The Greater Good [GrindelwaldxDumbledore]

~Chapter Two ~ Testing times

Alaska's skin flared, she slid down in her seat until her face was barely visible above the desk.

Gellert stifled his laughter, not wanting the teacher to notice. The clock above the teacher's desk appeared to be moving quickly, soon they were over-running by ten minutes.

"I'm not letting you go until I am certain you could write a half-decent answer for your OWLs, it reflects badly on us if no one in here can achieve anything higher than 'Troll'"

"I'm sure one of us will," Aleksa stared hatefully at Gellert.

Gellert was too preoccupied to hear her jealous whisper, the closer it got to half-past six, the closer his latest batch of the potion was to spoiling. With the teacher preoccupied with interrogating his fellow classmates, he focused the tip of his wand at the teacher's desk.

It suddenly sprung to life, cantering around the classroom like a wild animal, scattering their homework and knocking over a coat rack. It chased Professor Grabowska, barely giving him enough time to get the doors open to escape.

"Class dismissed," his voice was drowned out by the sound of the racing desk's legs on the stone floor so the class missed him sentencing them to 'a week's worth of detention'.

Gellert jostled his way to the front of the queue out of the classroom, keen to escape the complaints and questions bubbling amongst his classmates. As they all turned right onto the main corridor he turned left, following it down to the familiar tapestry of a Skaar Island. Two warring tribes of giants were battling for territory, wounding the earth below their feet, the scars of which were still visible in the topography of the island.

The dusty material gave way to a tight spiral staircase, climbing it quickly made him dizzy and left him out of breath. It delivered him to a secret chamber somewhere between the second and third floor, just big enough for him to sit and work at a reclaimed desk while a potion bubbled away on the lit fireplace in the furthest wall.

Late at night, when the fire wasn't lit, it was possible to hear snoring through the shared flue with the dormitory he had lived in during his fourth year. When he first discovered this nook he had been worried that someone might be able to hear him or smell his workings, but even the pungent aroma of an overcooked draught of the living death failed to raise any suspicious comments around the castle.

He breathed a sigh of relief, the cauldron was simmering nicely, a light purple mist hovering just above the pearlescent surface. His notes, odd scraps of parchment and duplicated pages of library books lay strewn across the surface of a tiny desk, he pulled one close and scanned the instructions. Setting his bag down gently he pulled out his stolen valerian root powder and lavender buds.

Gellert lifted his cauldron off the heat, letting it rest on a lump of wood that had been scorched by centuries of other wizards using it for the same purpose. Carefully measuring a teaspoon of powder into the blue liquid, stirring anticlockwise until it turned magenta. It was looking a little darker than he would have liked, close to the colour of a ripe plum.

He scoured his notes, looking for any clue as to what could have gone wrong, everything looked good until this point, had he over-stirred or added the Valerian too quickly? The smaller trial batch had worked fine, he had to do the medium batch twice to get the larger volume to work, the result then extrapolated to match the largest sized cauldron that would fit in the fireplace. Slapping his forehead with the palm of his hand he raced back to his bag, mumbling to himself about forgetting the catalyst.

The delay in adding the porcupine quills would weaken the solution, meaning it would probably only last six hours rather than the usual 8-12. While that wouldn't be a problem for this 'test' batch, making it on an even larger scale could prove problematic. Frustrated and not wanting to waste a month of effort, he put the cauldron back into the fire and reduced the heat.