September 2, Potions Classroom
Sweetheart,
You’re not worried, are you? I know retirement isn’t good to all couples, but your mum and I are still rubbing along well enough. I’ve joined a few little things and I’m writing a book about my career, so she hasn’t lost patience with me being about all the time yet. And we’ve agreed that if this goes well I’ll start on a more serious one about the history of the Assizes or a contrast of how courts in different regions handle the same sorts of cases, so the horizon is clear.
When will we see you and your boys again? I’m afraid Petunia’s still being unreasonable, but your mum and I can’t wait.
Love, Dad
Lily,
God only knows, because Merlin hasn’t a clue. —Remus
Dearest Beehive Ginger,
What? Moony and I are just roommates. I mean, of course I love him, but... I mean, what?
Dear Lily,
Er, Alice is beautiful and funny usually by accident but in a good way, and she’s amazing with the baby, and she could kick me teeth in if she felt like it but she even likes me enough to put up with me mam not thinking anyone’s good enough, so why wouldn’t I?
Sincerely but confusedly,
Frank
Evans,
What a question, but since if you can read this you’ve got past the wards on the envelope, you are yourself and benign and I’ll humor you. My maniac is magnificent, everyone knows that who isn’t stupid, and he wouldn’t like even the utterly harmless knowing more. Which is why I’m not signing.
(Incidentally, he’s laughing at me for thinking not-signing is useful, considering my handwriting. Not that he has any room to talk about anyone’s handwriting. Not him, I mean, he’s not here, but I can hear him doing it. And if you don’t know why that’s why, you’re not allowed to say you’re his friend anymore, and also you should get divorced at once for not knowing what love is. Which you should do in any case, if you ask me, because, though I loathe to say it of a kinsman, why, Evans, why?)
Sincerely,
not signing, I did say.
Lily,
I don’t know if I love my girlfriend yet, we’ve only been seeing each other a month or two. But she’s great. Thanks for not asking her name, we’re still keeping it to ourselves. You know how Sirius is.
Pete
Are you off your rocker? —S
Sev— I’m just trying to prove men aren’t all emotionally stunted. —L
That’s good of you. Don’t use me to do it. —S
p.s.: I note you didn’t say to whom you’re going to fail to prove it.
p.p.s.: Because your premise is faulty.
Now you’re just being difficult! —L
Always. And accurate. —S
p.s.: Your idea fails to take account of sex-based early-childhood cultural conditioning and is therefore more idealistically egalitarian than legitimate.
Idealistic egalitarianism IS legitimate! —L
When it puts on blinkers and lets optimism lead it by the nose, I must say ye neigh. —S
Do you imagine I can be trifled with? If you persist in sending me raspberries for every pun, I’m just going to save them up and make a chocolate jam for E. —S
Three paper airplanes and a cup of fruit is cheap for half an answer from you. ♥ —L
P.S.: that’s really sweet, Sev. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.
…I’m so proud. However, the next time you want to do something this ludicrous, put a Protean on a pair of notebooks. If you can spell raspberries into the fold I’m sure you can manage it. The third missive nearly took a marmalade kitten’s ear off, and more importantly H.S. is starting to give me a look his face can’t handle and I mustn’t laugh at personal mail in front of all the infants. —S
You are a ridiculous man. —L
P.S.: owl me a notebook you can stand to be seen with and I’ll see what I can do.
P.P.S.: the raspberries weren’t a challenge, Sev, for pity’s sake. But thanks, I adore blackcurrents.
L— I know you do, idiot.
Valley-goddess of the perpetual sunshine of frondlike lethality,
You know I love every inch of you from the freckles on your hairline to your weirdly cold toes and bouts of extreme violence with hurtful shouting, with particular reference to bits including your eyes which I am not going to otherwise specify because you left your letter out. Which I am taking to mean that you want me to leave the answer here, but also means Sirius will probably get into it. And if he doesn’t, the sprog probably will in ten years and then he’ll be traumatized and I’ll have to give him THE TALK, which is never going to happen because I’m fobbing it off on Remus.
You aren’t feeling neglected, are you? I thought you didn’t want to talk.
Your really overpoweringly adoring husband-for-life,
James
Dear Alice,
I’ve just done an informal survey, because Rita Skeeter (you remember her?) got me mad and told me it will never go well if you ask a wizard to explain why he loves someone. You might like to know that out of everyone I asked, including my father, Frank is the only one who’s less than completely ‘round the bend and even slightly qualified to be in a relationship. Both at once, I mean.
