I Know The End {Fred Weasley, ACT I}

Chapter 49- I Must Not Act A Whore

During their second year, Eleanor and the twins were caught out of bed after hours, switching the labels on different ingredients in the potions supply closet. Weeks of slow, methodical work flushed away due to a single misstep, of which Eleanor blamed Fred, he her, and George himself. A stoppered flask of unicorn tears laid out in front of them, the unique swirls of silver glitter that made the liquid so recognizable now gone, the substance a dark red, tinted with a hue of purple instead. They had been in the middle of dumping the transformed Unicorn Tears from one container to another, hoping to pass the liquid off as human blood. They'd done the same for a multitude of other ingredients already, swapping Bubotuber pus with eel slime, rose oil with Wiggentree Sap, even salt water with bile.

All it took was the slightest of taps of her wand against the liquid, combined with the sheer force of her will, and one liquid took the form of the other. The appearance, the smell, the consistency. She controlled it all.

And now, every class, wrong ingredients were being added to otherwise carefully cultivated potions. Explosions ensued, and no one could figure out why. Not even the all-knowing Severus Snape could decipher why a simple sleeping drought containing nothing more than a cup of rose oil, an infusion of wormwood, and three leaves of Lavender, was catching fire in every student's cauldron.

No one but Eleanor, Fred, and George of course, who had done their research well enough to know that adding Wiggentree Sap to an infusion of wormwood produced wildfire. Or that adding eel slime to dragon blood caused a small explosion.

They were having their fun, swapping labels, swapping appearances, as they watched the chaos from afar. They hoped to see Snape snap, bent too far in the frustration of continued failure, take his anger and implode from the within. They wanted him out, wanted him fired.

But instead, someone left the potions classroom door open that fateful night, leading Filch right to them, ending their game, ending their fun, with a harsh reality check.

According to McGonagall, they were irresponsible, reckless, knowing not what they had done, and above all idiotic.

Which was not entirely true. They'd known just what they were doing, been quite conscious of which potions they were swapping, a desired result in mind.

But reckless and idiotic was better than deliberate and cruel, so they played the role of dumb, erratic children, and they played it well, but Snape did not buy it the way he had their false potion ingredients. He wanted them expelled for putting others at risk, for putting him at risk. He called it an attempt on his livelihood, his life.

And that wasn't entirely true either. They weren't trying to kill him. No, that was a stretch. If Eleanor had been trying to kill him, she would have succeeded, but this point was not taken as the evidence of innocence she had hoped it was.

She remembered waiting as they called for Dumbledore, waiting to be expelled, waiting to watch her wand snap in half before her eyes, and thinking nothing could be worse than that moment. Fear pounded through every inch of her body, sweat dripped down her brow, bile burned the back of her throat. It was as though her anxiety took a year off her life that night, her hands clasped tightly to the twins' hands, palms pruning from sweat.

And yet, nothing happened in the end. Well, nothing more than five months of detention with Snape and an essay on the importance of potions safety.

It was a memory they looked back upon and laughed at. Just thinking of the absurdity of it all made them snort. They laughed at their creativity, at their unnecessary fear, at the horrible nights spent in detention with Snape as he forced them to clean out the bottoms of hundred-year-old cauldrons, as George burned himself by sticking his finger in a smudge of jellyfish sap on their work desk.