Roots

Chapter 3: "I cannot name this. I cannot explain this. And I really don't want to."

Tap-chink. Tap-chink-chink-chink. Tap.

Eleanor jerked out of her reverie over a leather-bound textbook and looked quickly around her dorm room. It was empty. She sat up on her bed and clutched the book to her chest, holding her head high and straining to divine where the sound had come from. Pandora's ears flattened against her skull.

Tap-ch-chink. Tap.

She turned to the window on her right, expecting a owl perched on the ledge outside, and nearly fell off the edge of her bed from surprise.

"Oh, what in the hell...?" She marched to the window and pushed it open. Fred and George Weasley hovered a few feet away on their broomsticks, each holding a handful of Every Flavor Beans. Fred's arm was raised, halted mid-pelt. "The fuck are you doing?" she demanded, arms akimbo.

"Don't be too happy to see us or anything. Wouldn't want you to have to change your robes," snarked George.

Her shoulders sagged guiltily. "Sorry. I've been studying all afternoon. Not in the best of moods."

Fred and George just stared at her. "Can we, er, come in, please? Before McGonagall comes round and sees us?" Fred said at last.

Eleanor's eyes widened. "Oh!" She opened the window as wide as it would go and stepped back to let them pass. They floated one after the other all the way into the room before dismounting their matching Twigger 90s. They let the broomsticks hang in the air and both bounced rambunctiously onto Celosia's bed. Pandora fled to the shade underneath Eleanor's bed, her tail puffed like a bottlebrush. As much as Fred and George begged and bribed and fussed at her, she had never warmed to them. Eleanor suspected that the cat's dislike was well-deserved; they had probably once tried to feed her Pepper Imps or something.

"We've been looking for you since yesterday supper," whined Fred. "Cel said you hadn't been down to the common room today."

"We wanted to check on your tongue," said George. "Has it worn off yet?"

She sat cross-legged on her bed and stuck out her tongue for them. The shocking purple had faded to a light berry shade.

"Hm," said George, leaning forward for a closer look. "Kaleidus Charm's supposed to last three full days."

"What's got you wedged up in here all day, El? Is there an exam we've forgotten about? Or slept through the announcement of?" asked Fred, falling back onto Celosia's pillows.

Eleanor held up her book and let them read the cover.

"Potions?" spat George, looking appalled.

"On a Saturday?" exclaimed Fred, looking horrified.

"I can see why you're in such good spirits, then," George snorted.

She shot him an acid glare. "Well, with all of your tender love and support I'll be my giddy old self in no time, won't I?"

George rolled his eyes. "Put the knife down, we just came to see how you were."

Fred looked suddenly thoughtful. "How was your session with Snape, El?"

Her posture slumped. She dropped her chin into her hands, elbows propped on her knees. "As expected," she said quietly.

Fred hoisted his eyebrows. "Mm-hmm?"

Eleanor sighed. "He's just - intimidating. He feels the need to lord his power over you every single second. He made me stand in front of his desk like an idiot until five o'clock exactly, then he lectured me a mile a minute for one hour - not a nanosecond more - while staring at me like I was some excised frog-tumor in one of his revolting jars. Actually, I'm sure he regards his specimens with more fondness than he did me. He looked like he wanted to flick me off the edge of his desk like an insect."

"If it makes you feel any better, he looks at everyone like that," said George. "Even the other professors."

"He just has a way of making you feel like utter crap, doesn't he?" Eleanor said, her voice breaking subtly. She felt a sting of humiliation at being so needy and vulnerable in front of the twins. She straightened her spine and held her head up.

Fred drew breath as if to speak, then paused. "It's what he does best," he said finally.

George smiled impishly. "Go on, then. Do your impression of him. Now that you've seen him up close and horrible."

Eleanor scowled at him. She was in no mood to entertain. "Fuck off," she muttered, irritated, and fell back onto her bed.

Fred and George gave her a round of enthusiastic applause. "Well done," said George. "Forgot the accent, though."

Eleanor snickered despite herself. "Now get the hell out of my room, will you? I have to feed Pandora and go deliver to Hagrid. And the Bitches of Eastwick could walk in any minute and bust us."

"Where's Eastwick?" asked George, frowning. Eleanor dismissed the subject entirely with a wave of her hand.

"You will come to supper, won't you?" asked Fred. "We've got to talk to you about April fools." Eleanor nodded indulgently and the twins hopped on their brooms.

"By the way," drawled Eleanor. "Snape was a big fan of your, uh, handiwork." She flicked her tongue at them. "Seemed to genuinely scare the holy hell out of him."