Yours,
Lily
Lily,
Color me surprised. I’d say ‘hands off, my husband is mine,’ but historically speaking you don’t go for the nice ones.
Alice
***
Even though Mum Jr. was lurking off near a window, Bill noticed him before anything else. You had to, there was just a sort of pull, even though he wasn’t doing anything. His arms were folded, his face was completely blank, and he had the kind of eyes where you could tell something was going on under there, and going very quickly. The eyes flicked over Bill and the other kids as they entered, and Bill felt they were doing something more than counting heads.
Ron started to move towards a seat, but Mum Jr. just looked at him—didn’t even turn his head, just flicked his eyes sideways—and Ron stopped moving. Mum Jr. gave the tiniest, sharpest nod Bill had ever seen. Then his eyes flicked again, this time to the desk at the head of the classroom. The rest of his face never so much as twitched, but it was still very clear that they were meant to look where he was looking.
There was another wizard from the teacher’s table there, a good head shorter than Mum Jr. but twice his size anyway. He was a very greying, balding blond. Bill noticed his eyes because they were a very pale green in his ruddy face, almost yellow but not, like gooseberries or grapes, not bluish-green like Granny Cedrella’s or the greyish lichen color of a few of the muggles in Ottery St. Catchpole . His waistcoat was old-fashioned, and looked soft but not woolly.
“Welcome, welcome,” he beamed at them, and there was a fussy note in his voice that made Bill think he’d been the cranky auntie shouting over the teakettle noise. “You can see the desks are two to a cauldron; each of you sit with someone from the other House and take out your potions kits.”
Wondering what would have happened if the numbers hadn’t been even, Bill waited only long enough to make sure Gwen and Hopkirk had started bustling to a desk together before hooking Ron, who looked relieved. “Cheers, mate,” Ron said. “I’m fair sick of everyone new telling me to talk slower.”
“If you’re sick of it,” said a very deep voice very quietly and very deliberately, from exactly behind them, “then talk slower.”
Ron, once he stopped jumping out of his shoes, hunched down in a grumbly sort of way. Bill, on the other hand, did not stop having his heart attack quite so quickly. He’d thought he was good at telling when people were sneaking up behind him! But of course people who weren’t the Terrible Twins, he realized now, wouldn’t be stifling giggles and tripping over their rompers.
The shadow passed on, although since everyone had now been warned only one or two other pairs of students shrieked and tried to leap through the ceiling when he crossed behind them.
Round-eyed, Bill hooked a thumb at the literally creepy probably-not-a-professor and just stared at Ron.
“I’ll take it from him,” Ron said in a disgruntled but I don’t want to tone. “He’s not trying to tell me to do something he won’t bother with.”
Across the room, Mum Jr. turned his head to look at Ron, something churning in his eye. It was a thoughtful sort of churning, though, not a scary kind. It only lasted a moment, and then he prowled behind someone else and made her hair stand on end even though she had actually been eying him. It was just like having a manticore in the room.
Except that Bill thought he probably wouldn’t have had a terrible Mum-like urge to make a manticore sit down in a nice trappy, squashy armchair and shove a cup of tea in its face.
“Sorry I said anything,” Ron whispered to Bill glumly. At Bill’s confused look, he explained, “He didn't look like he was planning to do that to everyone. I think he’s just making it fair.”
Questions piled up in Bill’s head. Like, why would you think that, and how is creeping up behind them fair to anybody. He settled for, “What goes on down there?!”
“None of your business, Gryffindor,” said one of the Slytherin girls who wasn’t Hopkirk. Bill had been too busy last night trying to figure out how the talking hat could exist to pay attention to everyone’s names, which he realized now had not only been silly of him but quite possibly two kinds of rude at once..
Then the girl jerked and her back stiffened—although she didn’t scream—because four long, very pale fingers had drifted down to land on her shoulder. Lightly, like a moth. She looked up into a face that was just watching her, coolly curious. Bill thought he’d maybe seen an eyebrow twitch, just a little.
The girl got frowny around the eyes, and told Bill grouchily, “That is to say, House business isn’t supposed to leave the common rooms.”
