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Don't Lie to Me	By : Veresna Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 13611 -:- 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.

Chapter List
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CHAPTER TWO: THE ACCIDENT

Monday’s lunch break, as usual, seemed much too short. Angelique had told Kathleen about the pictures and she had begged Helena to show them her sketches. But her roommate had refused. There was no way she was going to chance one of the teachers wandering by the table at an inopportune moment. She told Kathleen that she would have to be content with a brief description, and that she could see all of the pictures when they got back to their room after classes that afternoon.
Realizing that she was adamant about refusing to display the drawings, they gave up trying to persuade her and Angelique and Kathleen spent the rest of the lunch break gossiping while Helena began writing a letter back to her cousin. Although the morning had sped by faster than usual due to the distraction provided by drawing the pictures during Binns lecture, she was still dreading the afternoon class. She sighed and glanced at Angelique as she laughed and chatted with Kathleen.
Angelique had been her best friend ever since their first year together at Hogwarts, and one of her chosen roommates for the past three. They were opposites in so many ways. Ang was tall, thin, blond and blue-eyed, with a total disdain for hard work in general and for studying in particular. Although she was far from unintelligent, she preferred to breeze through her classes, doing the minimum of work necessary and always managed to get passing grades while doing as little homework as possible. She was vivacious and fun loving. And she was the main reason why "Advanced Potions" was turning into an endless nightmare for Helena this year.
Last year, Angelique had developed a mad crush upon one of their fellow Ravenclaws, Desmond Crowl. When it was time to choose lab partners for Potions class, she had immediately descended upon him with her eyes batting flirtatiously. He, immediately smitten and incredibly flattered, had instantly asked that she be his partner. Helena found herself in league with his former partner, Lewis Thurston, and it had proven to be one of the best things that could ever have happened to her. Lewis was bright and motivated and together he and Helena had managed to accomplish the nearly impossible feat of going through the whole year without botching a single potion. Although it would have been completely out of character for Snape to single them out in front of the class for his approval, even he could not find any excuse for not giving them very high marks for the year.
Unfortunately, Ang and Des had had a falling out over the summer over some silly misunderstanding, and her roommate had sworn that she could no longer work with him. On the first day back at Hogwarts, Ang had tearfully begged Helena to partner with her, and she had been so taken by surprise that she had agreed to it without thinking of the consequences. And she had been regretting it ever since.
As nice as Angelique was, she was a perfect scatterbrain as far as Potions were concerned. She could never be counted upon to take the time to prepare the constituents properly, and she had the most annoying habit of either skipping steps or adding ingredients out of order, which of course affected the quality of the final product. Although Helena had been able to prevent an all-out failure, she had already endured a wealth of waspish comments from the sharp-tongued Professor regarding the caliber of her elixirs this year. There was no way that she could even think of asking Snape to write a recommendation for her considering her current lackluster performance. And she had been wracking her brain in a vain attempt to think of a polite way to tell her roommate that she wanted to find another partner. Ang had seemed oblivious to the seriousness of the situation, and Helena was left in the difficult position of trying to decide which was more important, her academic future or her relationship with her best friend.
She was still debating this difficult question as they filed into the dungeon classroom that afternoon to begin their class. They sat, at Ang’s insistence, at one the tables in the very back, as far as possible from Lewis and Des, who always took one of the front tables. Helena swung her backpack unto the table and settled down for what she assumed would be a long and frustrating session.
A moment later Professor Snape burst into the room, his black robes billowing out behind him and his usual scowl plastered upon his face. His black eyes glittered malevolently as he called out the roll. He slammed the attendance roster down on his table and sneered contemptuously around the room.
Being a Ravenclaw, Helena had always shared her Potions classes with the Hufflepuff students. So they were luckier than the Gryffindors, who had to share their classes with the Slytherins, to whom Snape showed an open and unapologetic favoritism. At least he seemed to hate the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws equally.
