Notes:
1) The workings of the Unspeakables in this story are not canon. More notes on Unspeakables at the end of the chapter.
2) This story is canon-compliant up to HBP.
3) I've taken some liberties with the time line. This should be more obvious with the second installment but is reflected little in this one.
4) Additional notes to be found at the end of the second installment. I hesitate to say chapters because this was actually intended as a one-shot, and it was written as one, but it makes me uncomfortable to see that a single installment is equivalent to more than 10,000 words.
- - -
Carrefour
- - -
Agent F 872,
Your presence is requested at the Office of Assignations on 17 September at 16:00.
OA 898
Head
Office of Assignations
He stared at the blinking seal on the bottom—the one that read OA 198—for several moments. Surely it couldn't be another assignment. His right arm still trapped in a sling, he was loath to summon a Quick Quotes quill to answer the message; in the end he sent away the regulation Unspeakables owl with only a small parchment, on which there was nothing but his agent's seal, in acknowledgment of his receipt. He was certain, anyway, that the Office of Assignations knew the full extent of the damage he had suffered from his last assignment in Aberdeen, and would not be expecting a written reply.
It was quick work to dispose of the message; with a flick of his wand, he had it burning in the grate. The meeting was set for tomorrow, a Sunday; he had never been called into that office on a week-end, and he spent several idle minutes speculating on whether he was going to be fired (unlikely) or whether it was OA 198, whoever he or she was, deciding that it was time to rub old Professor Snape's nose in the dirt (more likely). OA 198 had an Unspeakable number higher than his own, which meant that the head of the Office of Assignations—the bounder who was responsible for exactly twenty-two uneventful and sixteen extremely dangerous assignments—had been hired as an Unspeakable more recently than he had been. That his fate was to some extent controlled by a person greener than he was, was no small source of irritation.
Moreover, Snape supposed that chances were high that OA 198—it was easier to think of the person as X—was a former student who graduated from the Auror program and decided that the next logical thing would be the life of an Unspeakable. He snorted. He had come to think of X in his mind as a dirty-blond version of Percy Weasley whose nose was covered in spots and whose skinny arse spent all day sitting in a cozy chair as he studied reports and Unspeakable profiles before assigning them to highly dangerous missions, of which he had little practical experience. The assessment was probably unfair—he trusted the higher echelons of the world of Unspeakables to have more wits than to assign a purely untrained dog to the task—and yet it was difficult to shake the impression.
His only contact with X had been through letters; for the past three years assignment folders had been handed to him by X's graying and horse-faced assistant Bertha. (It was not her real name, as those were never revealed. Among themselves, the Unspeakables called her Bertha for no better reason than that she looked like one.) He imagined X's face and weak chin and affixed to both the air of officious impertinence that Percy Weasley had exuded. He thought (bizarrely) of X saying: "Well, Professor? No speeches on brewing glory or foolish wand-waving?"
As though to banish the thought Snape jumped to his feet and moved to the window overlooking his small garden in Spinner's End. It had taken years of practice—three, really—for him to understand that assuming the worst of everyone was not the best course of action. He could remember a time when every word dropped from someone's lips—when every action, kind or not—constituted some deeper motive. In the intervening years he had cultivated relationships that were polite, almost cordial, and had sought the forgiveness (of sorts) of those he had grievously and knowingly offended. At the same time he had grown to realize that the attitude of mistrust worked fine for thugs and plug-uglies, but in his relationships with people—whether they were his officious superiors or his cleaning lady—it was often best not to make assumptions about their intentions. He had make that mistake once—hugely—already.
Still, as visions of X faded from his mind, he couldn't repress a pang of regret that there were students who would probably hate him for life. That it was something he deserved was easy to accept; that it was a phenomenon that he encountered with regularity was not. He had faced death and Voldemort and that vile snake Nagini and had come out the winner, and yet he was certain that there was something unique about the viciousness of ex-students. As to finding out whether X was one of them, Snape didn't have long to wait.
- - -
He walked into the office the next day, ignoring the speculative look that Bertha shot him from her small desk. Without his assistance, the door to the head's office swung open moments before he reached it; he had been so prepared for an encounter with X that he was startled to find himself in an empty room. And it was empty, not merely of persons but almost of things; Muggle-looking cardboard boxes were stacked neatly behind a polished desk that held neither inkbottle nor blotter. The shelves behind the desks were empty except for a small vase with a lone orchid in it.
There was one file cabinet—a tiny one in one corner of the room—that he suspected was magically expanded to hold all of the Unspeakable profiles. There were no pictures on any surface. Snape came slowly to the realization that whoever owned those cardboard boxes was either moving in or moving out.
Something behind him made a tiny sound; whirling around with his wand at the ready, Snape found himself being scrutinized by a very familiar-looking owl perched on the back of a chair.
"Hoot," it said.
"Professor Snape," said another voice.
Snape turned around slowly. No one had addressed him in that way for years, and there was something about that voice, something…
"Have you been waiting long?" said Hermione Granger from her place in the doorway. Behind her (he could see) Bertha was straining to look into the office; thankfully Hermione—Miss Granger, if she was still a Miss—chose that moment to close the door and walk past Snape to the tidied desk. His eyes followed her movements; he found himself almost too stunned to speak. Miss Granger seated herself behind the desk with the practiced ease of years and regarded him with a smile.