Fred and George grinned and high-fived each other, speeding off around the bend of the West tower. Watching them go, Eleanor wished that she had thanked them. For what, though, she wasn't sure. Pandora peeked her dark, angular face out from under the bed and mewed inquisitively. Eleanor smiled faintly and stooped to tickle her behind her incongruous snow-white ears.

"They're gone, baby," she said softly, a little sadly. "Will you eat?" She pulled a bag of kibble out of her bedside drawer and rattled it a little. Pandora withdrew under the bed again. Eleanor sagged resignedly, grabbed her dragon-hide gloves, and headed outside.

The greenhouses were predictably deserted for a Saturday afternoon. She flitted from enclosure to enclosure, gathering an armful of leaves, and vines, and bulbs. The only other person she encountered was young Neville Longbottom who dropped by greenhouse three for a pot of bluebells and chattered amiably at her for a few minutes before padding back to Gryffindor tower. Eleanor disinterred pale, fleshy roots from the black, spice-scented soil, stabbing expertly and fiercely with her battered steel trowel, working her tension out through her lithe and calloused hands. The greenhouses, laden as they were with languid greenery, dripping leaves, overripeness, and rich organic scents, always gave her a feeling of competence and fecundity. She knew the plants like she knew herself. Better, perhaps. She knew their secrets, their hidden talents and dangers, their potentials, their inner magics. She knew how to coax the shyest of buds into bloom. She knew how to poison the most malicious weed, make it curl away into a limp tangle of bracken. It's too bad the talent didn't spread itself around a bit, she had been told, again and again. She wondered often if she would pay for her single gift with a plethora of deficits. If her whole life would be defined by can and can't, with no in-betweens, no compromises.

It's too bad, she thought bitterly, yanking a root from the soil.

When she reached Hagrid's hut her arms were brimming with leafy stalks and gritty bulbs, so she kicked the door to get Hagrid's attention.

"Hey there, Ellie!" he said, swinging the door wide and cheerfully ushering her inside. "Oh, yeh've got a fine crop fer me today, have yeh?"

Eleanor nodded and dumped her cache on Hagrid's table. The stalks and grasses fanned out, and the bulbs and roots shone pale and corpselike in the dim daylight. "I've brought fluxweed, knotgrass, fresh foxnettles - careful, this was a feisty crop, they've probably still got a bit of bite in them - some odd leftover roots, and a few vegetables. Feed the redroot to your Thestrals, it's great for their teeth."

Hagrid beamed and picked through the harvest, examining. "Have a seat, Ellie, rest yerself a minute. Care fer a cuppa?" Without waiting for her answer, Hagrid bustled to his huge cast-iron kettle and put it over the fire. "How's yer kitty?" he asked, measuring tea leaves into an impossibly twee china pot.

"She's fine. Not eating much lately. I think she's been catching things around the castle at night."

Hagrid settled himself onto one of his huge wooden chairs. It groaned painfully under his incredible weight.

"So, Ellie," he began, an uncharacteristically stern downturn to his voice. "I Hear yeh've been havin' some troubles with yer marks?"

Eleanor sank into the depths of her oversized chair, huffing uncomfortably.

"I'm being tutored," she replied, sullen and defensive.

Hagrid's furry face spread into a mischievous grin. "Heard that, too." He leaned forward to whisper, the gesture laced with conspiracy. The force of his breath nearly blew her hair back. "He can be a strict one, Professor Snape, but -"

"He's a Napoleonic bastard-face," muttered Eleanor.

"Language, Ellie!" scolded Hagrid. "An' lemme finish. He's surely an unpleasant one, but he'll come through fer yeh in a pinch. Don't tell him I told yeh..." Hagrids eyes shifted back and forth. "... but he's stayed up more'n a few nights mixin' up medicine fer one o' me beasts that's taken ill. Grumbles about it, sure, but does it all the same."

Eleanor raised her eyebrows, circumspect. The kettle began its low banshee song, building up to a screaming crescendo. Hagrid pushed out of his chair.

"Just sayin' yeh might give him a fair chance. Make it easier on the both of yeh. He ain't all 'e seems to be." With that, he turned and tended to the kettle. Eleanor watched his broad back with a narrowed, skeptical gaze. Hagrid, she mused, had a very charitable nature.

* * *

Snape swept across the classroom with his usual villainous grace.

"The products of your last assignment were predictably abysmal," he sneered. "Have none of you yet learned to follow directions? I fail to see how you expect to receive a N.E.W.T. in this class if you haven't even figured out how to read a series of instructions properly."

The classroom rustled a bit with cringes and sheepish shrugs. Eleanor stared straight at Snape's face, her shoulders squared. She wouldn't give him the benefit of her embarrassment.

