but never placed it until now. In faded black ink, peeking out from beneath an open shirt
right over his heart was a name.
Mia gasped and turned away from the mirror as quickly as possible.
She was not ready for this.
She remembered what Harry had told her about the mirror: it showed the deepest
desires of our hearts. But Dumbledore had cautioned her friend that the mirror gave
neither knowledge nor truth.
And she needed both.
May 26th, 1975"You're here early, Belby."
"All right, Potter?"
Mia smiled as she walked into the Potions lab to find the young Slytherin hard at
work, sweating over a steaming cauldron. "Still experimenting with the aconite?" she asked,
trying to hide exactly how curious she was about his investigations.
While the rest of the class had finished their experiments anywhere from a week to
three months into the year, Damocles kept digging, insisting that the longer he brewed,
stewed, or dried the aconite, the more properties it released.
"Found something new you might be interested in. Look what happens when I add
scarab beetles to the brewed wolfsbane."
He dropped the beetles into the cauldron, and Mia gasped when the liquid let off a
faint blue smoke that she knew all too well to be a chief characteristic of the Wolfsbane
Potion. She squealed with excitement. "What did you do?"
He smiled at her, a look of pride and excitement in his eyes. "Kind of got the idea
from you actually. You mentioned that aconite could be used for mind sharpening. I tried
mixing it differently with a Wideye Potion, but then... Snape suggested that I could extract
more potency from the aconite sprigs if I cut them after stewing for two weeks. Smug sod
was right too."
Son of a bitch! Was it really that bloody simple?