Roots

Chapter One: "But if you think that I'm not strong, you'd best watch out. Nothing can stop me."

The Potions classroom was always freezing, even on a warm day like this. Eleanor Dewey shivered intermittently inside her robes, wishing she had given in and worn a sweater underneath. She hated the pudgy look the heavy clothes gave her under her thin warm-weather robes, but right now she'd happily forgo a svelte figure and endure the smug looks of her roommates for something thick and wooly around her arms and shoulders. She cursed her vanity and kept as close as possible to the low flame shimmering beneath her cauldron, giving her potion an extra, hopeful poke with her pestle. She hated these practical exams; she had failed two already this year. Professor Snape was moving quickly down the rows, taking a cursory glance into each cauldron, snapping a short series of instructions, and leaving panicky or disconsolate students in his wake. If the cold hadn't already broken her out into goosebumps, the approaching sneer of Professor Snape certainly would.

"I see you've added too much Bleeding-Heart," said Snape, suddenly looming over her like a thundercloud. "You've clearly not gotten a feel for weighing. That'll be ten points off."

"I'm sorry, Professor," Eleanor replied automatically.

Snape lowered his eyelids. "'Sorry' will not repair your Numbing Salve, Miss Dewey, nor will it raise your examination score. Now, you've steeped your Serpentvine correctly, but there isn't enough dragonfly wing in this paste. Add it in and see what happens."

Eleanor scraped the paste out of the mortar and into her cauldron. The mixture turned a bilious green.

"Done correctly it would be pale blue," Snape droned. "Evidently the American curricula are somewhat light in the area of potion-making." Eleanor stared down at her lap, humiliated. "Sixty points out of one-hundred," Snape continued, before moving to the student at the adjacent desk.

It was true that Eleanor was not a prodigy at potions. Ever since she had transferred to Hogwarts from the Mar Encantado Institute of Magic in California she had been doing badly in Snape's class. Herbology was her concentration; that was why she had come to Hogwarts in the first place. Professor Sprout was said to be one of the most talented Herbologists in the wizarding world, and Eleanor had received a grant to study under her tutelage.

But if she failed Potions, she'd have to go back. For most of this term she had felt a nervous nausea in her stomach whenever Potions - or the Potions Master - were mentioned. Which was fairly often, as many of the other sixth years were experiencing similar anxieties over their marks.

She hated the thought of going back. She had nothing to go back to.

"Twelve out of one-hundred, MacDuffy, and go dump it down the basin before it eats through your cauldron," she heard Snape say from far down the row. She sighed. Something had to be done, and it probably wouldn't be pleasant. She put her head down on her desk and waited.

Snape finally ended the exam with a dismissive wave of his hand and began to take inventory of a shelf full of vials and jars. Eleanor packed her things but lingered near her desk until the last student had exited.

"Professor Snape," she began timidly.

"Make it quick, Dewey, I've another test to give in ten minutes," Snape snapped.

"I was wondering - well, you know how badly I'm doing in Potions. And if I don't pass, I'll have to change schools again." Snape kept his back turned to her, his face in oblique profile. The fluid-filled vials cast odd greens and blues onto his ashen skin. "I was wondering if you could find the time to tutor me. Occasionally. Whenever it's convenient. I really want to get the hang of Potions." Her heart was hammering and she struggled to keep her arms at her sides. The thought of her future in Snape's pale, arachnoid hands was a frightening one.

"I do not make a habit of pandering to my students' individual academic deficits, Miss Dewey," Snape said dispassionately, still facing away from her. "If you cannot keep up in class, I see no reason to waste my time with you outside it. If you fear for your grade, I suggest you drop the course."

Her eyes widened. "I can't!" she cried. "Potions and Herbology go hand-in-hand - I need a N.E.W.T. in both! And anyway, it's too late in the semester to drop without a negative mark on my record! I'm only asking for -"

"I heard your request," Snape said acidly, finally turning around, dark eyes singeing her. "It is denied. Good day." He whipped around to face the shelf again, robes spinning out from him and then wrapping around his legs like a whip.

"Thank you, sir," Eleanor said weakly, and left, fighting the urge to run. She wandered blankly into the Great Hall, registering only dimly that it was lunchtime. She let herself be herded into place by the other students.

Fred Weasley jumped up from his seat as soon as he saw her. George waved and grinned at her but did not follow his brother.

"Ellie, what's wrong?" Fred asked quietly, taking her by the arm and leading her to an empty spot at the Ravenclaw table.

