Caelum Ignis Ch28: "Dittany"
A Dramione fan fiction
After the patronus vanished, Hermione didn’t wait, but ran for the door.
She unlocked it, swung the heavy oak panel wide, and stood in the opening, staring down the corridor that led to the West Tower, which only housed her and Draco, at least on this floor. For what felt like a long number of minutes or even seconds, she saw and heard nothing.
Then a figure she didn’t expect to see at all appeared in the corridor, striding towards her with his black cape billowing behind him and guttering the candles.
His narrow, sallow face looked hard, his dark eyes unmoving.
Not a flicker of emotion showed in those obsidian pits.
He was alone.
She stared at Snape as he strode right up to her; he didn’t slow until he was only a few feet away. As per usual, he looked down his long, hooked nose at her face, with an expression that suggested he smelled something particularly foul rotting around her general vicinity.
“Miss Granger,” he said haughtily.
“P-Professor Snape,” she stammered. “Did you need something, sir?”
“I came to see Mr. Malfoy,” he said crisply. He glanced down the hall in the direction from which he’d come, and tugged at the end of his long sleeves. “He was meant to meet me for an appointment.”
She felt the blood drain from her face. “He’s… uh, he’s not here…” She looked briefly past him down the corridor, in the same direction he’d just done, then up at Snape’s face.
For the first time, he met her eyes.
“I will wait,” he said coldly.
She saw the meaning in his face, and felt like a fool.
“O-of course,” she managed.
She swung the door wide that time, and stepped completely out of the opening. She flattened her back to the wall without letting go of the door, and made the hole in the stone wall as wide as possible.
That time, she swore she felt them as they walked past.
Snape took up the rear, and jerked a hand towards her, indicating that she shut the oak door behind him. She did as he signaled, turning her back briefly on whoever’d just entered to close and lock the door.
Snape aimed a wand at the center of their common room.
“Finite Incantatem,” he said.
He twisted his wand so that it covered most of the empty part of the room.
Hermione had expected it by then, but still let out a shocked cry when three figures appeared in front of her, shed of their disillusionment spells. Two of those figures were covered in water and blood. One of the two was very obviously holding up the other.
“Harry!” Hermione stared at her friend in shock.
Harry wouldn’t quite meet her eyes, but she saw dots of blood on his face and neck. More blood covered his hands, and the front of his white, button-down shirt.
Her eyes swiveled to the other student he held, and the blood drained from her face. Her breath hitched, and briefly, she couldn’t make any sound at all.
Draco appeared to be unconscious.
His shirt and the top of his pants were drenched in blood.
Since Harry had blood on him, too, she thought at first something had happened to both of them, that they’d somehow fought off an attack together, but Harry seemed to be perfectly all right, despite his soaking wet shirt and the blood across the front of it.
Harry’s expression looked pained, and now he stared at her with a devastated look in his eyes. Something about the look there forced her to understand.
The image abruptly clicked.
“Is that… is that… his blood… on you?” she asked in disbelief.
Harry’s eyes grew even more pained, but he still hadn’t made a sound. He had Draco’s arm wrapped around his shoulder and his wrist gripped tightly in one hand.
“Where’s his bedroom?” Dumbledore asked her.
Her eyes jerked to the headmaster.
Up until that instant, she hadn’t even looked at him.
She’d forgotten Snape stood there, as well.
Now she looked over the four of them standing there, blinked, then answered without thought. Her voice grew nearly cold in its sheer practicality.
“Upstairs. On the right.” She barely paused. “Would it be better to put him down here? On the couch?”
“No,” Snape hissed. “And be quiet.”
Hermione looked at him, but Snape didn’t return her gaze. He was now glaring at Harry like he’d never seen him before, his dark eyes vicious once he’d stopped keeping them intentionally unreadable.
She didn’t ask why they hadn’t brought him to the hospital wing.
Of course they hadn’t, she thought bitterly. Because Draco falling into the hands of Lucius Malfoy was a worse outcome for the Order than Draco Malfoy dying alone in the West Tower would be.
Dumbledore was already levitating him up towards the second floor.
