[Apparition Class]
"If you are seventeen years of age, or will turn seventeen by the thirty-first of August, you may take part in a twelve-week course of Apparition lessons, taught by an Apparition instructor from the Ministry of Magic."
Those wishing to take part should sign their name below.
Fee: twelve Galleons.
On the first day of the new term, a large notice appeared on the announcement board of the Gryffindor common room.
"Well, well—going to sign up?"
The moment they saw the notice; the young lions grew instantly excited.
All four of Gryffindor's reigning stars met the requirements to sign up.
Hermione was the oldest—the tail end of the seventies, a year older than the three children of the eighties: Sherlock, Harry, and Ron. Her birthday was the nineteenth of September, and by wizarding reckoning she was already an adult witch.
Sherlock's birthday was the sixth of January. He, too, was already of age.
Ron's birthday was the first of March. He was of age as well.
Only Harry, whose birthday fell on the thirty-first of July, still had half a year to go before he could be counted an adult wizard.
To the Ron of days past, twelve Galleons would have been a steep price indeed.
But now, well—Just as Ron pulled out his quill, about to sign his name beneath Harry's—
Lavender crept up behind him and covered his eyes with her hands, cooing in a honeyed voice: "Guess who, Won-Won?"
The others could only fall silent.
Who else would call Ron by that name, if not her?
Watching the two of them tangle together in something like a standing wrestling match, Hermione tugged at Sherlock's sleeve, signalling that they should leave promptly.
Harry turned and saw that Sherlock and Hermione had already walked off, and hurried after them.
It was plain enough that he, too, had no wish to linger near Ron and Lavender.
"Think they're a bit much?"
Hermione asked, smiling, once she saw Harry had caught up.
"Er—well," Harry hesitated a moment before deciding to simply speak his mind, "I mean, Cho and I were but never like that."
"One can't generalize from one couple to another."
Under Harry's startled gaze, Sherlock said mildly, "As long as it makes them happy."
Ever since the notice had gone up, the sixth- and seventh-years had been unable to contain their excitement at the prospect of learning to Apparate.
Nearly everyone who qualified was talking of little else but the new course about to be offered.
Clearly, everyone longed for the ability to vanish and reappear at will.
Even someone as level-headed as Sherlock was no exception.
"Convenient, swift, efficient."
That was how Sherlock summed it up.
"For me, it will save a great deal of time and greatly improve my efficiency.
"When I first learned that magic was real, it was one of the chief reasons I chose to step through the door into this world."
Hermione and Harry both laughed.
Both of them knew perfectly well that Sherlock had already deduced a great many things the very first time he met Professor McGonagall.
Looking back now, it was hard to believe that had happened nearly seven years ago.
In a way, this was Sherlock simply staying true to where he'd started.
In the days that followed, aside from the excited talk of Apparition, the students' lives seemed to settle back into their usual rhythm.
Everyone went on swimming through the sea of knowledge, submitting to the trials of the N.E.W.T.s advanced classes.
Whatever the subject, the difficulty only grew with the times.
More and more students began to show a certain symptom a look in the eye that could only be described as a beauty untouched by the corruption of knowledge.
By this point in the term, everyone had finally come to realize something: Snape, Potions Master that he was, genuinely had real skill when it came to Defence Against the Dark Arts.
In some respects, he was even better than Lupin, the best teacher they'd had before him.
"I don't understand it."
Hermione said, pointing at the Half-Blood Prince's old Potions textbook.
"Harry managed to teach himself to become a Potions prodigy with nothing but a book which means Professor Snape is actually rather good at teaching. So why didn't he teach like this when he had us?"
"The mindset, the philosophy, the circumstances of a student are worlds apart from those of a teacher."
Sherlock said calmly.
"Besides, I've said it before—for Snape, taking a teaching post at Hogwarts was never anything more than a cover, a way of protecting Harry.
"He never wanted to do it in the first place especially since, in his eyes, most of the students he taught were fools.
"Under those circumstances, how could he possibly have treated teaching as a vocation?
"He simply taught by the book, and how much anyone learned was entirely up to them.
