Till Ya Feel The Magic, O'Course!
It takes them six separate nights of hunching over a cauldron to make the correct brew - and it had been Snape's tweaks that led them to success. Not that he was right, but they weren't either.
The first batch had been ruefully turned into an Antidote to Veratiserum at the last second - lest it end up as a mixture of nothing. The Unicorn horn had not taken the way they envisioned - Snape was right. They're not even mad at the fact - no pride, no ego - rather, they found it impressive how he knew exactly what would happen with all variables considered - especially considering the minute it had taken him to read their recipe. (Because it had, in fact, lost binding with the Re'em blood immediately upon submergence, most likely due to the corrosive nature of Boltir's Weed.)
The Antidote was not the traditional recipe by a long shot, but it worked. They had left the brew bottled and boxed on what they assumed to be Snape's desk. It was gone the next night they went in.
The second and third attempts were spectacular fuck ups indeed. They had followed their original blueprint for these again - swapping Boltir's Weed and then reducing the heat at two minute intervals, just to see - and both had ended a far cry from what they wanted. They had to scrap the second (the horror!), and turned the third into a pain-nullifying concoction they had made up a few years back. They had reason to need it, then - even when the pain was gone.
Unfortunately, that one takes ten hours to brew. They were lucky to make it out of the lab unscathed by 6:37am. Leon isn't sure when classes start at Hogwarts, but they don't want to be around when they do. They had spent the rest of the day bathing porlocks. Hagrid has let them loose in the moke's mud bath.
The fourth had been a fluke. The pilot light had gone out a tenth of the way in - long before they had to add anything of importance - so they made a Burn Healing Paste. Can't do much brewing without a brew.
They had left a note for Snape in front of the cauldron.
Professor,
It is my deepest regret to inform you that I have, in fact, fucked something up. Or maybe it wasn't me.
The pilot light is out. I'm simply too unintelligent to fix it - I only tried a little so as to not blow up the lab. Send any scathing remarks to my room in whichever-tower-I-stay-in.
Much respect, Leon
When they went back the next afternoon, there was a note waiting for them, too. It was lying lamely on the table before the cauldron. The scrawl it contained was just as bewitching as they remembered it to be. The words were, as they had requested, just as scathing.
It is most unfortunate indeed - to be sharing such close quarters with such vast idiocy. The burners run not on fuel, but on energy - suffice to say you need magic to ignite it.
It is too bad you are parading around as a Muggle, then. What a predicament indeed.
Please, feel free to never leave an infernal sticky note on my equipment ever again.
They had been caught between amusement and a subtle frustration - not at Snape, but at their predicament. They can't brew their magic replenishing potion if they have no magic to ignite the fire in which would aide their making of said magic replenishing potion-
Of course, of course - they had been waiting so eagerly for yet another roadblock! Seventeen simply wasn't enough!
They lower the parchment, fighting a heavy exhale. The burner flickers demurely from below the cauldron before them.
...ah.
Unbidden, their lips quirk up. He must be curious indeed.
That night they had gotten close. They had soaked their Griffin claw in gurdyroot essence, omitted the Unicorn horn and Re'em blood mixture - and swapped it for Snape's ground Zouwu fang - separately boiled in the tears of a Cornish Pixie, until the concoction turns into a paste. Remove the paste from its subsequent cauldron and flatten with the edge of a bronze-laced knife. Smooth until it appears as though you were looking into a mirror. Add to your primary mixture - at two-hundred and seventy-eight degrees precisely - when it has been boiled for no longer than three hours and twelve minutes. Add one gram at a time. Do not splash, but carefully lower-
Needless to say it took ages - and they had expected his instruction to work, really. They were admittedly surprised when it didn't.
Regardless, waste not want not. Leon bottled their gallon of brew between ten different vials, leaving five on the desk-that-might-or-might-not be Snape's and four and a half for themself. The missing half had settled in Leon's stomach - the point of a potion is to consume it - before they had purged it out.
They leave another note for Snape. It is not sticky.
Professor,
I blindly followed your infailable corrections and this is the result. Use it how you wish - although I recommend testing this in an open field rather than a well-stocked classroom. It took me ages to clean up, sans overwhelming magic.
Rather than invoke a magical restorative, this seems to draw any and all objects in towards the consumer like a black hole. And when I say black hole - I mean black hole. I think I have a concussion. Part of me thinks you knew this would happen - and you just gave me the recipe so I'd take myself out. One less idiot in your vicinity. Well, better luck next time.
With a little less respect, Leon.
Ps., I've left the recipe with you. I've memorized it by now - but I assumed you would be privy to recreating the brew yourself (just in case I had royally fucked it up somehow.)
