Chapter 36
Taylor hugged her mum, sniffling harder. She waved her goodbye, then retreated inside the castle. She kept track of their progress until they were out of her range. She didn’t cry, she wasn’t going to cry. She meandered through the castle with no destination in mind, until she ran into her friend.
Luna gave her one good look and opened her arms, offering a hug.
Taylor did not cry. There was just some infiltration somewhere that happened to fall on Luna’s shoulder. Really.
The duo retreated to their tea-room for privacy. Once it stopped raining inside the castle, Taylor raised her arm to wipe her nose on her robes’ sleeve, then paused mid-action. She pulled out her wand instead, warily pointing it at her own face.
“Scourgify,” she whispered.
Her mouth and nose filled with soap bubbles. Taylor gagged.
Meanwhile, Luna was preparing the tea and arranging the table. “I like your mum,” she said, pouring hot water into a cup.
“Your dad is cool, too,” Taylor managed to say, after wiping the soap away on her sleeve.
After she finished cleaning her mouth, Taylor sipped the tea. She’d wanted to tell Luna about her power once she was back, but being ambushed by the headmaster threw that plan out of the window. And this was as good a chance as any other. Once again, she had Dee grab an armful of spiders.
“The headmaster lied. Snape isn’t recovering at St. Mungo’s. They don’t know when he’ll wake up.”
Luna hmed.
“He was trying to read my mind, but it backfired and he got hurt.”
“I think daddy would be very happy if I sent him that.”
“I’m not a seer,” Taylor said instead.
Luna tilted her head.
Taylor extended her hand. Dee flew in, carrying a bunch of rainbow spiders.
“These are the rainbow spiders. I used them to weave the pyjamas.”
The spiders waved.
Luna’s eyes were wide.
“And this is Dee,” Taylor said, gently petting the pixie’s head.
Luna was silent for a long time. Taylor had expected more reaction from her friend and the silence was as dreadful as any yelled condemnation. Was this when Luna called her a freak? When she’d stomp away, telling everybody how weird Taylor was? Always playing with bugs and sitting on the dirt and talking to them like they’re people?
“Are you weirded out?” she couldn’t help but ask.
“Why,” Luna said, her voice still dreamy, with her eyes fixed on the pixie, “haven’t you weaved clothes for him yet?”
Taylor didn’t understand the words for a moment, and when she did she burst out laughing. She couldn’t say when the laughing turned into crying.
It took a while to get the waterworks into control.
Taylor brought Dum and Bity to introduce them to Luna as well. Once introductions were made, she recounted the version of events from her point of view, how she knew things with her bugs, how she had started to use the pixies and bugs to trip and get back at the bullies, and how things had grown out of proportion.
Taylor confessed about exploding Snape’s lab because of what he had said to Luna, and overhearing Dumbledore’s meeting with the staff about not knowing when Snape was waking up. She talked about the secret room, and finding it was on the seventh floor near Barnabas the Barmy, and about the many strange and nasty bugs she saw in Knockturn Alley.
It all tumbled out in an incoherent story.
Luna listened to everything.
“Thank you,” she said. She nodded and patted Taylor’s shoulder when Taylor was done with her recounting.
Taylor just hugged her friend. What a silly girl. Taylor was the one that should have been saying thank you.
After the initial hubbub of Snape not being in the castle died out, things seemed to have calmed down until Wednesday. When they arrived for dinner there was a professor they had never seen sitting at the professor’s table. That sent the rumour mill into overdrive once again.
The first thing Taylor noticed was how large the new professor was, and how old he was, and how he was missing most of his hair. He had an immense belly, so large that the buttons on his waistcoat looked about to burst off.
Taylor could imagine him entering a room: first the belly, then the rest of him. That felt uncharitable even inside her head.
The new professor seemed jolly enough. He laughed and chatted with everyone. Even the ever dour McGonagall had a small smile for him.
Dumbledore didn’t lose time to make introductions.
“Good evening to you all,” he said with open hands, like he wanted to hug the whole Great Hall. “Let me introduce your new potions professor, Horace Slughorn.”
Slughorn got up. The new potions master smiled and waved at everyone. He was short too. The top of his head barely reached Dumbledore’s chin.
“Professor Slughorn will resume his position as Potions Master and Head of Slytherin house while Professor Snape is still recovering. Please, give him a warm welcome!”
The reception was mixed. Some of the students, especially those from magical families seemed to know the new potions master, at least by name. A few of the Slytherins seemed happy, which left Taylor afraid he was another shade of Snape.
It was no surprise then that Taylor spied on every potions class. What she found left her pleasantly surprised.
Slughorn wasn’t perfect by any measure. He did have his biases which were immediately clear, but he was nowhere near as bad as Snape had been.
First, Slughorn seemed to favour rich, famous or talented students.
“Harry, my boy!” Slughorn said the moment Harry walked into his class. “Come, gather around with everyone else, don’t be shy.”
Slughorn had a table set up with several bubbling cauldrons with many students crowding there already.
The look on Harry's face, even through her bugs’ eyes, had been very funny. Taylor had to hold back the laughter.
“Welcome to potions class. Brewing potions requires a lot of attention and dedication,” Slughorn said, thumbs hooked into his waistcoat. “And more nerve than people give it credit for.” That got nervous laughs out of the students. “Any fool with a decent recipe can brew a Boil-Cure. What separates a master from an apprentice is knowing why and how the recipe works. That will let you adjust any recipe to fit any need.” Slughorn’s gaze panned over the gathered students.
