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evilnerd3030 · 7 years

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Caffeine Challenge

Prompt from @caffeinewitchcraft for her Caffeine Challenge. I used "They say you never forget your roots, but I did." It’s a little late and I SERIOUSLY rushed this, so don’t expect too much from this. (More author notes on the bottom) (Also, I'm on mobile so please ignore any spelling mistakes and sorry I can’t put it under a cut for you guys).

It just slipped out from my fingers and shattered. A puff a blue smoke billowed out and the room was filled with screams and laughter. My cheeks burned and my eyes pricked, but I didn’t do much else.

“Corrine!” Professor Shorts shouts, nose flared.

The noise died down but for a few chuckles. I gulped, “Ye-“

“Oh, you clumsy witch! What happened?”

“Um, I-“

“Are you hurt?” She snapped. I shook my head, although the potion was starting to soak into my pants and sting a bit. If they were starting to smoke a bit themselves, no one cared.

Professor Shorts shook her head, eyeing the broken glassware distastefully, “Well, it was probably for the best anyway.” She leveled me with a steady look, the eyes of the entire class watching us now, “I would have given you a D if I had graded this potion, although that would be generous. You forgot the most important part of a beetroot potion, Miss Wintergreen.” She paused, probably to catch her breath, but it fell more like a malicious, dramatic pause. “When you re-do the potion for me to grade tomorrow, please try to remember the beetroots.“

A few people laughed and Professor Shorts glared at them until they fell silent. She may old, but red eyes were always scary no matter who they belonged to. Head bowed, I wished my hair wasn’t tied up so it would hide my face. Mortified, I listened to her instructions for cleaning up the potion as the rest of the class placed their finished potions - a clear red instead of my murky blue - on the lab bench in the back and filed out of the room, glancing at me and snickering.

Professor Shorts already had the cleaning supplies out and waiting for me. But she plopped some clean spare pants into my outstretched hands instead.

“Go change first, girl. Your pants are starting to disintegrate.”

Soon enough, I was on my hands and knees scrubbing the floor while Professor Shorts supervised. Normally, the students weren’t allowed to clean up spilled potions, but Professor Shorts was going on one hundred and sixty-five. As she put it, “My father may have been a vampire, but that only means I live long. It doesn’t mean I stay young.”

As I cleaned in near-silence - if I sniffled once or twice, Professor Shorts didn’t pay it any mind - she lectured, "Beetroot potion is mostly made up of unicorn tears and essence of nightshade, nasty stuff. The whole purpose of adding the beetroots is-“

Unthinkingly, I blurted out, “It’s to dilute and give those two ingredients something to bind to. Separate, unicorn tears will turn nearly anything into pure gold and essence of nightshade acts like an acid, destroying anything it touches.” Almost as soon as I realized I had interrupted her, without permission, I snapped my mouth shut, frozen on the floor. Something cold and burning raced along my stomach and spine and I thought I might either pass out or throw up. When Professor Shorts didn’t speak for a few moments, I nearly started shaking.

As it was, she merely raised an eyebrow, “Correct. If it were just those two mixed together, then the resulting potion would turn everything into a poisonous tar, as you can see.”

I glanced toward my former pants, which were slowing turning into a strange, goopy purple, safely in a hazardous bin. Tears welled up in my eyes again, a few dripping down my nose onto the floor. I scrubbed them away furiously, desperate to hide them from Professor Shorts.

Soon enough I was done. Professor Shorts glanced the floor briefly before studying me with a gaze far more peering than the one she gave the floor. Slightly panicked, I blurted out, “G-goodbye, Professor,” and nearly ran out of the room.

Potions was my last class for the day, so I took the quickest route home. Thankfully, it was a clear day out, so my hair was free to drape in front of my face. I only had eyes for the sidewalk, walking as fast as I could while being casual.

“Hey, look, it’s that clumsy witch from Potions!” A boy in my class yelled, laughing with a few others.

Already on edge from the terrifying one-on-one with Professor Shorts - and having no desire to let the boys poke fun at my new pants - I pulled out my rune book and recited the spell I had been working on. There was a screech of color and swirl of noise, then I was standing in my room, not a hair out of place. I winced, imagining the talking to I was going to get from Uncle Cy when he got another letter from the Board of Governing Magical Entities about my underage rune spells, but it was worth it to avoid those bullies.

Finally alone, the tears started to fall. What was wrong with me? Potions was my best subject, always has been, ever since I was little. I sank down onto my bed and eyed the picture on my bedside table. It was an older photo of my mom and I working on a simple potion, but it was my first time doing it alone. Those were better times, before she died and I still had skills and was actually good at potions. Then she did die and it was like all my talents, my skills, my happiness, they all died with her.

Everything now felt like tackling dragons. Even simple things, like talking to people or eating, felt overwhelming, towering over me until the only sensible thing to do was to just lie there and do nothing.

Logically, I knew I was depressed, but logic is nothing in the face of powerful emotions. Another tear slipped out just as there was a knock on the door.

“Cori?” Uncle Cy called softly as I scrubbed at my cheeks.

“Hey, Uncle Cy,” I went for casualness, but there was no way he didn’t notice how my voice caught.

He paused, “Can I come in?”

“Um, sure.”

The older man opened the door gently, quiet and sure with a half-smile on his lips and a full smile etched in his laugh lines. The half-smile died out when he saw me, hunched over on the bed with my head in my hands.

“Cori, what happened?” He sat down on the bed and made a motion like he wanted to rub my back or hug me. Instead, he patted my knee and withdrew.

I didn’t say anything, didn’t need to. Uncle Cy had always been more sharp than his big belly and small eyes let on. He sighed, “Cori, it’s just nerves. You haven’t been to school in a while, of course you’re gong to be a bit out of practice. It’s a skill, not instinct.”

