Worse than Dragon Farts

Chapter 11. Worse than Dragon Farts

Vorapulpam: A feared instrument of mayhem until it was outlawed at the end of the eighteenth century, Vorapulpam possesses the quality of eating swiftly and exclusively through human flesh. It typically creates cavernous wounds which, if they are not immediately fatal, often result in a lingering and painful death from sepsis. Vorapulpam enjoyed a brief resurgence in popularity in the early twentieth century, after the 1917 discovery by Canadian wizard Philopator Lefèbvre that the addition of a small quantity of tardigrades after the finished potion had been allowed to rest for twenty-four hours altered it in such a way that it would attack and dissolve only dead human tissue. However, since it is impossible to brew this benign substance without first producing its caustic antecedent, the ban on possession of the potion was lifted, but not on its manufacture.

...Glaphyra Fink-Nottle. Historia Potionum. London: Paracelsus Press, 1998.

******

Three and a half weeks into their partnership, Hermione was beginning to regret having given Snape all of the dicey potions and kept the legal ones for herself. He had spent yesterday preparing a fragrant batch of Percipio Corium, and as he methodically cracked the cooled sheets now for packaging, the faint odor of burnt sugar rose again into the air.

She, on the other hand, was assembling the components for a large order of Floo Powder, and was not especially looking forward to the mess and the smell.

"I thought you were supposed to crack that with your wand," she said, allowing her disgruntlement about the Floo ingredients to put an acerbic edge on her voice. They were working at tables a few feet apart, facing in the same direction, so she was talking to his back.

"That is indeed what the books will tell you," he replied, continuing to rap the topaz-colored sheets with a silver fork. "But using the subject's own utensil yields a more uniform result." His voice had the same smug tone it always did when he was showing off his superior knowledge and experience, and hearing it sharpened her irritation.

She heaved a large cauldron on top of her table with unnecessary force, making a satisfying whump.

"Fucking Floo Powder. It doesn't make much of a profit; I don't know why I took this order."

Snape said nothing, tucking the fork into a tin atop the wrapped packets and replacing the lid. He slid the tin onto a shelf and took down a folded dragonhide apron and gloves, and a pair of goggles.

"What in Merlin's name are you making now? You look as though you're getting ready for a nuclear attack."

"Vorapulpam."

"Oh." She shuddered. On second thoughts, maybe the Floo Powder wouldn't be so bad after all. "Rather you than me."

"How magnanimous of you." He pulled on the gloves. "Who buys this? You must charge a pretty penny, to make the risk worthwhile."

"Muggles. They have no idea. I sell it as a cleaning solution, under the name 'FRS remover.'"

"FRS?"

"Fucked-up repugnant shit."

He gave her a curious look. "What kind of Muggles need a solution that dissolves dead human flesh?"

"A New York company called Bio-Recovery. They specialize in crime scene cleanup."

"Circe's tits, that's a profession?"

"It's New York."

"I see," he said, and began dripping fer-de-lance venom into a small graduated cylinder.

An hour and a half later a beaker filled with thin liquid was cooling on his table, while Hermione was adding the macerated Phallus impudicus to her cauldron. A cloud of thick yellow smoke swelled up out of it, and she stepped back, gagging.

"Fuck me," she choked. "That's worse than dragon farts."

"I hesitate to imagine the occasion on which you might have been exposed to dragon farts."

"Charlie Weasley made Christmas crackers from them one year and sent them to Fred and George. Molly was livid."

"And to think you missed an opportunity to marry into that family."

"Fuck off," she said, unable to think of anything cleverer.

"Bloody hell!" he cried, which seemed a bit disproportionate until she realized that the malodorous smoke must finally have reached his nose. He picked up his wand and jabbed it toward the casement window nearest his worktable. The window swung noiselessly outward, and a further flick of his wand set a gentle vortex of air sucking out through it.

He turned around to face her. "Don't tell me your budget wouldn't accommodate a decent exhaust fan, Granger. Are you trying to asphyxiate us both?"

"Only you, actually."

