Draco Malfoy (dracoed) wrote in reoccurrence, @ 2020-06-26 11:52:00 |
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Draco let out a huge lungful of faintly pink-coloured air and let his head fall back hard on the back of his chair. Another botched experiment should not by now have been a surprise, but it was certainly no less frustrating. The last page of scribbled notes by his hand read - 28.4: added 1m dry strb, 1/2m ditt dilute. Result: effect not improved. Tastes like shit, strawberry very bad idea, what were you thinking? He wondered, not for the first time, if he’d been kidding himself when he had reasoned that being good at Potions would automatically translate to being able to devise a tobacco substitute based on the ingredients of the Calming Draught, ultimately resulting in a mixture which, when smoked, would have a similar or improved effect to a packet of Silk Cut, without the taste of tar in actual cigarettes or the debilitating effects of pure dried gillyweed. It made sense, in theory. But so far all he’d actually succeeded in doing was creating a lung-burning combination of dried ingredients that tasted like rotten fruit. What a perfect end to a perfectly shit week. All right, coaxing Salazar Slytherin into going after Perfect Saint Potter had been a bit of a highlight - and so far he even seemed to have gotten away with it - but the startling reoccurrence of his old Potions Professor had soured whatever brief petty triumph he might have felt. That was bringing up all kinds of disturbing things He hadn't slept since. Somewhere overhead a bell rung. He sighed again, even heavier this time. The damn dinner bell, when there were only two people in a house big enough to sleep twenty, not including servants. It was a pretence at something normal, just like the paint on the walls and the fresh bedding in all the guest rooms. Just a smokescreen. He was considering whether to just ignore the sound when it rang again. “All right, all right,” he muttered, getting up and stretching. He’d set up his little temporary lab in the cellar, which for some reason was the only room in the house where he could think straight. Maybe it was because he’d hardly ever been down here, or that it sometimes reminded him of the Slytherin common room. Maybe he’d just become the kind of creature who felt safest underground. He brushed flakes of dried strawberry off the front of his stained robe as he got up, thinking that he had probably been right three batches ago, and the problem was the ingredients. He couldn’t just dry things meant to be used in a liquid potion and expect them to work the same way. And he needed better, fresher ingredients too, not things leftover from his seventh year potions kit; but that would require actually going into a shop, since he couldn’t trust something so complex to a House Elf. That idea was not at all endearing. He could count the number of times he’d been seen in public in the wizarding world in the last seven or so years on one hand. Narcissa was waiting for him in the dining room. He fell into the chair that had been pulled out for him - with no display whatsoever of any of the table manners with which he had been raised - and glowered. “Can we not be done with the damned dinner bell, Mother?” he muttered. “We aren’t exactly a household that requires communal dining.” |