Title: Ardor Animorum
Author: AristideCauquemaire
Pairing: Scorpius Malfoy/James Sirius Potter
Rating: M for grown-up language and sexual situations and themes.
Warnings: original characters; slash, non-consensual situations
In which feelings and other things boil over... aaaaand we're taking two steps back again because that's how you do it when you tango.
I also uploaded chapter 6 today. Have you read that already? Because you totally should if you plan on understanding what's going on in this one.
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Chapter 7
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He was still fuming inside and mentally telling Potter to take his little grey owl and his shorthand note and shove it where only a forcefully applied long-handled stirring spoon might reach when he found himself huffing and puffing up the stairs, bucket alternately banging against his calves and the steps, mop lying heavily on his shoulder.
He opened the door onto a battlefield of fumes and puddles. Potter was standing in the middle of it, on a rickety-looking stepladder that was half a foot too short to let him reach the latch of the domed roof light. He was apparently trying to open it further to allow the smoke to escape, and failing.
"What the hell?" Scorpius said. The room was hazy with multicoloured fumes that were already making his eyes itch. The puddle seemed to be growing still although it was not obvious where the additional liquid could be coming from. There was a large greenish stain on the ceiling. One of the cauldrons, the one that had held the wound-cleaning potion last time he'd checked, was melting off the table, like in a Dali painting.
"Three quarters of an hour, Malfoy," Potter said, hammering at a rusty window latch with a spoon to no avail. It only made dust and cobwebs rain down onto him. "That's as soon as possible for you?" He grumbled something that sounded like 'bloody unbelievable', then held out his hand and demanded, "Give me the mop."
Scorpius handed the mop over, mop-end first, bridging the large, oil-coloured puddle that divided the room like an ocean divided islands from one another.
"Now get to work. Contain first," Potter snapped as he got back to his own task of letting more air into the room before everyone in it would die of asphyxiation.
Scorpius quickly decided to first tend to the remaining cauldrons that were about to boil over, then collected all the reactive ingredients that were still lying around and temporarily stored them on a safe table out of reach, and finally tended to the two kettles that were still happily cooking away, utterly unimpressed by the chaos around them. Lastly, he mopped up the spill. It was thick like syrup or glue and smelled of copper knuts and wet dog.
Potter, having succeeded in opening the window with the help of the mop and some brute force, cleared the ruined cauldron and the potions away one by one, each time making a bunch of notes in his notebook. By the end of his round, only two kettles were left with liquids cooking in them. Scorpius was standing over one of them, counting to twenty-one before each new stir.
"Step back," Potter said gruffly. "I'll clear it up. Start from scratch."
"But why?" Scorpius stopped stirring. "These two are still perfectly fine."
"No, they're not," he barked, ripped a page out of the notebook and held it out to him. "Get these ingredients from downstairs."
"But-"
"I am not going to repeat myself," Potter interrupted with barely restrained temper, glowering at Scorpius and following him with his eyes until he was out the door.
Scorpius took his sweet time collecting the items, muttering curses under his breath all the while until he was well and truly annoyed with James Potter, his pissy behaviour, the fact that he was going out with Alverdine Sullivan, and with the world in general. On his way back up to the brewing room, he pummelled the steps with his feet.
Potter greeted him with an "Ugh, finally" and all but tore the heavy basket with ingredients out of his hands. "I was just about to send out a search party." Scorpius rolled his eyes and gritted his teeth.
James ignored it and started instructing him using the bare minimum of words. From what Scorpius could tell, it was the same potions over again, except that the invigoratium and the lung clearing potion switched places for reasons James refused to expound, and that the wound-cleaning potion would now brew in a brass kettle instead of an iron one.
Today it felt like an insult when Potter went up to his table where he started the new wolfsbane and told him to "just deal with the rest" by himself.
Scorpius managed to keep quiet for more than an hour, hoping that the tension would ease, but it didn't. Annoyed and more than a little hurt, he broke the silence.
"So you're not going to tell me what happened?" He really tried to keep his voice neutral. "And what exactly am I doing here, anyway? I mean, you're not going to get any credit points for potions I brew, so..." He trailed off, flicking pungous onion peel into the bin.
Potter gave no indication that he had heard. But Scorpius knew that he had.
"I didn't even see Professor Smith anywhere downstairs. Where is he? Shouldn't he help you out in a situation like this?" He stopped short of 'What would you have done without me?', feeling that that would have been too forthright.
But when James still didn't react, he needled on, "So I guess I've been demoted again, eh? Back to the shut-up-and-obey kind of servant-"
"Damn it, Malfoy!" Potter had just been scribbling something onto another long roll of parchment – or maybe it was the very same? - that again curled around his feet and under the table. The quill broke with a snap. He tossed the useless end onto the floor as he turned around and toward him, spreading his hands in an impatient, almost helpless gesture. "What do you want to hear from me?"