The headmaster darted up the stairs with a shocking agility behind the body he controlled with his wand. Harry started to follow, but Snape’s voice brought him to a halt.
“No,” he hissed. “Potter, you will remain down here. You will wait until I come fetch you. You will not move until that time.”
Hermione had started for the stairs, too, and paused when Snape snarled that first “no” at Harry. But the Defence Against the Dark Arts professor only glared at her when she turned to look at the two of them.
“What are you waiting for, Miss Granger? Upstairs. Now.”
His obsidian black eyes swiveled back towards Harry, and briefly, Hermione saw something different flash in that stare than usual. His dark eyes didn’t hold the usual contempt or anger she remembered from class. There was something there that felt more furious, maybe more real somehow, or possibly even shocked.
“You will not move from this exact spot, Potter, I mean it. I will hunt you down myself if you try to leave. Stay here until I come back downstairs to speak with you.”
Harry nodded miserably, but didn’t protest.
Hermione couldn’t help but stare at that, too.
But Snape was already headed towards her, moving fast, and Draco was in his room now with Dumbledore, so she had to wait to deal with Harry, too.
She dashed up the stairs and then towards the right, through the open door into Draco’s bedroom. She saw Draco immediately, his long form having been deposited by Dumbledore’s wand on his back on the mattress. His eyes were still closed, his shirt cut to ribbons. She could see now that he was soaked from head to foot, his pants and hair, too.
His chest still seeped blood.
Her heart seized again as she stared at him, at how white his skin looked, and for a moment she couldn’t move from the doorway.
Then Snape pushed past her as if she wasn’t there, and nearly knocked her down in the process. It snapped her back, and she followed him deeper into the room. Dumbledore was speaking a spell over Draco now, and Snape was pulling a series of jars out of a deep leather satchel he carried, one Hermione hadn’t noticed up until now.
Her eyes went back to Draco.
His face really was frighteningly pale, even for him.
She didn’t want to ask.
She was afraid to ask.
Dumbledore looked over at her, a kindly smile in his eyes.
“He should recover just fine, Ms. Granger,” he said calmly. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to play nursemaid for a few days, however. As you’ve no doubt surmised, it’s not possible to bring him to the hospital ward for this.”
“What happened?” she whispered.
Snape glared at her, as if he held her personally responsible.
“Your fool of a friend, Potter, got it into his head that Mr. Malfoy was responsible for your outburst in class today, that he had done something to your magic––”
“Severus,” Dumbledore warned mildly.
Hermione blanched.
Then, that pain in her chest worsened when she remembered what she’d read earlier that day.
“Well, Harry wasn’t entirely wrong,” she muttered.
Snape rounded on her, his black eyes blazing.
“He nearly killed him,” Snape hissed. “I don’t know where he learned that spell, but I admit, I’d underestimated Potter. I never would have thought I’d see him wielding such dark magics for any reason. Certainly not in a spat over a girl––”
“Severus,” Dumbledore warned, a touch sharper.
Hermione felt her face grow hot.
She bit her tongue to control her fury, and forced her eyes back to Draco’s face.
“But you said he’ll be all right, Headmaster?” she asked, studiously not looking at Snape. “Are you sure he’ll be all right? He looks––”
“Yes,” Dumbledore said, his voice sympathetic. He aimed a faintly stern look at Snape before turning back to smile at her. “I know it looks bad, Ms. Granger, and undoubtedly, he’ll be unwell for at least a few days. But he did not fall unconscious of his own. He’s lost a great deal of blood, but he was trying to walk under his own power, so I made the decision to knock him out myself, so he’d be less likely to further injure himself. The spell should wear off by morning.”
“And it was truly a dark spell?” she asked, quieter. “The one that Harry used?”
“Very dark indeed,” Dumbledore affirmed cheerfully. “Luckily, Severus was on hand to provide assistance very quickly. He more than likely saved Mr. Malfoy’s life.”
Hermione looked directly at Snape only then.
She fought with whether to thank him, but something told her, when she saw his cold eyes shift back in her direction, that her thanks would be deeply unappreciated. In the end, she only nodded, and turned her eyes back towards Dumbledore’s.
“What do I have to do?” she asked next.
Dumbledore and Snape exchanged looks.
