When Professor Binns's soporific History of Magic lesson finally came to an end, the four of them waled out of the classroom together, Sherlock and Hermione leading, Harry and Ron trailing behind.
Torches drifted along the corridor, their flames making the shadows of the students stretch and shrink against the stone walls.
Harry chose to say nothing about Ron's observation that both Sherlock and Hermione had gone soft on their friends.
For one thing, he wasn't entirely sure whether Sherlock and Hermione were actually together.
For another, he was definitely seeing Cho Chang which meant he needed to watch what he said, or he'd only succeed in making things awkward for himself.
Besides, he knew well how Hermione worked. Sharp on the outside, soft underneath. When exam season came around, she'd lend them her notes regardless. She might grumble—you'd know all of this if you'd actually listened in class—but she'd hand them over.
And even if she didn't, it wouldn't be a disaster. Cho had told him quietly over the summer holidays not to worry about it. She wasn't Hermione—she didn't top the year every single term but she was Ravenclaw, and her marks were consistently near the top.
That seemed to be another Asian trait: studious, diligent, dependably good at school. With Cho being a year above him, a few tutoring sessions before the exams would be perfectly manageable.
At the thought of being tutored by Cho, alone, Harry felt a warmth creep up to the tips of his ears.
When they stepped out of the building, they found a thin drizzle had started. The rain came down in the finest of needles, cool against the face, and the grass in the courtyard had been washed to a vivid, saturated green.
The air smelled of wet earth and bruised grass. Figures clustered here and there across the courtyard, their outlines were soft and blurred through the mist.
The four of them found a sheltered corner beneath a dripping overhang, turned up their robes against the September chill, and speculated about what Snape was going to set them in their first Potions lesson of the year.
"Something impossibly difficult," Ron said with conviction.
"Obviously," Harry agreed. "Two months off and he'll want to put us back in our place the moment we walk through the door."
Sherlock and Hermione, unusually, did not disagree.
As it turned out, their prediction was entirely correct—except that Snape didn't even wait for the lesson to begin. The put-down started the moment they walked in.
The dungeon classroom smelled the same as always: wormwood and monkshood, undercut by the damp, woody smell of old stone. Sconces flickered along the walls. Cauldrons sat in even rows on their iron stands, catching the firelight in dull glints of dark gold.
"Before we begin today," Snape said, his gaze travelling slowly over each of them in turn, "I think it is necessary to remind you of something." His voice had that particular quality of his—the one that felt like a reprimand even when the sentence wasn't finished yet.
"In June of next year, you will sit an important examination that will assess the extent of your knowledge and ability in Potion-making. Although some members of this class are—" He gave a subtle pause.
"—of limited intellectual capacity, I nonetheless expect each of you to achieve at minimum an Acceptable on your O.W.L. I would be most displeased by anything less." His voice dropped a half-degree cooler. "And the consequences of my displeasure are not ones you should invite."
His eyes settled on Neville Longbottom's round, anxious face.
Even as a prefect, Neville couldn't help it—he flinched, drew a sharp breath. Some shadows went too deep to reason away.
"After this year, of course, many of you will no longer be taking my class. I admit only the most able students to my N.E.W.T.-level Potions group." A faint curl appeared at the corner of his mouth. "We shall be saying goodbye to some of you permanently."
The pause that followed was directed straight at Harry.
Harry had complicated feelings about this.
On one hand, the thought of leaving Potions behind after fifth year—of never again sitting through Snape's cold, orderly contempt gave him a relief so keen it was almost physical.
On the other hand, he'd learned things about Snape over the years. Glimpsed, in brief moments, what lay beneath that black-eyed severity. And when he thought of that, he felt something uncomfortably close to pity.
"But that pleasant parting lies a year away. In the meantime, whether or not you intend to continue to N.E.W.T. level, I recommend that every one of you applies themselves diligently. At the very least—do not give me reason to be angry on your O.W.L. results day."
Neville shuddered again at those words. He nearly knocked over a bottle at his elbow.
The threat was delivered as the real test began.
The potion Snape assigned was one that appeared regularly on O.W.L. examinations: the Draught of Peace.
It was a potion designed to soothe and calm feelings of anxiety and agitation. But if the ingredients were added carelessly, it would instead send the drinker into a heavy, sometimes irreversible stupor. Precision, in other words, was not optional.
Sherlock gave a quiet, dry laugh small enough that only Harry and Hermione caught it.
"Sounds rather well-suited to me," he murmured.
Harry glanced at him, then gave a small nod of understanding.
Hermione looked at Sherlock with a slight, worried crease between her brows. She knew what he meant. When there was nothing to occupy his mind, Sherlock tended toward restlessness—a grinding, low-grade anxiety that came with being the kind of person who thought the way he did.
She understood it. She couldn't do much about it. It was simply part of who Sherlock Holmes was: stillness and agitation existing in him simultaneously, always in uneasy balance.
But she quietly resolved, there and then, to brew a reserve supply of the Draught of Peace. It was far more effective than Muggle sedatives and crucially, it carried no risk of dependency or side effects.
"Ingredients and instructions are on the board—"
Snape flicked his wand. Neat, ice-cold handwriting appeared across the blackboard in close rows, listing every ingredient and step of the Draught of Peace.
"Everything you need is in the supply cabinet—"
Another flick. The cabinet at the back of the classroom unlocked with a sharp click, revealing shelves of jars, bottles, and pouches—dried herbs, powders, tinctures—their labels catching the dim light.