Some skin shifted around Mum Jr.’s weirdly dark eyes. It was very Mummish of him, except that Mum would have followed it up by putting her hands on her hips, glaring pointedly and, if Bill didn’t put his laundry in the hamper smartish, yelling. Mum Jr. just waited.
The girl gave in crossly. “Weasley, is it?”
The hand dropped on her shoulder in what Bill thought might have been a commiserating little pat. As Mum Jr. went to stand a bit near his window again, the girl didn’t exactly look happier, but she did look less likely to bite someone’s face off. Now it was more like Charlie’s grumbly I-bet-this-is-meant-to-build-character face when he didn’t think it was fair to make him bring the dishes to the sink for Bill and Perce to wash and dry, since Mum and Dad both had wands.
Bill noticed that their actual professor was rubbing up and down the bridge of his nose, which was on the reddish side even without that, and had his eyes squinched shut. But then the professor took a deep breath, huffed it out, clapped his hands again, and beamed at them all.
“Now, then, everyone all settled? Kits out?” He waggled a finger. “And your quills and journals, don’t forget!”
There was a collective groan from everybody. Half the class had apparently spent the last hour and a half taking very boring notes, and the other half had had such a good time in Charms that they’d forgotten they might have to take any.
“Anyone who would like to forego a memory aid and be tested at the end of class has only to say,” said Mum Jr. from his window, folding his arms meaningfully.
The professor looked like he wasn’t at all sure what he thought about that and was considering saying something about it. In the end, he just smiled at them again and introduced himself.
(It turned out that Mum Jr. had his own name, too. Ron might have said it before. Bill promptly forgot it this time too: it was all over hissy edges. In Bill’s opinion, Mum Jr. had enough hissy edges to be going on with and didn’t need, as Actual Mum would have put it, to be encouraged.)
When Professor Slughorn took attendance, it took almost fifteen minutes because he kept asking students if they were related to so-and-so and how their Uncle Whoozit was doing these days. Bill had to answer about Granny Cedrella’s health and how Auntie Muriel’s new magazine was getting on and if Dad was excited about the new department at the ministry.
He had to explain that Dad wasn’t allowed to talk about work at dinner, but Professor Slughorn chuckled when Bill volunteered that he knew Dad was excited about their cousin Sirius teaching him how muggle motors worked. Dad was really excited about that. You couldn’t sit down in the living room anymore without moving a book on technomancy somebody hadn’t bothered to close.
When the professor moved on to ask Ron how the crup-breeding business was going, Bill felt exhausted, although he didn’t know why. He glanced around, and flinched.
Most of the kids were just flipping through the textbook, nodding off, or playing Witch Hunt where their notes should have gone. Bill was pleased to see, when he craned his neck a little, that Gwen had got all the vowel-noise runes in a word that looked like it was going to be ‘founders.’ Hopkirk’s stick figure only had shoes and a dress on, not even a hat or wand, and certainly wasn’t on a platform or tied to a stake yet even if Hopkirk didn’t play the version where the witch got a broom before you drew the flames.
But Mum Jr. looked like he was going to set Professor Slughorn on fire with his eyes and then skin him with his fingernails and then throw all his toes off the Astronomy tower.
Not looked, exactly—his face was still very blank. But there were waves of murder sheeting off him, and his knuckles were a vivid yellowy-white against the soft, dark grey of his sleeves. He’d stopped looking like he was just leaning against the window casually: now he was coiled against it like he needed something to spring off when he leapt for the professor’s throat.
Bill suddenly thought he knew what had been making the teakettle noise.
Eventually, Professor Slughorn must have noticed, too, because he exclaimed, “Gracious me, will you look at the time. We’ll have to finish getting acquainted next cl—”
One of the glass things on Slughorn’s desk cracked so hard it sheared in half, with a noise like a ball hitting a window. The cork bounced the top part off the desk and onto the floor, where it shattered with a happy little tinkle.
Without a word, Mum Jr. flicked his wand at the shards. They flew up through the air and re-formed on the top of the twisty glass thing, as if nothing had ever happened. Everyone stared at him, and he looked blandly at the professor, just waiting for the lesson to go on. Bill thought there was just a hint of color pinking that very pale face, but he could have been imagining it.
