Chapter re-posted. Still not the right intro, and it veers even further off-course, but at least it has some references to Luna and the dissection bits will eventually tie back into the Quibbler. I know one isn't supposed to post until one is done, but I'm never done, so here's some more of un-doneness.
Suggestions solicited, as ever. Pay particularly close attention to Snape, who toes (and crosses?) the line between IC and OOC far more often than I'd like.
The Armour Potion was one of Snape's more clever inventions. He had been lying on his bed one particularly miserable night, chasing a moth with his wand and singeing its wings (until it couldn't fly anymore and fluttered, light as a feather, onto the pillow beside him) when the basic principle had chanced to enter his mind. Motionless he'd stared at the ceiling for close to an hour. Then the moth had chanced to graze his cheek in a pathetic twitch at flight and he'd turned his wand on it, slowly, to knit it a new pair of wings.
"Very good, Severus," Slughorn had said in his bemused way when Snape, after a month's worth of near-starvation in the library, had presented him with his two lists. One was a fairly simple inventory of curses, jinxes, hexes, and their counterspells. The other - barely legible, and on a separate parchment - was a list of potions, their recipes folded under their names. When placed side by side they'd fit like cogs in clockwork.
"You're quite right, my boy; one can indeed translate spells into potions and vice versa. Some spells and some potions, that is; by far not all."
Yes, all; Snape had thought. It's just a matter of intuition. And which means are the best for a given end... after all, it's hard to draw a potion in a duel.
"Could you take a look at my conversion tables, Professor? I couldn't get enough data on thippleweed and balsa root and some of the others."
A sheet of parchment had emerged from one of Snape's textbooks: this one had had the approximate dimensions of a large tablecloth but had been liberally sprinkled with pinching charms which hid the non-essential information and reduced the chart to the size of a napkin. Slughorn had perused it with interest, flicking various columns to the foreground and dismissing them with a nudge of his wand. Occasionally he'd had to use a magnifying charm: Snape's cramped handwriting had been condensed into about a third of its normal size; at various points he'd added so much detail that the chart had threatened to sprawl into more than three dimensions.
"Yes, very thorough. Though I must say, Severus, I think you're putting too much effort into these formulae. One can't really quantify magic, you know. It's just a matter of intuition."
"I need your help here, Professor," Snape had smirked. "It's obvious that the cocklegrass and the thippleweed must correspond to the twist in the wand here; but if, say, I needed to put that same twist in a potion that had these ingredients -" (another bit of parchment was produced from Snape's pocket) "- wouldn't the Pincerkrill eyebrows counteract the effect of the thippleweed? Would it still work?"
Slughorn had laughed.
"Just try it," he'd said with an expansive wave of his hand, "and see if it feels right. Maybe Miss Evans could help you - potionmaking is as natural to her as breathing, I think; quite extraordinary." And he'd dismissed Snape with a pat on the shoulder, chuckling: "Bottling the entire Standard Library of Spells. What a project."
This had not been Snape's project at all. He had simply realised that it was possible to tamper with spells - and invent new ones - by converting them into potions and back again. He'd been in his fourth year at the time.
It had been a good idea in theory. In practice, however, the two Unforgivables (Avada Kedavra being too easy to achieve by hand and thus of no interest to him) had proved singularly hard to bottle. And he had covertly provoked an opinion out of Lily Evans that had helped him not at all.
They'd been in class, Slughorn beaming like a very large sun over Evans (while a number of smaller suns like Potter orbited her nearby) as she waited for her ecru-coloured potion to go white. She'd chosen to make the Potion of Doubt: Slughorn had been a fan of, as he put it, nurturing the creative instinct, and Evans had been reading Nietzsche.
Snape had discovered, with the mental equivalent of a dry smirk, that he had accidentally chosen a potion that required a pinch of powdered orangutan bone-marrow to be added in its last twelve minutes, and that he had accidentally forgotten to supply himself with said ingredient before starting the potion. He hadn't, in other words, planned the trip to the store-cupboard that took him past Lily's cauldron. He also hadn't been surprised that his mind had arranged things this way, even with no conscious input from him.
It would have been unforgivable of him not to take advantage of the opportunity to talk to her.
"Your potion is utterly pointless, Evans - just cast Existentio and save yourself the stirring."
"Shut up, Snivelly; you'll drip into her cauldron and ruin it," somebody-- perhaps Black-- had opined.
"What are you on about, Snape?" Evans had wanted to know. "Existentio is different. It has a different scope. It's more a… state of mind, rather than a pervasive doubt about facts. Isn't it?"