******

Crookshanks felt it to be enough of an affront that She had been allowing this interloper to monopolize so much of Her time and attention. But it was really too much, being banished from Her presence for lengthy periods every day, a state of affairs which had coincided with Big-Nose's arrival. It wasn't that Crookshanks particularly liked the Room of Smells, which lacked a good soft place for sleeping; it was just that he resented being excluded.

So when the opportunity presented itself, he wasted no time in launching himself at the open window.

A younger cat would have sailed easily through the opening and jumped gracefully from the table to the floor. But Crookshanks was old and arthritic, and had not fully made peace with his diminished faculties; he landed awkwardly on the table and slid, scrambling for purchase, knocking over the beaker of unfinished Vorapulpam.

Snape gave a hoarse shout and lurched forward.

For a moment Hermione stood motionless, paralyzed with horror. Then she snatched up her wand, sprang around the corner of the table, and slammed bodily into him, half pushing, half dragging him in with her amongst the nozzles of the HazPot station. He was heavier than he looked, and it took her perhaps thirty seconds to shove him into position, and another fifteen to help him off with all the protective gear.

The station hummed into life, and the air around them shimmered briefly. She saw the potion lift away from the back of his clothing and vanish into the nozzles, and then the machine fell silent, the only sound left in the room Snape's labored breathing.

He started to move away from her, but she said, "Wait," and cast a quick Tergeo at the spilled potion remaining on the floor.

She stepped out and he followed her, staggering and catching himself with both hands on the edge of the table. His face was grey and covered with a light sheen of sweat. She looked him quickly up and down and saw, with a sudden feeling of sick dread, that the back of his trousers...completely dry a moment ago...had begun to glisten with a dark moisture.

He groaned and leaned forward onto the table.

Hermione knelt and unfastened his trousers, pulling them out away from his body in an effort to keep them from touching the wound as she slid them down. The grey shorts he was wearing under them were soaked through with blood, and there was a terrifying concavity where the swell of his right buttock should have been.

"Oh, Jesus," she said.

She spelled the shorts off him, and felt her skin go clammy; dark spots danced on the edges of her vision.

There was a gaping cavity, deep and wide enough to admit a man's fist, extending from just below his waist to the middle of his thigh. Blood was pouring rapidly from it and running down his leg. She pointed her wand at it and said, "Sanguinem ardeo," but she knew that a simple cautery charm would not hold the larger vessels for more than a minute or two.

He had begun to tremble violently. He's going into shock, she thought. She knew she needed to elevate his legs, but could think of no way to do it without laying him down on top of that horrific wound. Levitation was out of the question; she would need all her concentration for the healing charm.

"I'm going to push you up onto the table," she said. When he did not answer, she squatted, wrapped her arms about his lower legs, and lifted him so that he slid forward onto the table, leaving his trousers puddled on the floor. When she released him, the right side of her t-shirt was blood-soaked from neck to hem.

He was frighteningly still and silent.

"Snape? Severus? Can you hear me?"

"Unnghh," he said.

Passing her wand slowly above the wound, she said, "Gadhya Prafsarva."

Nothing happened, except that the blood continued to well up out of it.

"Fuck." Her wand hand was shaking, and she took a deep breath to try and steady it. "Gadhya Prafhaluva."

The bleeding stopped immediately. Then, beginning with the outer edges and progressing inward, the wound began to fill in. At first the tissue was an angry purplish color, but by the time the edges had met and fused in the center, it was fading to a dark pink.

She touched it gently, tentatively, with her fingers. It was smooth, and warm but not hot, the skin hairless and shiny like a normal scar. She opened her palm and slid it down the length of where the wound had been; there was no heat or swelling at all.

"That was unpleasant as fuck," said Snape, raising himself up on his elbows and craning his neck around to look.

There was a moment in which Hermione felt as if the Earth had shifted infinitesimally on its axis.

At Hogwarts, she had seen Snape as, first and foremost, a teacher. Since running into him in Salamanca and working side by side with him for nearly a month, she had begun to regard him more as a colleague, albeit an older and much more experienced one.

But she had never...not for one second...thought of him as a man.