“—Later,” Slughorn finished, pretending not to be alarmed. He was worse at it than Dad when Mum told him off for getting muggle grease on her rugs. He made his way back to the desk at the front and beamed at them in a jumpy, distracted sort of way. “Now, then, which of you has done any cooking at home?”
There was an uneasy pause. Some of the girls put tentative hands up. A few more looked as if they didn’t want to be volunteered for anything, and Bill didn’t think he was the only boy who sort of felt it just wasn’t on to spring this sort of question on anybody.
Mum Jr. swept the class with a very sardonic eye and put his own hand up decisively.
With a shrug, Bill did too, and a few more hands followed.
“Good, good, you’ll have a leg up already,” Slughorn said encouragingly. Since he didn’t drag anybody up to the front of the class, there was a general air of relief.
Except from the window. Mum Jr. looked as if he violently disagreed and was actually biting the insides of his lips closed.
“Now,” Slughorn said, “the first potion we’ll be making will be a boil cure! And anyone who does particularly well can make friends with some of the older students with skin problems, eh, Severus?”
“That’s one idea,” Mum Jr. said, with a dry look that left Bill unable to tell whether he was joking or advising them in dead earnest. “If the lazy s—beggars are incapable of making a first-year draught themselves, make them pay through the nose as a warning about buying commercial goods post-graduation. You’ll be doing them a favor, especially if they catch fire.”
The actual professor closed his eyes for a second and appeared to count to five before popping them back open with a smile of strained joviality. “Who can tell me what we’ll need?”
Linden Wood put up a brave hand and ventured, “Snake fangs, and stewed—”
“How many fangs?” Mum Jr. asked softly. Maybe it was just annoyance with Slughorn being annoyed with him, but he sounded a bit dangerous.
“Six?” tried Wood uncertainly.
Mum Jr. inclined his head. “What size?”
“Er, the book didn’t say.”
“Miss Jones?” Slughorn asked, because Gwen had her hand very solidly up, and her jaw was set.
“Snake teeth?” she asked in a demanding, upset sort of way.
“Yes, indeed,” Slughorn nodded, looking perplexed.
Mum Jr cleared his throat, low as a whisper, and sort of flexed two fingers and dipped his eyes when the professor looked at him. The professor kind of bounced his eyebrows and leaned back (Bill was fascinated), and Mum Jr. said, just as solidly as Gwen had raised her hand, “Potions isn’t cooking, Miss Jones, do not be confused by the similarities in method. You can make substitutions in food, but you cannot make the same potion with two different sets of ingredients.”
“But,” Gwen started, but Mum Jr. held up a silencing hand.
“However,” he said, still very firmly, “in years past, some made a career of creating potions of similar effects to those which require ingredients considered ‘dark.’ You may well choose to make a career of re-creating common potions effects using alternatives to animal material in common potions, but you will first have to become adept in the usual way, practicing on the usual potions. I assure you, nothing goes into a potion frivolously, although of course the potions can be made frivolously. Any further discussion of your qualms in the matter should be held with your Head of House or with the Headmaster. Do you understand?”
“…Er, I did, sir,” she said, although she still looked rebellious, “but what’s qualms?”
“Qualms are misgivings,” Mum Jr. replied.
“Worries,” Professor Slughorn supplied helpfully from behind one hand when Gwen did not look enlightened.
Mum Jr. scowled. “To return to the matter, an asterix,” he said a bit loudly, flicking a star-shape onto the blackboard with his wand in case anyone didn’t know what one of those was, presumably because Gwen had left him thinking they all couldn’t read, “will lead you to the footnotes, wherein you will find information that will help you to make a potion that will cure boils rather than blanket you in them, as it very well might if your measurements are wrong. Does anyone know what size fangs?”
Bill risked a glance at Slughorn, who looked less annoyed than Bill had expected. He was more measuring Mum Jr. than glaring at him.
Hopkirk raised her hand. “The book didn’t say what size, sir,” she said. “I’m sure it didn’t, because I kept looking. But it said they shouldn’t be from a venomous snake, and you should use, er, four measures of the powder, I think, but it didn’t say what measures.”
Mum Jr. looked pleased, which was the first time Bill had seen him look pleased. He didn’t go so far as to smile. He explained to the class, “Where ‘measure’ is used for the first ingredient listed, without explanation, you may assume with some safety that it means ‘so many ounces per batch.’”
