Well here it is at long last: the final chapter. Not much action, but a lot of soul searching and hopefully a couple of funnies in there too. I'm going to miss this...

I'll stop being sentimental now. On with the show!!!

Seven

All's well…

"Maud… Maud!"

"Wake up sleepyhead."

"Come on Maud, time to get up."

Maud opened her eyes and groped around for her glasses, so as to be able to see her friends with any degree of clarity. They were all crowded around her bed, grinning from ear to ear.

"It's time for your final dose," asid Enid, shaking the bottle of antidote at her. Maud grimaced. The potion was quite possibly the worst she'd ever tasted and she'd already had to drink almost an entire bottle that morning.

"Come on Maud, it's only one more spoonful," coaxed Mildred. "Then it will all be over."

"Alright, alright," she grumbled, sitting up gingerly. She poured out the final dregs of the potion and swallowed it with difficulty. "What are you doing in here anyway? HB will flip if she finds you all in here."

Her gathered gaggle of friends burst out laughing and Maud regarded them with a thoroughly confused expression.

"What? I'm serious. She said I needed complete rest and recuperation with no interruptions."

"That may be," said Jadu once she had regained some composure. "But I don't think that HB will be finding us in here any time soon." This sent the other girls into fresh peals of laughter.

Maud looked questioningly at her friends.

"Is anyone going to stop sniggering long enough to explain?"

Mildred finally took pity on her best friend and took a deep breath.

"HB will not find us in here because she is currently asleep in the potions lab."

"She dropped off in the middle of our lesson and Miss Cackle felt that it would be… safer to leave her be."

Maud raised an eyebrow in disbelief. The sight of her form teacher passed out on the front desk was not one that came readily to mind.

"Don't you believe us?" asked Enid, her voice full of faux-hurt. "It's the talk of the school. That and Ethel of course. You can't go anywhere without someone prophesising her doom, whether through explusion or pneumonia."

"Pneumonia?" Maud's state of befuddlement was not getting any lighter. Honestly, she thought. You're out of the loop for half a day and you completely lose track of everything that's going on.

"She tried to fly fifty miles in a thunderstorm last night," explained Ruby airily, as if Ethel did this sort of thing every day. "It didn't work."

"And now she's got a streaming cold," Enid added with relish. She gave Mildred, who had just got comfy on the end of Maud's bed and closed her eyes, a sharp jab in the ribs. "Wake up Mil, or we'll stick you in the lab with HB."

"Please no."

The girls burst into fresh fits of laughter and Mildred managed a somewhat sleepy smile, although it was clear that the memory of the cold feeling of dread that she had experienced last night had not fully died. Maud caught her eye and smiled in reassurance.

Just then the mirth was interrupted by a knock at the door. Miss Cackle's face appeared around the frame.

"I thought I might find you all in here," she said. "Strictly speaking, Maud is recovering from a serious illness and shouldn't have quite so many visitors all at the same time. But, since it is widely acknowledged that laughter is the best medicine, I'll let you off just this once. It's time for assembly now, and I expect to see you all there. Fully awake, I might add, Mildred."

"What about Miss Hardbroom?" asked Enid sweetly, looking as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. Miss Cackle returned the expression.

"Thank you for your… concern, Enid, but I can assure you that Miss Hardbroom is perfectly compos mentis. Now, if I can succeed in persuading you that Maud is going to be perfectly fine, maybe we will be able to proceed to assembly and leave your friend to get some much needed rest."

Jadu, Ruby and Enid all trooped out of the tiny room. Mildred showed some reluctance to follow them.

"You too Mildred," coaxed the headmistress. "You can come back afterwards."

"Go on Millie," urged Maud. "I'll be fine."

Eventually Mildred left the room, Miss Cackle following. Maud leaned back against her pillow and closed her eyes, going over the events of the day in her mind. It had been a long, long morning, and at that moment she wanted nothing more than to sleep for a week. Just as she was dropping off (or so it seemed – she later reflected that she'd probably been fast asleep for quite a while), the sound of the door creaking open jerked her back into consciousness. She opened her eyes and realised that she'd nodded off with her glasses on before looking up at her visitor. Her mouth set in a hard line when she registered who it was. Ethel was standing in the doorway; nose red and eyes watering from her cold. She looked sheepish and tenacious in equal measure.

"Yes?" asked Maud irritably. If it hadn't been for Millie's timely interception, Ethel would have been the cause of Maud's demise, and she didn't want to spend any more time than absolutely necessary in her presence. "Come to finish what you started?"

"Look, don't make this any harder than it already is," snapped Ethel. "I came to offer my apology, but if it's not wanted…" She turned to leave.

"Wait…" Maud called. She was not so bitter as to refuse an apology, no matter how grudgingly it was given. Ethel turned back and closed the door. She stood silently for a moment, wringing her hands as if she didn't know what to do with them.

"I honestly didn't mean to poison you," she said. "Honestly. I just wanted to see what the effects of the potion were."

"It's ok, I believe you," said Maud. She paused. "I just don't understand why."

Ethel shrugged.

"Curiosity I guess."

Before she could say anything else, the door opened again. A small 'oh' from the frame heralded Mildred's return. Ethel coughed uncomfortably, whether from her situation or her illness Muad couldn't tell, and rushed past the latest arrival to leave the room without another word. Mildred entered, her eyes narrowed with suspicion.

"What did Ethel want?" she asked.

"To apologise," said Maud cheerfully. "Although you know Ethel. The words 'I', 'am' and 'sorry' simply don't belong in the same sentence with her." She snorted. "I got the nearest to an apology I'm ever going to get I suppose."

