The Gifted Curse

Chapter 6 - Potions Assessment

[M rating] 🔥

It was another cold morning at Hogwarts as the scuffle of feet and loud chatter meant that the students were transitioning from their first lesson to their second. As Geneva expected, the day after the Yule ball brought plenty of gossip and newly fledged romances. Orah was clutching her books, deep in conversation with Geneva about her date, Billy.

"So he said that he's going home for Christmas and asked me if I'd like to spend New Years with him. I mean, don't you think that's a bit soon? His parents will be there and everything."

BOOF! Geneva was sent colliding into Orah against the nearest stone wall.

"Oops! Watch your back there."

Malfoy. Who else could it have been.

"Grow up!" Geneva hissed. "There's a name for guys who do that to women you know!"

"Woman?" Malfoy looked around in mockery. "I don't see a woman. You need to look out. Don't want you crumbling now do we, Azur." He turned over his shoulder to laugh with his cronies, Crabbe and Goyle, confirming they'd heard his brilliant joke.

Geneva scowled at him, wanting so much to wrap her hands around his neck, and by the way Orah responded, she was positively desperate to do it for her but Malfoy was quickly pulled away by his new girlfriend, Pansy Parkinson.

On the way to Potions class, they passed the notice on Professor's Snape's door, listing the times students were to take their practical assessments. Once Geneva could see past people's heads, she spotted her time - 2pm. She had already prepared her written part – two thousand five hundred words on parchment, listing her ingredients and method. She had sworn to herself to maintain her focus leading up to, and throughout the examination. She had to pass. She knew in able to, she would have to ignore every single thought and feeling she'd had toward Professor Snape, and focus entirely on her work in order to prove herself to the both of them.

"I just don't understand why I haven't seen ahead this time," she confided in Orah at lunch in the Great Hall, referring to her visions. "I mean, when I'm anxious like this, I usually have one."

"Maybe you're not meant to know," reasoned Orah. "Otherwise you wouldn't put in the effort."

"I suppose," Geneva settled. "Well, I best go. I have to go and see Hagrid and pick up the bullfrog before my assessment."

"Good luck with it."

Geneva scooped up her bag and books from the Great Hall benches and made her way first to Hagrid's hut, then back up to the Potions lab in time for her assessment. Her stomach bubbled relentlessly, but she tried to block it out as she made her way down the stone spiral staircase and into the lab. The last time she had walked in on her own, she had been in detention. No. Stop thinking about it. The smell of cinnamon, wood, cloves and earthly spices met her immediately.

Professor Snape stood in the distance, lit by the ambience of mounted wall torches, and looked up upon her entry from his busy table full of phials, jars and cauldrons.

"Azur..." came his bass like drawl. She tried desperately not to think anything of him other than him being her git of a teacher he always was, not the person she had masturbated over the night before. Oh god. He wiped his hands on a rag from what he was doing and pointed to a parchment and quill in the corner.

"Tick your name off the list, state your potion and hand your written piece to me. You will then collect your ingredients and begin in precisely ten minutes."

"Yes, sir."

With no time to waste, Geneva dropped her bag and books at the bench, placed the holed-box with the bullfrog on top of the bench she was working at and signed off her name, stating her potion – a healing elixir. She went swiftly to the store cupboard and assembled together all the ingredients she would need to make a healing potion for her wounded bullfrog, climbing the wooden ladder to reach some of the higher shelves. Everything was neat and meticulously categorised. Unable to carry them all, she went back twice, and then to the other side of the room to fetch a cauldron. With a deep breath, she arranged things neatly on the bench before her, centred the cauldron with the box next to it and looked up at her Potions Master, who was looking right back at her from his desk, now with a Slytherin encrusted sand-timer in his hand.