𝙳𝙴𝙻𝙾𝙲𝙰𝙿𝙾𝙽𝚄𝙼 » 𝚂𝚂/𝚁𝙻

𝙸𝙸 >> 𝚁𝙴𝙻𝙸𝚅𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝚁𝙴𝙼𝚄𝚂

< 4 DAYS >

The potions room is comfortably desolate. Inky, grungy, and undisturbed, the lack of clutter gives Severus a rather restful feeling; one he associates with the atmospheric ambience of a fresh start. A clean, blank slate. Complete isolation in the most superior possible way.

He's felt this emotion only once before. It happened when he graduated from Hogwarts and acquired his own living space. One where he didn't have to fear or speak to people and he didn't have to think about his father. It's a good feeling. Freeing, perhaps. Makes one feel as though they're made of air.

He remembers this room well, but he doesn't hold it in much esteem. He dislikes immensely how it's still arranged exactly the same as it was when he attended. Makes him feel as though he has to completely imitate everything that Slughorn has left behind: the parties, the clubs, the socializing, the favoritism. He abhors the thought. If anything, he'd want to have it match the style of his own home. He'll be living here during the school year anyway. He figures he might as well make it feel fitting.

He begins extracting the various integrant bottles from the dusty shelves, subtly irked that they aren't organized in alphabetical order but rather in groups of matching visual attributes. It'll take him a minimum of a day to sort them correctly; he's sure of it.

Multiple jars aren't labeled, so he groans as he forces himself to take the extra mile and mark them on his own. Viciously tearing some parchment and a pen from his desk, he scrawls names out in a violent hand and wonders exactly what it is that he's let himself agree to.

"Horace left you an open position," he spits derisively under his breath. "Nothing much, just teaching some children how to make things and, oh, also, reinstating four quintillion nugatory bottles of—"

Picking up another jar, his eyebrows knit themselves together as he looks inside.

"This isn't castor oil. Why did he put the castor oil label on the knotgrass decanter?" He pops open the lid and smells the plant inside. "If that impertinent mockery of a wizard ever makes his way back..."

This sentence fades out just like the last as the realization hits him that any of these other bottles could also be mislabeled and he'll surely have to inspect each and every one of them to make sure they aren't. Gritting his teeth and wresting them all off the shelves, he scatters them over the nearest work table and moves to the next shelf, dropping the jars onto the next table, and so on and so on until he's left at the last ledge, looking over the vial-ridden room with contemptuous dread for his upcoming project.

If he's estimated correctly, given the assumption that he has been able to grab eleven bottles per trip, he's just unladen roughly seven hundred and four flasks in totality from the shelving units. That's seven hundred and four bottles to inspect, reorder, relabel and put back onto the shelves of which he's just thrown them off.

He disregards his earlier adoration for the lack of clutter. Now disorder is all that the room is, surrounding him and drowning all hopes of making a quick move into his new position. In this moment, he boils at the thought of Slughorn ever functioning like this in the first place, let alone abandoning his post at the first premonition of demise and leaving it all for someone else to fill and sort through. Cowardice — it's something Snape disfavors to a colossal degree. Slughorn himself he disfavors more.

Taking a deep breath, Snape coaxes himself into beginning his work. He decides he may as well organize them into alphabetical order simultaneously while he checks them, so he makes a mental map of the floor, assigning a letter to each small segment and picking up the first bottle from the table to his left. He wishes there were a spell for this, but he figures that even spellworking couldn't do this with the standard acquired from one's own hands and eyes.