Mildred relaxed visibly and perched on the edge of the bed.

"I'm the one who should be sorry," she said. "If it wasn't for my frankly awful potion-making ability, you wouldn't be in this mess in the first place."

Maud sighed theatrically.

"Mildred Hubble, if I wasn't confined to bedrest I would jump up and throttle you. It doesn't matter what you did before, you saved me and that's all that counts. Ethel, on the other hand, whose fault it actually is because she was the idiot who gave me the potion as opposed to leaving it where it was supposed to be, ran away. I know who I'd rather have an apology from."

They sat in a companionable silence for a while, broken only by Mildred's intermittent yawns. Maud wondered what it must have been like for her friend, frantically running around the castle and facing her fears whilst she lay unconscious.

"What's going to happen to her?" she asked, her mind coming full circle back to Ethel. Mildred smiled.

"She's been banned from the potions lab for the rest of the year," she replied. "So she'll automatically fail her potions final. And she's definitely no longer HB's favourite, which for Ethel is probably punishment enough in itself."

Maud laughed, gradually remembering her long, long conversation with their potions teacher in the early hours of the morning. She had been very drowsy and couldn't recall exactly what happened, but when the wideawake potion had run out they'd had to talk to keep her awake. They'd started on strictly formal topics, but school could only fuel a discussion between teacher and pupil for so long and soon they'd moved onto more personal subjects. It was only when she had found herself describing just how much she missed her parents when she was away that Maud had realised that she had never shared the information with anyone before, let alone a formidable form-mistress. Likewise, she had found out things about HB that would probably rock the entire school if made public. But Maud wasn't about to make them public. What had happened that previous night was so surreal that she was having trouble convincing herself that it wasn't just a dream, and she wanted to keep it that way.

"Maybe she isn't so bad," she mused aloud.

"Who, Ethel?" Mildred looked startled.

"No, HB." Maud paused, trying to think of the right way to describe her thoughts. "I think, last night she proved she was a bit more… human than we usually give her credit for."

Mildred contemplated this, lining it up with her own experiences. The worried note in her voice when she'd diagnosed Maud's condition, the plea for trust between them… Her mind came to rest on their brief encounter in the cloakroom. She wondered about telling Maud what had happened, but something made her decide against it. She nodded.

"Maybe you're right."

XXX

Miss Cackle trimmed the wicks of the candle lamps in the staffroom before settling into her favourite chair for a well-deserved slice of strawberry cheesecake. Miss Bat was humming a little tune to herself as she crocheted what she claimed to be a scarf, but what looked more like an all-in-one sleep suit for a mutated squid.

"Well," said the chanting teacher presently. "I'm glad we sorted that out."

Miss Drill raised an eyebrow at 'we'. Miss Bat had spent the majority of the day in the staffroom cupboard and it had taken a good two hours of cajoling and fruit salad to assure her that crisis had been averted and that there was nothing ill with the world.

"Yes," said Miss Cackle thoughtfully, choosing to ignore the inclusivity of the statement. "All's well that end's well."

"Not quite," said Miss Hardbroom grimly. If her sudden appearance had made her superior jump she didn't show it. "We still have to explain to our chair of governors why his supposedly brilliant daughter failed her potions final."

"I was hoping that Ethel would explain that for herself," said Miss Cackle wistfully, although she knew that it was a long shot. Miss Hardbroom stopped in the middle of pouring tea into a cup and viewed the headmistress with disbelief.

"This is Ethel Hallow we're talking about. Leopards were not, when I last looked, in the habit of changing their spots."

"True," Miss Cackle conceded, "but they can change the way they see their spots."

Miss Hardbroom continued to pour the tea, thinking about the headmistress's philosophy. She thought about Mildred and her crisis of confidence, and the strange surge of something – pride, she supposed – that she had felt when her shaken pupil had finally succeeded. She thought about Maud, willingly opening up her innermost fears and hopes to a person she would ordinarily deride as an unfeeling dragon, and, conversely, her own decision to share what she had done with her student. She wondered about asking for Maud's discretion in the matter, but then decided against it. Was it really so important?

"You know, I think you might be right Headmistress."

Miss Cackle gave her a knowing look over the top of her spectacles.

"So I was right," said Miss Bat triumphantly, bringing Miss Hardbroom out of her reverie. "Everything has ended happily."

"It's still not quite so simple," said the potions teacher with a wry smirk as she remembered the reason she had entered the staffroom in the first place. "I still need to write a long and tedious letter to the Witches' Guild explaining why I had to make an extremely dangerous and definitely outlawed potion."

"Well…" Miss Cackle's eyes twinkled. "I don't think that will be strictly necessary."

"But Headmistress…"

"The witch who was due to investigate this matter has mysteriously contracted an acute form of Mexican Jumping Disease. Oh, don't be alarmed, it's nothing serious, she'll be perfectly fine. But it seems that in all the confusion, the case file pertaining to use of said definitely outlawed potion was tragically misplaced." She smiled. "I think we'll keep it under our hats, don't you think ladies?"

The three remaining staff members looked at each other and nodded in an enthusiastic unison.

Fin

Well, there we are. Final review anyone? You know you want to... I had to finish on a staffroom scene, we've already established that they're my favourites and I exercised remarkable self-restraint in limiting their appearances to just two.

Adieu for now, but if you enjoyed this feel free to have a nosy at my profile for more fics. There aren't any other WW ones unfortunately but who knows? Maybe this dreaded lurgy will give me wonderous inspiration... (*Kimmeth begins to think...*)