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Potions and Punishments	By : Veresna Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 8419 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Disclaimer: The following applies to this and all of the following chapters of this story: I do not own the characters, situations, locations or any other aspects of these stories and do not make any money from them.

Potions and Punishments
Chapter One: A Fatal Error

Professor Severus Snape, Potion’s Master of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was in an especially foul mood that Wednesday afternoon. As much as he detested teaching to begin with, this class, double potions with Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw Seven Years was his least favorite class of the year. Now, many people would have supposed that the double potions class with Slytherin and Gryffindor was his least favorite, since it meant he had to teach the "terrible trio" of Potter, Weasley and Granger. But at least that class gave him the satisfaction of being able to deduct a considerable amount of points from his rival house. And allowed him to award a large number of points (rather undeservedly, even he himself might have admitted, if forced to take a dose of his own Veritaserum) to Malfoy and his compatriots. No, this class was definitely much worse. And, strangely enough, one of the reasons it was lay in the fact that a very large number of the students were actually not dunderheads when it came to the "subtle science and exact art" of making potions. Which made it exceedingly difficult to find some reason to deduct points from them. The Hufflepuffs, while not models of academic excellence, were stereotypically industrious and painstaking in their thoroughness, allowing them to achieve very good results even when attempting the most challenging potions. The Ravenclaws, of course, were all bright, brainy and brash-they too usually succeeded in creating splendidly potent elixirs. Especially…..
His scowl deepened as his eyes fell upon Bridget O’Brien taking her usual spot at the front left-hand table. The pale redheaded girl was, in her own way, as much of a know-it-all as Hermione Granger. Not that she had ever frantically waved her hand to answer a question or submitted five feet of parchment on a subject when only two had been asked for. She didn’t even show off by helping other students. (Although, truthfully, since none of the students were nearly as abysmal as Longbottom, there was little need for any of them to be seeking help from others.) No, she simply sat and smiled in a singularly supercilious manner through each class-whether taking notes on his lectures, creating a potion or taking an examination. And she had done so every since she had first stepped foot into his classroom, absolutely refusing to be cowed, frightened or even impressed by his introductory lecture.
That fact had puzzled him until he had overheard a chance remark between the Headmaster and Professor Flitwick at the head table a few days later.
"So, Filius," Dumbledore had begun, "I take it you are quite pleased at the exceptional caliber of the new students this year?"
"Indeed, indeed, Albus," the tiny professor had replied. "Especially, if I may say so myself, the extraordinary students of my own household." Flitwick took a moment to wag a finger over in the direction of Snape. "I dare say that I have quite high hopes of Ravenclaw taking the cup away from Slytherin this year!" he added.
"Rather early in the year to be making predictions, isn’t it?" replied Snape, slowly and sardonically, with one eyebrow upraised.
"Oh, I don’t know, quite a few ‘familiar’ names in this bunch, aren’t there Albus?" the little man replied cheerfully.
"Oh, quite so, Filius, quite so." Dumbledore nodded his head thoughtfully. "In fact, Severus, it may be of interest to you that one of the new students, Bridget O’Brien, is a great-great-great-granddaughter of Gerald O’Brien."
At this, both of Snape’s eyebrows went up. It had been several centuries before his time as a student, of course, but that name was revered throughout the wizarding world-at least those wizards who had a suitable respect for the art of making potions. He had been a powerful and respected Potion’s Master at Hogwarts for many, many years. And he had also been a Slytherin.
Snape managed to cover his surprise and contented himself with a shrug before replying, "Well, since she was sorted into your house instead of mine, it would appear there is little chance of her ‘following in the footsteps’ of her illustrious ancestor."
Flitwick had laughed and returned to his meal, making no further comment.
Snape drew his thoughts back to the present. He had been wrong in that prediction. In all of her years as a student of his, she had never once failed in making a potion. In fact, she had seem positively bored throughout most of the classes, and he had the sneaking suspicion that she had already made a considerable number of the potions even before she had ever entered Hogwarts.
Well, he thought, a malicious grin spreading over his face, let’s see how she handles the class today.
He drew himself up to his considerable height and wrapped his robe around him as he glared out at the sea of faces. The small, quiet buzz of conversation immediately ceased and all of the students gave him their full attention.
"Since you have only a few short months left here at Hogwarts," he began, "I think it only fitting that I present you with a little ‘test’ to see how much you have actually learned about potions during your time here."
He smiled unpleasantly and abruptly moved his arms down, snapping the robe outwards as his hand effortlessly retrieved his wand from his pocket. He gestured at the blackboard on the far wall, and immediately a list of ingredients and preparation steps appeared upon it.
"A rather simple potion, actually," he sneered. "A ‘Minimizing Potion.’ Now, I am sure that you will recall that we made a ‘Swelling Potion’ during your second year. And the antidote to that, a ‘Deflating Draught’ last year. And that you prepared a ‘Shrinking Solution’ during your third year."