"Have you imbibed the thing already?" Snape had sleeked in reply. "The difference would be eliminated if you slipped in a hair or a nail-clipping from the victim."
There had been some unwitty witticisms from Potter and Pettigrew, concerning victimhood and Snivelly's hair.
"No," Evans had said, blushing a bit. "No, I'm sure you can't. You can't equate a generalised charm and a person-specific potion, Snape. They might have the same accidents but they're very different in kind."
She'd had a point, one which Snape had let Slughorn had praise at some length instead of trying to answer. Intuition could only do so much.
The solution had occurred to him that night as the shadows had swirled on his ceiling: might it not be the case (he reasoned) that a curse could condense on its countercurse, like breath condensed on a mirror? If, say, he made a potion out of Protego...
Another month had passed in the library, during which Snape's skin had turned into the dry brittle parchment of his research books and his inkwell had become as greasy as his hair. His Head of House had watched him with the same morbid delight he felt while crushing flobberworms. When Snape had finally ironed out the discrepancies in his recipe he'd found Slughorn waiting for him and positively grinning with anticipation.
"It's been terribly unfair for you to keep me in such suspense, my boy," Slughorn had clucked. "My health isn't what it used to be; it's beastly, beastly, to trifle with it."
"Very sorry, Sir," Snape had said, wishing Slughorn would just read the recipe.
"You've missed a number of excellent evenings with the Sluggies - I almost started to think you'd turned your back on us. And though you're very clever, Severus, it's hardly in your best interests to pass up such a great opportunity. I thought an examplary Slytherin like yourself would be more -"
After Snape had given his promises to be more dutiful in his extracurriculars, and consumed a very small sip of the waddlecider Slughorn had pressed on him, they'd finally gotten round to the point.
"Ah... what have we here? Yellow bile, dragon blood - quite obvious, of course... thippleweed, yes, lignum vitae - my, you really have been paying attention to your herbaria - Laetoli ash, how clever..." He'd suddenly frowned. "Are you quite sure about this, Severus?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Your potion requires cocaine."
"Yes, Sir."
"My dear boy - surely the Horntail blood will suffice!"
"It's not like an ordinary Courage Potion, Sir; it requires some bending of reality."
Slughorn had wiggled his eyebrows for a time, occasionally muttering "Well!"
"At first when I read the reports of this one Crusader I thought about using hashish, but I don't think it'll mix well with the thippleweed either. Nothing mixes well with thippleweed, Sir," Snape had tried to play the ingenue, poorly. "I know it's a Muggle thing, but protection as a concept sometimes forces you to use whatever resources you can."
Fortunately Slughorn had been too pleased with the overall result to point out that Snape sounded like an insufferable Ravenclaw essay, not like an ingenue. He'd ordered the necessary ingredients and signed the necessary access forms, and several nights later Snape had ladled his bluish liquid into a jar with a particularly satisfied sneer.
It had been late when he'd gottento the Room of Requirement – the ersatz Bluebeard's Chamber that generations of scientifically-minded students had called their own – and painted a circle of his potion onto the wall. There was not much wall in that room that had not already been spattered with suspicious substances or used for calculations, which made him feel cramped, and nervous, and even more sure he would fail when he stood back several feet and softly whispered "Crucio."
Nothing happened.
"Crucio."
Nothing happened. There'd followed a moment of panic where he'd wondered how well the potion would work if it dried. Then he'd pointed his wand at the wall again.
"Crucio."
Nothing happened. (How does one torture a wall, anyway?)
After several more tries he'd been shaking in a cold fury. It had taken him ages to brew the damned thing and earned him more snark, most of which had gone unanswered, to provoke him enough to Crucio the entire school; but this wall hadn't seemed to be getting the message.
He'd kicked an overturned flask. It had been lying there at least since the fifteenth century, so it had been rather grateful for being moved several feet to the left. It had been vocally grateful. It had infuriated Snape.
"Crucio!"
The flask had clanked, but – irony supreme – it had not been coated with the requisite potion. The dried bubbles of vitriol on its outside had hissed a little, however, before leaving Snape to the silence in the room and the growing suspicion that he was, in the end, useless at this.
"Crucio!" he'd hollered again, this time at the wall.
Still nothing. No: the Dark Curses were a coy and multilayered thing - what presumption it was to try to pin them down.
He'd glared balefully at his wand. (Indulging in teenage angst, are we? Too drunk on self-pity to concentrate on the task at hand? Those potions are rotting your teeth, pretty boy, for all the good they do you...)
