Magic and Mystery Coil by Allegory_for_Hatred

Good and Bad

"What about a rat?"

Snape looked up from his papers, brows furrowed in deep consternation. "Why would you put a rat," he said, cautiously putting his red-ink quill down, "into a potion?"

Dazai shrugged. He dropped a set of doxy eggs into a steaming cauldron, pulling a face when a foul, sulfuric smell burst out of it. "Why would you put any of this into a potion?" he asked sardonically. Then, "Would the rat drown first, or burn alive?" Angel was nowhere to be found these days—as always! But Dazai could dream.

By now, Snape had fully turned away from his essays and was staring at Dazai with clear trepidation. "Do not put a rat in your potion," he warned. "It will die. The cauldron will explode. It will be unusable."

"What, you're actually going to drink this? It smells like puke, Sir."

The Girding potion was a second-year staple potion. One of those mandatory basic things every wizard needed to learn—or at least, that's what Hermione would say. Dazai thought it was only good for smelling rightly awful and wasting his time. But he supposed he couldn't argue too terribly. After all, this was the first time in weeks Snape had hung out with him! Not that Dazai wanted to hang around Snape. Because he absolutely did not. But it was good, he thought, because that meant he wasn't upset about the whole mafioso thing.

Anyway. It wasn't really hanging out. It was detention. But Dazai wasn't going to argue semantics. He was in a good mood.

Snape pinched his nose. He did not confirm Dazai's question one way or the other, and only grunted out, "do not stray from the instructions, Problem Child."

Dazai mock-saluted. With his other hand, he threw a handful of dragonfly bits-and-pieces into the potion. It turned blue. Even the steam pluffing out of it was a deep sapphire color.

Snape eyed him for another long moment before, evidently satisfied, he turned his focus back to the essays in front of him. They were sixth-year essays, and though Snape had scolded him for it, Dazai had snooped over his shoulder and read some of them. Most of the essays were marked up and down in red, now. Dazai had told Snape he thought the older kids were pretty stupid—it all seemed very simple to him—and Snape had told to do his own assignments before nitpicking everyone else's. Stalemate.

"You're such a bore, Sir," Dazai told him honestly.

Snape didn't look up from his papers, only grunted.

That wasn't fun at all, Dazai thought. Grumpily, a took a knife from the table and began chopping up a flying seahorse into tiny pieces. The textbook said to make them inch-sized cubes, but Dazai had run the calculations in his head and figured it would brew faster if he made them thinner. So he did. He hoped it might make the potion smell less like a decomposing skunk, too. (It did not.) When Dazai added his first of three seahorses, the smell became unbearable. He coughed and covered his nose.

"Hey, Snape," he coughed through cloth. "Can I do an experiment?"

There was a shine of amusement in his eyes at Dazai's disgusted expression, but it tightened immediately at the suggestion. "Absolutely not."

"Please?" he whined.

"No."

"Pretty please? I'm going to suffocate on the fumes! I'm going to die. It'll be your fault—"

Snape lifted a greasy brow. "No."

Dazai's mouth clamped shut. The rank odor did not dampen. It reminded him plenty of being nearly trampled to death by a mountain troll—twice!—last year. Those things had smelled awful. Like unwashed flesh and mold. So did the Girding potion, although in a very different way. He shifted track, "It's an academic experiment," Dazai tried again, pitching his voice up to sound earnest. "And you can mull it over and everything, then tell me how stupid I am for thinking we could add some cold spring water and lemon flowers to this to make this smell less like death."