"It's nothing, I - uh -" She sighed. "Is it obvious? Are my eyes red or something?"

Fred straddled the bench beside her, provoking a few raised eyebrows from the surrounding Ravenclaws. He spoke in an uncharacteristic hush. "No, no, you look okay. I know you though. You're clutching yourself like you've seen a ghost."

"Not a ghost, just a fucking vampire," she spat. Fred raised an eyebrow.

"Hm. Snape?"

She smiled humorlessly. "I hadn't realized how accurate the comparison is. The man sucks you dry. He drains the life out of a room. Do you think he has a soul?"

"What'd he do to you?"

"I'm failing Potions. Miserably. If I don't pass, I go home. So I go to him, practically on my knees with my mouth open, and ask him if he can give me some time, give me anything at all, to help me stay afloat until exams. Not only does he turn me down, he insults my intelligence and hardly spares me a glance while he's doing it. And I know - oh, I fucking know he's going to find a way to bring it up in class tomorrow. To humiliate me. Because evidently it's not embarrassing enough to have no demonstrable talent whatsoever -"

"Calm down, Eleanor. Take a breath, have some food." Fred gestured at the overfull serving platters. She inhaled deeply and took a bread roll. She had no appetite, so she busied herself tearing it into bits and laying them on her plate. "Have you thought of a student tutor?" Fred continued.

"No one will take me. Everybody's too busy worrying about their own grade. I even asked Hermione Granger - a fourth year, for Merlin's sake."

Fred sighed. "Well - look, why don't you go to Sprout about it? She'll want to keep you around, won't she? Maybe she can pull a string or two, soften him up a bit?"

"I guess. I feel like I've done enough begging already, but... yeah. I'll try."

"It'll be fine, Ellie. You'll pull through." Fred, like his brother, was irritatingly constant in his optimism. She regularly battled herself over the urge to pointedly educate him that things didn't always turn out all right, that people didn't always find a way to wiggle out of their personal disasters, that she had firsthand experience in life's habit of making good things crash and burn. But today it would do her no good to disillusion him, so she decided to find his naïveté quaint and let it go. She patted Fred's shoulder and gave him a quick, half-genuine smile.

Her eyes narrowed as she spied Snape sitting at the High Table. He was staring out at the Slytherin table, expressionless, chewing rhythmically. "No," she said quietly. "He can't possibly have a soul."

Fred rolled his eyes. "Eat," he urged. "You don't want to give Snape the satisfaction of having starved you to death." She picked a shred of bread roll off of her plate and gnawed absently on it. It tasted yeasty and dry, seeming to suck the moisture from her mouth.

She went to the greenhouses after her last class, walking quickly with her head down. She knew she should take this opportunity to stroll rather than hustle, to bathe in the sweet vernal twilight that fell in dusty glows and shadows upon the Hogwarts grounds - after all, she wasn't sure she'd ever get to see another spring here - but she was holding in a jitteriness that bordered so closely on panic that she could hardly stop herself from sprinting. She wanted to meet her fate head-on.

"Professor Sprout?" she called, stepping into one of the greenhouses. Sprout emerged from behind an overgrown Cruscruris Araneus, shears in hand.

"Ellie!" she chirped. "Any news about your Wild Pepperspit? Is it doing better next to the window?"

"It's still looking a bit weak," Eleanor said uneasily. "That's not why I'm here, though." She paused as the Araneus surreptitiously arced one of its jointed stalks over Sprout's head. Sprout jabbed her shears threateningly at the plant's hairy bulb, and the stalk retreated.

"What's that, dear?" Sprout asked.

Eleanor took a deep breath, feeling oddly plaintive, petulant, like a schoolyard tattletale. "Um. Well, I told you how I wasn't doing... spectacularly in Potions?" Sprout nodded and raised an eyebrow. "That was kind of an understatement. It doesn't look like I'm going to pass." Sprout frowned, looking surprised, but let Eleanor continue. "I mean, I could, if I had some help. A tutor to get me through to the exam. But I can't find a student to do it, and I went to Snape, and -" she broke off with a frustrated sigh.

Sprout nodded sagely. "Ah."

"So..." Eleanor let out a hard sigh. "I don't know what to do. I need your help."