“Now. I’ve laid these out for you because I find students learn a great deal more from a bubbling cauldron than a chalkboard.” He put his hands out. “Nobody’s to touch. Nobody’s to lean over. Miss, ah, Bulstrode, that includes breathing on it. Thank you.”
Taylor had a beetle on the ceiling beam and a pair of flies working the edges of the room.
“This one first.” Slughorn tapped the rim of a cauldron full of what looked like clear water. “Harry, my boy. What do you make of it?”
Harry’s eyes narrowed, and said nothing.
“Cautious. Very wise.” Slughorn beamed at him. He turned to the rest of the students. “You don’t guess at a potion you haven’t identified for certain, that’s a lesson half my N.E.W.T. students never learn.”
Somebody at the back made a small strangled noise. Hermione’s hand had been up since he asked the question.
“Yes, yes, go on.”
“It’s Veritaserum, sir. You can identify it by how it looks: It’s clear and odourless like water. It takes twenty-eight days to brew."
Slughorn’s eyebrows climbed.
“Twenty-eight days,” he agreed, smiling. “And a great deal of stirring nobody warns you about. She’s correct.” Slughorn looked at the class again. “This is a truth potion so powerful that three drops would have you spilling your innermost secrets for this entire class to hear.” He turned to Hermione again. “Five points to Gryffindor, and your name, my dear?”
“Hermione Granger.”
“Granger, Granger. Not a name I know,” he said.
Slughorn moved on to the second cauldron, a spiralling steam with a shell-pink shimmer on the surface, and Hermione's hand was up before he’d finished turning.
“Amortentia, sir. The strongest love potion in the world. It’s supposed to smell different to everyone, depending on what attracts them.”
“Quite right, and quite enough about that one for a class your age. But remember this: Amortentia doesn’t create true love, only an obsession.”
Hermione also knew what the other two potions were by sight, which impressed the professor a lot.
Taylor was surprised to learn the new professor even helped during brewing.
“No, no, Mr. Longbottom,” Slughorn said after he approached Neville. “See here,” he pointed at the book, “You have to crush them first, then cut, only after that you put them in the cauldron. If you don’t crush it, your cauldron is going to melt.”
And so, when Friday arrived, Taylor went to the new Potions Classroom (hurray, it wasn’t in the dungeons!) to officially meet her new professor.
“Welcome to potions class,” he greeted. On display were the same four cauldrons from the lessons Taylor spied on. “Brewing potions requires a lot of attention and dedication…” he said and Taylor tuned him out. She’d heard that same introduction several times already. It wasn’t bad, but he repeated it almost word for word.
After the intro, Slughorn asked about the bubbling potions on display, which Taylor also didn't answer, because it would be cheating. Unlike Hermione, she had no clue how to identify any of them by sight or smell. She knew what they were because she’d spied on his class. Most of those potions weren’t even first year material.
The class was pleasantly eventful. They reviewed potions they learned in the first term, and in the second part of the class, they were to brew a herbicide potion, which would later be used in Herbology classes.
Luna and Taylor kept to their same arrangement. Taylor gathered and prepared the ingredients according to the book’s (and Luna’s) instructions, while Luna made sure the brewing and timings followed the book’s explanation.
By the end of the class, Slughorn approached their table, checking over the result.
“My, what a surprise!” he said, examining their potion. “What a superb technique Miss Lovegood. Must run in the family. Take five points!”
Luna had one of her rare, small smiles and Taylor’s opinion of the man went up several notches.
That good mood carried up for the rest of the day. Luna snuck into Taylor’s bunk to sleep.
“What do you think about the new professor?” Taylor asked.
“I like him,” Luna said. “He taught my daddy and mum.”
Taylor closed her eyes, setting for sleep. Now, if only she could find a way to make Lockhart disappear too, things would be perfect. She snorted at her own thoughts.
Things seemed to settle into a routine after that. She spied on the first house meeting where Slughorn broke out the new order of things. These weren’t his exact words, but the message amounted to:
Don’t be stupid. Stop being petty bullies. Make connections and friends. Be useful and people will curry favour with you. That’s how you go far in life. You bunch are doing the opposite, making enemies instead.
Without Snape to enable Slytherins students, and with Slughorn not shying away from punishing the green bullies, the amount of attempted harassment reduced drastically, and Taylor had to spend less and less effort with the curse.
That gave her more time to spend with the important things, like learning new spells with Luna.
They tried every new magic in their book, some with no success at all. Luna’s book was very fancy. It was enchanted by the creator to be capable of projecting text out of the page for simpler reading. The book was also capable of conjuring various objects, even entire rooms, to provide a safe environment for practising the various spells.
There was this one charm, called the Patronus, that no matter how much they tried, there wasn’t even a single wisp of magic leaving their wands.
In transfiguration classes, Taylor taunted Nneka about their new spells, as a way of inviting her and Ginny to another tea-party. Nneka showed up, Ginny didn’t.
“I don’t know what’s up with her,” Nneka said. “Since holidays, when she’s not crying her eyes out, it is like she’s not even there.”
That left Taylor even more worried about her friend. The bugs also confirmed that when not crying, Ginny had developed a strange love-hate relationship with her diary. She’d throw it away, only to fetch it back the next moment.
That didn’t seem healthy and while she didn’t want to intrude, Ginny really looked like she needed help.
Taylor went to bed thinking about how to help her friend. Maybe she could involve Luna too. Could they play Quidditch with only four people? Maybe they could invite more students to play? That ought to cheer up Ginny, right?