Damned and Blasted
St Mungo’s Hospital - Ground floor. 8th August 2002
@agoosesong
The lights above him faded in and out of focus. He could barely hear the healers clamouring, asking him questions, but he could feel the near constant building pain of the burns and the way that his soaked robes tugged at them as they were cut off him. There was a dull throbbing in his calf and side, and he knew that they were caused by pieces of the cauldron. The immediate injuries he knew all too well, having been in enough shock and with enough adrenaline running through him to look down at himself after he’d been thrown back against the desk. They hadn’t really hurt at the time, just felt like someone had given him a poke with their wand. He’d been so calm.
20 mins earlier- Hogwarts Lab 3
Daisy roots, wafer thin slices of crocodile heart, a dash of Flobberworm mucus. Easy enough. He’d collected his supplies earlier in the week, and while he’d already spent a little time pickling a few of them, he hadn’t had the chance to brew. To stand over a cauldron as fumes and smoke coiled up in lazy plumes from the swirling surface and watch the subtle interplay of light on bubbles and the change of colours in the liquid. There was something very calming about it.
His quiet, zen-like contemplation of the brew before him was interrupted when there was a faint whistling from one of the bubbles. It should have burst and descended back beneath the surface. It shouldn’t be maintaining it’s shape and making that noise. He glanced down at the flames beneath the cauldron. Doing things the traditional route meant no quick way to change temperature, but this potion was simple and fairly temperature stable. Even Longbottom on a good day would have been able to manage it. As he straightened up the bubble finally collapsed, losing structure and sinking down with a wet plop. The colour and texture looked wrong. He stirred a ladle through it, watching its previously homogenous smoothness splitting as a few congealed lumps dribbled down back into the mass in the cauldron. Snape frowned and rested the ladle against the rim. Another bubble had formed and when it burst with an unpleasant purple smoke he spat on the flagstones in disgust.
And then the Cauldron exploded.
Severus went from standing a foot away from the cauldron, to propped up against a desk, drenched and shocked, five feet away from a burner covered in gunk and slop. He regained his senses, wiping his face clean before opening his eyes and quickly chucking a bucket of sand over the burner, just in case whatever he’d made was flammable. Then he looked down at himself.
The leather apron and dragon hide gloves had kept the potion off his skin, and he realised with a dull surprise that the ladle- or half of it- was jammed into his arm. He could feel a sudden heat across him and dashed towards the emergency showerhead, stripping the apron off as he went. Raising his hands up revealed another chunk of the cauldron, a shard of cast iron protruding just below his ribs, and the awkward run showed another was in his leg. His heart was thumping in his chest and he didn’t quite feel like he was getting enough air but he managed to pull the cord for the water, and the one next to it to alert the hospital wing. It was automatic, though he’d rarely had to be the one using them, more often shoving some poor unfortunate student under the freezing water. His teeth chattered slightly as his robes soaked through and he looked down again at the patches of skin showing through rips in the fabrics.
Even as the blisters had started to raise on his skin, and strange scaly, almost armadillo like plates had begun to push themselves from beneath the blisters he knew he should be in a lot more pain. All he could think about was the catastrophic failure of the brew. The door to the lab slammed open just as he pitched forward and fell to the ground.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
He didn’t know how long it had been since he’d been brought in, but there was pastel orange burn salve slathered over most of his skin, and someone standing at the foot of his bed. He tried to focus on them through the haze of confusion and pain-reduction potions and weakly, managed a strained, “Poppy?”
The silhouette wasn’t right though, and as he tried to scowl and sit up, he felt an unpleasant grinding of something and looked down to see poking between the burn salve were hard rigid plates of what looked like bone. He glanced over at his arm, and could see someone else was running some kind of spell on the space where the ladle had been.
“How bad is it?”
