Chapter 24: The Challenge
Potions was a struggle the following afternoon after only a few hours of sleep, but Ariadne was determined not to let her weeks of perfecting the Draught of Living Death to go to waste. She knew it was likely that the potion would appear in the their N.E.W.T. exam, and she wanted to ensure that she had the process down to a tee.
The group of N.E.W.T-level Potions students was small, considering that very few made it to the advanced stage of this difficult subject (or wanted to.) The seventh-year Gryffindors were paired with the Slytherins for Potions this semester, and in total there were only about a dozen of them.
This made it very easy for Sirius to set up his cauldron right next to Ariadne's without attracting any notice. He then took the opportunity to spend the entire double-period dropping hints about the plan to infiltrate Yaxley's group and not-so-subtly persuading her to agree to impersonate Clarice.
"You've known Clarice since you were children. Your disguise would be foolproof," he murmured while going to the store-cupboard for more wormwood.
"You guaranteed me that your Polyjuice Potion would last for 12 full hours," he said, leaning close to her under the pretense of adjusting the flame below his cauldron.
"Impersonating Clarice is our absolute best opportunity to take down Yaxley," he whispered while stirring in another dose of powdered asphodel.
Ariadne was resolutely ignoring him and concentrating on her own potion, but her patience had its limits. She was focusing on a particularly tricky sequence of alternating clockwise and counter-clockwise stirs while simultaneously adding ingredients when she saw Sirius leaning in again and opening his mouth to speak.
"If you're about to tell me that I'm Hogwarts' best chance for redemption against the forces of darkness, save it," she pre-empted rather snappily, trying not to lose count of her clockwise stirs.
"Actually, I was going to ask if I could borrow your knife. Mine's getting rather dull," he with a smirk.
Ariadne grabbed the implement and handed it to him without letting her eyes leave her cauldron. Sirius's hand closed over hers and he slowly and carefully slid the knife out from between her fingers. "Careful, Morrigan. Let's not handle dangerous things lightly," he said.
"Isn't that exactly what you're asking me to do, though?" she said impatiently. "Do you fully comprehend how risky it is to insert myself into a meeting full of dark wizards in training at some unknown location? Yaxley will be expecting something like this. He already knew exactly how to trap us with Clarice. He's smarter than you think and you're underestimating him," hissed Ariadne through the pinkish vapors rising from her cauldron.
"Morrigan, I watched Yaxley hex his own pinky finger off while trying to grow his hands bigger to catch the Quaffle in third year," said Sirius dismissively. "He's an imbecile who would've been kicked out before his N.E.W.T.S. if not for his powerful father pulling strings for him."
"But you can't deny he completely outsmarted us in the forest," countered Ariadne.
"Someone outsmarted us."
Ariadne narrowed her eyes at him. "What exactly do you mean by that?"
"Well it's obvious, isn't it?" Sirius said, his eyes glinting in the dull glow emanating from his cauldron. "There's no way Yaxley could have come up with that plan on his own. He's getting help from outside Hogwarts."
Ariadne bit her lip, an action that Sirius apparently found somewhat interesting, considering that his eyes lingered on her mouth just a bit longer than she would have deemed normal. But Ariadne was too preoccupied with the implications of his statement to devote more attention to Sirius's wandering eyes. If Yaxley was getting help from outside the castle, it made their mission much more serious and dangerous.
"This makes our plan even more serious and dangerous," she told Sirius. "I mean, if you're right, that is."
"I'm right," said Sirius breezily and confidently, now cutting up his sopophorous bean.
"You do realize that your highly inflated ego and overconfidence leads you to underestimate your opponents and sometimes results in your downfall?" said Ariadne, as more of a statement than a question.
"Not in my experience," said Sirius with a shrug.
"I can't tell whose head is bigger, Potter or yours," muttered Ariadne. "Can I have my knife back?"
Sirius was about to return it but pulled it back at the last second, as if considering something. "Just for the record, nothing of Potter's is bigger than mine."
"Without any personal experience to suggest otherwise, I suppose I can't refute that statement," said Ariadne dryly, holding out her hand for her knife.
Sirius seemed satisfied with her answer and gave her the knife, which confused Ariadne, because she hadn't said anything to compliment him.
It took her four more clockwise stirs of her potion before she realized what was going on. She set her wand aside and glared at Sirius. "Did you just test me to make sure I haven't slept with Potter?" she said as quietly yet indignantly as possible.
Sirius barely glanced up from stirring his own cauldron, seeming unfazed by her disapproval. "So you haven't."
"Whether I have or haven't is none of your business!"
"I didn't ask you if you had slept with him. You volunteered that information, love," he replied with one of his particularly infuriating smirks.
Ariadne resisted the urge to huff in annoyance and finally got to cutting her sopophorous beans. "Why do you care if I have, anyway?"
"Sheer curiosity," replied Sirius, apparently disinterested and wholly focused on his own brew.
Ariadne didn't buy the act.
"Potter certainly seemed invested in me spending the night in your dormitory yesterday," she probed, watching for his reaction out of the corner of her eye.
Sirius was adding the chopped beans to his potion. "Really?"
"Don't play dumb, Black, I heard him."
"Well, I wonder why Potter would say something like that. By the way, your sopophorous beans are leaking," he added.
"They're supposed to be. The key aging ingredient in sopophorous beans comes from the juice, not the pod or the skin of the beans. Crushing them releases more juice than cutting them up," she said, collecting the juice in a small vial and pouring it into her potion. "And what do you mean, you wonder why Potter said that?" she added, now stirring.
Sirius sighed and put down the spoon he had been using to ladle out a sample of his potion. "Don't play dumb, Morrigan. You know that Potter expected you to spend the night with me, not him."
Ariadne did know this, so she wasn't sure why she was reacting so defensively. "Maybe he was just saying that so as not to upset you."
Sirius gazed at her with an unreadable expression, made even more inscrutable by the vapors and smoke hanging between them. "As single-minded as you can be about your studies, to the point of blocking out everything else around you, do you really expect me to believe that you're not aware that the entire school thinks we've shagged, or are about to at any moment?" he said in a low voice, which was always a bit huskier than his regular tone.
Ariadne let his question hang in the shimmering air for a moment and folder her arms. "Well, are we?" she asked matter-of-factly, with a hint of a challenge in her voice.
Sirius either didn't know how to or didn't have the chance to respond, because at that moment, someone with oversized, batlike robes and a mat of oily black hair swept by Ariadne's cauldron. Ariadne watched Severus Snape glance over at her pale, carnation pink brew out of the corner of his eye. A slight sneer spread over his mouth and, and he turned his back, muttering with satisfaction, "Probably an acceptable, if that much."
Acceptable? After she had she had reduced and thrown out her Valerian root juice three times to make sure she had gotten the concentration exactly right?
Ariadne saw red. Oddly, it seem flickered through with gold, too.
Snape had already busied himself with searching the store cupboards for another ingredient when Ariadne heard following words come out of her mouth, bold and clear, and seemingly of their own accord.
"My Draught of Living Death is perfect. I dare you to do better."
He turned around, his eyes narrowing, and the rest of the class turned to stare, too.
And this, Ariadne, she thought to herself, is why you're a Gryffindor, and not a Ravenclaw.