Severus Snape: OneShots

(2) The Potion

PART II
Snape was seething. That the werewolf had had the gall, the naked audacity, to come in here, deny all knowledge of Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs, take the map back and drag the Potter boy away from facing his rightful punishment too, made him furious. But he hadn't had enough proof to charge Lupin with being the Moony of the map any more than he had had to go to Dumbledore with the news that Potter had been sneaking off into the village. He knew he was right, but with an even greater certainty he knew that if he didn't have solid, unbreakable evidence then he would only waste his breath to make a fuss.

It was absurd, he thought yet again, that Dumbledore should admit a monster to the school. He was a danger to everyone. Something should be done.

Snape curled his lip at his reflection in the dirty glass of the window. He knew full well that many people thought that 'something should be done' but that very few actually did anything. What could be done? He'd tried his best with Dumbledore, argued and tried to persuade him that what he was doing was foolish, and he knew it would be completely futile to try again. So if he wanted to achieve anything, he would have to try some other track.

The obvious thing would be to discredit him somehow, reveal what he was. But how could he manage, without openly defying Dumbledore? None of his previous attempts had succeeded: the students had been too stupid to recognise the broad hints he dropped in the classes, not even the Slytherins had recognised him for what he was.

He mulled over it for a long time without coming to any conclusion, and after a while he stowed it away in the back of his head as something to worry about later. A glance at his calendar showed him that it was time to brew the Wolfsbane Potion again.

As he took out the ingredients, he looked at the monkshood and the nightshade on the top shelf. There was another way to get his revenge...

No. Nothing that would implicate him. No right-minded person would think that disposing of a werewolf counted as murder, but Dumbledore was ridiculously soft-hearted and morally-minded, and though teaching might be a fool's way of earning a living, Snape didn't want to lose his job.

He set the ingredients carefully on the desk and looked at them for a moment, thinking again about how the potion worked. He was beginning to understand it now, beginning to see how everything blended together. It really was very clever, there seemed to be no way to improve upon it.

And then it came to him. His lips curled together into the nearest thing to a smile he ever showed on his face. There was a perfect way to do it, a perfect way to reveal the werewolf. With a look of deep concentration upon his face, he pulled the recipe to him and began to scribble notes all over it. If this was possible, if it worked, he would have the werewolf.

It was three hours before Snape was satisfied with his calculations and conjectures. The Wolfsbane Potion was an incredible invention; to tamper with it would require great care. But if this worked, if this alteration was successful, the werewolf would be revealed. And then, once everyone knew there was a monster teaching here, he would be sacked, driven out as he should be.

Leaving the desk, he began to work. The walls of the dungeon seemed to radiate cold, even in June, but Snape did not feel it as he measured out the dried wolfsbane into the pestle. Carefully, he weighed out seven ounces less than that neatly written recipe before him specified, and began to grind it methodically, making sure that every last part of it was crushed into a fine grey-green power. It looked so utterly harmless, Snape thought, and that was the beauty of it.

He left the wolfsbane on the table and went to his cupboard. From the racks of cauldrons, he removed a small, silver one. A sharp word, and there was a fire lit beside his table. He suspended the cauldron above the green flames, and measured out the other ingredients, changing the amounts of a few potent substances.