"It's only because he has such a strong interest in Defence Against the Dark Arts, and because the students in the advanced class tend to have a decent foundation already, that you've felt him to be different this time."
"Doesn't seem all that different to me," Harry said sourly. "He takes points off Gryffindor every single lesson."
Sherlock patted Harry on the shoulder. "Never mind—whatever points he takes, Professor Slughorn will only give them right back to you." Harry couldn't help a dry smile at that.
If Snape docked points at every excuse he could find, Slughorn handed them out just as freely.
During one Potions lesson—Slughorn began lecturing the class on Golpalott's Third Law.
It concerned poisons and their antidotes.
Apart from Sherlock and Hermione, not a soul in the room could follow it.
Because to accept Golpalott's Third Law was to accept that once the components of a poison had been correctly identified using Scarpin's Revelaspell, the goal was no longer simply to select an antidote for each individual component but to find the one antidote for the whole, the added ingredient that would counter them as a whole.
Under those conditions, it could then transform, through a process nearly indistinguishable from alchemy, a group of components that had nothing to do with one another into something new.
And, sure enough, no one understood it.
If that had been the end of it, it might have been bearable.
But then Slughorn, quite out of character, did not have them brew a potion straight from the textbook. Instead, he changed things up: everyone was to take a random dose of poison from his desk, and then, following Golpalott's Third Law, work out the specific antidote for it.
At that, Harry was completely at a loss.
"The Prince can't help you this time, Harry — you'll actually have to understand the principle behind it. No shortcuts here!"
From that alone, one could tell that Hermione had had quite enough of being outdone in every Potions lesson.
Being outdone by Sherlock was one thing, because she knew that was genuine talent.
But being outdone by Harry—that, to Hermione's mind, fell directly under what she'd just called "taking shortcuts."
She'd said nothing about it the entire previous term, but watching Slughorn treat Harry as his little Potions prince had left something festering in her all the same. Today, she meant to prove herself.
Harry, for his part, was well aware of this too.
Because the first time Slughorn made his rounds, he'd leaned eagerly toward Harry's cauldron, all ready to give one of his usual delighted cheers only to jerk his head back at once, coughing hard, driven off by the reek of rotten egg.
At that, not only Hermione but the other students—the ones Harry had been outshining all term wore expressions of the utmost satisfaction.
Not that any of them knew how Harry had managed to outdo both Sherlock and Hermione and become the top Potions student in the class.
But that hardly stopped them turning into lemon-sucking cynics over it.
Though Ron felt a small private thrill of satisfaction, seeing how helpless Harry looked, he still leaned in and asked quietly:
"So... he really didn't give you any hints at all?"
"None," Harry said glumly, flipping Advanced Potion-Making open to the chapter on antidotes to show Sherlock and Ron. The page on Golpalott's Third Law had not a single note scrawled on it.
Clearly, a Potions genius like Snape had grasped this particular law one so opaque to everyone else as effortlessly as Sherlock and Hermione had.
At a loss, Harry turned to Sherlock, his eyes pleading for help: "Sherlock, what am I supposed to do?"
Sherlock glanced at the vivid pink poison in front of Harry and gave a short laugh.
"Want me to brew the antidote for you?"
Harry understood at once what his old friend meant.
Brew him a proper antidote on the spot, then swap it in.
"Sherlock!"
Hermione's brow shot up immediately, and she lowered her voice: "You can't keep spoiling him like this!"
Ron, meanwhile, quietly shifted his position to block Slughorn's line of sight, and lowered his own voice too:
"Hurry it up!"
Harry, for his part, was torn.
He did have his pride, after all.
Hermione might believe he'd been cutting corners in Potions ever since last term.
But Harry didn't see it that way.
It was almost funny, really—he already knew perfectly well that the Half-Blood Prince was Snape, and yet the fully realized, grown-up Snape of today somehow taught worse than his teenage self ever had. As far as Harry was concerned, the "Half-Blood Prince" had taught him more than Snape and Slughorn combined.
Even so, before this, he'd always been the one carrying out the Prince's instructions scrawled in the margins of the textbook—badly done or not, it had at least been his own hands doing the work. But having Sherlock simply do it for him outright—that, he found he couldn't quite stomach.