((Unlikely))
They spend five days outside of the lab after that. Thinking, not thinking. Working, not not working. Hagrid, ever so observant, can see their pondering a foot away. He finally decides to do something about it on the fifth day.
"Wha's got you all curled up these days?" He inquires, hands full of a woolen hay for the mokes. Leon pauses their smearing of it along the floor.
"What's curled up?"
"You's."
"Me's?" It's evasive at best, downright dismissive at heart.
Hagrid knits his brows, frowns, "Don' be all avoidin' now. Ain't kindly ta do that to yer friends."
And, Merlin - Hagrid in his eleven foot, bushy faced glory calling them his friend? Straight to the heart. Leon sighs. Spreads their sloppy hay more slowly just to keep busy.
"I still haven't cleared the trees." They murmur - as if he doesn't know. Hagrid, for all of his lovely kindheartedness, seems to find relief at their admission. Leon raises a brow.
"Blimey - I'd'a thought somethin' heinous happened. What with you starin' off like yer was locked with'a dementor." He waves a flippant hand in the air, "Don' worry 'bout the field none. If there's one thing Gamekeepers got - it's time, aye."
Leon leans back on their heels, arms dangling over their knees via their biceps. They purse their lips.
"Well.. truth be told I'm more worried about the no magic part of that equation."
"Blimey!" Hargid repeats with more life. His brows are high, "Yer magic's still fickle?"
"Aye." They echo flatly. Hagrid doesn't seem to notice - too busy muttering up at the sky.
"...surely you'd've worked it out with... figured you'd have that all said an' done... ain't no harm in.... no magic! Fer this long!... not know how to brew... Master Potioneer!-"
"Hagrid," they interject, now scrubbing their brows, "telling it to the birds doesn't actually work."
"Birds? Not at all, I'm consultin' the great forest up ahead!" Hagrid furrows his brows, "Everybody knows birds aren' inclined ta honesty."
What?
"It's a metaphor." They clarify. Pause. "...Or an analogy."
"Ah, phooey. When's the last time Metafor or Anagoley's come 'round to help ya out? What ye want's the forest." Hagrid nods his head, resuming his hay casting at a great pace, "Full'a magic, she is. Ought'ta do ya some good, gettin' outta that castle an' reconnectin'."
Going out into the magical, beast ridden forest without magic. Right - it's such an obvious solution. Why hadn't they thought of that? Truly, though, they aren't bothered by it. They've been through enough to warrant a blatant disregard for self-preservation.
Unbidden, a hand drifts to their torso. They feel fire lick down their arm - heady, poisonous, laced with vitriol. Their face remains a careful neutral. Their fingers clench.
Ah, but they had been trying to fix that, hadn't they? That's why they came here, after all. That's why they half-heartedly entertain the kids and staff instead of keep to the grounds, why they're bothering to brew this potion at all.
A sigh. A droop of their head, their hands down their face, and then grimacing - because their hands were full of wool. They spit a few clumps out.
"Go'on. Don' think about it none, just get." Hagrid's encouragement makes them wonder whether he sees them as an animal or a person. They are working in a pen..
They'll let it slide. They let the images behind their eyes slide, too.
"Okay, okay. You've convinced me." Their joints crack horribly as they rise - but oh does it feel good. It reminds them of the stoop they need to revisit - with the courtyard teeming with children. Ugh.
"So you want me to just.. go into the forest?"
"Aye!" Hagrid nods his great big head. Leon peers into the trees.
"How far?"
"Till ya feel the magic, o'course!"
The fight the urge to tip their head back and groan. "Right. And for how long?"
"...Till ya feel the magic, o'course!"
Damnit, fine!
Hagrid must sense their dislike for his answers. "Reconnectin' ain't somethin' that can be taught, y'see? It varies more than a house elf's nose - what works for one don' always work for another." His voice is slightly admonishing - as if he finds it silly that he has to explain himself at all. Still, he took the time to try.
"Okay, okay. Thanks, Hagrid."
They're jostled forward when he pats their back. They think they feel their spine pop. He looks impossibly proud.
"Any day - now go'on then! Reconnect!"
☆
And so here they are, hours later, reconnecting. Of course, that is only if reconnecting means standing, unmoving, as a Thestral stares back at you. If it does, then they're reconnecting so hard right now.
Those that truly know Thestrals know they aren't inherently bad creatures, nor are they good - nor is anything born with either inclination. The closest analogy would be like limbo - something that exists to teeter between. Despite their passive and overwhelmingly gentle nature, the Wizarding world doesn't take kindly to them. Seen as a bad omen - haunting and skeletal in physique and isolated by birthright - they've long since been wrongly cast aside.
