Felix came down the grand staircase, empty-handed, as he always did, unlike other professors who carried books, papers, and the like with them.
As he passed by the Caretaker’s office on the ground floor, he heard Lupin’s voice.
“… I’m sorry, I’m bothering you, if you can find it, please do let me know.”
Lupin’s single figure emerged from the office and brushed past Felix, “Hello, Professor Hap.” He flinched for a moment and smiled.
“Hello, Professor Lupin, you look well,” Felix said back.
When he left, Felix knocked on Filch’s office door, “Mr. Filch, are you there?” The door is pushed open and Filch’s face is revealed from the shadows, a pair of goldfish eyes staring back at him.
“It’s Professor Hap, I thought …” he muttered, moving aside and Felix followed in, it is a rather small room, next to the foyer of the castle.
No windows inside, even in the daytime, it looked dim and cramped, the only source of light is a green lamp hanging up on the ceiling, with many wooden cabinets lined up around the walls, some already stuffed to the brim, poking out from the cracks with yellowed and old parchment corners.
There are few chairs in the office, although Felix has no idea of sitting down, he covertly applied an air freshening spell on himself, and finally got rid of the widespread smell of fish.
Felix locked eyes with a bony cat on the desk, its eyes large, bulging, and bright.
“She looks very human,” Felix said.
Filch is pleased that he used the word “she” and said with a quivering jaw, “You’ll never find a smarter cat, more like a human if you ask me. … At least she won’t break school rules and will do you a solid favour.”
Felix listened patiently, about how Mrs. Norris was patrolling the corridors alone (a cat?) for a while until Filch is out of breath when he answered, “She looks a little malnourished, though.”
Filch froze, as if no one had ever asked about it before, and stammered, “She’s a bit of a picky eater, I’ve persuaded her, but she only eats the fried fish I make …”
“I have some nutritional supplements here, very cleverly formulated, and crucially harmless,” Felix said, his right hand brushed over the ring on his left hand, a square wooden box appeared in his hand.
He opened the lid of the box, gave it a brief glance, and said with some regret, “There’s only half of it left …”
Filch said hesitantly, “Norris may not like–” He took a small glass bottle from the square wooden box, open the stopper, a strange aroma spread out, diluting the smell of fish in the room.
Mrs. Norris immediately raised her head to stare at the glass bottle, showing a longing expression.
But it did not move, but looked up at Filch, and Filch said, “It’s okay, Norris, drink it.”
The cat immediately let out a seeping purr, leaped off the table, ran quickly to her master, stretched out her tongue to lick the bright red liquid in the bottle, only when she licked the last drop clean, she stretched out contentedly and let out a “purr” sound.
Filch’s eyes shone with a strange light, he could not help but say: “Norris has never been like this, she does not care about the pet store tonic.”
Felix smiled and explained, “The recipe came from a master of potions who won the Second Class Order of Merlin, Professor Belby left it behind, although he only made it at his leisure, but the effect is certainly far more than the products on the market.”
“Then the recipe -”
“I can give it to you, the brewing method is very simple, and it doesn’t even require you to use a wand, though some dragon blood might be needed.”
“That’s not a problem,” Filch said quickly.
“Do you have any parchment here?”
“Yes–” Filch nimbly lifted the drawer and flipped out a stack of blank parchment, Felix hooked his fingers and let a piece of parchment float to him, a smooth string of letters automatically appearing on the paper as he gazed at it.
In the process, Filch kept his eyes on the parchment in the air, as he kept his hands together with his knuckles flexing. Felix inquired carelessly, “By the way, I just saw Professor Lupin.”
“Yeah.” Filch unconsciously replied.
“He came over-”
“To ask for something confiscated,” Filch said, his eyes still fixed on the parchment, “Professor Hap, don’t blame me for picking on … him.”
“Why do you say that?”
Filch snapped back to his senses, and with a wary glance at the door, he lowered his voice and said, “He was misbehaving when he was in school and loved to break school rules … of course not as much as his two friends, but I can recognize him, he’s the one with the worst ideas.”
He looked at Felix and complimented, “Unlike you, you were a decent guy when you were in school–”
Felix said with some amusement, “I got into a lot of trouble when I was in school.”
Felch said slyly, “Not the same — sir, not the same, you never caused trouble to anyone else unless they came to you first,” he pointed to the filing cabinet by the wall, “there’s a drawer that belongs to them — Lupin and his merry friends, if Hogwarts hadn’t abolished corporal punishment …”
He muttered disgruntledly, “Mr. Pringle managed to be in a good time, unlike me, oh, Pringle was the former Keeper of the Castle, he left a lot of tools behind, I kept them all.”
Felix looked at the carefully polished chains hanging on the wall and shook his head; the young wizards loathed Filch for good reason. He had learned early that Filch liked to physically punish his students, and even though the physical punishment had been abolished, the mental punishment remained.
And Filch is trying to find ways to push the art forward and develop it.
“Mr. Filch, you just said that Professor Lupin came over to claim his stuff-”
“That’s right, a dozen years ago, he and his friends were wandering around, and I searched them and recovered a suspicious, rolled parchment from them, which I suspected contained some secret, so I confiscated it.”
Filch said as his face twitched, “You don’t know how bad they are, they still looked indifferent after the parchment was confiscated,” he said viciously, “they must have thought I couldn’t decipher the secret on it and would just throw it away, so they could pick it back up secretly. But–I didn’t, instead, I kept it, just locked in the drawer.”
“And what about the parchment now, have you returned it to Professor Lupin?” Felix asked curiously.
“… lost it,” Filch said discouragingly, “I don’t remember when I lost it, maybe they took it away from me.”
“But you said it, Professor Lupin came over to ask for … it.”
“Who knows, maybe his friend didn’t tell him, or some other little wizard stole it from me over the years,” Filch said with a regretful look on his face.
The parchment fell from midair and Felix handed the recipe to Filch, “Please keep it.”
“Thank you, then you–”
“You’re welcome, Mr. Filch, I got what I wanted, too.”
Filch looked at him in dismay, and Felix chuckled, “You see, isn’t Mrs. Norris satisfied?” He gestured to the cat at his feet, which is lazily nuzzling his leg.
———-
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