"Open your textbooks to chapter 107!" he barked.
Scattered groans arose from the students. There were only one hundred and ten chapters in the entire textbook. Although none of the potions they were called on to prepare could have been classified as easy, the ones found in the back of their textbook were notoriously complex.
"Silence,’ he murmured, his voice silky and threatening. "We shall be making a Dissolving Potion today. Mr. Thurston?"
Lewis gulped and looked up from his book. "Yes, Sir?"
"Tell me: What intriguing conundrum must be confronted when preparing this potion?" he asked, idly brushing away a piece of lint from the sleeve of his robe.
Lewis stole a look at Desmond, who merely shrugged.
"I-I don’t know, Sir," he admitted.
Snape snorted softly and cocked his left eyebrow. "Would you dare to venture a guess, Thurston?" he sneered.
"No, Sir."
"Anyone else?" he challenged, his cold eyes darting about the room and noting the look of sudden and unmistakable panic upon all of their faces. Well, almost all. He noted that one of them was looking thoughtful rather than perplexed, though she certainly showed no sign of raising her hand.
The entire class remained still and silent.
Snape sighed again and began to prowl up and down the classroom between the tables. "After more than six years of Potions instructions, you are still a collection of singularly dull-witted dunderheads," he spat out. "Is it quite above your limited capabilities to follow an infinitesimally simple line of deductive reasoning? Do you really believe that Potion Making consists of merely memorizing a list of ingredients and tossing them into a cauldron?"
He stopped by the side of Helena’s table and gestured angrily with his right hand. "In this horde of Hufflepuffs, is there not a single one of you industrious enough to page through his or her textbook and seek out the answer to this utterly simple question?" he chided. Turning slightly to the side, he smirked and airly waved his hand toward the other row of tables. "And am I frankly astonished to see that amongst this throng of illustrious Ravenclaws, there appears to be no one in possession of a functioning brain cell this afternoon," he taunted.
Silence reigned supreme throughout the chilly dungeon room. Helena trained her eyes upon some distant object in the far corner, her fingers twined tightly together on the desk in front of her. Unlike the other students, she appeared angry rather than abashed.
Snape turned and took a few steps towards the front of the class. Suddenly, he wheeled around and trained his glittering eyes on Helena’s face. He glided over to her desk and stood in front of her. After a moment he leaned over, placing both of his hands down on the desk so that his face was about a foot away from hers.
"Miss Harrison?" His voice was deceptively soft.
She gulped and raised her eyes to meet his. "Yes, Sir?"
"Please enlighten us. What is the problem inherent in making a Dissolving Solution?" There was something menacing in that tone, warning her that this was the last time he was going to give someone the chance to come up with the right answer.
She took a deep breath, and tried to answer as firmly and confidently as she could. "You have to prevent the potion from dissolving the cauldron you’re making it in," she replied.
He smiled unpleasantly. For a moment Helena’s heart lurched. She really had been certain that she given him the answer he sought, but suddenly she was not so sure.
His eyes gleamed coldly. "Precisely," he murmured.
Helena felt a sigh of relief go around the classroom and her own shoulders relaxed slightly, only to immediately tense up again as he suddenly bent down closer. His face was now mere inches away and she was afraid that if he attempted to get any nearer, she’d be feeling the ends of his oily hair brush against her face.
"And, tell me, just how do you prevent the potion from melting the cauldron?" he challenged.
She swore that a second earlier, she would have not known the answer. But a simple solution suddenly popped into her head. Trying to make her voice sound as confident as possible, she replied: "You use an Impervious Potion to coat the cauldron ahead of time."
Snape stared down at her for a moment, his cold black eyes hard and unblinking. Then he slowly nodded and drew himself back to his full height. "Exactly."
Helena could see Angelique smiling at her out of the corner of her eye.
Snape crossed his arms and looked down at her with a nasty grin on his face. "So. Let’s make it ten points from Ravenclaw, shall we?" he asked, scornfully.
