Have A Cigar

Have A Cigar

It's a hell of a start

It could be made into a monster

'Are you ready?' asked Hermione. She was sitting on a stool across from Edward Teach at the worktable in the basement of Spinner's End. It was New Year's Eve.

In response, he loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his starched white shirt. 'Ready.'

They regarded the table in front of them. There was a large piece of parchment, listing Snape's remarks about the potion he had created. Hermione had copied very carefully from his journal in order to make sure that she missed nothing of what he had written. There were also several smaller pieces of parchment, arranged in a queue, with the names of ingredients written on the front side and the effects of those ingredients on the back. There was a tattered, blackened book, open to a page whose heading read in ornate lettering, 'The Soulhouse Solution.' And there was another book, newer, slightly battered, with a colourful cover and a piece of lined A4 sticking out of the middle of its pages.

Hermione picked up the small pieces of parchment and began to lay them out on the table in a new arrangement, one by one, explaining to Teach as she worked:

'These are the, er, inactive ingredients of the Soulhouse Solution, according to this book.'

Edward shuddered a bit in distaste but paid careful attention.

'First,' Hermione said, putting down a scrap, 'the sage oil. This acts as a stimulant, like nicotine.' She placed the next scrap directly to the right of the first one. 'Then the camomile flowers, calming and soporific. The conjunction of these two ingredients will do... what?'

'In the right proportions,' Edward answered, 'they will produce a physical state of calm but attentive equilibrium.'

'Right,' Hermione nodded. She placed another scrap on the table. 'Rosemary oil. This improves memory and focuses concentration.' She shuffled the pieces of parchment in her hand and selected a fourth one, putting it on the table so that the four pieces together formed a square. 'Stinging nettle. It blocks pain receptors and induces mild euphoria.'

Edward said, 'Together, they create a state of mind that parallels the equilibrium in the body.'

Hermione laid down a fifth scrap of parchment in the centre of the previous four. 'Ginger.'

'Aids in the absorption of the potion into the bloodstream.' Edward leaned back on his stool, balancing himself with his palms flat on the worktable. 'Altogether, that would make a baked chicken taste divine.'

Hermione cocked one eyebrow and fluttered the remaining three scraps of parchment in her hand. 'I don't understand what effect those things are supposed to have on an object. How do they prepare the object to receive a piece of soul?'

'I'm fairly certain,' Edward responded, brow furrowing slightly, 'that this stuff kicks in after the, er, active ingredients have humanised the object. Once the object has taken on human properties, the sage and rosemary and so on affect it in the same way they would affect a human body. They make it attentive, calm, and receptive.' He glanced toward the cabinet that held Snape's Potions paraphernalia and commented, 'We'll need all of them, and probably in the same proportions used in the Soulhouse Solution.'

'Probably,' Hermione agreed. She selected two of the scraps she still held and hesitated for a moment before laying them on the table, slightly to the right of the arrangement of the other five. 'Now – the modifications Professor Snape made. First, the acacia extract dissolved in rosewater. In a "0.125mol/L" solution."'

Edward stared at the parchments for a moment, considering, and reached over to the colourful book and opened it at the page marked by the lined paper. 'That should work out to one part extract to eight parts rosewater per litre of solution.'

Now it was Hermione's turn to stare. 'Okay. First of all, how do we make the extract? Second, how do we know how much extract equals a mole? Third, how do we make sure we're measuring the proportions by amount of solution, rather than amount of solvent? Fourth, once we've made the solution, how do we know how much to put in the potion?'

Smiling, Edward said, 'Well, as to the second question, we can look that up.' He stood, walked to the bookcase, and searched carefully for a moment before pulling a thick reference work off the shelf. He paused for a moment, gazing at the title, and turned back to select another, smaller, book. Then he returned to the table and opened the smaller one, murmuring, 'Acacia...' under his breath. A minute later, he looked up at Hermione and said, 'It looks like the pharmacological substance in the acacia that we need is mescaline. Look that up in the other book, would you please?'

Hermione drew the thick book to her and opened it. The pages contained an inventory of chemicals listed alphabetically; in the M section, she found mescaline and read aloud, 'C11H17NO3. 211.26 grams per mole. Melting point 183-186 degrees Celsius.'

'We'll have to assume that that mass of our extract won't contain the right amount of mescaline,' Edward said thoughtfully, 'but I'm willing to bet that Snape used that number anyway. The equipment here doesn't really allow for the kind of chemical precision he would have needed to measure a mole of pure mescaline.'

Hermione consulted Mark's science textbook – for that was what the colourful book was – and said, 'A 0.125mol/L solution means that for one mole of extract, there should be eight litres of liquid. So if we want to use one litre of liquid, we should be using an eighth of a mole of acacia extract.'