"We will begin again," Snape said disdainfully. "With a simple Pepperup. Since this class is so obviously in need of... remediation." Here, his eyes lit and lingered upon Eleanor. She did not look away, though her lip twitched reflexively. His eyelids drooped smugly, and she hated him.

"Can anyone," he began, still staring at Eleanor. "Tell me what is the active ingredient in Pepperup Potion?" A few hands went up, but he ignored them. "Dewey? Can you?"

Eleanor drew a deep breath. This she knew.

"Peppermint leaves," she said, quavering slightly and cursing herself for it.

"And the active ingredients in that?" he prompted.

"Menthol and caffeic acids." Her voice was steady now.

"Ah, yes, our little Herbologist," Snape said, condescension curling through his tone. "Well then. What catalyzes the stimulant compounds? What gives Pepperup Potion its power?"

Eleanor blinked, furiously excavating her memory. He had spoken of this during their session.

"The feathers of the - Aethonan?" Snape gave no encouragement, not even a blink of acknowledgement. "The... levitation and weightlessness charms woven into the feathers... when removed from the body of the Aethonan and combined with the peppermint leaves... take on a mood-elevating property...?"

Snape stared at her for a beat, long enough that she was sure she had been wrong, before giving a curt nod.

"Be thankful that I'll be tutoring you again this evening," he said. "Perhaps you'll be more confident after a review." Sniggers bubbled around the room, mostly from the Ravenclaws. Even Celosia looked deliberately the other way, as if embarrassed for her. Or of her. She swallowed hard and held Snape's gaze. "Five o'clock, Dewey," he muttered. "I trust you know enough to arrive on time."

He swooped away and began the lecture.

That evening she waited outside his office door until bare seconds before five, hoping desperately that her watch was in sync with his desk clock. When she finally knocked, he ordered her inside with his usual laconic bark.

"Sit," he commanded from behind his desk, and she obeyed. This time she knew to have her quill and parchment at the ready; still, he began before she could settle herself.

"The Aethonan has evolved in quite a different manner than the creatures it resembles. It is nothing so vulgar as a birdlike horse, nor a horselike bird. By strict physical reckonings, its wings are neither broad nor sturdy enough to support its body weight during flight. It is the magic inherent in its being that gives it the ability to fly. Its feathers are suffused with - what, Dewey?"

It took her a moment to realize he expected her to fill in the blank.

"With a - an interlocking sequence of charms which -"

"We know them as charms simply because we have no other words for them," he said sharply. Eleanor felt strangely and severely chastised, as if what she had said was a punishable offense. Snape went on, leaning forward, his hands clasped together on his desk. "Charms are an artifice created by wizards, a way of harnessing and utilizing magic. The magic of creatures, though, and of flora, and the elements, is shaped and developed through a series of confluences and coincidences and necessities and disasters so complex we cannot begin to grasp them. The discipline of potion-making is the closest we ever come to understanding and applying the natural magics. Now, what are the properties of these magics?"

"In - in the feathers...?" She felt oddly frightened of him; his face was livid, animated, lit with an energy she had never seen before. She had the odd sense that he might attack her if she made a wrong move; he had the tensed, fixated look of a cat poised to strike

"In the feathers, Miss Dewey," he said mockingly. Her throat tightened; she was horrified by her dangerous proximity to tears

"They create a - a near-weightlessness, which allows the -"

"Oversimplified," he snapped. She flinched visibly. His eyes narrowed, seeming to measure her. "You've swallowed that over-digested textbook pulp whole, haven't you? How very Ravenclaw." His lips curled maliciously. Suddenly, in a panicked burst, she thought, he's trying to break me. He wants out of here as much as I do. He's trying to make me rush out of here in tears, or flip out so that he can punish me. She set her jaw and stared at him defiantly as he continued the lecture. It won't be that easy, Snape, she thought. She let the words echo inside herself until she believed them, taking notes as calmly as she could manage.

That night she camped inside the casements of her bed, wand lit and propped against a bedpost, long after her roommates had fallen asleep. Bent over her Potions texts and the copious, messy notes she had made during their two sessions, she rubbed the kinks out of her neck and read the words over and over, fighting to give them meaning, fighting to make them stick, her eyes narrow with spite.

During the next Potions class he bore down on her harder than ever.

"And the driving force behind all of this, Dewey?"

She looked up at him with a hard set to her face. "A very basic magic in the hippogriff's beak, which allows the animal to crush its prey with a much greater force than would be possible given ordinary physics. When the beak is powdered and diluted, its inherent powers become flexible, and enhance the magical muscle relaxants found in spikewood sap," she said evenly, almost insolently. She could feel Celosia shift next to her, and knew she was staring at Eleanor intently.