Sprout bustled over to her. "Oi, Ellie, don't look so nervous. I'll let you in on a secret." Her eyes twinkled conspiratorially. "Snape owes me many a favor for late-night runs to the greenhouse for this herb and that sap and aged-root-of-the-other-thing. I'm his... his dealer, after all." She snickered to herself and patted Eleanor on the shoulder. "We'll get this all worked out. We can't afford to lose you."

Eleanor smiled gratefully. An Araneus stalk crept quietly across a potting table, inching toward Sprout's apron pocket. Eleanor grabbed a trowel out of a nearby hanging fuchsia and slapped at the bristly appendage. It pulled back with a creepy rustle. Sprout grinned and shook her head.

* * *

"And just where do you think you're going, Miss Dewey?" There was a menacing curl to the words.

Eleanor stopped in her tracks, just in front of the suit of armor that marked the entrance to the Ravenclaw dormitories.

"Come to give me detention, Professor Snape?" she smirked. "I'm afraid I'm busy. Bugger off and kick a Hufflepuff or something if it makes you feel better." She pivoted to face the speaker.

"How'd you know it was me?" Fred Weasley said sulkily. George was beside him, snickering.

"Besides the fact that your voice is an octave higher than his?" teased George.

"And the fact that your accent is twangy Devon, and Snape's is London posh," said Eleanor. "But really, it's mainly that you're just not creepy enough. You've got to really get your Boris Karloff on." The twins' faces looked blank. "You know...? Oh, never mind." She added yet again to her long series of mental notes to stop using Muggle culture in her analogies. "Anyway, you've got to really camp it up." She stormed toward them suddenly, glaring, fanning her robes out behind her. "I don't expect you to truly understand the beauty of the simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of the liquids that rush through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses..." She bent her voice dramatically, discarding her flat American accent in favor one of the many British patois that swirled around her daily at Hogwarts, forcing her tone as deep as it would go, letting it swirl around the words, rushing in spots, drawling in others, with shades and tones of malice and disdain coloring every syllable. She held her face in a haughty sneer, with one eyebrow arched condescendingly and her upper lip twitching. She stopped in front of George and narrowed her eyes threateningly. "Five hundred squillion points from Gryffindor, Weasley, for having the nerve to exist on my planet."

Fred snorted loudly. George fell to his knees and threw his arms around Eleanor's waist, crying out, "Please, Professor Snape! Don't hurt me! Hurt Fred instead, please, he hates you and thinks you smell like the back end of a Manticore. He told me so."

Eleanor broke up laughing and gave George's hair a playful tug. Fred socked her shoulder chummily, saying, "Not a bad impression, El. You seem to have paid quite a bit of attention to our Potions Master's little mannerisms, hm? A bit taken with him, are you? The tall, dark, and -"

She cut him off with a grimace. "- Please don't make me vomit, Fred. My day will have been quite fabulous enough without having ended on a gastronomical rummage sale. What the hell are you two doing here, anyway?"

The twins grinned and glanced at each other in their characteristically impish way. "We know you've had a bad time of it lately, and we've brought you a present to make you feel better," said George. From his back pocket, Fred produced a small white paper pouch, tied with red ribbon and bulging with a number of small and indeterminate shapes. Eleanor raised an eyebrow, circumspect.

"Aw, Ellie, don't look at us like that," Fred said plaintively. "You'd think we were trying to poison you or something."

Eleanor took the bag from him warily and pulled the ribbon to take a peek inside. It was filled, predictably, with a variety of colorful candies, undoubtedly the fruits of their last Hogsmeade holiday. Striped licorice allsorts, mottled Every Flavor Beans, gleaming sherberts, geological chunks of toffee. She was suddenly and forcefully reminded of how little she had eaten today.

"And you haven't - you know - done anything to them, have you?"

Fred gasped and George jumped a step back, clutching his chest. "How dare you," whispered Fred, evidently breathless with shock. George shook his head sadly.

"You know, trust is a vital part of any working relationship, El."

Eleanor rolled her eyes.

"Enjoy them," Fred said, leaning close to her, the mirth gone from his face and a rare, soft look in his eyes.

With that, the twins disappeared around a bend in the corridor. As always, the space they left behind them seemed emptier and more silent than it had been before they came, as if joy were a palpable thing, a thing that somehow stuck to them. She sighed wearily and turned, absently murmuring the password - "Metutum Diluculum" - and heading through the near-deserted common room and up to her dormitory. All of her roommates were already in.