There was a pause, and then Professor Slughorn waggled his eyebrows meaningfully and made a writing sort of gesture in midair. There was a mass scramble to open ink bottles and scribble.
Ron put his hand up. “Er, some safety, sir?” he asked.
Mum Jr. looked more pleased, but left it to Professor Slughorn to chuckle and assure him, “You may rely upon it until your OWL year, Mr. Wagtail. Well, Severus, if you don’t mind,” he gestured at the blackboard, “four measures of six powdered snake fangs.”
Mum Jr. agreeably flicked words onto the board. Bill had to squint, because the handwriting was a bit tortured-spiders-got-into-the-inkwell, but with effort he could nearly make out:
ALL RECIPES IN THIS BOOK ONLY
ONE BATCH BREWED IN: Water[∇]x2Liter[L], Pewter[♃]Cauldron[Cn] Size[s] 2
∇x2L, ♃Cn.s2
"That's shorthand," Mum Jr. paused to say, tapping the squiggly backwards-K looking letter. "Technically it means tin—you'll see it in Astronomy class; tin is ruled by Jupiter. However, it serves as a shorthand for pewter, which is a tin and copper alloy. This prevents confusion, as one can have copper cauldrons but if you try to brew in tin you deserve everything that happens to you." He gave them a menacing look in case they were thinking about brewing in tin, and flicked another line up:
General Cure for Common Pustules
“It is generally called a Boil Cure, you know, Severus,” the professor commented, sounding as if he were trying not to have a headache.
“That isn’t half so accurate, though,” Mum Jr. pointed out sensibly. “It isn’t just good against boils, it targets all swellings with pus at their core that don’t originate from broken skin, from acne and styes to tubercular scrofula and buboes.”
Slughorn began, “Severus, we’ve discussed—” and cut himself off, either because Mum Jr. was giving him a confused huh-what-when look[1] or because he just didn’t want to get into it. Instead, he commiserated, “That’s quite true, m’boy, but I’m afraid they’ll never find the accurate version in the index.”
Mum Jr. paused, gave the textbook an annoyed look, and sighed. Slughorn looked as if he’d dodged a killing curse, which seemed a little over-the-top to Bill.
Erasing the heading, Mum Jr instead flicked up onto the blackboard,
℞ “Boil Cure”
a general cure for common pustular swellings, cysts, and nodules
1. 6 x common snake fangs, powdered, use 4℥
“What’s a kist?” Ron whispered, looking horrified.
“Dunno,” Bill whispered back. Everyone around them was having the exact same conversation, such as it was. “Do you know what a stupluar is?”
Ron made a confused face, and Bill pointed. “Oh—I think it’s pusteller? No. …D’you think we want to know?”
“…No?”
Mum Jr. was drawing the symbol bigger. He tapped it, and pointed his eyes at one of Gwen’s roommates. “This means?”
“Ounces,” she said, sticking her chin up in alarm at being called on.
“Very good, very good,” Slughorn said. “Severus, while they have their quills out, why don’t you show them the rest.”
There followed a sharp little lecture, and the class wrote down ’20 grains (gr) to a scruple (℈), 3℈ to a dram or drachm (ʒ), 8ʒ; to an ounce (℥) 12℥ to a pound (℔), 14℔; to a stone (st).’
“Although you shan’t have to work in stones, and seldom even in pounds, unless you become commercial brewers,” Mum Jr. added. “They often have to make several dozens of batches at once. Now, if you will look at the scales you’ve bought, you’ll note the weights it came with are marked both in these measurements and in grams—”
“And I shall expect each of you to fill in a table of conversion, to be handed in next class,” Slughorn interrupted hastily.
Mum Jr. looked thrown off, then shrugged and flicked a grid onto the chalkboard. It had five rows in six columns with all the symbols at the top, and in the very bottom right corner it read ‘1gr = 3.24mg.’ The top left read ‘1st=5.222kg,’ and one in the middle said ‘8ʒ=31.12g.’
“What a memory you have, Severus,” the professor noted, looking slightly weirded out.
Mum Jr. threw him a confused look, and shrugged when nothing more seemed forthcoming. Not unsympathetically, he told the class, “If your tutors haven’t emphasized basic arithmancy, you may find a classmate to help you on this occasion, but you must each show your calculations.”
“And now that we have that sorted,” Professor Slughorn clapped his hands, “who can tell me what we do with the snake fangs?”
