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BELLA WAS RUNNING on even less sleep than usual as of late. Normally, she was able to force herself to squeeze in two or three fitful hours of rest, but now she was lucky if she managed to get one. She was excellent at hiding it, though, so her friends were none the wiser about her increasing exhaustion.
She didn't even manage to accomplish much at night. It was mostly just the thinking that kept her up, and then she sometimes spent the time catching up on homework that she neglected in order to partake in Moody-watching throughout the day. She neglected to think about anything else in her personal life, such as her complicated relationship with a certain boy and the fact that she was lying to all her friends, and instead poured all her energy into obsessing over Moody.
She watched him avidly in class, trying to pick up on minute mannerisms and listen to the cadence of his words, searching for a double meaning in everything he said that she wasn't sure was even there. It had reached a point of unhealthiness, her obsession, but she was too far in to pull back now. She was so close, she knew she was, she was on the precipice of uncovering the secret, if only she could tip the scales and find what she was missing.
It wasn't until the third week of April that she remembered the bloody potions book. She'd thrown it down in a huff, claiming its uselessness, but what had she been doing in its absence? Thinking? Observing? Certainly not researching, that was for sure. And the only thing she could be sure of was that Moody was drinking something suspicious, something suspicious that she knew the properties of. How had she been so careless as to forget that? It was the most important piece of information she had.
She had to be careful about when she read it, though. When she read it around her friends, she had to carefully hide it in her lap and claim it was an Ancient Runes textbook, and she had to flip through it so cautiously that she couldn't make much headway with it when she was around them.
At least, she thought as much. Until she reached the end of the P's.
It was a long section, the P Potions, and she had to tediously scan the properties of each one, write them in her list, and then decide whether or not they were likely candidates for what was in Moody's flask. She'd already added the Pepperup Elixir, Pepperup Potion, and Poison Antidote to her list, and she was about to stop there when she happened to catch sight of the next potion name and it stopped her in her tracks.
Her heart began beating rapidly, and she seemed to only be able to focus on the name glaring at her from the page, blood rushing through her ears as her surroundings faded. It seemed obvious, now that she'd seen it. How had she not thought of it before? It made so much sense, now that she'd seen it, so much that she couldn't imagine any other possible answer.
