Dance With A Serpent

Enlightenment

The green concoction bubbled serenely under his gentle steering. It had to be gentle, or the next ingredient was going to make a big impact on the room's decoration, and sooty grey had never been his thing. Severus was more of a pure black.

Artemis, his so called assistant, danced lazily around in the background, supposedly taking notes.

Bah, notes. She was dancing. Ari was supposed to be just a sarcastic and cynical woman. Not a lovey-dovey little girl.

Ever since she and Malfoy made up she had been nothing but a pain. More of a pain than usual that was.

The nagging blond had even begun to make little remarks about Granger.

...Hermione.

He hadn't even seen that girl for almost two weeks. Except at meal times of course. Not that he looked for her in the milling maroon crowd of Gryffindors.

She didn't even attend the Head's meetings. Malfoy came alone and just handed him the sheets of parchment with Hermione's report. Which was a good thing. The less he saw of her, the more it quelled those scandalous rumours.

It wasn't that he missed her. No, not at all. But these days Advanced Potions was getting unnervingly droll.

The knuckleheads left in there were just so stupid. Hermione's annoying mannerisms and impudent answers made, in retrospect, the class seem semi-intelligent. Nowadays only idiocy remained.

He had found himself glancing over towards her now empty seat. Especially after the entire room had failed to answer one of his simpler questions.

He reached for the purple bottle containing the liquidised Manticore mane.

A strand of hair fell over his face and he jerked his head to remove the nuisance. The rest of the black oily revulsion had been tied back, so to minimalise the risk of it falling into his brew.

The gesture made him glimpse himself in the mirror standing in a corner to his left side.

His eyes met the eyes of the same horrible man as always. The small black eyes peering back at him with disdain. The greasy hair that had caused him ridicule for decades. Yet the hair had nothing on the beak of a nose. His father's main legacy to his face. Most of his features he'd inherited from that wretched man, but the crocked nose was the most predominant one. Then there were the Spider-web thin lines running all over the face, declaring the age of this old evil man.

Him, this shell of a broken, but cruel and aged man. This man a young, a lush girl claimed to care for.

With the unbidden assistance, his minds-eye changed the image in the mirror to feature her.

Her brown amber eyes looked up into his. She lifted her smooth and delicate hand to caress his cheek.

"You are the only one here who thinks of you as evil." The memory told him in her bell-like voice. Her entire being had radiated a warmth and love that had scared him. How could such a flower look at a monster like him in such a way?

Sluuuuurp

Severus turned form the mirror to look in to his cauldron. The green liquid had turned purple, as it should. It was also creating a whirlpool and devouring itself, as it should not.

Severus stumbled backwards.

Artemis who was flipping through a book looked up.

The slurping sound was replaced by a whooshing sound as the cauldron's content exploded upwards in a pillar of purple fluid.

Most of the descending mass managed to return to the cauldron. Most... good thing there were house-elves to deal with the rest.

"What the fuck did you do?" Ari asked, breaking the stunned silence.