what, Hermione Granger had always been there in his class; hand in the air to answer whatever question he had asked. It never changed day in or day out.
At first, he had decided that she was just showing off her knowledge to be obnoxious, but after a while he realized that it was something else, something more than that. She didn't answer the questions to show off; she did it to challenge herself. The girl wanted to become the best she possibly could and to do so she felt she had to know everything. It didn't help that few of her classmates had obtained the knowledge she had or that she managed to acquire an insatiable thirst for wisdom. She simply wanted to learn more.
It was how she went about learning more that bothered him the most. He would have preferred to work in silence without her incessant chatter or questions. She was always asking him 'why?' It was a constant barrage of "why did this work?" or "why didn't that work?" There was never any quiet acceptance; she needed a reason behind everything.
She challenged him, too. With the girl always wanting answers, he felt that he would have to provide them in order to still be above her. He couldn't let her be his equal; his mind would not accept that. She would always be his student; a child in comparison to his intelligence. Deep in his mind, he knew that she was more brilliant than he gave her credit for, but she had yet to earn his full respect.
Severus decided that the best course of action would to find where she had run off to and then proceed to talk some sense into her. Depending on where she was, the house could get dangerous after dark, especially if she had found her way outside.
The first place he checked was her room, but found no signs of her presence there. The library also brought similar results. Deciding that there had to be an easier way to locate her, he visited the kitchen. Hermione was not there either, but his two elves were.
"Have either of you seen Hermione?" he inquired sharply.
Nolly nodded so energetically that he thought her ears would fly off. "Mistress went outside. Nolly is good house elf and brought Mistress her cloak."
"Thank you, Nolly." Snape stormed out the door into the gardens. It figured that she would have ended up here. He looked around, not finding her anywhere in sight. A second glance made him notice a small, dark lump with frizzy hair underneath one of the fruit trees. He approached her cautiously, not wanting to have her go off at him again. Once he had gotten close enough to be certain it was her, he spoke softly, "Hermione?"
"What? Have you come to belittle me again?" She didn't even turn to look at him.
"No," he said slowly. "I've come to talk with you. Do you mind if I sit?" He knew he would have to take it slow with her at first if he was to win back a bit of her trust.
"It's your garden, isn't it?"
Severus sat down next to her, wondering how she managed to sit comfortably with her knees pulled tightly into her chest. "Yes, it is, though at the moment, I think you have laid claim to this particular tree."
There was a pause before she replied, "Well?"
"I'm not going to apologize for earlier and I am not going to force you to apologize either."
"That's good, because I wasn't planning to. You came all the way out just to tell me that you refuse to apologize?"
"Not precisely. I think we got off on the wrong side of each other."
"And how long did it take you to figure that out?"
Snape wondered how she could manage to be so harsh at so young an age. "It was very obvious to see."
"So what do you want to do about it?"
"At the moment, I would suggest we go inside. It's dark out and the temperature is dropping quickly."
"Fine, inside it is."
Severus stood up first and offered a hand to assist her. After glaring at it for a moment, she took it, allowing him to help her stand. He brought her in through a door that lead to the library where there was a set of two chairs and a blazing fireplace waiting for them. "Sit and we shall talk." He gestured to one of the chairs. She took a seat, still glaring at him.
He made eye contact before beginning once again. "It occurred to me after you stormed out of the lab, that we had begun this project in the wrong way."
"Oh?"
"Yes. Tell me, Hermione, was your job at the Ministry satisfying?"
A confused expression crossed her face before she answered. She wondered for a fleeting second why he was asking, but chose to reply any way. "No, not particularly. At first it was, but then the stuff they were having me research was boring and not incredibly challenging. It was something a fourth year student could have easily figured out."
"You were used to being more intelligent than those you worked with, were you not?"
"Yes." It was completely true. She hated how the people at the Ministry had trouble thinking for themselves. "I kept wondering how some of the people there had even managed to pass their OWLs."
"That is exactly as I suspected. You are used to working with people of lesser intelligence."
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"From spending too many years as a professor, I have learned that working with those who are not up to your level causes a person to look down upon others without realizing it. What I managed to derive from what you told me, you are simply used to being in charge and being forced to spell everything out to your coworkers."
"True," she admitted.
"Good," Severus nodded thoughtfully. "Then I believe we have this settled."
Hermione looked at him, not completely understanding what he was implying. "What's settled?"
"You and I are alike in more ways than you may think, Hermione Granger. I, too, am used to working with incompetents and assume those who work with me are necessarily part of that group."
"So all you're saying is that we are both intelligent human beings and should be able to sort through this conundrum without biting each other's heads off?"
"Correct." He was impressed that she managed to decipher what he had been saying, even if her way was not as eloquent.
"So you won't treat me as an insignificant child if I respect your ideas as well."
"Yes."
Hermione smiled shyly as she stood up to approach him. She stuck out her hand. "Truce, Severus?"
"Truce." He placed his hand in hers.
{Author's Note: For those of you wondering, the Founders' Potion is based on a large amount of research I did on herb lore and other stuff. Most of what I am basing it on is Wicca. Being the person I am, I forgot to tag all the sites I used namely since there were so many, so therefore I am stating that any information about what any of the ingredients in the Founders' Potion are used for is NOT mine. I cannot and will not be held accountable if any of you choose to try this at home, which I do not suggest. Other than that, read, review, and enjoy!
Squiggle: You must have been away for a while. It took me a few weeks to update! You have now officially been added to my list so you will get notified when I update. Thanks for reviewing!
Alanfan: I'm glad you are enjoying it. If you want to know when I update, just drop your e-mail in a review and I will keep you posted.
BlueLemons: I enjoy snarky Snape. He's much more fun that way and I still have a difficult time seeing him as warm and cuddly as amusing as it is. As for the house, that's what happens when I get put on various meds for allergies and then bronchitis. The chapter was actually written in the two days following the AP tests and everything else, so it was more of a release of built up ideas after I was free instead of keeping up at it with everything going on.
Angel2707: I've converted someone into liking Snape as a character! Yay! How I see him is that he is a difficult man being forced to do some things he did not want to do and was unhappy with life. I figure after the war, he is still not an entirely nice guy, but he is more human than before.
Stargazer Starluver: Thanks! You know, people keep telling me that they liked this chapter…maybe I should get sick and medicated more often. It seems I write better that way. I'm glad you enjoyed the house. As for Hermione, considering Rowling mentions her character as flawed in the books with the frizzy hair and the teeth (even though they were fixed), it's hard to make her perfect. I also have a hunch that Snape would not go for perfect women since he is far from perfect himself. I dunno, that's just my opinion for you.
Azulkan2: The main plot is going to be based on the gathering of the ingredients so it should be progressing nicely from now on.
Eternal Queen: The thing is, I didn't have any time to write. Chapters 7 and 8 were a complete release of the days after the tests and the play. I honestly sat and wrote for a few hours nonstop. Really? How did your Titanic go? Ours kicked butt! Except for the end of act 1 the one night where our Mr. Fleet accidentally broke the bell as he rang it to warn of the iceberg and when we kept breaking things during 'Dressed in your Pyjamas.' Other than that it was awesome!
RebelRikki: People seem to like the man eating closet. I suppose I will have to mention it more often. Maybe feed stuff to it…That would be amusing. I'm not sure how to get yours to do that though. You'll have to ask Snape's dead uncle.
Peace, Love, and Popsicles, Nataly Ravenlock}