'Right,' Edward agreed. 'Easy enough.' He did some rough calculations on a scrap of parchment. 'We put 26.41 grams of extract into a litre-beaker and then fill it up with rosewater.'

'Oh!' Hermione exclaimed. 'Of course.' She frowned. 'But then how much of that do we put into stuff from the Soulhouse Solution?'

Edward shrugged and twisted his mouth into a rueful smile. 'We'll just have to do a drop-by-drop titration until we get it right.'

'How will we know when we've gotten it right?' Hermione asked, worried.

He seemed to recognise her worry and share it. 'We'll have to drink it.'

'What exactly is mescaline?' Hermione wanted to know.

'As far as I know, it's a psychedelic hallucinogen.'

Knowing how dangerous such a plan was, especially with such a substance, Hermione nevertheless set her shoulders in determination. As long as the potion wasn't fatal – and Snape himself had drunk it, so it was safe at least in that regard – she could deal with its adverse effects. 'Right then,' she said firmly and put the eighth and final piece of parchment onto the table. 'Tincture of wormwood.'

'Snape says it activates the potion,' Edward offered. 'It makes sense, intuitively.'

'Yes, I suppose it does,' she agreed. Then she frowned again and looked up at Edward thoughtfully. 'The question is, what exactly does this potion do? We've got enough information to make an assumption, but...' She raised her eyebrows.

Edward gazed off into space for a while, tapping his index finger against the table. 'Snape was going to use this potion to remove Voldemort's bit of soul from Harry Potter's body,' he said eventually. 'So, we must assume that the potion removes the soul from the body.'

'That's what I don't quite understand,' Hermione responded, frustration creeping into her tone. 'He says it worked, but wouldn't it have removed Harry's soul from his body as well?'

He rested his chin in his hand and gave this observation some thought. Eventually, he said, 'It must do that. But once the soul is out of the body, it can be commanded, right?'

Hermione nodded.

'And we know he planned to command the piece of Voldemort's soul into a different object to make another Horcrux. So – maybe he planned to command Potter's soul back into Potter's body.' He waited expectantly for her response.

Command Harry's soul back into Harry's body... Hermione chewed the inside of her cheek, thinking. But she was not thinking about whether this was the purpose of Snape's potion – at Edward's words, her thoughts had struck off in a different direction entirely. 'Forget Horcruxes for a minute,' she said slowly, almost unaware of the fact that she was speaking out loud. 'If it's possible to command a soul that is outside of a body, then this is how the wizards of the New World were communicating with their ancestors.'

Edward narrowed his eyes at her. 'What do you mean?' he asked cautiously. 'What are you thinking?'

Dreamily, she went on, 'We could command the soul of someone who's dead.'

'How?' Edward demanded, his attitude suddenly, painfully intense.

'We use this potion to remove a living person's soul from their body,' she whispered, 'and then we command the soul of the dead person into that body.'

'But how would we get it back out again?'

'The same way,' she said. 'Give the body the potion again and switch the souls.'

'What happens to the living person's soul while it's outside of their body?' Edward asked.

Hermione seemed to come out of her trance. Blinking, she said, 'I don't know. My God,' she said suddenly, her eyes widening as something that should have been obvious occurred to her. 'How did Snape get his own soul back into his body after he took this potion?'

'Perhaps there was somebody else present to command it for him,' Edward suggested.

'Oh, I doubt that,' Hermione answered, smiling. 'You didn't know Professor Snape, but I did – and he would never have shared this with another person.'

Edward pointed out reasonably, 'Then why did he write it down in his journal?'

To which point Hermione was forced to admit she had no answer.

***

They divided up the tasks involved in recreating Snape's potion. Hermione took the sage oil, camomile flowers, rosemary oil, nettles, and ginger to one end of the table and set herself to chopping, grinding, and diluting. At the other end of the table, Edward, his hands carefully sheathed in dragon-hide gloves, ground the dried acacia leaves with mortar and pestle, pulverising them into a fine powder. He lit a flame under a small cauldron and warmed the powder in it, regularly adding drops of alcohol from a tiny pipette until he was certain that the excess water had been steamed out of the acacia powder. He poured out the mixture over a glass dish, straining it through a thin piece of linen to separate the alcohol from the grains of acacia, and placed the linen to one side to allow the powder to dry. He repeated the process several times, using up all of the acacia leaves from the coffee jar, then excused himself for a few minutes. The work had been so fiddly and careful, Hermione knew, that Edward needed a break to stretch and let the intensity of his concentration wear off.