She got the impression an older conversation lived there.
For the first time, some of the coldness grew less prominent in Snape’s eyes.
“You see, Severus?” Dumbledore asked cheerfully. “I told you, did I not? Practical. And loyal down to the bone.”
“Hmph,” Snape said only.
From his voice alone, he sounded deeply unimpressed.
But when Snape looked at her that time, she saw an expression in his eyes she’d never seen on him before, not aimed at her at least.
She didn’t even try to make sense of it.
Snape took her through the rows of different potions quickly, and without pause. He didn’t wait for her to ask questions or write anything down. He’d laid them all out in neat rows on top of Draco’s bureau, color-coded and labeled in his tiny script.
“Dittany,” he said coldly, picking up one of the smaller, slightly heart-shaped bottles. Hermione noticed there were six such bottles on the dresser he’d commandeered to act as his own potioneer’s table. “This will be the most difficult, at least in the next two days.”
Dumbledore had left Draco’s room, and likely their residence altogether by then.
Harry might still be downstairs, or he might not––Hermione had no idea. She guessed he probably was, though, unless Dumbledore had rescued him from Snape. For some reason, she doubted Dumbledore would in this case.
Either way, she still couldn’t spare much thought for Harry yet.
Draco was still unconscious.
Snape’s voice was businesslike, stripped of emotion.
Nothing but pure instruction lived there, absent of anything else.
“These wounds are the result of dark magic,” he told her in his clipped, impatient voice.“For the same reason, they won’t heal normally… but I think the worst of the scarring and muscle damage can be avoided if it is treated with large amounts of dittany. You will apply the tincture in these bottles liberally over all of his wounds eight times with an hour between sessions, then with three hours between sessions up to eight more times, which should bring you well past the end of the first full day, when the magics imparted by the spell remain the most potent… are you listening?” he growled, glaring at her.
“Yes,” she said at once. “I’m to wait one hour between application sessions for the first eight times, then three hours between sessions for the next eight. Which brings it well past twenty-four hours, when the magical harm imparted by the spell should lessen somewhat.”
“Good,” he said, with obvious reluctance.
His deep voice reverted back to its usual dry emptiness.
“Once he regains consciousness, you will also need to supply him with blood-replenishers…” He tapped his long, pale fingers at the top of a taller, more cylindrical blue container. “…and a general healing potion, which should speed up the process of closing and healing the cuts from the inside, particularly when the magic causing the wounds weakens…” He tapped a bottle of a similar size but a dark, reddish color. “There is also Dreamless Sleep…” He tapped another. “…a painkiller for when he awakens from his magic-induced sleep…” His fingers tapped a rounded, green bottle. “…and these are the potions he regularly takes daily for his… ah, condition…” Snape’s fingers rested lastly on a set of two different potions in orange and red-tinted bottles, one tall and thin, the other short and fat. “He normally takes one of each under my supervision, every morning. He already took his for today.”
Snape looked at her for the first time since he’d started.
“I’ll be honest, Miss Granger… I have no idea if this particular recipe is helping Mr. Malfoy at all at this point, or if he’s simply learned to rely on…” He sniffed and looked her over darkly, his face showing scorn. “…other methods. However, as Draco has been on some strength and mixture of this concoction his entire life, practically from birth, I’m not at all certain that taking him off some version of these potions for any reason would be particularly wise… given we have absolutely no idea what it would do. It is not an experiment I feel would be beneficial to him at this juncture, particularly in such a weakened condition. Do you agree?”
Hermione swallowed, and nodded, once. “Of course.”
“Ah, good,” Snape sneered. “Of course. Then, of course, I will certainly hold you responsible, if Draco were to mysteriously forget to take them.”
Her jaw tightened.
She briefly had to fight the urge to tell him to fuck right off.
“Did you hear me, Miss Granger?” he prompted.
She stared up at him. “Of course,” she said, a little coldly.
A faint smile twitched his lips.
It was gone before she could fully focus on it.
“You have administered dittany before?” he asked.
“No.”
“You have administered any healing potion or tincture before?”
“No,” she said, folding her arms.