For an instant he'd recalled Lily Evans looking at him with contempt of such finality he'd had to shut his eyes.
When he'd opened them, still reeling from the pain, the coat of potion had been peeling itself from the wall in fits and spasms. It had appeared to be oozing blood, or sweat, and when he'd raised his wand to catch it before it slid to the ground it gave a convulsive shudder. He could have sworn it had been whimpering.
"Lovely," he'd crooned in a hiss, lifting it as if his wand were a fork.
In a later encounter with the Dark Lord he'd been prepared to elaborate.
"Cruciatus, Master? Unforgivable. It's unforgivable to subject someone to complete, incapacitating, unbearable pain all at once, when much better results can be obtained by calibration."
"Get on with it, Snape. Get to the bloody point."
This had been one Moloch Gibbon, for whom patience was something played with cards. Malfoy, on the other hand, had been gazing at Snape with a vaguely metallic interest, which had sharpened at Snape's bow to Gibbon and become a half-smile when Gibbon had begun screaming.
"That was Torquepollex, Master," Snape had explained. And Malfoy's lips had twisted a bit more, as if in wonder that the Muggles had achieved something so neat.
"You dissected Crucio," Sinistra had said with a ghastly smile when he'd told her about it.
"Fourteen weapons are better than one," Snape had replied. "Even as a child I thought Crucio was far too crude."
Sinistra was not the sort of person to waste her pity on such news. "That creates an ethical difficulty, doesn't it-- are the mini-Crucios unforgivable too?"
"I didn't ask the Ministry," Snape had said, his voice dripping acid.
"I suppose that's why Dark Magic is dark," she'd mused, "rather than black-and-white."
It had been Crouch Jr. who'd found fault with Snape's approach. "But Master," he'd said, "what is the point of this? We're wizards. We don't need thumbscrews or knives to torture someone."
Snape had considered casting Sectumsempra on him, just to point out that knives were useful in their way, but had kept his wand still. The Dark Lord enjoyed watching his gladiators practice; he also didn't think them competent enough to do so without spoiling themselves for the war.
Crouch had barely warmed up. "Why a thumbscrew curse, Master? When we need to question someone or break a Memory Charm we want the information - we don't want to waste time. Really, Master, in my experience Crucio simply can't be beaten. What is the point of these superfluous games?"
And Bellatrix Black, or Lestrange, or Malfoy, or whatever consanguinity she was up to these days, had seconded him. "I agree, Master. Pain is pain. Severus might like to play with his food," (Snape's eyes had narrowed) "but the results are much better without this Muggle pussyfooting."
Not one for Dark or Grey or Sort-of-Twilighty Arts, Bellatrix. She'd liked clear distinctions.
"Now, now, Bellatrix," the Dark Lord had said-- in one of the rare moments when he sounded like Slughorn-- "I believe Severus was referring to the Treatise on Torture of Paul Grilland, an excellent Dark Wizard in his time, even if he chose to practice his arts for the apparent benefit of the Muggle Inquisition. Fourteen weapons are better than one."
"The Inquisition?" Sinistra had shrugged. "I honestly don't understand where you find enough energy to invest in these things. Though I suppose I can't judge. We all have our pet blood-soaked historical period."
"We're living in one," Snape had tried -- to no avail.
"Of course we are. The most current event in world politics that I know about happened three thousand years ago, and I'm still quite on top of things. Someone was trying to take over the world. There was blood. Now someone is trying to take over the world and there's blood. Am I right? Plus ca change... I haven't missed very much, have I?"
Sinistra simply didn't care about Voldemort. "Will he create jobs for Astronomers?" she'd intoned once, when Snape had tried to press upon her the magnitude of the threat. "Will he offer a pension plan? Honestly, Snape, world domination is a pretty silly concept if you don't have a pension plan. And dental insurance."
She was an odd experience for Snape: not too stupid to understand, not caring just the same. "Another Divination professor," she would say to him upon Firenze's appointment. "Did it occur to Dumbledore that I could teach them anything he can? Anything he and Trelawney can?"
"Dumbledore's hiring policies have nothing to do with qualifications," Snape would observe, feeling brutal. "Or with teaching the children. You know that; it's why he hired you."
"And you," Sinistra would say, not to be outdone.
"And Trelawney, and Hagrid, and Flitwick, and the werewolf, and the centaur, and Filch, and I have my suspicions about Sprout. In fact I'm hard-pressed to think of someone who works here who isn't incapacitated in some way, other than McGonagall."