I ground my teeth, “They’re my skills and there’s no excuse for me to keep messing up like this!” I tried my best not to take any of my anger or sadness out on Uncle Cy - he had really been there for me these past few months and didn’t deserve me snapping at him. But still, why didn’t anyone understand? If I didn’t have my skills at potion-making, then what’s left? A sad, broken little girl, that’s what.

He didn’t say anything for awhile, which was fine, I didn’t feel like talking anyway. He seems to sense my reluctance, because he just sighs and leaves it at that.

The rest of the night and even the next day is quiet, until it’s time to go back to Professor Shorts’ class.

The knot that had been building up in my gut all day reached a tipping point as I was just ten feet from the door. I couldn’t do it, I turned around to leave and nearly ran into Professor Shorts herself. The tall woman, not the least hunched with age, seemed like an immovable warden, trapping me in my prison cell. But her red eyes were gentle.

“Corrine, we need to talk. Come with me.” She turned and marched toward her office, with me struggling to keep up. God, how did this dinosaur move so fast?

It wasn’t that far, and I found myself in a smallish office, adorned with certificates, plaques, and photos in equal measure. The dull ivory of the walls was lost in everything she had hung up there. All of the certificates were on the wall opposite her desk, above the chair I was siting in, and all the photos of her family were behind her. The amount of personality in the office surprised me, considering the person in question had hardly ever laughed in the few years I had seen her around the school, and that was mostly rumor.

Professor Shorts was busy gathering papers behind her deck, so I looked at each picture in turn. Most of them were of Professor Shorts when she was young with her rather large family. There was one that stuck out to me. It was a young Professor Shorts, about seven years old, with twin braided tails, dirtied cheeks, and bright red eyes, but there was laughter ringing throughout her entire body. A tall, regal woman behind her radiated the same feeling, although with much more poise. The mother and daughter duo were holding a first place ribbon, with the young Professor Shorts clutching her mother’s hand eagerly. It was cute, if not a bit weird to see my normally stern teacher smiling so much.

A snap of paper brought my attention back on Professor Shorts, who glared down at the papers in her hand. For a brief moment, I wondered where that smiling girl in the photo went.

“Daughter to Seanna Wintergreen, who received the Sigar’s Award for her work with the Folinetrine flower, which has let to huge advancements in the medical community ” she begins, “Homeschooled, then an A-plus student, and the youngest ever winner of the Touguntenta City Exemplary Young Witches and Wizards Magical Fair. And yesterday, you dropped a potion that was worth a D, at best.” As my ears burned, Professor Shorts stared at me over the top of her glasses. Absentmindedly, I noticed they were the ones her mother was wearing in all the pictures on the wall behind her, with a white frame that seemed to emphasize her red vampire eyes. “What is going on?”

There was no excuse, nothing so say, so I shrugged. The older woman sighed, something people around me seemed to be doing lately.

“Corrine, I know losing your mother was hard and you’re still adjusting,” there was a sudden, unusual flare of rage in me at the term ‘adjusting’, “but it does no good to mope about it.” For a strong moment, I seriously considered standing up and leaving.

“Let me guess. You spend most of your time by your mother’s side, watching her preform her experiments at home,” I stared at Professor Shorts, eyes wide. “You learned as you grew, learning to love potions as much as she did. Whenever you two spent time together, it was either making potions or talking about potions or showing someone else about potions. Then she died and now all of those good memories are painful. Just thinking about them makes your head hurt and your heart feels like its ripping itself apart. Nothing makes sense, as it feels like it should. Then, eventually, you try making a simple potion. Maybe you remembered your mother doing the same thing, only she’s not there anymore. It hurts, so you stop trying to get it right anymore. You just stop trying, because it’s easier that way. It’s easier to wallow in the pain than to move forward, to relive old memories with someone else than to make new ones without them.”

There were tears in my eyes, but I was slightly awestruck. I spent so much time curled in on myself, thinking that whatever I was going through was too terrible to put into words. It was exhilarating to hear the emotions I was going through, to have it all laid out before me. I once again glanced to her glasses, to all those photos of her and her mother on the wall behind her, and remembered what she said yesterday. ‘My father may have been a vampire, but that only means I live long.’

Suddenly, Professor Shorts wasn’t an intimidating teacher, staring down her nose at me. She was someone who had done this before, who has felt the things I’ve felt, strongly enough to put it into words where I stuttered. She was like a guide, a light at the end of the tunnel. I thought back to the pictures, noticing where the photos with her mother stopped and remembered all the awards on the wall behind me.

The realization that it was possible to go forward - the proof is sitting in front of me, watching me with quiet, understanding eyes - was less like a thunderbolt and more like a rock had been taken out of the bag I was dragging. It was a step forward and that was enough.

Professor Shorts stood up sharply and came around the desk to place a warm hand on my shoulder. “Class starts in ten minutes, Miss Wintergreen. Take as much time as you need, but I expect a proper beetroot potion on my desk tomorrow. You may use the connecting door at the back of the classroom whenever you are ready to join us.” She may have smiled at me, but I could have imagined it and she swept out of the room, still as regal as ever.

I took a moment to stare at the photo of Professor Shorts and her mother, laughing with a first place ribbon, and the photo right next to it, with Professor Shorts in her graduation cloak, proudly holding her Grand Master’s certificate alone. I smiled, tucking a long strand of hair behind my ear, and made my way back home. Mom’s old lab equipment was still in the basement and I had everything I needed for a beetroot potion.

That’s it. This was fun. And as a side note, this is the first thing I’ve written in months. Depression really gets you, you know? Anyway, thanks for reading y'all.

#caffeine challenge #my writing

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