Snape tilted his head back, regarding her down the length of his generous nose, a curious gleam in his eyes.

"Correct," he said simply, and finished the lecture without addressing her again.

As she headed out the door, he called, "Dewey?"

She turned, her stomach clenching nervously.

"I trust I needn't remind you anymore of our meeting schedule?"

She nodded, relieved, and he dismissed her wordlessly.

That evening, they left mood-elevators behind in favor of healing draughts.

"Our next unit will include Skele-Gro and a variety of skin-healing salves and pastes. Few students are able to calibrate their medical potions finely enough that they heal completely and without side effects. It will require intense concentration, intense dedication." He paused, watching her, as if waiting for an affirmation. She nodded quickly, and he began. She wrote as hastily as she could, feeling frequently left behind by his quick, lofty elocution, but wanting to get as much on paper as possible. After a few minutes, he pushed back his chair, startling her - he had always conducted these sessions seated, from across the desk - and stood, smoothly continuing the lecture, pacing the floor of the classroom as he spoke.

"Do you see now why successful mediwizards are such a rarity?" he asked after a while, turning sharply on his heel to face her. Pausing a second to wonder if the question was rhetorical, she decided to take the risk.

"I was wondering," she began, testing, but he did not stop her. "Why is it most people are so inept at potions? You'd think anyone able to read and tell time would be able to put together a working brew, right?" He cocked his head to the side, regarding her fixedly. "...Sir?" she added meekly.

"This craft is not mere cooking, Dewey," he said, in a quiet, terrifying way that made her stomach boil up and her muscles tense involuntarily. She wondered dizzily if he was angry, if he was about to lash out. He continued in the same soft tone. "Otherwise yourself and your housemates would excel at it. Potions manage to be both an art and a science - and more, infinitely more." His voice was low, almost imperceptibly tremulous, strangely hushed and reverent. He spoke like a Muggle clergyman, not in throes of evangelical fury but with a deep, nearly humble sense of awe. "There is a logic in it, a mathematical cleanness. And there is abstraction. There is artistry. There is passion." His body was preternaturally still as he spoke; his face, however, worked and shifted, more expressive than she had ever seen it. She couldn't take her eyes off of him, and her quill hand fell still.

She did not realize how long he had been talking, nor how tightly she had been gripping her quill, until her hand began to spasm. She looked down at it, breaking the eye contact they had held for - she glanced at his desktop clock - two and a half hours.

"Oh!" she cried, halting him mid-sentence "I'm sorry, Professor, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to keep you so long. I'm sorry." A part of her registered that it was hardly her fault; another, more instinctual one drove her to placate him and get out as quickly as possible. She scooped her things into her book bag hastily as he watched her from the center of the room. "It was fascinating, I'm sorry, I really am, I have to get back to Ravenclaw, it's so late, I'm sorry." She rushed past him trailing apologies behind her, as he regarded her with a look of intrigued confusion, and said nothing.

Four faces bobbed up to watch her as she rushed into her dorm room. Abigail and Mary Jane trained on her their deadly-beautiful predatory eyes, smirks twitching on their smooth faces. Jin and Celosia wore pinched, worried looks.

"Wendelin's ghost, Eleanor, we thought he'd killed you!" cried Celosia. "Did he give you detention on top of your - er, session?"

"No," Eleanor said vaguely, still reeling and dazed from... whatever that was. "No, the lecture just ran long."

"Is he terribly long-winded? Probably in love with the sound of his own voice, the way he drones on and on," chirped Celosia, perching on the edge of her bed, clearly expecting gossip.

"I guess," shrugged Eleanor.

"Is he still bullying you with questions you can't answer? Don't worry too much about that, he just does it to feel superior. I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't have the slightest idea what he's talking about - we just assume he's so intelligent that it's all going over our heads." Celosia smiled smugly.

Eleanor snapped alert. She searched herself for a rebuttal, a way to make Celosia understand, and found no adequate way to express herself. "Trust me," she said pointedly. "That's not the case." Her eyes bored into Celosia, who looked away uncomfortably.

"Whatever you say," she said repressively, and grabbed a textbook off her bedside shelf, effectively ending the conversation.

Eleanor sighed wearily and stretched out on her bed. She felt almost dizzy, as though coming down from an adrenaline high.

"Where's Pandora?" she asked blankly.

"She went out," said Jin.

"The mighty huntress," smirked Celosia.

Eleanor pulled her Potions notes and textbooks out of her bag and closed the bed-curtains around herself, cocooning.

She had so many questions. She cracked open one of her books.

This chapter's title is a lyric from "Shameless" by Ani DiFranco.