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Early December. Corridor outside the Slytherin Deputy Head's Office
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After locking the door to his office, Harry walked slowly down the corridor. It was fifteen minutes before curfew, and in the school corridors were an awkward mix of nighttime silence and the distant rustle of student sprinting.
At the junction with the main corridor, Harry stopped as if struck by a bolt of lightning.
"Padf...!"
Harry bit his tongue and shut his mouth mid-sentence.
In the middle of the corridor fork, an all-too-familiar dark black figure loomed in the distance.
Harry slowly closed his eyes, then opened them again.
"A black dog in the middle of the crossroads..."
The ominous black dog's eyes glowed with a piercing intensity, and its majestic shoulders spread wide. Then it slowly opened its mouth.
-Whimp-!
"Aren't you a cute little Grim puppy."
As if from nowhere, Peverell's firm hand stroked the nape of the black dog.
"-Whimp- Woof! Grrrr-"
The dignity-damaged Death Pup tried to growl deep in his throat, but the young man's hand was skillful and merciless.
"Aha. All grown up, I see, you're not a puppy, then, an adolescent Grim you are."
It didn't sound any more dignified than a Grim pup.
Puppy of Death... well, the black dog let out a ferocious bark, typical of adolescent dogs, but the professor merely stroked its head with a rough hand, as if he hadn't even considered the possibility of being attacked.
Harry grinned, suppressing the burning tears in his eyes.
He'd grown a good eight inches since the last time he'd played with this black fur, and Padfoot's shoulders wasn't yet square as much as they had then. There was no rough scarring, no mad glint in the Grim's eyes that twelve years in prison and the loss of a lifelong mate had left behind.
Just a big, shaggy, black-furred young dog staring up at him with the bewildered eyes as if it were looking at a madman.
Instead of fleeing in terror, the Slytherin professor, faced with the omen of death, continued to stroke the black dog as enthusiastically as he would a childhood pet; and the dog tried to squirm away.
But Harry wouldn't let go. He skilfully scratched the nape of dog's neck with a hand that knew Padfoot's weak spots, and the black dog whimpered a few times before finally dropping to the floor on its belly.
"...I don't know who you belong to, but... why don't you stop by my room for a while, Mr. Adolescent Grim?"
At the voice of the professor's sneaky, black-hearted coaxing, the Death Pup... well, the dog sprang up from the floor, seeming to come to its senses.
"Woof!" it barked briefly, then resolutely pulled away. It walked a few steps in the opposite direction, turned its head to look at Harry, and barked again.
In a clear gesture to follow, Harry chuckled and followed. He wasn't sure what kind of crazy prank the Marauder had in mind this time, but as long as he was in Padfoot's form, he was willing to play along.
After a few flights of stairs, they came to a corridor that led to a series of unused classrooms. Nearing the classroom where he had once discovered an assault on a Gryffindor girl, Harry cast a light scanning spell. He sensed no movement.
The black dog continued down the corridor briskly. It stopped in front of an old door and turned to look at the professor. Harry frowned and used a more aggressive scan near the door.
He detected a flicker of a ward. Harry shrugged and pulled out his wand. He turned to look at the black dog, but Padfoot had already disappeared. True to his nickname, Padfoot had slipped out of sight without a sound of footsteps.
"This is... I seem to smell a tattle-tale here..."
Harry smirked, muttering what his godfather would have been horrified to hear.
Harry moved his wand carefully; the old door was clearly warded.
A ward of concealment and protection. There was even a ward of indifference that would make most people turn away.
It was in fact a decent ward. Whoever had placed it had been a seventh or sixth year, at least. It lacked the power of an adult wizard, but it was warded with an uncommon Eastern European magic, and there was quite a bit of wit in the way it was also combined with runes.
Carefully unraveling the bindings, Harry scratched his head; there was something vaguely familiar about them. Which seventh year had played this?
Impatient, he broke the ward a little roughly at the end. Harry quietly opened the old door.
"-Levicopus!"
As he half-expected, a hex struck on his way. Harry flicked his wand to block the spell, and lightly sent back a counterattack.
The student in the doorway turned like a stone and was subdued.
It was a student - one he knew very well.
"Snape?" Harry muttered softly.
The boy's face was paled white. Harry's eyes swung around the room. He pressed his forehead, recognising the place at first sight. Oh bloody hell.
This room belonged to Snape all right. Potions ingredients of all sorts were lined up in rows along a wall, and the other wall was lined with finished potion bottles.
In the centre of the classroom were three cauldrons and a table for ingredient prep. It was a perfect potioneer's lair.
It was a long way from Myrtle's bathroom stall, where Harry and his gang had set up a mini laboratory rent-free. Well, there's a three-year gap between second and fifth year, so it's only natural that there would be such a gap...
Burying his head in his hands and trying to escape from the reality around him, Harry suddenly turned his attention to the cauldron.
