BANG

“It worked!” Harry sat up in bed, settling his glasses onto his face. He looked around the room for any fish, but there seemed to be none flapping about. There was a very distinctive, unpleasant smell, but that was all. He got out of bed, looking around for some clothes to change into.

A quarter of an hour later, the door opened and almost knocked Harry over as he struggled to put on one of his socks. Only years of quiddich training prevented him from biting dust.

“Oh, you are almost ready. Good.”

Good? That was a strange thing to hear from Snape, especially this early in the morning. Snape waited as Harry stuffed his shoes on next and grabbed his bag from where he had abandoned it on the free bed.

“Done, Sir.”

Snape just nodded and led the way out into the corridor. Harry jumped when he realised that there was already a couple of other people there.

“Hi…”

Fowley was standing there scowling with their eyes half shut. Zabini appeared to have fallen asleep on one of the stone benches which was carved into the wall.

“Breakfast time!” Snape said, in a voice which might have been aiming for cheerful. He ignored the three identical glares which were aimed at his back.

Things seemed a bit brighter in the Great Hall. Harry was happy to notice, from his reflection in a polished, silver teapot, that his hair was actually returning to its usual shade. He had been worried that he might have identified the wrong potion yesterday- that his hair would have been dyed all over again.

He caught Snape’s eye in the reflection and saw himself go bright red, clashing horribly with his hair.

“Um, I wasn’t-“

“Of course not.”

Harry ducked his head, determined to not look back up until he had died of embarrassment.

There was a put-upon sigh from the other side of the table.

“Do I really have to come to the Sunday brewing session, Professor? I’m going to be doing alright in classes from now on. And we’re only a few weeks into term.”

Snape snorted and put down the empty cup from his second coffee, “You have impeccable timing as always, Fowley. You are coming to the extra credit session because you have obviously been making up everything since first year. I received an owl from your grandfather yesterday evening and it is his wish that you bring your grade back up, now that we are aware you are not merely incompetent.”

“Thanks a lot, Potter.” Fowley tried to kick Harry under the table, but their legs were too short and they only succeeded in scuffing his knee.

“What do I have to do with it?” Harry sputtered, shuffling back on the bench so that Fowley would pretty much have to crawl under the table to do any damage. “I have to go to the stupid club too.”

“This is not Potions Club.” Snape pointed out. “This is extra credit. You should be grateful that I am letting you join in and not giving you extra detention work to do.”

“Wait, even I get extra credit for this?” Harry asked.

“Technically, you will be making up for one of the zeros you have already earned this year. It will be a quiet session, there will only be the three of you there.”

Zabini’s head snapped up and he dropped his fork. “I did not agree to remedial potions!”

Snape frowned at him, “Good, because you are not invited. I was referring to Mr Diggory.” Harry glanced behind them and saw that Cedric was sitting in his usual seat at Hufflepuff- despite there only being maybe thirty people in the Hall this early in the morning. “I believe you have a detention this morning anyway, Mr Zabini. Until then, perhaps your time would be best spent in ensuring all of your homework is of an acceptable standard for tomorrow?”

Zabini grumbled. Detention with Professor Moody was not the way anybody wanted to spend their Sunday.

As Harry watched, Diggory checked his watch, grabbed another slice of toast and fished under the table for his bag. A glance at Snape showed that the man was forgoing a third cup of coffee and getting ready to go as well. Harry quickly stuffed a couple of apples into his bag- who knew when they would eventually stop for lunch?

 Harry found himself idly resenting Fowley’s dirty shoes, since they had left marks on both his trousers and the dungeon floor that he had cleaned so carefully in his last detention.

Snape made a funny noise when he saw Harry cast a quick cleaning spell at Fowley’s feet and the floor beneath.

Cedric had been waiting outside when they arrived, just brushing the toast crumbs off his hands. He set up his cauldron at the bench next to Harry, both of them behind Fowley. The Hufflepuff seemed to know what he was doing and collected all of his ingredients quickly and was preparing them before Harry even had his book out on the desk.

Snape wrote instructions up on the blackboard for Fowley to follow and thoughtfully gave Harry a list of all the Potions he had earned a zero on in the last year which were a part of their OWL coursework. There were a lot.

