Chapter 49: In Which We Contemplate Potions and Psychopaths
The sun crept slowly across the deeply blue sky of Cleveland summer. While waiting for it to go down, Severus rummaged around the kitchen for the necessary ingredients to make an anti-nausea potion. Sugar, ginger, and peppermint were all easy to locate, now he needed chalk. Fortunately Hermione would be back with some soon.
"Why chalk?" Hermione asked him, leaning against the counter when she returned.
"Because of the magical properties of the grounding forces of earth taking into effect the spicy fieryness of the peppermint and ginger, while balancing the water that all the ingredients will swim in." Severus looked somewhat pleased with himself.
"You have no idea." She smirked at him.
"I have no idea. The potion works. It's always worked, and it's so basic I've had no desire to test it to see why it works."
"It bet it's because chalk is basic and stomach acid can make you feel sick." She handed Snape a roll of Rolaids and a few sticks of chalk she had found in one of the classrooms.
He snagged the chalk, and began working with the mortar and pestle he had found. Hermione watched him and then grabbed a food processor, measuring out the ingredients, using the Rolaids instead of the chalk.
In a matter of seconds, she had a smooth minty paste. In a matter of minutes, Severus had one as well.
He very carefully scraped his into a pot of boiling water, and she dumped hers into a similar pot.
"Are you trying to drive me insane this sloppy job you're doing." He wasn't truly angry, but she could see he didn't enjoy watching her work in such a slipshod manner.
"I'm trying to see if the ingredients really matter, or if it is all about the application of will."
He went back to timing his potion. At precisely two minutes and thirty-six seconds, Snape took his potion off the heat, stirred it three times clockwise, and four times anti-clockwise.
Hermione took hers off at about two and a half minutes and gave it half a dozen stirs. Both carefully poured the very hot liquid through a strainer into a jar. Hermione lidded the jars, gave each one a number, and put hers in the fridge to cool. Severus cast a cooling charm upon his.
"Giles will grab one of the two of them tomorrow, and we'll hear back how it worked," Hermione said. As they were walking out of the kitchen, Hermione looked thoughtful. "You know, if it really is all about will, that might explain why Neville was so awful at potions. Between his fear and trying so hard to focus on the ingredients, he probably never spared a moment to concentrate on what the potion was supposed to do."
"Did you ever find out why he was so afraid of me? I know I wasn't kind to him, but I was worse to you and Potter, and neither of you developed Snapephobia."
"We had bigger things to be afraid of, impending return of Lord Voldemort and all that. Maybe Neville didn't?"
As they left the kitchen to get ready for dinner, Hermione thought of something. "Why did you leave the castle during the final battle?"
Snape looked a little startled by the question. "I suppose that's not totally out of the blue given this afternoon's conversation. I left because I could see in Minerva's eyes that Potter was standing right next to her, and she was going to kill me if I stayed a second longer. There was no way he would trust my information if I killed Dumbledore in front of him, and then stunned Minerva in what looked like an unprovoked attack. I would have had to stun him, get him to trust me, give him the information, and then hope he'd go do what he needed to do. That would have been a rather large mess. I was hoping to get back into the castle, find him without him seeing me, and let my Patronus tell him what he needed to know.
"It really was an abysmal plan. Had Potter been any smarter or told you, I'm sure one of you would have noticed that a suicide mission against Voldemort was also a great way for Voldemort to win the battle."
"He didn't tell me because he was sure I'd stop him, and I would have. I suppose we might have had a chat with Dumbledore's portrait just to make sure, or the hour would have elapsed and the fight would have started again. Who knows? I wasn't with him when he saw your memories. I was with the Weasleys. Fred had just died…" Hermione visibly wrenched herself away from that line of thought. "Okay. That's enough grim for one day."
They continued walking towards their room. "So, tell me about the girl who won last year," Snape said.
"She had a very simple plan. Capture Voldemort; put him into a magical stasis. Have an all out, pull no punches, hunt for the Horcruxes. Destroy them. Kill Voldemort the day after Harry died for the slow version. Kill Harry and Voldemort in the quick one."
"There is a certain ruthless efficiency to that."
"Talk about ruthless, each year I get at least one girl who either kidnaps the children of the Death Eaters to ensure their good behaviour or has them all killed in Azkaban as soon as Voldemort rises again. In 2002 I had one girl come up with homicide bomber Harry. He enters the clearing under his invisibility cloak with enough explosives strapped to him to destroy everything within a city block. Obviously that one didn't win."
"You thought it might be a bit difficult to get those kinds of explosives at Hogwarts? Let alone make a bomb work with all that magic making Muggle electronics shaky at best"
"That and there was a better plan that year."
"Really?"
"Take a time turner. Go back to the graveyard where Voldemort returned. Make sure every Auror and Order Member was there and in hiding, and blast the hell out of him and Pettigrew. Hunt down the rest of the Horcruxes while he's floating about. Cast a locator spell, find his soul, capture it, and wait for Harry to die of natural causes. They get extra points if they find a way to keep Harry alive."
"Can a soul be captured?"
"Her thought process was: if all the other bits of his soul could be stuck in objects, why not this last one?"
Snape sighed and shook his head.
Hermione shrugged. "Yeah, I didn't have a good answer for that either. It seems plausible, and I've heard of soul gems, so maybe one could be made with what was left of Voldemort. Mostly I was impressed by the use of a time turner."