Bill caught Mum Jr. irritably stopping himself from rolling his eyes and not stopping himself from staring with impatient glumness at the nearest textbook.
Taking this for a hint, Bill started to reach for his textbook, but Mum Jr. rapped out, “One reads the chapter before class begins, Mr. Weasley.” Eyeing Bill a little coldly, as if he’d caught him cheating (which wasn’t fair at all), he suggested, “Would you care to take a guess?”
Bill gave up a bit, since he had a feeling that guessing would be bad. He said, “The book said what temperature but not how much water, sir. Unless we’re just supposed to heat it dry?”
“It’s on the blackboard,” Mum Jr. said irritably, smacking his wand into the line at the top with the upside-down triangle.
“Er… no offense, sir, but that line’s a bit hard to read.”
Mum Jr. shot him a what-the-hell-is-hard-to-read-about-it look, but fortunately he was forestalled before Bill was put in the position of having to explain that his handwriting looked like a flock of sparrows had sat in a chalk-pit and then done a line-dance on the blackboard and there were more brackets to keep track of than Dad’s office worked up at the start of Quidditch season.
“In the back of your book,” Professor Slughorn saved Bill placidly, “you’ll find all sorts of useful little tables and diagrams. The one you want, Mr. Weasley, is ‘Standard measures of Water By Cauldron Size.”
Gwen put up her hand. “’Scuze me, Professor,” she frowned, “but we were only told to bring one cauldron.”
“Quite right, Miss Jones,” he beamed. “As this book was written for Hogwarts’ students at your level, all its recipes require a size 2 pewter cauldron, as Severus wrote here,” he waved at the blackboard. Without even looking at Mum Jr., he forestalled whatever the younger wizard had been about to say by adding, “You shall learn why the materials of your tools are important next year, once you’ve got the basics down. Now, who can tell me what temperature…”
Mum Jr. sidled over to Professor Slughorn and whispered intently, “They won’t have time to brew it Borage’s way at this rate, the slugs have to stew half an hour before they can even start heating the base water!”
“Well, then, they’ll have to brew it at the start of next class,” Slughorn told him calmly. He was so not-dismayed that Bill thought he’d never meant them to start today, even if he pretended to, and had meant to go on getting to know them for most of the period. “I’m sure you can think of something to keep them occupied once we’ve got the recipe sorted out, m’boy.”
For a second, Bill thought Mum Jr.’s head would actually explode. Then something seemed to occur to him. He nodded sharply and banged out the door in the back that read Stores.
The class went through the rest of the recipe without him, which was a much more relaxed way to go about it but with fewer pauses to find out the whys of anything. Finally, though, Professor Slughorn went to the Stores door, rapped on it, and opened it. “Severus?” he called pointedly.
Mum Jr. came out holding a big, wicked looking knife and a basket of vegetables. “I hope you’ve taken good notes,” he said, a bit sadistically. Bill was sure he wasn’t the only one whose eyes were drawn to the knife. It wasn’t the glintiest thing about Mum Jr. as he elaborated, “As you won’t be able to put them into practice for several days.”
He thumped a potato onto the workbench. Then he did smile, and it was awful. He asked, “Who thinks they know how to use a knife?”
It turned out that none of them knew how to use a knife.
It was possible that Bill’s mum didn’t know how to use a knife.
He wasn’t looking forward to telling her.
They had to bring in vials of cut-up vegetables and powdered oats and chicken bones for homework, and the table of conversion, and a foot of small writing or two feet of large about why cutting things up properly was important, and a neatly copied-out recipe for the boil cure potion.
The only upside was that when Bill jokingly asked Ron if he thought the Gryffindors could get away with powdering their oats during History class, Ron stared at him enviously and declared, “That’s genius!”
It turned out that even a half-blind ghost with only half his mind in the present century couldn’t ignore a whole class of eleven-year-olds industriously grinding their mortars instead of taking notes, but that was okay. The dead professor wasn’t half as scary as Mum Jr., unless you thought people really could die of boredom, and he didn’t take away more points than Bill’s class had got out of Professor Slughorn.
They’d just have to do it under their desks next time.
When Bill told Ron how it had gone when they found each other in the Great Hall on the way to dinner, Ron stared at him, open-mouthed, and then turned to Hopkirk and said aggrievedly, “See? I can be a good Slytherin.” Hopkirk raised her eyebrows at him, and he explained, “Because I think all these idiots are morons.”