Harry picked one which he remembered had been pretty easy. It had been ruined only because Neville’s potion had exploded as Harry had been about to bottle his own and it had been contaminated. He took his book with him to collect the right ingredients from the student storage cupboard. He walked into Fowley by accident as the kid was struggling with about seven jars.

“Sure you’ve got the right colours?” Harry joked as he forcibly took a couple of the jars off the indignant kid and over to the table.

“Very funny,” Fowley said. “And I’ve got a colour chart, so yes.”

“Huh, that’s smart.” Harry went back to the cupboard, double checking everything before pulling it down. It would be just his luck to blow up his second attempt at the potion too.

As Harry settled down to preparing the base for his potion, he noticed that Snape was tidying out his own store cupboard at the very front of the room, behind his desk.

“So how did you wind up here? I thought this was remedial potions?” Harry asked Cedric. It wasn’t until he had said it that he realised the other boy might be offended.

Cedric saw how worried he looked and seemed to take pity on him. “Yeah, I need all the help I can get in potions. It’s always been my worst subject. Somehow I scraped an O in my OWL, so now I have to do NEWT too.”

Harry laughed, “You can’t be that bad if you got an Outstanding!”

Cedric gave him a look, “You’d be getting O’s too if you went to two extra labs a week, an extra credit session and wrote a third more for each essay. I think I’ll have to give up on the ideal of getting anything past Acceptable in my NEWTS though. There is no way I’m doing this to myself for another two years.”

“Yeah, that does sound pretty awful.”

“I was thinking of entering myself for the tournament though, if it isn’t only open to the seventh years. It would be a good excuse to drop out of this and focus on the subjects I’d need for that.”

“You might find that you need your potions knowledge for the tournament Diggory.” Snape called from the cupboard.

“With all respect, Sir, I don’t think there’s been a single brewing challenge in the past six tournaments.”

“Ah, but is that not all the more reason to have one now? And after all, usually the task can be accomplished through many branches of magic.”

Harry snorted and everyone glanced over at him. “Sorry, I was just imagining somebody trying to use astronomy to get past one of Hagrid’s Blast Ended Skrewts.”

Cedric pulled a face and Harry guessed that the sixth years had the misfortune of dealing with the beasts too.

“Yeah, that might not be the best. But it might be handy in other situations.”

Harry blinked, “I can think of literally no situation, bar being turned into a centaur, where knowing astronomy would help me.”

Cedric laughed, “That should all start to make more sense this year. You move on a bit from memorising moons, and you start learning about how you can judge when potions will be more effective. Which types of spell work better at what time of year, the power that comes from eclipses and that sort of thing.”

He caught Harry staring at him. “I told you- potions is my worst subject. Watch that cauldron, you’ll need to give it an extra half-stir because it’s too hot.”

Harry huffed, doing as he was told, but not really sure about why he should be doing it that way. And not interested to ask. All he had to do was turn in an Acceptable potion.

“Have you met Hermione?” Harry asked, “I get the feeling you two would get on. What’s your stance on House-Elves?”

“House-elves?”

“Don’t worry about it.” 

“Potter!”

Harry looked up reluctantly from his ground Doxy fangs.

“Yes Sir?”

“Would you care to explain?” Snape’s voice was vicious, in a way that it hadn’t been for days now.

Harry frowned, “Would you care to elaborate? –Sir.”

Snape appeared in the door of his store cupboard, eyes narrowed with distrust. “Some of my ingredients are missing, Potter. I want to know what you have taken and what you have done with them. Now.”

Harry threw his hands up in the air.

“You always assume it’s me. When am I supposed to have nicked anything? You know where I am literally all the time.”

“You were sneaking around when I caught you. For all I know you were creating a diversion for your little friends.”

“What diversion? Nobody even noticed anything until we were all in the Great Hall the next morning!”

Snape came out of the cupboard, arms folded, glaring at Harry.

Harry’s potion started making worrying noises. These were ignored by both Snape and the Gryffindor. Cedric tried to get their attention, but they were too busy glaring at each other to notice. He hurriedly tipped the ground fangs into the pot and stirred it, leaning across to turn down the flames under his own cauldron.