Her sense of humour was dry but rarely deserted her. "Perhaps I could improve my prospects if I told him my mother was a sphinx. Incapacitating, no? Surely it benefits some affirmative action."
"You'd do better if your mother was a goblin."
She'd smile her tight wide smile. "How is Miss Lovegood treating you these days?"
"Impossibly." Snape would look sour. "Yesterday she felt compelled to interrupt class for a lecture on the endangered status of an ingredient. How's she treating you?"
"Yesterday she felt compelled to interrupt class for a lecture on how Galileo wasn't Inquisitioned because of his heliocentric system but because the Pope had a bad case of the runs. I do so love the child."
Snape would snort. "Enough to write for its ubiquitous dad?"
"Come on, Snape. I'm a charity case. Lovegood runs an even bigger charity menagerie than Dumbledore. And Hogwarts funding isn't what it used to be-- aren't you feeling the pinch?"
Creature comforts didn't concern Sinistra, but the telescopes required maintenance. She also required certain books by Muggle authors, which had to be purchased with Muggle money; and with exchange rates being what they were, and with the bankers twitching and paranoid and barely willing to lend Muggle money at all, for fear of a crisis, and with the Muggle publishers charging what they did for good solid research-based books, she'd really have no choice. Simon Lovegood had odd priorities, but he also had had the foresight to make enough money to burn.
"Because he keeps getting sued," Snape would hiss. "With good reason."
"But he never loses," she'd reply wryly. "And Dumbledore's defense budget is spiralling out of control. Now, out of all the people who obsess about world domination, Dumbledore's probably my favourite. I can make some sacrifices for him if I have to. On the other hand the Babylonians obsessed about world domination too, and caring for their astronomers was part of it, not something that could be put off until everything was all right again. But what does he do? He hires Firenze. Which means that the single job of Astronomer-Diviner that the Founders had in mind is now split into three. Which means we should each get a third of the set endowment. Which would have been enough - I don't need the fanciest of fancy clocks or anything - but we only get a third of what's left over when he's done withholding our security taxes. Even that might have been enough, but his defense budget is -"
"Spiralling out of control. You already said that."
"Well, what is he doing with it? He can't be bribing Voldemort!"
Snape would then tell her about the Wolfsbane Potion, and the prohibitive costs thereof, and how this was symptomatic of all of Dumbledore's other endeavours - which, inexplicably, boiled down to maintaining a retinue of people (or some approximation thereof) who never really did anything. Sinistra's yellowish eyes would widen in the dark. When he'd finished she would grin: "Please tell me you're siphoning off a respectable amount for yourself, at least."
"Only the most respectable of amounts," Snape would demur. "If it makes you feel any better, Black was eating rats for a while - though it might have just been his way of contributing to the cause." And he'd explain about Pettigrew.
"I'll bet Dumbledore was paying him to do it, then," Sinistra would laugh. "Maybe we could tell Dumbledore I've been bitten by a werewolf, so he could give you twice the money he does now. We could split it."
"You're not important enough to save," Snape would say, perhaps with a smile.
He'd gradually gotten used to her and her habits. She slept in a hammock. Her company was first tolerable, then pleasant, then mercifully distracting from the torpor of work; though it never became so distracting as to make him forget that Sinistra, more than anyone, was one of Dumbledore's approximate-people who never really did anything. It was galling. She had a mind. Lovegood, at the very least, had a world's history of people killing his people informing his every thought (and his wand-arm) to let this latest of Dark Lords rise unopposed. His ideas about opposition were a bit odd; but at least he had them. Sinistra had removed herself from the land of the living.
She'd been his first ally at Hogwarts: a tight-smiled, unconcerned ally who didn't expect him to be jocund or force him into the camaraderie of Hogwarts activities. She cared little for Hogwarts activities. Part of this, of course, was that she was exclusively nocturnal; and her work had sharpened her eyes to the point that even layers of shading-charms couldn't make her comfortable in the Great Hall. On the rare occasions when she appeared at the staff table it was for an emergency breakfast, at dinner, when her need for coffee eclipsed her aversion to light.
He'd quickly learned which professors were likely to engage him in conversation, and when; and Sinistra had kept to her own orbit so scrupulously that he'd written her off as a threat almost at once. So it had been a surprise to find her at his door late one night. She hadn't greeted him but announced, "I need something to smoke. Could you?..."
Snape had waited for more information and thought about slamming the door.
"Anything. Any old rubbish. Neither Pomfrey nor Sprout stock that type of thing. Students, you know. Underage. I'm literally ready to beg."
"Madame Rosmerta, I believe --"
"It's four in the morning."