As a child she had gone through a stage of being acutely aware that all male beings had penises. For a period of months, whenever she saw a man...on the street, in church, at the grocery...she would think, he's got one, and imagine it, dangling there behind the flies of his trousers.

Something of the sort occurred now. She realized suddenly that Snape was naked from the waist down, and that if he were to raise up from the table she would come face to face with the cock he must surely possess. And then she thought, fuck me, I've got my hand on Snape's naked arse! and snatched it away.

"Are you feeling all right?" she asked shakily.

His color...such as it was...was starting to return, and he was looking at her with what she could swear was amusement.

"Better than before, certainly," he said. "But I could really use a drink."

"Oh, gods, me, too. What a brilliant idea. No, wait, don't get up!" Now he clearly was amused. "I've got a travel rug in the study, I'll get it for you."

******

He had, as it turned out, been too weak to walk on his own; standing up had been enough to make his ears ring and his field of vision begin to narrow. Hermione had cast a Mobilicorpusand steered him gently down a half-flight of stairs into her study, the crocheted rug flapping about his legs. Once he was settled in an overstuffed chair, she said, "I'll be right back," and ran back up the stairs.

The study was small, and crowded but tidy. There were, unsurprisingly, a number of bookshelves and a desk with several books open on it, but his attention was drawn immediately to a large diagram pinned prominently to one wall. It was perhaps four feet wide and three feet high, and looked from where he was sitting to be some sort of genealogical chart. Nearly all of the spaces between the labels in the diagram had been filled in by scribblings in inks of various colors. He was too far away to read them, or the chart itself, without getting up and walking across the room, which for the moment was out of the question.

Hermione reappeared, wearing a clean t-shirt and carrying a tray which she set down on the desk. "Blood-replenishing potion first," she announced, handing him a vial. He drank the viscous liquid off in one pull, then held out his hand for the whisky glass. "It's brandy," she said. "That's what they always give the fainting heroine in novels, so it seemed the best choice."

He wasn't especially pleased at the comparison, but had to admit that the combined effect of the potion and brandy was just what the doctor ordered. Warmth flushed through his limbs, and he was suddenly aware that his right arse-cheek was itching intensely. He wished she'd turn her back for a bit so he could scratch, but instead she sat down opposite him and propped her feet on the shared ottoman.

"Feeling better?" she asked.

"Much." He took another sip of the brandy. "Was that spell one of your originals?"

"Yes." He saw that the hand holding her glass was trembling slightly. "Sorry it took me a couple of tries to get it right. I've never actually used it before...in a practical situation, I mean."

"Remarkably effective, though. And obviously not Latin-derived. How did you work it out, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Of course I don't, and you're right, it isn't. I developed it from three Proto-Indo-European roots: ghedh, solwo, and kwreph."

"Ah, yes, I remember your mentioning something about early language research. Why Proto-Indo-European?"

"Because it's the earliest form available. I got to wondering why so many spells have bits of Latin in them, or Greek. Why ancient languages should work but modern ones not. And I thought, maybe it's because those words are historically closer to the true names of things."

"So," he said, "if two-thousand-year-old words work well, why shouldn't older words work even better?"

"Exactly." She had taken her feet off the ottoman and folded them underneath her, and was leaning forward slightly. "What I think is, the original language spoken by humans consisted almost exclusively of the true names for objects and actions...the sounds that have real power over things. As languages evolved, words must have grown further and further distant from those original forms, and so lost most of their power. And since that earliest language predates writing by thousands of years, there's no record of those first words."

"And yet you seem to have figured them out."

"Oh, most of that work was already done." She gestured to the chart on the wall behind her. "There are armies of comparative linguists who've spent their lives puzzling out PIE roots. The difficult part is reconstructing the exact pronunciations and word order and inflected endings. All I did was to develop Arithmantic formulas that could do that with a decent level of accuracy."

She was trying to sound offhand, he could tell, but he could hear the pride and triumph she felt. Justifiably so, he thought: if she had indeed developed such formulae, it was a remarkable achievement. And explosive in its potential.