“You have had all weekend to distract me for long enough for your little friends to sneak in here and steal what they wanted.”

“What did they want? You still haven’t told me!

“I expect you know very well what is missing. The same things you stole from me two years ago. Did you think I would not notice?”

“I don’t understand!” Harry said, thinking of a certain firework incident in second year and trying to not look guilty. “Look, as far as I know, my friends have been too busy with detention and homework to get up to anything. I’ve hardly spoken to either of them in days, and I think that they were caught at the same time as me.”

Cedric was trying frantically to slice some kneazle liver one handed, while dropping a tiny amount of armadillo bile into his cauldron.

“Professor, I can’t do this! Fowley, can’t you help, for Merlin’s sake?”

Fowley took in the bedlam and reluctantly started walking around the desk to get closer to the cauldrons. Snape and Harry were too focussed to notice.

“It would only take one person to set that joke up, Potter. What were the other two doing?”

“I’m flattered that you think I can cast those spells, Professor. The others sorted all of that, I was just tidying up after they left, since I had the best disguise.”

There was silence for a moment.

Well, not immediately. There was a hissing noise for a couple of seconds. At first Harry thought it was Snape making the noise, but then he saw the man turning, wide eyed to look at the cauldrons on the desks.

Then there was silence for a moment.

Cedric took half a step back.

“Oh, shit.”

Then everyone moved.

Cedric threw himself backwards, bringing his wand up in a silent shield charm. It was a good thing he did, because the next instant the cauldron he had been about to add an ingredient to had erupted in a foul smelling, three foot, yellow geyser.

Snape’s wand appeared in his hand and he cast a faster Cauldron Containment charm than he had ever needed for one of Neville Longbottom’s potions disasters.

Unfortunately, the perfectly cast charm was knocked slightly off course, and only managed to cover one of the cauldrons. Professor Snape was barrelled to the ground, landing hard beneath two of his students. Both of them appeared to be made out of elbows.

Fowley choked from the force they had been pulled to the ground with by the neck of their expensively tailored robes.

Harry found himself sandwiched uncomfortably between a struggling Fowley and a furious Snape. Embarrassed, he rolled out of the way, before poking his head up over the top of the desk to survey the damage. 

“Protego!” Harry snapped back to the floor, pushing down the two Slytherins from where they were almost sitting.

Snape grunted as he received yet another elbow to the solar plexus.

Something splatted on the outside of the spelled shield and Harry grimaced and directed the gunk to the floor, before he cancelled the shield and banished the gunk. Sheepishly, he stood up, pulling Fowley by the arm and offering a hand to Snape who stared at it for a second, before hauling himself up by the edge of the workbench.

Cedric was already banishing the mess from his own cauldron, before it could spread any further across the floor.

Looking at his own cauldron, Harry was thankful to see the Containment Charm still in place. Glancing through the transparent shimmer of the spell, Harry laughed.

“It looks like this was the only one that didn’t explode.”

With a few waves of his wand, Snape had banished the whole mess.

“Is everyone uninjured?”

The three students checked themselves quickly and when they had each counted all four limbs and their own heads, nodded back at the professor.

Snape took a deep breath.

“Mr Diggory, for your cool head, twenty points to Hufflepuff.”

Cedric nodded, still quite pale.

Snape turned to Harry, who prepared to lose a great many points for Gryffindor. “Potter, ten points to Gryffindor for trying to help.”

Harry grimaced, if he hadn’t done anything then all three of them would be covered with, at the very least, the beginnings of a Forgetfulness Potion and the base for a Hiccoughing Solution. But he supposed that it was still better than losing points.

“I don’t get how these points work out.” Fowley said, still rubbing their funny bone.

Snape smirked back, “It’s a largely arbitrary system. Ridiculously easy to influence.”

By some common consensus, they all took a seat.

 “So what’ve you lost?” Cedric asked cautiously. “Nothing we might have used in classes by mistake, I take it?”

Fowley blinked at the prefect, astounded by his audacity. Even the older Slytherins didn’t dare to poke Professor Snape when he had just calmed down.