“A good Slytherin,” said a dark, scary, amused voice from just behind Gwen, as Mum Jr. paused by them on the way to the head table, “sees to it that he has allies smart enough not to get him into trouble.”
Bill eyed him. He was, okay, Bill would admit it, scarier than Actual Mum—but it was the same sort of scary. And Bill was a Gryffindor; if Gryffindors were stupid they were stupidly brave, like Uncle Giddy said. So he asked, “Are we in trouble?”
Mum Jr. looked down at him consideringly and decided, “If you don’t all receive at least an E on your first Potions and History of Magic exams, Mr. Weasley… lingering, painful, dream-drowning worlds of it.”
And, looking rather cheered by this thought, he passed on.
“He definitely likes me,” Bill declared.
Gwen smacked the back of his head. Hopkirk got the exact same kind of considering look as Mum Jr., then nodded happy satisfaction and followed suit, rather harder.
Nerve-bendingly, even though Mum Jr. was in no way facing them, Bill was sure he heard a stifled snort.
[1] During Severus’s very Potions class (not counting all the ones with his mam), he heard they were going to do a boil cure, immediately started quietly explaining about how Lily should set up her potions kit, walked her through why cutting things up to their described sizes is important (“think of it like your mum said about baking, Lils, catalysts, like, and heat getting all the way through all the pieces at the same rate and the way the juices from a teabag ooze out differently than if it’s looseleaf—” “Oh! And, Sev, ew, tea doesn’t ooze, it seeps, is your tea moldy or something?” “Well, I’ve read about kombu-cha, it’s from Manchuria so I suppose it might be interesting to make, but I haven’t tried yet, you need—to not hold your knife like that when you’re cutting slippery things!”), and started them brewing.
When he was asked about his family he said, “Sorry, sir, just a minute, I think the fire’s too hot, I had it a second ago, it’s going to scorch the fang powder, this stupid grill keeps hiccuping,” and Slughorn stopped and said, “How can you tell, m’boy,” and Lily said proudly, “Sev can feel it! But 250 Paracels means it should be more pumpkin-colored than satsuma in dim indoor light over common coal anyway, right? Because it would be about 1100 degrees Celsius if we had a thermometer?”
And Slughorn said, “Yes, indeed! Very good, very good, take a point each! And never fear, Miss Evans, we’ll teach you temperature-measuring charms by the time a few degrees really matters. Carry on!” and talked to Narcissa Black for ten minutes while Severus gaped indignantly and started explaining to Lily why a few degrees absolutely mattered all the time including right now, look, she could already see some browning in the powder and it was only ever supposed to melt once the wand-wave worked with the pewter to crystallize it, no, that’s not insane, think about it like boiling honey that’s gone solid, or making caramel. Only we don’t want to caramelize the snake fangs; it’ll still work but it’ll itch, so the flame really can’t be this yellow, dammit, stupid grill—!
During Severus’s second potions class, he asked why they had to do the boil cure a second time, and everyone looked at him funny, which he did not notice, and Slughorn told him it was, uh, to make sure he really had his technique right and it wasn’t a fluke. And so Severus said, Oh, Science! in an inappropriately happy tone of voice, and Lily started giggling while half of Slytherin stared at them like Can We Kill The Mudbloods Now and half of Gryffindor stared at him like Nerd, Why. Severus having enough time to ‘ask reasonable questions’ about the way the textbook was written and about the course goals* did not improve matters.
What Severus remembers from his entire first, second, and third year of Potions classes is BORED BORED BORED BORED (help me Lily and extracurricular reading, you’re my only hope) BORED WHY IS EVERYTHING MEDIOCRE BORED booOO-OOO--OOOooored BORED (why are these people trying to kill me this is not an appropriate challenge or distraction from being bored) AUUGH WHY IS MY TEACHER USELESS SOOOOO SOOOOOO BORED.
What Slughorn remembers from Severus’s first through seventh years of Potions classes is every single argument, Thank Salazar For Miss Evans, and getting drunk a lot.
* in Severus’s whole time at Hogwarts, only Delores Umbridge ever showed her students her syllabus, because most teachers were not damn stupid enough to lock themselves into a timeline in a school as volatile as Hogwarts without being forced to.