While he was gone, she mixed the wormwood into ethanol to make a tincture and measured out a litre and a half of rosewater. Then she put the sage, camomile, rosemary, nettle, and ginger together in a medium-sized cauldron and began to warm it with a very low flame. There was nothing left to do until the acacia extract was dry, so she followed Edward upstairs and collapsed onto the floor of the sitting room, feeling slightly tired and drained. Edward had taken up position in one of her parents' old armchairs; resting his feet on the low coffee table, he allowed his head to fall back against the wing of the chair and very quickly fell into a shallow sleep.

Unable to sleep herself, Hermione lay on the shag carpet and stared at the ceiling, her mind curiously empty. She drifted into a steady state of relaxation almost like a meditative trance and was therefore somewhat startled when Edward woke a few hours later and nudged her with his toe.

'You ready to start again?' he asked through a yawn.

'Yeah,' she answered hoarsely, picking herself up from the floor and making her way to the stairs that led to the basement.

At the worktable once again, they both pulled on their gloves and examined the acacia extract, which sat in little piles on several squares of linen at one end of the table. Edward poked gently at one of the piles with his fingertip and said briefly, 'It's dry.'

Picking up the squares of linen carefully, they deposited the fine powder onto Hermione's scales. When each side of the scale balanced at last, Edward collected the powder carefully into a one-litre beaker. Hermione lifted the container of rosewater and began to pour. When the level of the liquid reached the white line on the side of the glass, Edward picked up a stirring rod and began to swirl it gently through the solution.

Meanwhile, Hermione stirred the oils and herbs in the cauldron and deliberately added a single drop of the tincture of wormwood. Most potions, she remembered from Professor Snape's lessons, had to be constructed in a particular order, but she hoped that wasn't the case with this one – Snape had added the wormwood last, but she and Edward couldn't do that without wasting acacia extract. And without knowing how much of it might be required, they couldn't afford to waste any at all.

'Do you think it's all mixed in evenly yet?' Hermione asked Edward, pointing at the beaker of rosewater solution.

'Should be,' he answered shortly. Bringing it over to the cauldron, he gave her a very serious look. 'What colour are we aiming for here?'

'Courvoisier,' Hermione answered, lips turning up in a small smile.

'Ah.' He sucked some solution into a pipette and held it over the cauldron. 'Keep track. First drop.'

An elliptical droplet formed at the end of the pipette and hung there for what felt like an eternity before dropping off and splashing with a tiny plop in the cauldron. Nothing happened.

Edward drew his sleeve across his forehead and positioned the pipette again. 'Second drop.'

The next drop fell without as much drama, but still the potion remained unchanged. Hermione made a second tick mark on the parchment to her right.

The suspense was clearly getting to Edward, who wiped his forehead again and gritted his teeth. Hermione felt strangely calm and empty when he said, 'Third drop.'

The glittering droplet fell, and the potion blossomed into a beautiful, clear gold.

Edward exhaled sharply and emptied the pipette back into the beaker of solution. 'Would you say that's the colour of Courvoisier?'

'I don't know,' responded Hermione. Her calm had dissolved instantly when the potion had alchemised. Giddily, she added, 'I think it looks closer to Remy Martin.'

***

When the potion was cool and decanted into its vial, Hermione stood motionlessly for a long while, regarding it, awed by the nature of what they were about to do. She couldn't seem to wrap her mind around the possibility that the potion worked, that it did what they had assumed, that any of it was real. She knew that souls existed, she knew that they could be manipulated, but somehow it seemed to her like a dream, like a cosmic joke – one of them would take the potion and do nothing more than get extremely high from the mescaline it contained. Presumably, that was what had happened to Snape when he tested the potion before he had discovered the need for the wormwood. Slowly, she removed her dragon-hide gloves and laid them on the table, then turned and walked into the other half of the room to sit down on the indented cushion of the sofa. Edward took off his own gloves and followed, settling himself into the armchair across from her. He seemed slightly agitated – he fidgeted for a few minutes, crossing one leg, then the other, and chewed on his lip.

'What is it?' he asked finally. 'What's the matter?'

Hermione hesitated before saying, 'I think there's an ethical dimension to all of this that we haven't really considered.'

'And that is...?'

'We've agreed to test this potion on one of us,' she said, 'and that's fine. We're in a position to give consent to that. But whomever we choose to bring into this – the dead person's soul – isn't in a position to give consent. What if the experiment damages them somehow? What if putting their soul into a living body is somehow the equivalent of killing a living person?'

Edward pulled his wand out of his pocket and twirled it nervously in his fingers. 'It can't really be like that, though,' he argued mildly. 'A dead person knows what it was like to be alive – it won't come as any surprise to them to be alive again, even if it's only temporary. A living person doesn't know what it's like to be dead; that's why it would be worse to kill than to do what we propose to do. The situations aren't equivalent.'