Thinking this over, he gritted his teeth.
Even if it meant losing points for a botched antidote, even if it meant disappointing Slughorn, even if he ended up right back where he'd started—he wasn't going to do it that way!
Seeing the resolve in Harry's eyes, Sherlock naturally understood exactly what his friend was thinking.
He gave a light laugh and went back to working on his own antidote.
Ron pulled a face and straightened himself up again.
In his own mind, if he'd been in Harry's shoes, he'd have said yes without a second thought.
"How about I help you, then?"
At Sherlock's words, Ron looked pained. "You're Legilimising me again!"
This was, of course, only a joke.
Whenever Sherlock saw straight through what was on his mind, Ron—coming as he did from a wizarding family always trotted out that same line.
"Yes, I am, as it happens—so, do you need help or not?"
"Better not."
Ron shrugged. "If this were the first lesson, maybe. But if I turned in a flawless antidote now, no one would believe it—not even me."
Sherlock nodded. "Well, at least you know yourself."
Ron: "...."
Seeing that Harry had, in the end, not sunk so low as to let Sherlock cheat for him, Hermione let out a breath of relief and turned her attention back to her own antidote.
She began carefully decanting the mysteriously separated components into ten different crystal phials.
Harry might not have cheated, but he hadn't given up either.
After a moment's thought, he went back to flipping through the Half-Blood Prince's Potions book, to see if he could find some other solution.
And, as it turned out, he actually found one.
Beside a long list of antidote names, someone had scrawled a single line in the margin:
Just shove a bezoar down their throat.
Harry stared at the line for a moment, and then it hit him.
He couldn't help but glance over at Sherlock.
On Snape's very first Potions lesson, the professor had thrown down the gauntlet, firing off a string of questions at him.
Back then, he hadn't managed to answer a single one.
Luckily, Sherlock had bailed him out.
One of those questions had been about a bezoar.
Put simply, it was a stone found in the stomach of a goat, and it had extraordinarily powerful detoxifying properties able to counter a wide range of poisons.
Harry knew perfectly well this wasn't actually the answer to Golpalott's problem.
If Snape were still the one teaching Potions, Harry wouldn't have dared try it.
But now—Sherlock, naturally, had noticed exactly where Harry's eyes had gone.
One glance at the textbook lying open in front of Harry, and he understood at once what Harry had in mind.
"If you're going to do it, do it!"
He offered his encouragement boldly:
"Believe in yourself. The power lies within you."
Harry had already been leaning that way, and with Sherlock's encouragement behind him now, he didn't hesitate for a second before making a dash for the storage cupboard.
He shoved aside unicorn horn and heaps of dried herbs, rummaging through the mess inside.
At last, right at the back, he found a small cardboard box, with BEZOARS scrawled untidily across the top.
Harry opened the box and found six shrivelled, brownish lumps.
He wrinkled his nose, the things looked less like stones, honestly, than like dried-up kidneys.
He took one out, put the box back in the cupboard, and hurried back to his cauldron.
Just at that moment, Slughorn called out loudly:
"Time's up! Come now, let's have a look and see how you've all got on!"
Slughorn made his slow way around the classroom, inspecting the wildly varied results.
Golpalott's Law had, evidently, proven difficult for everyone.
Almost no one had managed to finish.
Say nothing of the rest even Hermione was still trying to slip a few more ingredients into her phial before Slughorn reached her. Most of the class had simply given up altogether—Ron among them.
His cauldron was giving off a stench of decay, and he was doing his best not to breathe it in.
Harry, clutching the bezoar in his fist, grew more and more tense.
As always, Slughorn had left the Gryffindor table for last.
He didn't so much as pause at Ron's cauldron in fact, he looked rather close to being sick.
Then came Hermione.
She was drenched in sweat, dust smeared across her nose, her face a pale, greenish colour.
Her antidote, of course, was nowhere near finished either—it sat there bubbling sluggishly though it was already a good deal better than most of the others.
At least it didn't reek of decay, and it did contain a full fifty-two separate ingredients, including a strand of her own hair.
But none of that made the slightest bit of difference.
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