Enraged, she opened her mouth to object.
He cocked his head to the side, his ear bent towards her mockingly. "Do you wish to make it twenty?" he threatened.
She snapped her mouth closed and shook her head. "No, sir."
"Very prudent of you, Miss Harrison. May I suggest that you never again make me waste valuable class time when you know the answer to my question," he replied shortly.
He uncrossed his arms and strode back to the front of the room. "If you turn to Chapter 53, you will find the instructions for making the Impervious Potion. You will then return to Chapter 107 and make the Dissolving Solution. I would suggest you be extremely careful when preparing the final product. And be sure to use only wooden implements. If even a trace of unprotected metal comes into contact with the potion before it is finished, it will cause a most calamitous reaction."
Helena sighed and turned the pages of her textbook back to Chapter 53. "Great. Ten points off for answering his question correctly," she murmured to Angelique.
Her roommate shrugged sympathetically. "He’s in a pretty foul mood today. He would have found a reason to take points off for something," she commiserated.
The class proceeded rather quietly for the next hour or so. Helena found to her relief that Angelique was being more careful than usual, and they succeeded in making the Impervious Potion in record time. Snape had circled the classroom making disparaging comments to almost every table, but limited himself to a relatively noncommittal snort as he passed by their table. She coated the cauldron carefully and made sure the layer had time to harden completely before they began to pile in the ingredients for the Dissolving Potion.
All in all, things had been going quite well until they got to the point of adding the puree of dragon spleen to the mixture. Helena had carefully chopped and mashed the pieces into the perfect consistency on a small brass plate, and had handed it to Angelique to add to the cauldron. She had turned her attention to measuring out the correct amount of horny toad skin when she heard Angelique grunt in exasperation. A few of the mashed pieces were clinging stubbornly to the edge of the plate and her roommate was trying in vain to fling them off into the pot by flicking her wrist. Helena was moving towards her with a wooden spatula to help her scrape the last little bits off when she saw the dish slip out of Angelique’s fingertips. Time seemed to grind to a sickening halt as she helplessly watched the brass plate drop into the bubbling liquid. A split second later the thin brown liquid within the cauldron had turned to red-hot, lava-like goo and almost instantaneously there was a loud banging noise as the cauldron cracked and shattered into a dozen pieces and a fountain of the scorching liquid shot ten feet up into the air. Angelique shrieked and Helena pushed her away from the table, afraid that the liquid would spew down upon them. Instead, the liquid fell with a splash on the surface of the table and there was a loud hissing noise. A second later, Helena realized that the table was melting before her very eyes. She reached to grab her knapsack off of the table, but the corrosive liquid had already hit the base of the bag.
As she swung the bag towards her, the entire bottom of the bag dissolved and she watched in horror as her wand, books, quills, ink and paper went flying off in different directions across the room. She caught a momentary view of Professor Snape running, wand in hand, from the other side of the room before she glanced down at the floor in front of her. The pool of hot liquid was moving towards her feet, and she could see that even the stone floor of the dungeon was liquefying as the fluid crept over it. It was now only inches away from the tips of her shoes and she felt the cold, hard wall of the dungeon on her back as she tried in vain to scramble further away from the encroaching liquid. She closed her eyes.
"Liquidis intractum!" It was Snape’s voice.
She dared to open her left eye just a bit and squinted back down at the floor. The red-hot liquid had ceased to move and was rapidly turning to a dull, steel gray color and the pools were solidifying into long clumps of sludgy, semi-solid material. A think, smelly haze of smoke was permeating the room. She opened both eyes fully and glanced over at Angelique.
"Are you okay, Ang?"
The blond girl nodded weakly. "You?"
She nodded back and opened her mouth. She had intended to say "Fine", but at the last moment she had turned and caught a glimpse of Professor Snape’s face. Considering the look that was on it, maybe she would have been better off being vaporized.
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Don't Lie to Me