Snape’s End

Note: I really wanted to be the one to kill off Snape in the Twising the Hellmouth HP Survivor game, but I got caught up reading the Half Blood Prince, and someone else beat me to him. Here’s the story, anyway.

Severus Snape entered the sanctuary that was his dungeon. Classes were over for the day; the whining and jabbering students had retreated to the upper reaches of the castle. He could get a little peace and quiet before he had to return to supervise the brats while they ate their dinners in the Great Hall. Merlin knew that none of the other teachers at Hogwarts would keep the hellions in check.

He stopped. His dungeon wasn’t empty. A dark haired, round faced boy sat at one of the benches beside a cauldron. The icy blue shimmer of Frigid Flames crackled beneath it. There was a slight whiff of sulphur in the air.

“Longbottom! What are you doing here?”

The boy jumped out of his seat, and Severus suppressed a smile. He had missed being able to abuse that boy on a regular basis.

“Oh! P-P-Professor Snape, Sir, I— Er— Uh—”

“Spit it out! I don’t have all day! You aren’t even taking potions anymore. What. Are. You. Doing. Here?”

“Hermione, Sir! She asked me to keep an eye on this for her, while she ran up to the library to check something.”

“What is it?” asked Snape.

“Er… I forget sir. She said it was something we could use against Voldemort.”

Snape cringed when he heard the name. First Potter, and now all his little friends kept saying the Dark Lord’s name, like it was nothing. He would have taken points from Longbottom for that, but the Headmaster had explicitly forbidden him from doing so. Still… “Five points from Gryffindor, for using my classroom without permission. Since when did my dungeon become that know-it-all’s personal laboratory?”

“I don’t know sir, She just told me—”

“Get out!”

Longbottom pointed at the cauldron. “But Hermione’s potion, sir—”

“Get out of here, Longbottom. I will take care of Granger’s potion.”

“Er, yessir.” Longbottom pointed to the thermometer suspended in the cauldron. “She said that it was critical to keep the temperature between 15 and 30 degrees, sir, or else it might exp—”

“The day I need your advice on the preparation of a potion, Longbottom, is the day that I will die. Get! Out!”

“Yessir!” Longbottom nearly ran from the dungeon. Severus smiled to himself. He still had it. In a way he missed having Longbottom in his classes. None of the latest crop of students were as easy to intimidate. He turned his attention back to whatever it was that Granger was making, hoping that he could find that she had been taking things from his personal stores. Maybe he could get the annoying little Muggleborn expelled for stealing from him.

He was disappointed that there was nothing on the bench that came out of his stores. Everything seemed to be in bottles that looked to be of Muggle manufacture. He read the labels: nitric acid, sulphuric acid, glycerol… Not a single substance that had any magical properties whatsoever. What did that Granger girl think she was doing?

Severus tried to work on grading some papers written by his seventh year advanced potions class. The crackling of the Frigid Flames under the cauldron disturbed his concentration. A flick of his wand extinguished them. Let the concoction overheat and spoil. That might teach that girl not to make anything in here without his permission. He looked at the thermometer and saw that the temperature of the mixture was already rising quickly. Some sort of reaction was going on that was heating it rapidly. The temperature passed 25 degrees.

Snape saw that there was something else on the bench. He Accioed the sheet of Muggle paper, and glanced over it. It contained the printed directions for the preparation of… What in Merlin’s name was nitroglycerin?