"Kidnap Merope Gaunt and have her raised somewhere far away from Tom Riddle," Snape said. "When you factor in time turners the possibilities are limitless."
"Yes, after that year, I told them I wanted them to use magic/weapons and tactics available to them. So they better have a fantastic story for how one of them gets her hands on a time turner."
They had reached the door to their room. Hermione opened it and continued speaking, "I'll admit that I was shocked that no one on our side realized that there were time turners sitting in the Ministry, waiting to be used. I had one all of my third year and to use it for anything but classes never occurred to me. Dumbledore, a time turner, five minutes in spent in an orphanage in 1933, and all of our lives could have been much simpler."
"More fodder for the idea that Dumbledore wasn't actually trying to get rid of Voldemort." Hermione really didn't like that idea, but she couldn't argue against it. Severus continued, "Anyway, who knows what a world without Tom Riddle looks like? It could be awful. It could be lovely. It probably doesn't involve the two of us sitting in a room in America."
"It probably doesn't. Plus, I'm not convinced that killing kids is the best way to go about dispensing justice. Harry tells me that by the time he was ten Riddle was already tormenting the children around him and their pets. Maybe he was born broken? Maybe he was fragile and had he been raised with a loving family who nurtured him, he would have been fine?"
Snape stopped peeling off his clothing and looked at her aghast. "I suppose we could break into the Ministry, steal a time turner, kidnap baby Tom, and give him to a loving, supporting family, and then find out that he killed them shortly after his fifteenth birthday because he was just plain evil. I don't think there was ever anything good or wholesome about that man. He was the rotten fruit of a diseased tree. There used to be whispers about how Merope's father was also her uncle, her mother also her grandmother. Or so the rumours went among the old families."
"And you would know…?"
"Because my Grandmother Prince was older than dirt, pure blood, and a nasty gossip. Slytherins love it when one of us does well, but it's even better when one does fantastically awful. And the Gaunts were almost a cautionary tale, why the occasional, very occasional, half-blood was allowable. I suppose it was her way of saying that even though I wasn't a pure blood, I wasn't useless." He was buttoning a dark green shirt. Hermione continued to toss bits of clothing out of her bag.
He saw her grab a bundle of lime green fabric. "Finally, I was beginning to think I had forgotten this." When she shook it out he saw a small summery dress. "So, with Voldemort gaining support and raising strength for the first war, your grandmother would spread rumours about his mother?"
"No! No one knew he was related to the Gaunts. I didn't know until Dumbledore was looking into his background to learn more about him. One day I found out Dumbledore had been pressing Augusta Longbottom for any memories about the Gaunts, so I told him what I had heard. I doubt Voldemort could have risen as far as he did if he had gone by the name Gaunt. I can guarantee you that the Malfoys and the Blacks, and the rest of high Slytherin society would have had nothing to do with him. His blood would have been considered a bit too pure." Severus flicked his wand and his socks zoomed to him. "Do you know where my shoes are?"
"I think they're under the bed." Snape bent down to look, while Hermione pulled her hair into a loose pony tail.
"You wouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt?"
Snape lifted his head. "Huh?"
"Baby Tom, no benefit of the doubt?"
"No." He straightened and looked at her seriously. "I'm not saying that it's a good plan to execute psychotic ten year olds, some probably will get better. But in this particular case I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea. If it wasn't for the fear of the unseen and unforeseeable consequences, stealing a time turner and taking out Baby Tom would be immensely tempting." Hermione looked disquieted. He sat next to her and took her hand. "I spent more time, more closely with him than anyone else currently alive. Unlike all his other pets, I never disappointed him. He came closer to trusting me than he did with anyone, and he still almost killed me over a stupid, bloody wand. When I say he was evil, it's not an opinion. That he had no redeeming qualities is not conjecture. I'm not rushing to judge here either, I had four years with him the first time and four years the second, and any method that could have removed him would have been a blessing for us."
"A baby?" She still looked disturbed.
"Not a baby, that baby, and only that baby."
"Don't you believe in the possibility of redemption?"
"For almost everyone. Hell, we're getting ready to go out to dinner with an ensouled Vampire and his Slayer lover, if there was ever a case of redemption, I'd say that counts. But Voldemort wasn't almost everyone. He's a very specific case of someone who… what did you say about elemental evil? You didn't like the idea, but had no reason to doubt it. If humans can be pure evil, he was. Think about it: we could say: let's go get the time turner and give him to a loving family, and he still comes out evil. Well, obviously it wasn't the right loving family, so we'll try another loving family. Gosh, he's still evil. Well how about another family? When does it stop? When can you say we tried enough, he's really bad to the bone, let's take him out?" Hermione looked thoughtful and started to apply eyeliner.
"Of course, that begs the question: would he turn out evil if given to that first hypothetical loving family?"
"Do you honestly believe he would have been all sunshine and roses?"
"No. I do think he was actually sick. But I like to think that he could have channeled all that awfulness into something more constructive, or less destructive." She looked at him in the mirror while finishing her lipstick. She wasn't sure what Severus' expression meant, but she guessed he was thinking she was being unbelievably naive and didn't want to say anything about it. Well, what he doesn't say can't hurt me. She kissed her lips together to make sure the lipstick was on right, and then said, "Ready to go?"
He smiled at her. "Yes, let's go."