White Lies

More Mishaps at Potions

"— will force a shape-shifter to reveal itself, normally used against the Polyjuice Potion and animagi. It's charm counterpart is the Restoring Spell. However, it is not strong enough to work on Metamorphagi, and I strongly advise you not to attempt it on a werewolf, lest you be intimately acquainted with your innards, either before or after you have administered the potion," Snape drawled on, a sneer in place as if he had expected all of them guilty in thinking of trying it, which was not entirely untrue. "Boggarts may –"

Harry could feel his eyelids drooping as he tried in vain to stay focused on Snape's voice and on his work area. He was partnered up with Malfoy again – no surprise there, though you'd think that Snape would have grown tired of shoving them towards each other in hopes of humiliating him – and he was sitting on the stool, in charge of the ingredients while Malfoy stood beside their cauldron, stirring and muttering the necessary spells to keep it at the right temperature.

Experience taught them that brawling wasn't going to get their potion to make itself (though that had been fun too, since Snape was forced to take points off Malfoy as well) so they came up with the agreement that Harry would be in charge of the chopping and the crushing and the dicing (living with the Dursleys had an advantage after all, Harry thought bitterly, other than the relation with his mother that prevented him from being Dark Lord-fodder) while Draco did the fancy work and the tricky parts.

Harry never did get precision and accuracy. He was more of the 'a bit, some more' type rather than the 'ten milliliters, ¼ cup of'.

Soon enough, Snape stopped speaking and was checking the cauldrons one by one starting from the back of the room, and Harry realized that he failed to pay attention again. He sighed, this lack of sleep was seriously doing him in. Okay, Restoration Potion. After the rat tails, what next? He thought, scanning his own travel-size collection of plants. At the same time, he racked his brain up trying to remember the ingredients that Snape had listed off earlier. Something wood... He picked up the southernwood –

"Wormwood, Potter, wormwood! Weren't you listening?" Malfoy said, sniffing with disdain. Even so, his hand continued stirring the concoction in perfect timing, never missing a beat. Harry could imagine him counting (...twelve, thirteen, fourteen...) up to the needed twenty-three clockwise stirs in his head even as he frowned with impatience and prepared to scold him.

Harry had long since admitted to himself that Malfoy was the Potions genius here, and grudgingly, he found it impressive as it was horribly annoying how Malfoy could be accurate in the number and the speed of his stirs and yet still keep an eye on Harry.

"Five points from Gryffindor for not listening, Potter," Snape's voice came up to them from across the room, making the Slytherins snigger and the Gryffindors curse under their breaths. Harry stared at his professor's back, who merely continued walking to the back of the room, checking on the cauldrons one by one. It was like Snape was so used to taking points off Harry, he does it almost subconsciously. Disturbing, that.

"I was listening, Malfoy," Harry lied, muttering so that Snape wouldn't hear.

"So the winter froze up your brain instead of your ears then," Draco drawled, retorting just as quickly as Harry did. "Not that there's anything to freeze inside that large head of yours," he said as an afterthought, smirking. The several Slytherins who were closest to them snickered openly. Draco took his wand out of the cauldron, letting it drip above the potion (Ah, done with the twenty-third stir then.) and waved a hand over Harry's chopping board. "Now crush the wormwood, not the southernwood."

"Yes, Your Holy Pratness," Harry drawled back, rolling his eyes as he put aside the southernwood that he had just been in the middle of crushing. He reached for a shoot of a green, leafy plant at the corner of their table – and promptly yelped when Draco smacked his hand away. "What the hell was that for?"