He had begun to stride between the desks during this last speech, stopping at a point where he was just past the front line of tables. However, his excellent peripheral vision allowed him to see that Miss O’Brien had been studying the board intently, and had half-raised her hand for a moment, before bringing it down and suppressing a smirk of triumph.
"Now, I’m also sure all of you realize what the difference between this and a ‘Shrinking Solution’ is, don’t you?"
For a moment, brows were furrowed and lips were bitten while the students grappled with that question. Within a few seconds, however, a few hands had arisen in the air. Snape flicked a glance back at Miss O’Brien and say that she was sitting quite contentedly, with her hands folded sedately in her lap.
"Mr. Burns?" he said, nodding his head in the direction of that student, a Hufflepuff.
He stood up to answer. "Well, sir, although it is called a ‘Shrinking Solution’, when we tested it upon a bird, it did not merely shrink it, it returned it to the form of an egg."
"Correct, Mr. Burns." He turned around and swept back to the front of the class. "A ‘Minimizing Potion’ can be used on any organic substance to reduce it to one-tenth of its original size. A ‘Shrinking Solution’ not only reduces the size of an inanimate object, but also, when a living creature ingests it, makes it regress back to an earlier form. Apparently, the wizard who first transcribed the potion-making instructions made a fatal error in his Latin translation. And what was that, Miss O’Brien?"
His smile broadened as he enjoyed the involuntary jump she gave at realizing that he had addressed a question to her. And the rapid blink of her eyes confirmed his suspicion that she had been so busy happily contemplating what she thought was a mistake on his part that she hadn’t been paying close attention to what he was saying.
She licked her lips. "I’m sorry, Sir?"
Well, well. It had taken him seven years, but he had finally managed to disconcert her. "Weren’t you paying attention, Miss O’Brien?"
Her blue eyes blazed back furiously at him, but her voice was soft and emotionless. "I’m sorry, Sir, could you please repeat the question?"
He glared back at her, but she refused to drop her eyes. "I asked, Miss O’Brien, what mistake the wizard had made in translating the Latin name of the potion into ‘Shrinking Solution’?"
She held her head higher and smiled coldly. "It appears he misunderstood the original meaning of the Latin word that is used as the root for ‘reduction’ or ‘reduce’ in English. It meant, not merely to shrink something in size, but to return it to its original form."
"Exactly. And do you know who that wizard was?"
Her smile disappeared and there was an angry flush in her cheeks as she nodded. "Yes, sir. Gerald O’Brien."
"Ah, yes, your famed ancestor. Well," he added, nodding his head sympathetically, "Everyone is entitled to a mistake or two, aren’t they?"
"Yes, Sir," she hissed.
"And, after all, he made so many other valuable contributions, didn’t he?"
"Yes, Sir." Her lips were barely moving now and her hands were tightly clenched in her lap.
"Such as," he turned away from her and gestured at the board. "The potion we are about to make. It is one of his creations, isn’t it?" he asked.
Suddenly, a hint of a smile returned to her lips. "Yes, Sir, it is," she replied quietly.
He waited a moment, expecting her to say something more. "Then let us begin, shall we?" he said, turning his attention to the rest of the class. "You may gather the ingredients you need from the supply closet."
With a wave of his hand, he dismissed them to their task and sat down at his desk. He pulled a stack of essays from his fifth years class towards him, and began to grade them as the students began bustling about, gathering the ingredients and retrieving their cauldrons from their storage places. Within a few moments, the room was filled with the sounds of the various ingredients being chopped, mashed and shredded.
Snape noted that Miss O’Brien waited until everyone else had retrieved their potion ingredients before she stood up and made her way to the supply closet. When she returned, she bent down and whispered something to her partner, Miss Franklin. Her friend’s eyes traveled up to the blackboard for a moment, and then she turned back to Miss O’Brien and mouthed "Are you sure?" To this, Miss O’Brien had smiled and nodded her head emphatically.
Snape suppressed his own smile as he kept his head bent down over the parchments. It appeared she had stepped right into his trap.
Several hours later, Snape stood up from his chair and stretched languidly. It seemed that all of the students were finished. The last step was to bring the mixture to boil and then to allow it to come to room temperature slowly. They had begun to clean up their preparation materials, and several of the students had taken out books from some of their other classes to read while they waited for the potions to cool. It appeared that Misses O’Brien and Franklin’s potion had taken longer than the others to come to a boil, so he began his testing on the other side of the classroom and worked his way slowly towards them.
To the amazement and chagrin of the first students he approached, their elixir had absolutely no effect when dropped unto the small potted plant that Snape had produced as the object he would use to test their potions with. He continued on to the next table, where again the potion had no effect. In fact, it appeared, as he circled the classroom, that no one had been able to make an effective compound.
