Ecdysis

Chapter 20: Fifth Year: Private Moments

There is some mature content in this chapter.

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My first work session with Snape felt like a cruel kind of initiation. I'd hoped for an adventure through the Dark Forest, foraging for rare seasonal mushrooms, or a simple task like prepping the first year's lab for the following day. Instead, he summoned me right after the final bell while my books were stacked beneath my arms and I was just about to recite the password to the common room.

"Granger," he barked, darting straight past me, assuming I would follow.

The common room door creaked impatiently at my indecisiveness, and I muttered a grouchy, "Shut it," before turning away, shifting my books to alleviate some of the strain on my cramping arms. I swear the door hissed at me as I rushed after Snape.

"I should have done this at the start of the year," he began in a low, surly voice when we reached the storage closet. "But I didn't have the time." He stood in the centre of the room, surrounded by ceiling-high shelves of potion ingredients. Dust particles floated in the air, illuminated by faint torchlight from the corridor and the impressive glow of a small but mighty lantern hanging from a nail on the wall.

"What are we doing exactly, Professor?" I asked, dreading the thought of inventorying all those bottles. There must have been thousands of them.

"Tossing anything that has expired, noting anything that needs replenishing, and you might as well dust while you're at it. The labels are getting more difficult to read with all these... cobwebs." He grimaced, flicking his hand through a particularly dusty corner of a shelf a few inches above his head. He rubbed his fingers together to wipe the residue away.

I winced. How tedious. "How will I know if something has expired?"

"You should recognise most of the ingredients. The labels will almost always include the date of collection. I will be here, working alongside you if you have any questions. Some," he said, lifting a bottle that looked like it had grown an entire ecosystem, "will be obvious to identify."

I was about to ask him about finishing my homework, but held my tongue. He was testing me. He already assumed that I wouldn't be able to handle the extra work this year, and Draco was doing most of my homework already. This was my chance to prove that I could master my time management, earn top marks, and take on extracurriculars all while being a prefect.

Settling into the task, I established a rhythm that made the hours move quickly—remove the bottle, inspect its collection date and contents, toss it away if it has expired or set it aside to re-shelve once the shelf was emptied and cleaned. Snape had conjured a large bin near the door, where we tossed the expired potion bottles.

I'd accidentally set off a miniature explosion tossing an old bottle of Exploding Ginger Eyelash into the bin a little too roughly. The room rumbled and the ground quaked beneath our feet, causing dozens of bottles to fly off the shelves and rain violently over us. It could have ended very badly were it not for Snape's speedy reflexes, spreading his palm in a stunning display of wandless magic and stopping all the bottles mid-air, then with a twist of his wrist, they returned to the shelves undamaged, as if moving in reverse.

"Are you injured?" he asked, sounding moderately more concerned than when Finnegan or Longbottom made something explode in his classroom.

My cheeks grew warm, and I released the shelf that I'd used to brace myself when the ground began to shake. "No," I mumbled, ears ringing from the explosion. "Sorry."

Ignoring my meek apology, he whispered an incantation over the bin that automatically softened the landing of anything tossed inside, and I couldn't help but feel like a child who still needed training wheels on her bicycle.