Snape fixed him with a look. “No, Mr Diggory. I should hope that all of my NEWT students can recognise Boomslang skin and Bicorn Horn when they see them. And all other students know they are not to enter my stores on pain of expulsion.” Snape swung around to glare at Harry instead.

Harry however, wasn’t listening.

“Boomslang skin and Bicorn horn?” He repeated. He knew his friends hadn’t stolen the ingredients. And Snape seemed convinced that somebody had.  Which meant…

“Sir, that store leads straight through to your office, doesn’t it?”

The two of them looked at each other for a long moment.

“We will see the Headmaster immediately.” Snape decided, standing up so suddenly that his stool scraped across the stone floor.

The three students jumped up as well, gathering their things together, more out of habit than anything else.

Snape scrutinised them carefully. “Fowley, you are going back to the common room. No excuses!” He held up a hand to stop the kid from complaining. “You are already on watch. If you do not do exactly as I say, then all of your free periods will be forfeit until Christmas.”

Fowley scowled, but stormed out of the classroom anyway. Harry doubted the kid would do as they had been told for long, but maybe the Slytherins could keep them out of trouble.

“Diggory, I would like you to come with us. Your input would be helpful, and I may need you to keep an eye on Potter later.”

“I don’t have a clue what is going on, Sir. But it sounds important, I’ll do my best to help.”

“Good. Potter, I need you to pretend that you blew those cauldrons up on purpose.”

“I didn’t do anything to the stupid cauldrons!” Harry hissed.

Snape gave him an appraising look. “That should do it. I will walk quickly, try to stay well within range of the spell as we move through the castle. But look as though you are tripping up every so often. That will maintain the illusion more than anything. Are you both ready?”

Both boys gave cautious nods and without another word, Snape strode out of the classroom, slamming the door open in front of him.

“If he keeps up at this speed, then I’m going to be falling over the whole way.” Cedric muttered. “He doesn’t half have a flair for the dramatic.” 

Harry thought that the walk to the Headmasters office would almost have been fun, if it had not been for the true purpose behind their visit. Looking sullen every time Snape span around to spit insults at him was entertaining enough, and once he felt brave enough to throw an insult back (much to the horror of some first years).

Snape had sent Diggory into the Great Hall as they passed, so that he could fetch Professor McGonagall. Harry pretended to trip near the top of the staircase, so that the other two could catch up. He didn’t really want them to have to explain everything twice.

When McGonagall arrived, she was spitting tacs. Harry thought she might actually want to expel him, from the look she was giving him.

“Of all the fool-headed things you have done, Potter!”

McGonagall spotted a few Ravenclaws dithering on their way down the stairs. “Move along!”

She turned back on Harry, “To deliberately explode a volatile potion? Never, in all of my days-“

“For Helga’s sake, Potter. Get up, there is nothing wrong with you.”

Harry thought that that was a bizarre oath for the Potions professor to use, McGonagall seemed to too. Her sharp eyes widened, and she seemed lost for words for a second but she recovered skilfully.

“Come along, Diggory. We will be needing your word as an eyewitness.”

The rest of the way was less fun. Although it was funny to see the third year Ravenclaw bullies scatter in terror before Professor Snape. The gargoyle outside Dumbledore’s office seemed to be surprised to see so many people.

“Kiwi Kelpies.” McGonagall announced to the guardian. As they started to enter the stairwell, there was the sound of feet slapping against the flagstones and two very familiar people careered around the corner.

“Wait, hold the door!”

Harry, who had gone through the door first, in his role of escorted prisoner, popped his head back around past the gargoyle.

“Hermione? Ron?”

“Oh, Harry!” Hermione looked surprised to see the unlikely group who was trying to get into the headmaster’s office. Ron on the other hand, seemed to be having issues getting his eyes to focus on anything. McGonagall seemed torn between examining the redhead and getting them all upstairs as quickly as possible.

Snape decided the matter by grabbing Ron by the arm and stepping onto the spiralling staircase. Harry, of course had no choice but to follow, and the others had no reason to stay in the corridor without them.

The opening to the staircase closed off behind Hermione with the scrape of stone on stone.