The Trail of the Black Star

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He awoke on the bed with a cool rag against his forehead. His body felt completely drained, though not unpleasantly so. He sat up in bed, only to realize that he was naked as a doxy. Fortunately for her, Granger was in the lab, most likely preparing the next potion.

She had thoughtfully cleaned and laid out his clothes on the chair. Still, he thought as grabbed his neatly-folded underwear from the arm, it hardly made up for the invasion of privacy.

When he was fully dressed, he entered the lab, fully prepared to give her an icy lecture about appropriate boundaries. She was ladling out another beaker of the potion base. She turned to him when he cleared his throat.

"Oh good, you're up. You were out for nearly half an hour, you know," she said, scribbling the time in the lab notebook. "Have a look at what I've written. Feel free to add more, since it seemed like you were still capable of observation until you lost consciousness."

His arms were crossed and he was looking at her with his most imperious expression. It would have been courteous of her to at least look a bit repentant for stripping him. Instead, she looked concerned.

"Are you feeling all right, Professor? Do you need something to drink?"

She was going to pretend that nothing had happened. Fine. Two could play at that game.

"No, I don't need a drink," he snapped. "Is there any particular reason you left an unconscious potions tester alone for half an hour, after said tester ingested an ingredient with unknown long-term effects?"

The deliberate slur on her actions had its desired effect. Her eyes narrowed, and her fists settled on her hips. He prepared himself for a lecture on testing regulations and safety. But it never came.

"I thought it was pretty obvious what made you pass out, Professor. I thought you'd be more comfortable in bed. Or would you have preferred being left on the bathroom floor with your dick hanging out of your trousers?"

He goggled at her, jaw working up and down, for a moment before he found his voice. "Vulgar, Granger. You go too far."

"Childish, Professor. There's no need to get bent out of shape because you're suffering from the typical British fear of the physical thing. Contrary to what you may believe, we are both adults here." She tossed the notebook and quill at him, though without any real malice. "Now, are you ready to do more testing, or do you want to have some supper first?"

He wasn't about to dig himself deeper into the 'physical thing' hole, but he wasn't about to let her get off so easily. "As you should be aware, food could react negatively with our tests.

"You're right. We'll keep at it. Which essence do you think I should try next? You've got a 50% chance of choosing correctly."

"That is assuming a great deal." Severus wondered if she was ignoring his ire just to spite him. Still, he was anxious to continue testing, especially if it meant that the girl might get a taste of her own medicine. He gazed at the neat rows of tubes in pearly white and dull green. The white released iridescent bubbles periodically. There was really no choice involved. "The green."

"Substance over flash? That's refreshing." She was muttering.

He gave her an odd look. Did she know he had been eavesdropping on her conversation with Tino that morning?

"I beg your pardon?"

"Nothing." She hastily added three drops of the green compound to the corn base, which bubbled and turned a buttery yellow. She scooped up a dose in a clean vial and held it aloft. "Cheers, Professor!"

She drank.

"How do you feel, Miss Granger?"

"Fine."

He made an impatient noise. "A little more specificity would be helpful."

"I feel unchanged- exactly as I did before taking the potion."

"Were you feeling any pain before taking the potion?"

"None."

He wrote this down. "Give me your hand."

She held out her hand, which he pricked with his quill knife. She gasped.

He began to write, but she grabbed his wrist. Her eyes were wide.

"That didn't hurt."

He ignored the acrobatics his stomach decided to perform at this admission. "But your reaction was that of pain."

"That was my reaction to seeing it. It really didn't hurt at all. Do it without me watching if you don't believe me."

"Very well. Look away, Miss Granger." He took her hand and pressed the dull edge of his knife into the fleshy heel, not terribly hard. "What do you feel?"

"Just a bit of pressure."

He dragged the clean nib of a spare quill down her life line. "And now?"

"Pressure. It tickles a bit."

Using the razor-sharp tip of his knife, he made a small cut across the tip of her ring finger. "And now?"

"Still just pressure, a bit of moisture. Is it ink from your quill?" His heart was beating fast. Could he allow himself to believe that they'd done it?

He cleared his throat. "You'd better look, Miss Granger."

She stared at her bleeding finger, eyes wide. Her voice was soft. "We did it."

"We don't know that yet. There are many other types of pain."

"Of course! Hex me, Professor!"

"As much as the prospect delights me, Miss Granger, don't you think we should work our way up to that?"

"Nonsense. Just don't use the Cruciatus curse until we've got a better idea of how long a dose of this stuff lasts."

What did she know of the Cruciatus curse? All talk, as usual. Still, there was no need to have her writing on the floor in agony just yet. He finally settled on a pricking hex, used most often to deter thumb-sucking children. "Fodio."

She grinned. "I didn't feel anything. Try something a little nastier."

"Noceo."

"That's supposed to be nasty?"

Impertinent. He'd wipe that smirk off her face. "Pello!"

Her face jerked sharply to the side as if she had been struck. He had put enough force into the spell that all but the steadiest would have ended up on the floor. She remained standing, but barely. She raised her eyes triumphantly.

"I felt that one, but just the force of the blow. No pain."

He wrote down her observations. "Interesting. Miss Granger, I'd like to get in as many tests as this dose will allow. If you will permit me to enchant one of your quills?"

"Of course. Why didn't you do so in the first place?"

"Because, ridiculous child, I wanted to make sure that the potion was still in effect before we make a record of using illegal curses." A wave of his wand had the quill standing at the ready. "Now, if you can limit your responses to a sentence or two, we can begin in earnest."

Before she had a chance to respond, he hit her with a burning hex, popular for interrogation since it caused no physical damage but felt akin to being immersed in boiling oil. Her response was immediate and professional.