Hermione nodded carefully. 'That may be true. But it doesn't address the issue of consent. It would be wrong – it would be like rape. It can't be right to deprive someone of their personal agency, even if they're dead, even if it's for a good reason.'

Shaking his head in exasperation, Edward said, 'So, you're saying we shouldn't do this at all? We've rediscovered this, we know what it does, Snape did it – but we're not supposed to duplicate his experiment?'

'We don't know what it does!' Hermione exclaimed, leaning forward intently. 'We think we do, but what if we're wrong? And Snape only did it to himself. He didn't put some poor person's soul into his own body.'

'Hermione,' Edward said earnestly, 'think of the knowledge we could gain if we did this! Not just for us, but for the whole magical world. What is one person's discomfort, compared to the greater good?'

She reared back suddenly, horrified. 'No!' she cried, thinking of Dumbledore, and Harry, and Snape. 'The "greater good" is never a good reason to demand somebody's unwilling sacrifice!'

Startled by the strength of her negative reaction, Edward slid out of his chair to kneel in front of her, taking her hand in his, holding her gaze with his own. 'Hermione, it wouldn't be a sacrifice!' He gripped her fingers almost painfully. 'What is ten, fifteen minutes of their eternity? It's nothing! A drop in the ocean. A single grain of sand. Time, for the dead, is infinite. And it could be an enlightening experience for them, too!'

'No,' she protested, weakened by the intensity of her revulsion. 'We can't know that. And since we can't know it, we can't do it.'

He dropped her hand as if it burned him and stood up. He ran his fingers through his hair, obviously trying to control the level of his frustration. Pacing, he began to twirl his wand again while Hermione watched him warily. Every now and then, he would glance at her, his expression betraying his irritation.

'Edward, I'm sorry...' she started, but he interrupted her with a slash of his hand.

Then his stormy expression cleared abruptly, and he stared at her in surprise. 'Hermione, what if we could get consent? Or rather,' he amended quickly, 'what if we chose somebody we knew would agree?'

'Like who?' she demanded.

'Professor Snape.'

Her eyes grew wide as her face suddenly flooded with heat. 'Professor Snape?' she repeated in a whisper. In all of her fascination with the potion and the theory behind Horcruxes, she had forgotten that this was exactly what she had wanted to do from the moment Edward had first told her about methods for communicating with the dead. Talk to Professor Snape! And she knew with fervent certainty that Snape must want this too – hadn't he been trying to communicate with her for months? Hadn't he said in her dream that there were ways to communicate that were far better than the dreams themselves, better than using the Urim and Thummim? He must want to speak to her as badly as she wanted to speak to him! In fact, he wanted to issue some sort of warning – there was something he believed wholeheartedly she must not do. How could she ever find out what that was if she didn't use this opportunity to speak to him, really speak to him?

Slowly, she tilted her head to look up at Edward. 'It would have to be you,' she insisted softly. 'You would have to take the potion.'

He shoved his wand into his pocket and squared his shoulders. 'I've been willing to do that all along,' he assured her. 'You'll have to restrain me, though.'

'Why?' she asked, surprised.

'I don't want Snape doing anything with my body.' The idea actually seemed to nauseate him; his face grew pale, and he swallowed convulsively.

'All right,' Hermione agreed. Privately, she couldn't think of anything Snape might be inclined to do with Edward's body that Edward wouldn't do himself – and immediately blushed at the thought. Shaking her head to clear it, she said again, 'All right.'

Edward sat back down in the armchair and made himself comfortable, wriggling back into the cushions. 'Good. I'm ready.'

'What, right this second?' Hermione blurted, startled. 'Don't you want to, you know, prepare yourself mentally?'

He shrugged. 'Isn't the potion supposed to do that for me?'

'I suppose so,' she offered weakly. She pulled out her wand and pointed it at him, her hand trembling.

When she had stood like that for a long moment without moving, Edward rolled his eyes at her and said, 'Well? Get on with it, Hermione!'

She nodded once, firmly, and cried, 'Incarcerous!'

Magical ropes snaked out of her wand and bound Edward firmly to the chair. He tested them carefully, straining against them, and looked satisfied. 'Excellent,' he said encouragingly.

Unable to contemplate what she was doing, and unwilling to examine it, she steeled herself to go over to the worktable and pick up the vial of potion. Still keeping her mind blank, she returned to Edward and put her hand on his chin, tilting it gently upward. 'Open up,' she commanded.

He met her eyes and winked, grinning. Echoing Snape, he said, 'Cheers!'

Hermione blinked once and poured the potion into his mouth.