"Very impressive," he said.

"It's tedious, is what it is. That Healing Charm took me nearly six months to develop. Hundreds and hundreds of calculations based on thousands of language samples, all to distill out a list of a dozen possible wordings for a potentially workable spell."

"I can see how potion-making might provide a steadier source of income." He helped himself to another generous splash of brandy.

"It's difficult to get people to pay in advance for months of work that may not yield anything useful. I've had a handful of very lucrative commissions, but for the most part I have to invest the time up front and hope to come up with a marketable result. And you can only sell a new spell once, of course: after that the genie's pretty much out of the bottle."

"How many have you created?" He kept his tone light. Just making conversation here.

"Altogether, thirty-one, and sold half a dozen. I work on them in the evenings, mostly, when I've put the lab to rights and don't feel like cleaning up any more mess."

"The rest you just file away?" Softly now.

She gestured towards one of the shelves, on which sat a row of notebooks. "For the most part. I published a set of three reducing spells in an article for Modern Grimoire a year or so ago, but it's really more of a hobby than anything."

He knew the article. It had appeared under the name H. E. Sarah and was one of the first bits he had found that led him eventually to Salamanca. "I'd like to read it sometime."

"I'm sure I've got a copy around here somewhere. I'll try and unearth it tomorrow."

"I could look for it, save you the trouble."

Her head went back just slightly. "Much quicker if I do it. And speaking of tomorrow, do you think you'd be able to have a look at the tent?"

"Certainly. I'll have another go at the Vorapulpam first thing, and work on the tent while it's resting."

"You'll do no such thing."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I have to make deliveries tomorrow, and you're absolutely not going to work on a such a hazardous potion while I'm out."

"Miss Granger. Hermione." He allowed just enough of a sneer to make the use of her first name more condescending than intimate. "I have been handling dangerous substances on my own for a number of decades now. I can assure you, I don't need a minder."

"Suppose I hadn't been here today? Suppose you'd been working alone when that happened?"

"It would not have happened if I'd been working alone."

She opened her mouth to say something, then shut it again.

"Besides," he said, "You've been brewing up god knows what all by yourself here for years, haven't you? No mishaps in all that time?" That HazPot station, did you acquire that before or after something blew up in your face and left that nasty mark?

"Please. I'd just feel better if you waited. And the tent really does need doing."

"All right, then. How long will you be gone?"

"Till midday at least. But I reset the wards to admit you weeks ago, so just, you know, come and go however you like. Do you think the tent business will take long?"

"Mmm. Six or eight hours at least," he lied.

From somewhere in the house there was the sound of a bell, and she jumped to her feet. "That'll be your clothes."

He looked at her in disbelief. "You have a house-elf hidden away here? You?"

She shook her head and grinned. "All modern conveniences. Muggle machines, only slightly magically enhanced. I'll be right back." And she was up the stairs and gone.

He took the opportunity to make a quick reconnaissance of the bookshelves...and to have a blissfully satisfying scratch...and was back under the rug by the time she returned. She handed him his folded shorts and trousers, which were oddly warm.

"I'll leave you to it, then," she said.

"You know, Granger," he said, "if we're taking it in turns, you are overdue to get your kit off."

A/N

Spells and potions: Percipio Corium is an invention of corianderpie from her fic Caramel. Which, if you haven't read it, why are you wasting time on my author's notes? Go. Read. I command you. It's the single best chaptered SSHG fic I've ever read.

Vorapulpam and Sanguinem Ardeo are my inventions, as is of course the Healing Charm that Hermione uses on Snape's bum.

Bio-Recovery is a real New York company (http://www.biorecovery.com/).

The three PIE roots cited by Hermione are as accurately reproduced as I can make them without access to phonetic symbols.

Yes, the discrepancy in the way Snape and Hermione form the plural of formula was intentional. It's a generational thang.

Special thanks are due this chapter to sc010f for double-checking my Latin.

And as always, loads of thanks to my wonderful beta/Britpick team, corianderpie and exartemarte. They are patient, perspicacious, and alliterative.