"You have one hour and a half. Begin."
There was no question that Snape was a Potions master of extraordinary ability. His understanding of the art was, by any measure, unrivalled. His teaching, however, was another matter. He possessed neither Lupin's gift for drawing out the best in every student, nor Flitwick's talent for making the difficult seem approachable and even enjoyable.
What Snape offered was the bare minimum of instruction—the board, the materials, the time limit and then left the students to sink or swim on their own ability.
Sherlock, for his part, saw nothing wrong with this approach. The method was written on the board in full; the materials were all provided. One simply followed the steps in sequence. Elementary.
The problem, of course, was that most people were not Sherlock. The gap between understanding a set of instructions and actually executing them, under conditions that required exact weights, precise timing, and controlled heat, was enormous.
It was the kind of gap that looked small from the outside and felt like a chasm from the inside.
The requirements were demanding: moonstone powder added in a strictly measured quantity—not a fraction of a spoonful more; the mixture stirred an exact number of times in exact sequence—ten clockwise, then five counter-clockwise, at a steady, even pace; the flame reduced to a specific shade of cherry-red at the moment of boiling, held precisely there for three full minutes before the final ingredient could be added.
Any deviation, anywhere in the chain, could compromise the entire potion. In the worst case, it could cause the cauldron to explode, or release a toxic vapour.
This was the reality pressing down on most of the class, which explained the concentration and the sweat.
Sherlock found the whole thing rather like asking whether a person could learn to count. He scanned the board once, committed the entire sequence to memory, and did not look up at it again. He picked up a small silver ladle, measured out a precise spoonful of moonstone powder, and tipped it into his cauldron with a light, controlled turn of the wrist.
From that point on, he never glanced at the instructions again.
The rest of the class scrambled into motion. Everyone knew from experience that Snape's time limits were not generous.
The minutes passed in tense, oppressive silence.
"Your potion should by now be emitting a pale, silver-coloured steam."
Snape's voice cut through the room when ten minutes remained on the clock.
Sherlock's cauldron was doing exactly that—a thin, luminous curl of silver mist rising from the surface.
And he himself looked, in contrast to nearly everyone else in the room, entirely unflustered. He had leaned back in his chair, arms folded, watching his cauldron with relaxed attention like contemplating a piece of art.
Hermione, the other standout of the class, had produced a silver steam as well—though hers shimmered just a shade darker than Sherlock's. Her forehead was filled with sweat.
Her hair, always on the unruly side, had gone limp against her cheeks from the heat. Her hands were still moving, still stirring to the required rhythm. She'd used every ounce of concentration she had, and there was none left over—she couldn't spare Neville so much as the help she'd given him in previous years. Only the occasional anxious glance from the corner of her eye.
Neville stared at his cauldron in despair. The contents had gone stiff and dense, like concrete someone had forgotten to pour in time. He sat with both hands in his hair, motionless, trying to decide whether to try to scoop the mess out, or simply to pretend nothing had happened and wait for the inevitable.
He already knew Snape wouldn't let it go.
Harry was sweating steadily, wiping his eyes only when the blur became too much to work through. He'd nearly made a catastrophic error just moments ago.
Snape's board read: Add moonstone powder. Stir counter-clockwise three times. Bring to boil for seven minutes. Add two drops of Syrup of Hellebore.
After the seven-minute boil, Harry's mind had simply gone blank. He'd completely forgotten the Syrup of Hellebore and was moving on to the next step when Sherlock stopped him with a well-timed intervention that left no room for argument.
Harry caught himself, grabbed the bottle, and added the drops.
Not that it was entirely his fault, he thought.
The dungeon was thick with overlapping fumes—red, green, even purple roiling up from a dozen cauldrons at once, turning the air thick and murky. Reading the fine print on a blackboard through that haze, without his glasses working at full capacity, was genuinely difficult.
He'd tried asking questions before.
Snape's response to I can't read the board had been: "That is your problem."
His response to asking a classmate had been: "No talking."
His response to a direct question had been: "Can you not read?"
Harry had stopped asking after that. And this time it had very nearly cost him.
Sherlock had been able to help Harry precisely because Harry was close to the finish, one small correction and he could have recovered cleanly. Others were in worse shape.
Ron's cauldron was spitting green sparks and emitting a smell of rotten eggs that bore a strong resemblance to diluted hydrogen sulphide.
Seamus was frantically thrusting his wand at the flames beneath his cauldron, which were guttering toward extinction. The brew inside had slowed its simmer dangerously; if the fire went out entirely, it was over.
Snape moved between the workbenches, looking down over his hooked nose at each cauldron in series—Sherlock's, Harry's, Hermione's and said nothing.
Which meant he had nothing to criticise. Whether he was willing to admit it to himself was another matter.
He stopped walking and turned.
"Ten points from Gryffindor."
His voice was perfectly level, his gaze fixed on Sherlock and Harry with cold contempt.
"Holmes. I do not recall giving you permission to assist another student." He let that land before continuing. "Potter. And I do not recall giving you permission to accept assistance from anyone."
Her paused for a second. "Do you intend to rely on your dear friend for the rest of your academic career?"
Snape drew out the pause, a thin, unpleasant smile appeared on his face. "Of course—if the two of you were to marry, I suppose that could be arranged quite conveniently."
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