To shrink and Un-shrink

[Severus Snape]

Severus didn't bother to obtain permission to use the empty classroom, He pretty much assumed it would be alright to do with the classroom as he well pleased. He pushed open the door and went to the closest station. He opened his bag and took out his battered potions book, his painfully cramped potions kit, and his tools.
He sighed, he always scrimped and saved, always to get good ingredients, but everything else he owned as in less than spectacular shape.
He shoved the thought aside and went to work starting his shrinking solution. Of course the book had it, for a very small testing amount. Severus spent the next few minutes re-working the list to make as much as he would need enough for two bottles of shrinking solution. He wondered when Natalie would show up, that is if she even intended to show up. The thought of her showing up and being impressed with how smoothly he made potions made him feel a little giddy. If anything he really wanted everyone to respect him for his potion making skills.
he decided that he would have to pay attention to the next steps of the potion, he couldn't really daydream through it, even if daydreams were alluring, he couldn't really afford to screw up.
He would have to find a way to make money some how.

[Natalie St. Clare]

Natalie wasn't particularly sneaky in her movements. She merely had an ability to move quietly and without the kind of haste that leads to clumsiness and unnecessary noise. She was so small and light and moved with such an unearthly grace that her movements attracted no attention. It was easy for her to slip out of the Ravenclaw common room unnoticed and down to the dungeons where she ws to meet Severus.

Unlike him, she was not nervous or uncertain. Seeing Severus was, to her, a comforting thought. She felt calmer in his presence, and more completely herself.

She found the empty classroom easily and opened the door without making a sound. Her footsteps were equally quiet, and one would have to be listening to hear them.

Seeing him instantly, she moved towards him and, before he even noticed, she was sitting right beside him. "Hi, Severus," she said shyly.

[Severus Snape]

Severus heard Natalie speak before anything else. He paused before adding the next ingredient and slightly turned his head toward her. He was glad to see her and felt his heart skip a beat for a moment before relaxing back into the workings of a potion. He was glad at least living the kind of life he had, that he learned to at least always look calm. Even if sometimes under that calm face he was running a gamut of emotions.
"You're like a ghost! I didn't even hear you open the door!" he laughed as he dropped in a now un identified chopped substance into the cauldron. He stirred it counter clockwise and the potion changed color.
"This is almost done! It has to stew a bit now." he said with a smile as he turned the heat of the fire down to a blue flame.

[Natalie St. Clare]

Natalie smiled shyly. "People say that a lot," she said. "I just move quietly... I used to sneak up on Sabrina all the time without even trying."

She leaned forward, one elbow on the table, and watched him as he worked. He was often so hesitant and uncertain in his movements, but not when he was working on a potion. Here he was confident and graceful, and he knew exactly what he was doing. It was like he was meant to be doing exactly what he was doing. It was kind of beautiful to watch, like watching a perfect ballet.

"You're so good at this," she said softly.

[Severus Snape]

Severus blushed, he had started to set up another cauldron. He mumbled a thank you and set the new potion to work. He felt himself take a nervous breath and he turned his book to the antidote. He quickly re-worked it and started on the first phase of it.
He added the last ingredient to the solution and it turned a vermilion then to a muted orange. He cut the flames on that potion and let it cool. He turned back to his ingredients for the antidote and finished grinding and chopping the rest of the ingredients.

"I'm sure once you get more practice, You'll be as good. Potions are a simple and straight forward magic, like art and science together." He smiled easily as he thought of potion making as a whole. He didn't mind if he could never make an umbrella out of a grain of sand, or charm birds to dance in the air, none of that was as important as making a potion correctly.

[Natalie St. Clare]

Natalie shook her head. "You're a natural. It's a gift, you know. You can try to teach it, but some things just come naturally to people. Yours is potions. It's like an art for you. I don't think I could be that good... I have too much noise inside my head. It distracts me."

That sad thing was, that was true for most of Natalie's classes. The noise, the emotions, they distracted her and made it hard to concentrate. Tests were especially hard for Natalie, as the nervousness of all the other students seemed to drown her, making her completely unable to do anything at all. She'd had to make special arrangements to take her tests privately.

[Severus Snape]

Severus wanted to disagree, but nodded anyway. He didn't think anyone couldn't do a potion, it was a matter of paying attention, but he understood Natalie, she had it harder than most other students.
"maybe when you don't have to work with so much noise, you could do better..." he thought for a moment and asked "Do you think you could learn if I taught you? Or would I be too much distraction?" he dropped in a pale orange shredded skin of something and stirred the antidote in a figure eight.
He thought maybe it was too personal a question, maybe she would just say yes to be polite, but he shoved that thought aside and added the next ingredient.

[Natalie St. Clare]

Natalie thought about this for a minute. "I could probably do it if it was just you," she said slowly. "In a room full of people, there's so much noise, they're all thinking about the potion, and most of them are doing it wrong. I would pick up the wrong feelings from the wrong person and the potion would all go wrong. But with you... I'm more in tune with you than with others. I think I could learn from you."

[Severus Snape]

Severus smiled when she said she was in tune with him. He liked the feeling of someone 'in tune' with him, the idea of someone understanding him, even if it was a little.
"If you ever want too, or you think your grade needs it, we can possibly set something up with slughorn...He'd want to check of course...so it might be during the day." He set the antidote to stew and he checked the shrinking solution. it was the perfect color, and just cool enough to bottle. He took out two old looking bottles from his bag. they weren't really potion bottles, but he knew they were potion worthy, he hadn't knicked them from his mother for nothing. He was glad he was resourceful enough to get enough things from his parents, even if they were a little unwilling. He carefully poured the potion into the bottles and capped them and sealed them with his quickly shrinking candle. He'd have to get another one soon. He handed one bottle to Natalie.
"There! Now we can start our mission to make our tower comfortable." he left a bit in the bottom of his cauldron, and poured it on a stool no one was using, it shrank to a toy size in a blink of an eye. "and it works!" he smiled happily at Natalie. So far she was the only one that saw him smile now and days.