"'Lo, El," said Celosia Sutter, a tall girl with a messy blonde bun held in place by an unused quill. She hardly looked up from her book, Ludicrously Complicated Runes and their Infuriatingly Simplistic Translations. Across the room, Jin Woo, a thin girl with a shaggy pixie cut, gave her a shy smile and a wave. Her other roommates, Abigail Beauchamps and Mary Jane Abbott, ignored her. She was used to this. She sat cross-legged on her bed and contemplated her bag of candy. Her black and white cat Pandora leapt sinuously onto the bed and gave the bag a delicate sniff.

"The twins gave me these," she said thoughtfully. "What do you think they'll do to me?"

Jin giggled. Celosia sighed deeply. "Best case: they'll go right to your thighs. Worst case: they'll turn you into a salamander and I'll be forced to chase you all over the room and bottle you up in a mayonnaise jar. And then I won't have time to study, and I will fail my Ancient Runes exam, and in my subsequent rage I will smash your salamander body into tiny green pieces. In other words, please don't eat them." She irritably turned a page. "By the way, how was your Potions practical?"

Eleanor shuddered. "I don't want to talk about it. I do want, however," - she drew a licorice from the bag - "to drown my sorrows in glucose. Down the hatch." She popped it in her mouth and chewed carefully, experimentally. It tasted all of the ways expected of a licorice allsort. She held up her hands. They were still human-shaped and of normal coloration. "Well, there's a first time for everything."

"You're eating those now? Right before bed?" said Abigail sourly, from across the room. Mary Jane whispered something in her ear and they giggled secretively. Eleanor rolled her eyes dismissively, feeling only a slight internal pinch. She had roomed with them far too long to be seriously wounded. She dropped the bag on her bedside table, gave Pandora a firm stroke down her sleek, flexible back, and headed to the bathroom to groom for bed.

She felt a little guilty for her skepticism of the Weasleys' intentions. I didn't even thank them, she thought, running a comb absently through her hair. They had only tried to help her salvage what would otherwise have been a sorry waste of a day, and she had behaved as though they were offering her a dream date with Sirius Black. She felt a twinge of sympathy for them. Life must be difficult when no one takes you seriously, she thought. Not that the twins do much to remedy that situation. She frowned at her reflection in the mirror.

"It's not my fault you're having a bad hair day, dear," it scolded. Her frown deepened. Her hair was looking a bit flaccid. She stuck her tongue out at herself, feeling sulky. Then she screamed.

"Weasleys! Damned, bloody, blasted, fucking Weasleys!" Eleanor hopped up and down in front of the mirror in a smoking fury.

"What? Eleanor, what's wrong, for Godric's sake?" Celosia cried, skidding on the bathroom floor in her socks. She must have heard from all the way across the hall. Eleanor whirled to face her, tongue protruding angrily from her mouth.

It had turned bright yellow. And then electric blue. And then a shocking purple. And then a brilliant orange. A carnival of colors pulsed like an ambulance light on her tongue. Celosia clapped a hand to her mouth and split into giggles. Eleanor couldn't stop a short laugh from heaving out of her, and then another, and in a moment they were clutching one another for support, their knees wobbling dangerously, their breathless, choking laughter echoing off the bathroom tile.

* * *

Eleanor had left a sliver of space between her bed-curtains so that the moon could shine in on her face. She had never liked falling asleep in heavy darkness. When she was a child, she had nearly set herself on fire more than once after falling asleep with a wand on Lumos lying on the pillow beside her. Pandora jumped off the side of the bed, rustling the casements and leaving them swinging. Her light footsteps spanned the room and faded away.

The sick, clenching neurosis of the day was evaporating. Damn the Weasleys, she thought. And bless them. With the help of Jin Woo, the resident Charms prodigy, she and Celosia had managed to get her tongue to stop flashing colors. Instead, it had settled on one color: a rich, royal purple. She smiled faintly. It must be good to be a Weasley, to always have a gag or a grin at the ready, to own an unflickering belief that all sadnesses and sicknesses can be mended with a little well-placed humour. In a tumbling, shouting, loving family like theirs, optimism was as good as a birthright. She felt a cold twist in the pit of her stomach. She shouldn't envy them their lives.

Maybe she could take a lesson from them. Maybe she should believe tonight that everything was going to be all right, that bad things didn't happen to good people, that licorice allsorts could heal a heart.

She fell asleep with the moon setting below her windowsill and a small glow of hope in the center of her chest.

This chapter's title is a lyric from "Nothing Can Stop Me" by Heavens to Betsy.