“Well, I’m quite certain your overlarge opinion of yourself will assist you greatly in keeping Mr. Malfoy alive,” Snape sniped. “Arrogance and certainty of expertise with nothing to back it up is unquestionably helpful when it comes to delicate healing arts. How lucky he is, to have such a generational talent at his side throughout this ordeal…”
She didn’t bother to answer that. She was back to looking at Draco’s face.
He was breathing, she told herself.
He was breathing, and while he looked pale and sweaty and like he was in a lot of pain, all of those things meant he was still fighting.
He hadn’t fallen unconscious on his own. He’d probably been kicking and screaming the whole way, which is why Dumbledore knocked him out.
She could feel her hands shaking.
Dumbledore said he would be okay.
Her throat and chest hurt.
Dumbledore said he would survive this.
“You will apply the dittany now, with me here,” Snape went on in that deep, clipped, professorial voice. “I will watch, Miss Granger, and instruct you, if you will permit the impertinence of my assuming you might want or need instruction of any kind.”
She didn’t bother to answer.
Snape vanished Draco’s shirt.
He did it without preamble or warning, and Hermione sucked in a shocked gasp before she could stop herself. The back of her hand went to her mouth, and she struggled to control her hitching breaths, unable to take her eyes off the violent, ragged wounds covering his chest.
The cuts had looked bad enough through his lacerated and bloody shirt.
They looked positively gruesome without it.
The worst of the gashes stretched long and diagonal and deep across his chest. One went all the way up the side of his neck to his jawline and to his face. She counted eight… no, nine of them on his torso alone. Two slightly thinner cuts sliced up the length of each of his arms. The long, thick-looking lines were barely closed, and appeared to be opening again in places, like a straining seam on a piece of too-small clothing.
Two on his chest were already weeping blood.
Thick, viscous-looking fluid left trails down his chest.
“They will continue to reopen without the dittany,” Snape said coldly. “You see why it needs to happen every hour?”
She nodded, feeling sick.
She closed her eyes longer than a blink, and fought to calm herself.
She breathed, in and out, on the verge of tears.
She didn’t want to cry in front of Snape.
“Do you see what your friend Potter did?” Snape jeered. “What a great friend you have in him, that he would feel the need to express his annoyance at your love interest in such a way. Or is Potter more than a friend to you, too, Miss Granger?”
She barely heard his words. She couldn’t tear her eyes off Draco’s chest. “Is this… is this all of them? What I can see here? Or will I need to––”
“Do not move him,” Snape said, his voice suddenly forbidding.
He held up an arm, as if to ward her off from trying to drag Draco off the mattress and onto the floor, or maybe tossing him headlong down the stairs.
“There is no need to move or turn him whatsoever,” Snape repeated coldly. “Everything you see before you is all Potter managed to accomplish. If he had been a more skilled caster with this type of spell, he most certainly would have killed him.”
Hermione felt her throat close.
Her chest hurt so badly she could barely see.
She wanted to ask him how it happened, what they’d even been fighting about, but she didn’t really want to know, and right now it didn’t matter.
She had no words to answer Snape, in any case.
She watched as her professor cast a drying charm over Draco’s body, instantly drying his trousers, hair, and likely his pants and socks. He cast a warming charm over him directly after. Neither charm did anything to affect to the trail of blood flowing down Draco’s chest.
“Begin,” Snape said coldly.
He held out one of the heart-shaped bottles, and she took it from him carefully.
She inhaled, tried to steady herself, and then walked around and closer to the bed, on the opposite side of where Snape stood by the bureau of drawers covered in bottles.
When it occurred to her that she wouldn’t be able to reach Draco from there, given the size of the mattress and the fact that Draco had been positioned in the middle of it by Dumbledore’s floating charm, she climbed up on top of it. She walked over to him carefully on her knees, edging nearer until she was only a few inches away.
She jumped a little, shocked, when Draco’s hand moved closer, and his fingers wrapped around her thigh.
She stared down at his chalk-white hand, bewildered. Then, slowly, she forced herself to relax. She bent down to peer into his face, thinking he must be awake, but his eyes remained closed, his expression slack.
It must be some kind of reflex, then, or unconscious impulse.