[Natalie St. Clare]

Natalie smiled more with him than she ever had with anyone else. Not that it was a big, wide, toothy smile. Even when she laughed, which was also rare, it was usually with her mouth closed. Still, with Severus, her smiles were genuine and sweet.

"Of course it works," she said simply. "No one is better at potions than you are. I knew you could do it."

[Severus Snape]

Severus blushed and muttered "It's best to test a potion first..." but he turned back to his antidote and took a small ladle and took a bit from it and dropped it on the stool, which sprung back to it's normal size.
"It's like Alice Through the Looking Glass..." It was a battered memory of Severus, a sad and beaten book that was a sad comfort that a dream world is always a dream. As far and children's books went he knew of a short few.
"You're cute when you smile." he smiled and cut the flame on the antidote, it was obviously done. He took it off its hook and set it on an iron plate to cool.

[Natalie St. Clare]

Natalie blushed and stared down at the table. She wasn't used to compliments like that, but they were always nice to hear. "Thank you," she said. "You should smile more, too. Maybe people would see what I see when they look at you."

She looked at the now fully-restored stool with interest. "I wonder if the stool can feel it when it shrinks. When you use a shrinking solution on people, doesn't it make them younger?"

[Severus Snape]

Severus shuddered he didn't want to try 'shrinking himself' "That would be unadvisable...What if you shrank to young and you forgot how to make yourself big again? Or what if you actually shrank? what could you do if you're only three inches tall?" The horrible possibilities could never end.
"I don't think we should try it on anything with a heartbeat... that might be too cruel."

[Natalie St. Clare]

Natalie nodded. "I agree. It's not a good idea. So we shouldn't try to be like Alice in Wonderland... the results are too unpredictable. It's just like in transfiguration class, when you have to turn an animal into an inanimate object... it's cruel, don't you think? What happens to the frog when you turn it into a tea kettle? One minute it's alive, and the next it is not. I suppose if you wanted to turn a frog into a kitten that would be one thing... at least it would be alive."

[Severus Snape]

Severus considered for a moment and frowned "I had never considered that before...It does make it seem very cruel. " he continued "Still seems abrupt for the frog to turn into a kitten. Turning one thing into another thing seems like wonderful magic...but it can't last forever can it? like if you turn a tea cup into a hamster, will the 'hamster' live the life expectancy of a hamster or will it turn back into a cup or continue to be a hamster until the caster of the spell dies?" It was a puzzle... it was something he would have to ask his head of house about...He'd be damned if went to the proper professor now... "You sneaky thing you, you've gotten me thinking about Transfiguration!"

[Natalie St. Clare]

"These are all good questions," Natalie said. "I don't know the answer. But it seems wrong to do magic on living things, you know? I think sometimes, wizards do magic without thinking about the possible consequences. It's dangerous."

These were very heavy thoughts for a child as young as Natalie. But then, Natalie was much more mature than other girls her age. She saw and felt many different things from the eyes and emotions of others, and it had stolen much of her innocence away. Perhaps these thoughts were not hers at all, but filtered through someone else she'd bumped into in the hallway.

"Maybe I should try touching a transfigured object... see if the tea kettle recalls being a frog."

[Severus Snape]

Severus picked through what he knew of transfiguration and bit he had learned of alchemy, it was a far more difficult subject but Alchemy had laws and these laws prevented certain actions through magic. "I had wondered before why transfiguration seems to bypass alchemical law, when they seem to be the same kind of magic...I think Alchemy is a far more complex sort of transfiguration... maybe it's permanent while transfiguration is temporary...even if it lasts years it's not forever going to be transfigured... It's very complex I think." he picked up his other bottles of potion and sealed them too, he handed a pair to Natalie and said "These are yours, use about a drop on most things half your size, two for anything as big as you and three for anything twice your size." he said smiling to her. He put his two bottles in a worn black bag and put it in his school bag.

[Natalie St. Clare]

Natalie smiled. "Thank you," she said, taking the two bottles and slipping them into the bag she had slung over her shoulder.

The discussion of alchemy versus transfiguration was not something Natalie had ever really thought of. She didn't know much about alchemy. "I wonder why they don't teach alchemy at Hogwarts," she remarked. "Sort of like an advanced potions class. I'm sure some students would find it interesting, don't you?"

[Severus Snape]

Severus considered a moment and thought "Maybe it's too difficult to have it here in Hogwarts, I only know a little about it because it was mentioned in one of the books the Dueling instructor asked us to read, it was only very little." he paused and continued to tidy up a bit and added "It seems that transfiguration and Alchemy as tied to lots of subjects, you have to be competent in all of them...You need to know enough about Runes and potions and even basic compositions... it's closer to muggle science than potions, I think, but it seems very difficult...no first year could dabble in it...It's dangerous I think."

[Natalie St. Clare]

Natalie shrugged. "I don't know, it might be useful to some of the older students," she said. "I'm sure it would be more useful to most people than Divination is. Even Professor Simple says that the class is a waste. You either have the gift, or you don't... it's not something that can truly be taught. I've been working with her, but only because I already have the ability."

She sighed heavily. "There are still so many things I don't understand. I was helping a couple of Aurors from the ministry the other day... they were trying to find out who killed Katie and thought maybe I could help. I think I did... But one of them, when I touched him, I saw visions I didn't understand. I warned him, but I don't know if it will help."