"Just about anything would be acceptable by now," Scorpius said, a bit more loudly and forcefully than he should, as he impaled one of the onions with the peeling knife. "Try talking, and try doing it as if you didn't take me for some sort of brain-dead house-elf, maybe." Also: Really!? That's not a fair question.
They stared at each other across the room for several seconds.
Potter grimaced, then broke eye contact first and turned away again. Just when Scorpius was prepared to put down everything and leave – really leave – he started talking. More to himself than to Scorpius, but at least he talked.
"Apparently, the aconite fluid wasn't properly labelled," he said. He sharpened a new quill with the Swiss knife, put it aside and tended the boiling liquid in the kettle before him. "Concentration wasn't high enough, the rest of the belladonna wasn't completely dissolved. When I left it overnight, the belladonna residue vaporized. The smoke didn't escape through the hatch and reacted with the iron-and-salt- mixture in the wound-cleaning potion which weakened the kettle. I didn't even notice it, but when I added the hellebore about an hour ago, the thing just... And then..." His hand gesture approximated a growing puddle. "Chain reaction."
"That sucks," Scorpius commented quietly, then pressed his lips together when he realized that it could be misunderstood as innuendo.
He need not have worried because Potter was too angry to care about it anyway. "What sucks the most is that the wolfsbane came out as a variation," he all but growled. "Instead of just being plain spoilt – a bloody variation." He exhaled mightily after the odious word was out.
Scorpius immediately remembered the conversation with slightly drunk Mariella. He looked up at Potter's back and suddenly wished for him to stop talking.
"Because of the mislabelling, I got a first base concoction instead of a proper potion which means that I wasted seventeen days of work. Seventeen. Days." He rubbed his eyes like a potion maker never should for fear of becoming blind or worse. "Not to mention several dozen galleons worth of ingredients."
"But... But a first base to wolfsbane is still really good," Scorpius pointed out tonelessly. "It's the same potion, it's got the same ratio of ingredient and therefore the same effect-"
"Maybe, or maybe not," Potter cut him off. "We're not talking about a cough expectorant here. It would be downright irresponsible to let anyone sample a variation of wolfsbane." He sighed exasperatedly and stirred his young wolfsbane-to-be with a large silver spoon. "As far as safety and usability are concerned, and within the rules of my apprenticeship, that brew is completely, utterly worthless." He murmured something inaudible, then added, "And since I added substances to substitute for runespore and dragon venom and all those rare, expensive ingredients, I can't even use it to extend a proper wolfsbane potion. It's... it's just wasted. Dead-end variation. It will never become anything."
When Scorpius looked back on this moment that evening while lying in bed and staring at the dark ceiling sleeplessly, he wondered if he had taken it all so personally because the bad Quidditch practice before and James' bad mood had scraped his nerves raw, or if there were toxic fumes and pungous onion juice involved, or if Mariella's slurred words had simply hit the bullseye perfectly and made him irritable. Irrational. Vulnerable. Whatever the case, someone said with his voice, "That wouldn't have happened if you had paid more attention to this and less to Ms Sullivan, would it?" before he could stop it.
He refused to look up from his onion-cutting although he could practically feel James' eyes on him after the words were out.
"What did you just say?" Potter asked quietly which made it much worse.
"There's a woman and suddenly your mind is just elsewhere – was the same thing with Sarah, back in the days, wasn't it?" he blathered on. Please, understand. "I mean, I must confess that the instances of tardiness were probably largely my fault, but I don't think you can deny that you were distracted by her, big time. I mean, so was I, once. It was kind of her thing..."
"Malfoy, what is this about now? Why are you-"
"When you walked with her, did you take the way from Madam Puddifoot's to the station? So that you'd come by the Shrieking Shack?" Did you walk by with her on your arm just when I was thinking about you?
"Why are you saying these things?" Potter snapped at him.
"Because they need to be said, don't they?" he snapped back instead of a truthful I don't know, I just want to make you hurt as much as I do right now because that just sounded like crazy talk, looking up for a short moment but then looking down again because he still couldn't stand the disgust. Please, understand. "To clear the air? To avoid further misunderstandings? To get the past behind us?" He pushed the knife down with each snide suggestion.
To show that Mariella was wrong, that you're not what I have to aim for- Because you're not perfect. You're far from it.
Maybe that will keep you from running after Alverdine Sullivan.
He wiped his nose with his sleeve. "You know, you never answered my question, Potter," he said.
I don't stand a chance, otherwise. Please, understand.
I just don't think I can take running after you forever with no hope of ever catching up.
"Sarah Halberman," he said numbly. "Why did you break up with her?"
/TBC
Ugh, hormones and the confusion, eh? But Coco is right - it needs to be f*cking said, otherwise there'll never be any snogging.
Be a dear, spare a review. (The gods reward all the good that you do...~~ )