“How very touching,” Snape sneered.
Hermione’s face grew hot.
For the first time, she snapped completely out of her numbness and near-tears. Briefly, she had to fight the overwhelming urge to tell Snape to fuck off for real. He might have seen it on her, too, because when she glanced up, he smirked.
It occurred to her that maybe he was trying to goad her out of her shock.
Maybe he was trying to make her angry instead of worried or afraid.
But that would have implied Snape gave even the tiniest shite about her, which she found more than a little bit difficult to believe, for a lot of reasons.
Maybe he just wanted her mentally clear and competent for Draco.
“Begin,” Snape prompted, impatient. “Can’t you see them opening again? Or do you enjoy watching the blood flow out of your boyfriend’s body?”
“How much do I––”
“The bottle’s cap contains an eyedropper which should allow you to dispense the solution in drops,” he said, his voice suggesting she must be the dimmest person in existence. “Use a few drops all along the length of each cut until it closes. If any begin to reopen before you’ve finished all of them, go over them again until they are closed.”
She fought to ignore his tone, the way he looked at her with utter contempt, his eyes staring at Draco’s fingers around her skirt-clad thigh. Her hands shook only a little when she pulled out the eye-dropper. She forced them steady, then did as he’d said, watching puffs of what looked like steam coming off each drop as it fell along the edge of a wound.
The skin knitted itself back together as each drop fell.
She had to go over the entire length of a few of the larger cuts twice.
“Go over all of them thoroughly every time you apply the solution,” Snape said, his voice bored-sounding now. “If something doesn’t quite close up, go over it as many times as it takes until it does. Do not wait until the next session to do this. Make them all close before you stop. All of them, Miss Granger.”
She didn’t bother to look up or nod.
She went over the cut on Draco’s neck and jaw and face particularly carefully.
Snape gave her a few more pointers and corrections until she’d finished closing every one of the large wounds on his chest and neck, and closed all the cuts on his arms and hands.
Draco’s fingers never stopped clutching her leg.
They only let go when Snape opened Draco’s mouth carefully with his fingers and poured a small amount of Dreamless Sleep down his throat.
“If you feel the need to do this,” Snape said as he poured in a few small swallows, working Draco’s jaw and throat to get the potion to go down. “Do only a little unless he is awake. Only a very little,” he emphasized coldly. “You run the risk of choking him otherwise.”
She nodded, now wringing her hands together.
She’d climbed off the mattress and was watching Snape avidly, not wanting to miss a single thing he did. She could tell he would be leaving soon, just by the way he spoke.
She would be alone with a half-dead Draco in their room.
“When you are finished closing every cut on him, check the time, Miss Granger,” he drawled flatly. “It is now eleven fifty-two. At the end of one hour, you will repeat all of this again. As I said before, you will do that eight times. This does not count as one of those eight,” he warned, his dark eyes piercing. “I will come back to check on him when you should have completed this, and if everything looks right, you will switch to every three hours for another eight times.”
His voice had gone back to his droning, lecture voice, the one he reserved for when he assumed his students were all too stupid to understand anything he was saying. He again sounded as if all of this was nothing but an excruciatingly boring task Dumbledore had forced upon him.
Hermione had checked her watch while he’d been speaking.
Her timepiece showed the same time Snape had said, so she set the watch’s alarm for 12:52 AM. She would go get her alarm clock once he left, and set that one, as well.
It was louder.
She didn’t dare oversleep, not even for one of the sessions.
Not even for a few minutes.
She could doze in one of the chairs here… or maybe she should go to her room, so the alarms wouldn’t awaken him. Yes, her room. She’d go to her room to try and sleep, since she’d be doing this all throughout the day tomorrow. Maybe she could have a message sent to her professors, to get them to send her classwork to her here––
“Do not let anyone up here apart from me or the headmaster,” Snape said, causing her eyes to jerk up to meet his.
The expression on his face had turned forbidding once more.
“Really, you should let no one into your dormitory at all,” he added. “No one knows Mr. Malfoy was injured, and we need to keep it that way. I will inform Potter that he is to tell no one, as well. The story will be that he is suffering from the same ‘illness’ that you contracted, and that you are both under quarantine for the next few days to prevent a breakout in the school. Until the worst of his injuries can be corrected, your lessons will be sent here.”