And so it had been, but it hadn't been a concern of his. He'd told her so: "You'll just have to control yourself, then."
"What an auspicious start," she'd sighed. "All right, then, Professor Snape; I shan't trouble you any further. Good night, or good morning --"
"Good morning to you too," Snape had said, moving the door several inches closer to its frame.
"I'll be up until dawn," she'd said. "In the event that mercy or procrastination intervenes in my favour."
"Unlikely," Snape had said with a curt nod. "Good morning."
But his fingers had strayed, and he'd indulged them -- saying to himself that it was only for practice, only to make sure that he still knew what he'd discovered as a teenager of limited foresight, that he needed to do something with the pouch of peelings of minkwood (otherwise useless), that it would be a shame to throw them away, that only the tiniest pinch of ginger-root and the tiniest sliver of clove would be required to make them burn really well and even clear one's sinuses when they did so. All in all it had taken him two and a half minutes.
Once he'd blended the shavings, however, he'd been at a complete loss as to what he might do with them. He'd been in no mood to smoke them. He could not very well have delivered them to her. And so he'd put them in the pouch and put it aside, along with his thoughts of Sinistra.
Precisely three minutes later Sinistra had tapped his door with her wand again. "Excellent," she'd said, spotting the tobacco-pouch at once. "Thank you."
She'd then shamelessly summoned it and traipsed off with no further comment.
When pressed about her timing -- Snape's paranoias were not to be trifled with, and nothing worried him more than someone spying on him in his quarters -- she'd grinned so cheerfully as to almost make him hex her. "It was something much more prosaic," she'd explained. "I just wandered back down here to pester you for a book. The Theologia of St. John Damascene. The Library wards say that you have it, and that one Simplicius Delmonte -- in your own House, I believe -- had it before you. I'm marking essays, you see."
Snape hadn't believed a word of it.
"My perspectives on plagiarism are historical rather than hysterical, you know, by which I mean downright lax; but this was just so crude and so blatant and so obvious it's insulting. His entire essay is copied word-for-word from the book. I wouldn't normally care so much, but does he think I don't read? Stupid boy."
"Why, then, did you grab the tobacco and leave?"
She'd stared at him. "My dear Professor Snape, I can't stand the light in your rooms, I can't very well smoke in the hallway... and, like I said, I'm desperate."
But after a full minute of Legilimency there had been nothing more forthcoming; nothing more than Sixth-Year essays and Simplicius Delmonte's plagiarism and the pipe and the pipe and the pipe. "Are you quite done?" she'd finally asked him. "Because the light is behind you. My eyes can't take much more of this and I'm useless without them, you know."
There had been something else in her mind, or about her in general, however, which Snape had found even more reassuring than her lack of hidden motives for tapping his door. It was a defensive, almost pathological disregard for everything on earth except her two long-haired Ravenclaw boys and her telescopes. And, of course, pipe-filler.
"Forgive me," Snape had said. "I was rude."
"Just give me the damned book; I'm getting quite jittery. Quite."
He'd done so, and, curious, followed her to the Astronomy Tower. Along the way he'd asked her why she'd needed the book: would it not have been simpler to just line up Simplicius and ask him, with the aid, perhaps, of a little Legilimency? She'd dismissed this with a twisted smile. "Mindgames? Life's too short. I'm rubbish at them anyway."
"The proper disciplinary action will be taken, I assure you."
"You know," she'd said to him, "you and I are the only professors at this school whose subjects are the exclusive province of Muggles. How disturbing is that?"
It had been dark in her quarters, and cold. It always was. Heat interfered with the telescopes. She didn't keep an open fire in her grate, didn't keep candles or light around even for marking essays. "How do you read?" Snape had asked. His own eyes preferred twilight, not this thick pitch-black darkness of hers.
"I'm rubbish at everything, really," she'd admitted. "The one thing I can do tolerably well are conversion-charms." And she'd waved her wand at the book and the suspicious essay, which had proceeded to read themselves, in unison, aloud.
"Leaves the hands and eyes free," she'd exhaled a cloud of smoke. "Students. Why should I devote all my attention to their drivel?"
The pipe had filled itself so quickly he hadn't noticed it starting to glow: perhaps a darkness charm had further been cast on the embers. By then Snape had started to rather enjoy himself. "Excellent policy," he'd remarked, "and the essay--"
"Oh, awful. Didn't even bother to write it in his own voice."
He'd listened to St. John Damascene drone in stereo for a few minutes more, then made his way back to his rooms.Too Sue?