From the centre of the three cauldrons, a wisp of blue smoke was floating up. Almost simultaneously, the cauldron on the right suddenly began to bubble and boil with no fire underneath. Harry glanced urgently back at the boy.
"Snape, what the hell were you experimenting with?"
Snape blinked in confusion, then answered in a small voice.
"...Uh, I was only given the recipes... don't really know the name of the potions..."
"You DUNDERHEAD!" he snapped, and entirely meant it.
Never in his wildest dreams had he thought he'd ever be able to swear at Snape's intelligence, the cunning triple agent and potions genius. Should I feel honoured, Harry grumbled to himself. Are all the teenagers idiots? Well, certainly Harry was when he was a teen... but...
He stopped the thought and checked the state of the cauldron.
Things were not looking good. The left cauldron was fine, but the centre and right cauldrons were boiling violently. The blue smoke in the centre and the boiling steam on the right were affecting each other, accelerating the reaction, and he still had no idea what the hell was inside.
Damn it, if only Snape did him a good service of brewing common illegal intelligence enhancer or a telepathic potion for cheating like an ordinary OWL student. Even in the time warp, there's never a time in Harry's life when Snape isn't his nemesis.
Should he vanish these with an Evanesco?
After a moment's hesitation, Harry shook his head. Occasionally, an insane potions master (and there were quite a few) would concoct a potion that reacted violently to a vanishing spell. Those were not a meek textbook potion by any stretch of the imagination, and it would be dangerous to try to vanish them thoughtlessly.
Harry flicked his wand and cast a spherical shield about two feet in diameter over each of the cauldrons. Sometimes a simple, physical response was the right one.
Through the wards, the potion's status was perceived. Harry warned them softly with a touch of magic. The potion on the right, which had been seething, went meek and quiet. The one in the middle rebelled with an attitude, reminding him of a typical adolescent retort, whut, dude?
Harry raised an eyebrow and reduced the size of his shield. It shrank in diameter until it was tight against the cauldron. Dark blue smoke poured out, threatening to shatter the shield from within.
Harry examined the cauldron without blinking. Cast iron. Not bad.
He mentally calculated what the melting point of cast iron was. The blue smoke began to rebel in earnest; Harry nonchalantly added more magic to the shield.
If this girl thinks of me as a normal Potions Master, who is all devoted to the knowledge like a good scholar, she is badly mistaken.
Harry favoured sheer power over sophisticated... well, let him say he preferred to rely on his instincts for resolving conflicts. He also prided himself on his... artistic talent, of a sort.
An iron bead could be quite pretty, with an effort and power in its manufacture.
The next moment.
The cauldron exploded in violent rebellion.
The explosive vibration was loud enough to reverberate through the lab floor, even though the shield had blocked it once. The inside of the shield turned blindingly white. Severus stood some distance away, his mouth gaped, unable to speak, a chill in his spine.
"...well, tamer than I thought."
Harry nodded without a trace of surprise, and the next instant he reduced the diameter of the shield drastically.
The smoke from the explosion pulsed and shook the inside of the shield. Despite the violent movement, the shield didn't budge. As it shrank in size, the cauldron within the barrier wobbled for a moment, but not long before it began to crumple inward.
The next moment, the cauldron melted like wax, along with the liquid inside, leaving no trace. Severus was frozen in place with a horrified silence.
Harry flicked his wand, his face placid. The spherical shield, now less than a tenth of the size it had been at the start, vanished with a whoosh.
Clang!
The shield vanished; and a round lump of iron, slightly larger than his fist, dropped to the floor. The pale blue colour of the potion rippled over the iron like the pattern of a blade.
Severus blinked, dumbfounded.
Harry picked up some of the ingredients organised on the wall, crushing them with his magic and forced them to mix. Creating a compound of high level preservatives and stabilisers, he sprinkled handfuls of the powdered concoction into the two remaining cauldrons.
The potion in the cauldrons congealed into a semi-solid form. Judging them safe for a few days, Harry nodded and sealed each cauldron with a ward.
Three of the headaches taken care of. Now it was time to deal with the remaining one, in the form of a teenager.
Harry turned to Snape, who remained rigid.
"Where's the recipe?"
The boy hesitated, then gave up and hung his head.
"...First drawer, under the ingredient table, sir."
Opening the drawer, Harry found several parchments with the recipes written on them and read them over.
As the boy had said, they had no title. The recipes were incomplete in places, full of blanks needing theoretical verification and experimental confirmation.
What sort of bastard was out to ruin a potioneer? Muttering to himself, Harry flicked through the parchments once more. He read the ingredients required and checked the lab's current inventory. He checked what were currently in the cauldrons to find out what stage Snape was at.
When Harry had finished reading the recipes, he leaned lightly against the table.
"Snape."
There was no smile in the professor's voice.
"Yes, sir."
"These... things you were making, did you know they were dark potions? All three of them?"
The boy's opaque eyes fluttered slightly.
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