She hesitated, wanting to ask how he planned to explain that to Harry.
She closed her mouth when she realized Snape wouldn’t react well to that, either.
She nodded instead, feeling her jaw tighten.
“Yes, sir.”
She hadn’t even fully got the words out before Snape turned his back on her entirely. He walked away from her without a backwards glance, jerked open the bedroom door, and swept out of the room.
She followed him cautiously, but only as far as the opening into Draco’s room. She did it more to look downstairs, to see who might still be down there.
She saw Harry standing right where Snape had left him. He was looking up now, clearly having heard the bedroom door open, but he didn’t seem to notice her. His eyes followed nervously as Snape swept down the stone staircase in his direction.
Dumbledore was nowhere to be seen.
“Potter,” Snape said coldly. “Come with me. Now.”
Harry nodded miserably. “Yes, sir.”
He only noticed her after Snape had strode past him along the stone floor. Harry gave her a bare glance, right before he mouthed, I’m sorry.
She could only stare at him, barely able to comprehend his meaning.
When it finally reached her, she struggled to make sense of what he’d done.
He’d nearly killed Draco.
Harry had nearly killed someone using Dark Magic.
The fact that it was Draco was almost incidental to that fact.
Where had he even learned a spell like that? It had to be that damned Advanced Potions book, the one annotated and scribbled on all over by the so-called “Half-Blood Prince.” Even Snape seemed shocked Harry would know such a spell, as much as he tried to hide it, and even though he’d belittled Harry for not performing the spell at full power. Snape had sounded genuinely angry as he stood over Draco, muttering about how close his godson had come to death. Then again, Snape seemed to blame her for that as much as he did Harry.
Hermione didn’t really want to ask Harry about the how of it, though.
She wanted to ask him why.
Why would he do this? What the hell happened between them that would cause Harry to try to harm anyone, even Draco Malfoy, to that degree? She wouldn’t have thought Harry would go so far as to try to murder another person, not for any reason.
Even after Bellatrix killed Sirius, Harry hadn’t tried to use the killing curse on her when he caught up with her in the Ministry Atrium; he’d used the cruciatus, instead.
She couldn’t even comprehend where the fight had taken place.
Had they fought out by the Black Lake?
Was it raining outside?
Why were they both soaking wet?
Even now, Harry stood dripping on their stone floor, Draco’s crimson blood soaked and diluted into streaks decorating his white, long-sleeved shirt. Water stuck the fabric to Harry’s bare chest; his trousers hung heavy and bunched strangely to different parts of his legs.
She wanted to ask him. She wanted him to explain what the hell happened.
She couldn’t ask, though.
She couldn’t ask Harry anything.
And seconds later, Harry and Snape were both gone, and the oak door was shut firmly behind them.
The first two sessions with the dittany were brutal.
The third and fourth went by in a kind of hallucinatory haze.
Number five was when she saw the first bare hints of dawn streaking down over the hills, at least by the time she’d finished.
She didn’t sleep at all between number five and number six, since her internal alarm clock told her it was time to be awake and getting ready for breakfast and then class.
As she’d just started to break the seal and crack open a new bottle of dittany from among those on top of the bureau, Dobby popped into the room with a shocking crack! and nearly made her jump out of her skin. The smiling elf gripped a silver tray in both of his hands, loaded to overflowing with pancakes and sausages and syrup and fruit and raw blueberries and candied apples and fried potatoes.
Much more of a relief was the large pot of tea he left her on the table he conjured into being in Draco’s bedroom, and the pitcher of milk and much smaller pitcher of honey he’d left to go with the tea.
She finished the sixth application of dittany, going over every wound twice to make sure they were all truly sealed, then poured herself her first cup and drank it down like it was a shot of muggle tequila. She was still sitting at a chair by the table, and had only just closed her eyes to rest them for a few seconds, when her alarm went off again.
She jerked up, wandered over to Draco in a daze, then began applying the seventh round of dittany to all of his wounds.