As he approached the final table, Miss O’Brien stood up, her mouth already widened into a grin as she anticipated his surprise when he tested her potion.
"You look rather pleased with yourself, Miss O’Brien?" he questioned, gazing down at her coolly. Although, to be honest, he wasn’t gazing down very far. She was very tall, only a few inches shorter than he was. He was rather grateful for the tall heels of the boots he was wearing today.
She made no answer, but crossed her arms in front of her and watched as he placed the plant upon the tabletop. He dipped his glass dropper into the cauldron and drew up a small amount of liquid. He gingerly placed a single drop upon the green surface of a leaf, and a moment later, with a small plopping sound, the entire plant had shrunk down to one-tenth of its original size.
"It appears that you are the only one who was able to create a useable elixir," he commented.
Her smile broadened in response.
"However did you manage it?" he asked, a touch of admiration in his voice coloring its usual silky tone.
"Well, you see Sir, you made a mistake," she replied.
"Indeed?" he replied, drawing up his eyebrows.
"Yes. You forgot to include a most crucial ingredient: ‘Spirit of Violaceae’."
Snape looked back over his shoulder and studied the instructions. "Oh, dear me." He looked back at her. "You are absolutely correct." His eyes swept over the rest of the class. "No wonder none of the potions seemed to work."
Her triumph appeared complete. She threw back her head and smiled up at him with intolerable insolence.
"Tell me, Miss O’Brien, when did you notice that mistake?"
Her smile faded just a bit. Over the past seven years she had heard that tone of voice too often not to recognize it as a prelude to danger. The rest of the class knew it as well. The students had just begun to relax, happy to learn that there was a simple explanation as to why all of them had failed. Now they began to shift in their seats, wondering if it would have been better if Bridget had not pointed out to Snape the error he had made.
"I….." she hesitated for a moment and swallowed. A moment later, her head was back up and her gaze was again defiant. "I noticed it immediately, Sir. I helped my father make this potion at home a few summers ago."
"Oh, I see. No doubt that serves as a pastime for all the members of your family? Making some of great-grandfather’s potions in your spare time?"
She narrowed her eyes and shrugged.
"Why didn’t you point out the error to me immediately?" His voice was now low and so soft that she could barely hear it.
She swallowed again. "I don’t know, Sir."
"Oh, I think you do, Miss O’Brien. Think hard."
She refused to look away, but he noticed, to his amusement, that her hands were trembling slightly as she kept her arms crossed in front of her. He moved in closer to her, so that his face was mere inches away from hers.
"You wanted to be the only one able to make the potion correctly. And you wanted to make me look like a fool for not listing all the ingredients, didn’t you?"
"No, Sir." Her voice was flat and expressionless again.
He sighed and moved away from her. "I am afraid you all failed," he announced.
This remark was met by a slight murmur from the students, which was quickly stilled by the warning look he gave them.
"In the first place, I announced that this was a test of your knowledge and abilities, so you should have been on your guard for something unusual. Secondly, I would think that after seven years of potions class that some of you might have relied upon your own experience as to how ingredients work in combination with each other to suspect that a crucial component was missing. And, in the third place, the directions distinctly state that the potion would be very thick and viscous before it came to a boil. The fact that all of your elixirs were runny and boiled easily should have alerted you to the fact that they had not been made correctly. So the rest of you fail for your inattention."
He returned his gaze to Bridget.
"And you, Miss O’Brien, fail because you should have brought the error to my attention immediately instead of allowing the whole class to waste their time."
She nodded, angrily.
"Thirty points from Ravenclaw," he began.
She drew in a quick breath and clenched her fists.
"And a detention. Tonight at eight o’clock in my office," he continued.
Her whole body went rigid. She had never, ever had a detention before.
"Now, throw out those useless liquids and clean up!" he barked.
Bridget moved back to her table and had just seized her cauldron with both hands when she suddenly felt him move immediately behind her.
"Oh, not you, Miss O’Brien."
He strode over to one of the shelves lining the walls of the classroom and returned with a funnel and a stoppered vial. He placed it by the side of her cauldron. "No sense in throwing away a perfectly good supply of ‘Minimizing Potion," he sneered.
He stood and watched as she poured the liquid from the cauldron into the bottle. Her hands were still shaking slightly, but she managed to control them enough to fill the bottle without spilling. She replaced the stopper on the bottle and glared back up at him.
"Very good," he said calmly. With a small smile, he placed the bottle into one of the innumerable pockets of his robe. "And very useful, too," he added.
She looked up at him, slightly perplexed.
"Well, you see," he explained, "We will be testing it tonight. Upon another subject."
Author’s Notes: So, uh, when does it earn it’s rating? Next chapter.
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Potions and Punishments