All of that to say Leon really, really loves Thestrals. Unconventional, but more so seen as a sign of lunacy, not many people freely admit to being fond of them. One has to see death to see a Thestral, after all - and anyone that has seen such a thing is surely off their rocker!
There was a point, back when Leon was something less than a person, where they had frowned upon Thestrals. Been enraged by them, even - because of what Leon believed - with skewed, grieving glasses - they stood for. The fact that they had only revealed themselves after Leon had so dearly lost. It had felt like a smack in the face, a knife to the chest. They had spent many a nights shouting at them in the woods, bottle in hand and a twisted grief on their face.
They regret it now, their blindness. Their cruelty - because the creatures didn't ask for such a steely reception, but merely linger around and brave it.
And so Leon stares at the Thestral, brilliant in black and bone, and they do not look away. It stares back, head turned the way horses do to peer with a bold, unblinking gaze. Gangly legs, narrowly pointed horns, lidless eyes. It doesn't graze, doesn't snort, hardly even breathes. It's like staring a ghoul in the essence of its very soul. The world narrows and trembles horribly outside their tunnel vision.
Reconnecting, Hagrid had said. Perhaps he was right.
"I'm sorry." Leon murmurs some hours later, when the sky is black and the Thestral blacker. They can't see it anymore, can't see anything at all - but they feel that it's there. Feel that it hasn't left. Feel it's snout press into their shoulder some minutes later, feel their remorse leave them with each swipe of their palm down it's bony neck.
A very pretty thing, Thestrals are. Leon hasn't always been so favorable to beauty.
☆
On the sixth day after their laboratory self-banishment, Leon finds themself teetering on a stool before their cauldron. It bubbles and pops, a whimsical opal tint, and they stare into its depths. They had forgone all instruction and instead let their hands do the work. Their hands with their invisible Thestral miasma, and their shoulders with their sudden weightlessness.
They add the last of their Graphorn horn, the dwindling supply of their Unicorn hair, finely flayed Hippogriff feathers. They dissect a preserved dwelling moat snake and declaw a fermented poppet. Grind, boil, de-bone, stir. They bring the mixture to a boil for four minutes, change their stirring to clockwise as opposed to counter-clockwise, lower the heat to a simmer.
For hours they sit on their shitty little stool and toss in what their hands seek. When they decide to simmer the brew for twenty minutes, they glance at the paper off to the right. A bottle sits slightly above and beside it. Poised, purposeful - like everything about a certain Potions Professor.
Yes, if only everyone had as astonishing a wit as you. It appears you truly have sustained a modicum of head trauma, babbling as your insipid note was.
Regardless of my assessment of your disparaging intelligence, it so pains me to acknowledge that the gap between our capabilities is not so.. cavernous. Our results were not so varied.
Adjustments are required.
It's the closest they'll ever get to 'I was possibly not correct' or 'you're not as shit as I thought you'd be at potions, considering we got the same result' (in not so refined, non-acerbic laced words). They imagine it must have been a vexing moment for him - to realize their brew didn't fail because of their ineptitude, but because of its blueprint. Or perhaps his obvious passion for potions glazed over his constant, vehement disgust - seeing as he bothered to add adjustments are required.
They suspect the parchment and attached bottle haven't been sitting out in wait for them all week. They can't imagine Snape going out of his way to summon the two every afternoon either, though. This, Leon knows, is a question they will never receive an answer to.
Snape's own brew swirls prettily in his proffered vial. Serpentine in shape, amorphous and clean.
They stare at it for a moment before rooting through their bag. From the depths they pull their own mix. They look the same. Still, something about Snape's breathes refined. They set the two down carefully off to the right. They return their gaze to the brew, stare well into the night until the room flickers by candlelight. Blue by bunsen burner.
It takes hours to get it to a pasty white, and Leon knows its not completed. Can feel it like the heat of a flame, persistent, fickle. With a mind of its own, their hand sinks into their bag once more. There is a peculiar sort of complicated emotion on their face once they see what they've pulled out.
Ah.. but Hagrid has said to reconnect, did he not? Sometimes, the best way to do so is to let go.
The cork pops like a vacuum when it's removed. Their hand hovers above the cauldron for a while, seemingly frozen in time. Leon inhales, exhales. They tip the vial, and its innards sprinkle in little stars into the brew below. Once empty, they set the glass aside. The brew shifts into a stunning iridescent silver. Leon knows, then, that they've done it.
Their newly empitied bottle breathes clear air for the first time in years. The peeling tape upon it reads Chimerae Blood.