When he groaned a bit that time, writhing every time a drop of the solution hit his skin, she considered the painkiller, but he didn’t seem awake enough to be able to swallow on his own. She was more afraid of choking him than leaving him in some measure of pain.
She decided to wait a bit longer and see if he woke up first.
She went over every wound several times again, but for the first time noticed nothing at all had reopened that time. She wondered if that had been true the time before as well, but couldn’t remember well enough to be certain.
She finished and set the timer for another hour.
She’d barely sat down in the seat, when the alarm buzzed angrily in her ear.
She’d given up on changing rooms.
It felt utterly impossible to go back and forth between her room and his, and Draco never seemed to have moved very much when she got up from the chair. The sound of the alarm certainly hadn’t woken him, or done much more than cause his skin to twitch.
She had just plucked the second bottle of dittany from the top of the bureau, and was about to walk around the bed and climb on the mattress to begin applying the tincture again, when Snape appeared silently in the door’s opening.
He looked around the bedroom with a curled lip, noted her breakfast on the table, and the second cup of tea she still hadn’t made it more than a few swallows into, and openly sneered.
“How cozy,” he said coldly.
The implication that she was surely shirking her duty was a given.
She didn’t bother to answer.
She bit her tongue though, which at least woke her up a little.
Snape pushed her aside almost roughly, mainly by shoving her out of the aisle area between the bed and the wall nearest to the door. He didn’t look at her as he did it, but moved her bodily out of his way as though she were a piece of furniture carelessly left in the wrong place.
She didn’t protest, but only jerked further away from him.
She ended up at the foot of the bed, standing there stupidly with bleary eyes, the dittany clutched tightly in her fingers. She watched as Snape bent over Draco, and examined his wounds closely, his nose nearly touching Draco’s pale skin. Whatever he saw, he didn’t comment. After he’d looked over the length of every single cut and gash, he bent over Draco’s face, and lifted his eyelids one by one to stare into his pupils.
Hermione bit her lip, mostly to keep from blurting out questions.
Maybe to distract herself, her eyes fell to Crookshanks, who’d come in maybe an hour after Snape left the first time and curled up into a ball between Draco’s legs. Crooks had been sleeping there ever since, completely unfazed by the alarm, and seemingly unbothered by his occasional twitches and moans. The half-cat, half-kneazle scarcely looked up each time Hermione crawled clumsily over the mattress to apply dittany to Draco’s wounds.
Crooks looked up at Snape now, stretched his front paws and legs briefly, then curled back up into a fuzzy ball and shoved his nose under Draco’s thigh.
After another tense-feeling, silent few minutes, where Snape cast a number of charms that looked diagnostic in some way, the professor straightened.
“After this one, switch to three hours,” he sniffed. “I don’t know if you’ll need the full eight applications for that. I’ll be back this afternoon to check. You might be able to go to six hours after the first four.”
He gave her a cursory once over, and frowned.
“I suggest you take the opportunity to sleep, Miss Granger.” He pulled something out of a deep pocket in his robes, and set it on the bureau. It was a low, flat, round, metal, maybe two-inch tall container, roughly as wide as her hand. “I made this. The active ingredient is essence of murtlap. It will help him with the pain, along with the potion I gave you. The pain could be significant when he wakes up. Dark magics tend to be unkind in that regard, so don’t be stingy with either the potion or this.”
He pointed at the metal tin.
“Rub the salve into his wounds if you come back here after three hours and they are still unopened. You should be able to do it after this current application.”
He stared at her briefly, as if waiting to see if she would speak.
“Is he––” she began.
“He is healing adequately,” Snape cut in. “Better than I feared.”
She frowned, fighting with the next dozen or so questions she had.
“Continue to apply the dittany,” he repeated sternly. “Give him the other potions once he wakes. Apply the salve over the dittany in three hours. I will be back this afternoon,” he repeated. His eyes grew colder. “Do not forget the two potions we discussed, Miss Granger. There is a good chance he will fight you on them.”
Great.
Bloody fantastic.
Of course he would fight her on them.
Why would Draco make any of this easy?
Something of what flickered through her mind must have shown on her face, because her professor of six years smirked at her for the second time in twenty-four hours.
Then, without another word, Snape swept out of the room.