"Heat, not unpleasant. No pain."

"Gravatio."

"Nausea, slight dizziness, no pain."

"Pugno!" Her body flew across the room and slammed into the wall. One of the suspended quipu fell on top of her.

"Really, Professor, if you could refrain from destroying my tent?"

He was beginning to enjoy himself. "Stick to your responses!"

She gave him a dirty look. "Force of collision, no pain. And I'll have you know that it took me a week to get that quipu in order-"

"Premo!" Her speech cut off abruptly as his spell squeezed her throat. He released it a moment later.

"Pressure," she rasped, "I was unable to draw breath, but there was no pain."

"So the protection is only perceived. I wonder... Decipio."

"Ooh, good idea. No effect."

"Really? No desire to attack me out of mental anguish?"

"None." She grinned cheekily. "Are you out of spells?"

"Miss Granger, that is a stupid question, even for you. We've hardly scratched the surface. Quasso!"

She winced as the bone in her upper arm snapped.

"Pain?"

"No pain, but I can't move my fingers."

"That's to be expected. Haven't you ever had a broken bone before, Granger?"

"No."

"Really? Now would be an excellent time to catch up. Frendo!"

Granger's body stiffened as an awful series of crunching sounds filled the air- the sound of every bone in her arm and hand shattering. Her face had gone an unnatural shade of ash. Had he overdone it?

"Pain?"

"No." Her voice was shaking. "Merlin, Professor, what spell was that? My arm- my hand..."

The useless limb dangled at her side. She looked close to tears.

"Perhaps it would be wise to stop and mend you before proceeding further. It would be rather unpleasant if the potion were to wear off now." He flicked his wand at the quill on the sideboard. "Finite incantem." The quill stopped scribbling and fell on top of the parchment, and Hermione turned a shade less pale. He'd forgotten about the other hexes that were still in effect. He silently cursed himself. Sloppy.

"Come here, Miss Granger, and lay your arm on the bench."

He wanted to say something comforting, but her shaking was making it very difficult to set the bones.

"Are you in pain?"

"No."

"Then remain still! If you continue wiggling this way, you may never regain use of the hand."

She made a heroic effort to calm herself, and he nodded approvingly. He ran his wand slowly down the length of it, simultaneously setting and healing the hundreds of tiny fractures, exactly the same way Poppy Pomfrey had done for him over the years.

When he had finished, she gave her hand an experimental flex. She was still entirely too pale. He glanced around the lab to see if she had the ingredients for a calming compound.

"Will I be able to play the piano after this?" she asked in a small voice.

Perhaps he had overdone it. But he knew his bone mending was just as precise as Poppy's, and she was a trained mediwitch. Still, a twinge of guilt tempered his response. "Of course you will."

"That's nice," she sighed, impish grin briefly lighting her wan features. "I didn't know how before."

See if he ever expressed concern over her again! He pulled himself up to his full, not-unimpressive height and looked down his nose at her. "As amusing as I'm sure your attempt at humour is, it is hardly conducive to good experimental procedures. Now, are you still under the influence of the potion?"

She banged her thigh against the sharp edge of the table. "Yes, I believe so."

"Then keep an eye on the hourglass and prick yourself with the pen knife until it wears off. You have your blasted anti-pain potion. I trust I need not do the rest for you."

"But-"

He turned on his heel and stalked out of the laboratory. Thankfully, she did not follow after.

He washed his hands and set to making himself some supper. Even the girl's larder was impertinent- filled with things he didn't recognize. Working largely by smell, he managed to fix himself an edible meal from rice and a few gourd-like vegetables that ended up tasting rather like butternut squash.

He heard her moving things around in the laboratory a few times, but she did not emerge, for which he was grateful. To ensure his solitude, he took his plate and wandered outside.

He walked over to the edge of the trees where there was a fine prospect of the camp and sat down. It was nearly completely dark, but four or five people had made a fire in the pit and were chatting animatedly around it. He was unsurprised to see Tino with his arm around Brittany. Fortunately, Hermione's tent was close enough to the forest that they had not noticed him. The great mountains rose up on all sides, so that only the sky directly overhead was visible. It was another startlingly clear night.

The stars that represented the Great Leopard seemed poised to spring into the Great River of stars. And the Monkey near his tail looked ready to grab the Serpent and fling him to the other side of the heavens. At last, his eye fell upon two tiny stars, nearly indivisible to the naked eye, which represented the two lovers from his poem, Chuqui-llantu and Acoya-Napa.

He sighed. He and Hermione had, in the span of two days, dismantled millions of years of evolution's most hard-wired reflex; that reflex that caused one to recoil from fire and curse when one shut one's hand in a drawer. He was not unaware of its potential lack of insignificance, and he sincerely hoped she was, too.

But knowing her, within a few weeks, she would have maximized the potion's effectiveness. Then she'd figure out a brilliant way to store it to prevent its losing potency, knowing her luck, on the very first try. She was probably still planning to market the potion to the public, and there wasn't a thing he could do to stop her.

He stabbed a bit of squash with his fork.

It really was a shame the girl was so horrible. Well, perhaps not horrible, but still, she had no business doing the kind of work she was doing. She was certainly nothing special in the lab, but her newly developed subtlety of analytical thought was a promising sign. Still, she was brazen, forward, pushy, intrusive, and utterly impossible to work with. And with this discovery under her belt, what on earth would she try to tackle next? He shuddered to think.

The only other person able to get under his skin so effectively had been dead for over twenty years, and his son was almost as bad.

But Granger seemed to occupy a space of her own under his skin.

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