Dark Lord's Pet

Lessons

Harry

The 'now' comment hadn't been a joke. Voldemort immediately guided Harry to a room of the apartment that seemed impossible. It was large and simply filled with. . . everything. Books, cauldrons, a fire, endless shelves of ingredients in jars, buckets, boxes and bags, something he tentatively identified as a training dummy, an empty patch of wall covered in scorch marks, odd colors, cracks, dents, and jutting segments, etc., it just seemed to go on forever.

A soft whoosh was the only warning Harry got, but his quidditch reflexes helped him to duck and spin to face his opponent. Another something, a small metal disc, flew at him again, but this time Harry halted it with magic. This was a test after all, and he needed to think not just act.

He reached out and plucked the shiny silver disc from the air, only to be burned by it, searing heat making him jerk back his hand. He'd been listening to the doctors treat him at the hospital, and remembered how their magic had felt as it sealed and resolved injuries. A warm buzzing sensation occurred in his fingers, and when it left, so did the pain.

A green jet of light lashed out at him, but Harry had expected it, and his shield, strong with his reinforced magical core's support, deflected it. Without words, they continued to spar with their magic, and after five minutes of nonstop onslaught, Harry was sweating and his feet were having trouble keeping up. A few spells later, and a purple flash got through his guard and sent him sprawling on his face.

"Shit," Harry groaned, rolling to his back as a stinging hex assaulted his bottom.

"Language Pet," Voldemort said, "Good reflexes, prodigious ability for wandless magic considering your age and education, terrible endurance, messy spell craft, little forethought, and only rudimentary understanding of magical exchange. Dueling lessons, physical endurance and strength training, food, etiquette, and brain training, by which I mean you'll be spending hours a day with your nose in a book and are expected to absorb the information. Questions?"

"Why the hell are you so bossy?"

Harry yelped as his clothes disappeared followed closely by another stinging hex.

"Language again, and I do believe I must remain true to my words of yesterday. Pity you haven't seem to learned a jot since your prior errs, I had hoped you may have been the recipient of an iota of common sense, but, well. . . I suppose this'll be going the hard way."

Harry was crimson, the blush having spread from his cheeks down to his chest, and glaring at the other man as he tried to cover himself. This goddamn sadist.

"Now we are going to be testing your potion making abilities. Four potions, one to test your general preparation abilities, one to make sure you can follow directions, the third for knowledge of ingredients, and the fourth to test if you are at all competent at a more challenging draught. I will take no questions, the potions are all bookmarked and labeled with the order you are to do them in. Any mistakes you make I will correct as we go along because if I supplied comments after, you would not learn as well, or, it is very likely, remember even making the error."

He went over to the potions section of the room, and saw a slim black book already open on the table.

Quickly, Harry gathered all of the ingredients.

Shred two shrivelfigs

Taking a very sharp stainless steel knife, he began to lightly cut away at the peel so that he created an almost pulp like consistency of the fruit.

"Stop," Voldemort said immediately, "It's shredding, not pureeing. Here, I'll do one, you do the other."

He picked up the second fruit and, with what Harry saw as prodigious speed, sliced the entire thing into paper thin slices one way before doing the same process the other way to make extremely thin sticks.

Working in a kitchen for as long as he had, Harry was very good with knives, and copied the effect, if a tad slower.

He went on to cube a bezoar, and was quickly corrected on what size to make the pieces. The smaller they are, according to his teacher, the better they incorporate themselves into the potion. It turned out that the only technique Harry didn't manage to screw up was slicing, and that was because by that point he'd caught on to the 'smaller is better' general theory.

This first brew was incredibly simple, merely putting everything into the cauldron in the right order and constant stirring was necessary. It was a generalized anti-inflammatory potion, and Voldemort seemed pleased with the end result at least.

The second potion went much the same as the first. Harry did fine preparing the ingredients, but every step seemed to mean something different than what the paper said. Luckily, he didn't much mind when Voldemort corrected him, because while the man was incredibly insulting at times, repeatedly stating Harry's incompetence and marveling that Harry had yet to blow himself up, he did teach the younger wizard how to make the potions properly.

The third potion was more difficult. There were ingredients involved that Harry had never used or even heard of before with exotic sounding names, and, to hear Voldemort tell it, each could cause severe and permanent damage if Harry was as useless with them as he was with everything else. By now, insults just rolled on by Harry, and he only noticed the especially creative ones.

"No! You imbecile, don't you know anything? Banshee tears cannot be exposed to the light until they are neutralized!" 

"You can't seriously expect to live past today if you're such a bloody moron. Veela hair is very delicate around flames, no wonder you set your hand on fire. Don't you expect me to heal that for you, this is a learning environment not a day care."

"Pet, if you fuck up one more time, I'm going to send you to the side of Mars facing away from the sun until you become a popsicle."

And on it went.

By the end of the session, Harry had learned more about potions than he had in all four years of Hogwarts education under the dungeon bat.

"Thank you," Harry said sincerely at the end.

Voldemort's eyes widened in shock, and he blinked at Harry in confusion. It was almost funny.

"What're you thanking me for?" he grouched, "You're such a goddamn idiot that every five seconds I had to scream at you so you didn't wreck my apartment or me."

"Because I've never had a potion's master that actually taught me anything. Snape was always to busy lording his intelligence and skill over us without bothering to explain a single aspect of instructions."

The white skinned man frowned, "I'll have a word with Severus on that. Well, perhaps not. I don't really want the brats at Hogwarts who've been brainwashed by Dumbledore to have actual abilities when it comes to throwing potions. I'll see to it once the old fart is dead."

Harry's lips pursed, but he didn't say anything. What were you supposed to say to that?

"Okay then, next we'll be going through your Care of Magical Creatures knowledge."