"I'm sorry to have kept you waiting," she said, indicating that he should sit. He remained standing, looking at her. "I've been giving a tour of the department to the new OA head. He speaks very bad English and I speak very bad Russian, so between the two of us we had rather a hard time understanding each other. I spent five whole minutes explaining why I said I was 'showing him the ropes.'"
"Miss Granger," he was able to say, finally. "I assume you called me to this office for a reason."
"Oh, that," she said. Her smile never faltered the whole time. and while it looked like it did so many years ago, there was something about it that was different. "I'm assuming that it will take more than a few minutes. I think you had better sit down. It will be better for your leg."
Snape scowled, glancing at the leg in question. He hadn't limped once since entering the department, but he supposed there was no hiding from the (now former) Office of Assignations head the extent of his Aberdeen injuries. There was a large gash behind his left thigh and it smarted, even though he was regularly dosed with a pain-reliever potion. With the most dignity he could muster he made his way to the lone chair facing her sad, empty desk.
Mercifully, she began, filling the tense silence. "I'm leaving this office today," she said, conversationally. "It's the only reason I was allowed to meet you. The last assignment I took care of was your stunt at Aberdeen. You and F860 handled it well. How's your arm, Professor?"
"Miss Granger," he gritted out, feeling something within him snap. "You are addressing me by the wrong title. Particularly since I now realize that you are in effect my boss." He shot her a quelling, angry look. Her face was blank, but her answering tone was light.
"Actually, I'm nowhere near your boss," she said dismissively. "I just decide who gets sent to what mission. I've done nothing but sit in this desk for the past two years and review files of cases and of persons. The position's a special one, if you'll excuse the word. I'm not anyone's superior except OA 720, who is probably listening at the door as we speak," she said, raising her voice slightly with her last words. Snape realized belatedly that Bertha was OA 720.
"Very well." He inclined his head. "And is there a reason you have called me to your office on the day of your leaving it? Perhaps you are calling in all field agents to say your tender goodbyes and say your apologies for every mission you've ever sent them on? I recall you doing something similar on the day before your graduation."
During his small speech her smile had been gradually fading; at the word "graduation" her hands, which had been resting on the table top, clenched into fists. "I'll have you know," she said sharply, "that I did not make a habit of that. Yours was the only office I ventured to enter that day."
Snape hid his surprise, though perhaps not as well as he hoped. This was news indeed. He said nothing.
She continued, "I don't really have much to tell you. Just that for the past two years I've been here. I've come across your names innumerable times. And I haven't hesitated to send you out to the most dangerous missions there are. Aberdeen wasn't the worst, was it? I seem to recall you sustaining a lot of damage from your trip to Charing Cross last March." Her eyes crinkled in a strange smile, stretching a scar that was embedded on her eyelid.
"Is there a point in you telling me all this?" Snape interrupted. He was growing impatient. He knew—knew from her tone, from the way she was looking at him, that there was something he was supposed to be understanding, something he ought to know; but the shock of seeing her—seeing her here, so normal, so seemingly happy—held him suspended in shock. "I know exactly how many missions you have sent me on and I know exactly how close I was to death every time. Did I hurt your feelings that much, three years ago, that you chose to exact your pathetic revenge on me by becoming head of this office?"
Her soft answering "Yes" gave him pause. "I mean, of course you hurt my feelings, but there's more to it than that. I never hated you, not even for all those things you said. You were the reason I first thought of working here. I heard about your leaving Hogwarts and Minerva visited me in Italy and told me you had become an Unspeakable. When I heard that I saw my opportunity almost immediately… not for revenge, but for—for leveling debts." She looked at him steadily. Meaningfully. Her lily-white hands, one bearing the hair-thin magical scars that he wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't been looking for them, had relaxed, on the table top.
He found that he couldn't say a word as realization washed over him. She spread her hands and said the words moments after they had formed in his own mind. "I saved your life three years ago," she said. His breath caught in his chest. "I know you haven't forgotten it. But I gave it back to you the moment I first sent you on a mission. I gave you back your life by letting you risk it."
- - -
Three years earlier"Professor Snape!" she scrambled to sit up in bed as soon as he entered the room. The nurse beside her bed pushed her back down immediately. Fixing the nurse with an short but unholy glare, Miss Granger remained lying down, eyes tracking his progress across the room to the foot of the hospital bed. It was a private room. Snape suspected that, crowded as the wards were, Potter had a hand in obtaining a private room for his beloved friend. A sneer found its way to his face.
This did nothing to lessen the intense brightness of his former student's smile as she looked at him from head to toe, as though assessing injuries sustained. Aside from a small gash at the side of his face from a wayward but weak slicing hex, Snape stood before her, whole and unharmed. And he hated her for it.
"You're all right," she said. Her voice was raspy; either from disuse or from screaming, he couldn't tell. "I'm so relieved."
"And yourself?" he sneered. "How have you fared?"
As he spoke the nurse left her patient's side to quietly exit the room. Snape sensed it but made no move to either look at her or stop her. Miss Granger seemed not to notice at all. Her eyes were fixed firmly on his and she was smiling like a fool, the corners of her eyes crinkling.
"I'm well," she said. "I'm being discharged from hospital today. I can continue my recovery at home. Oh, Professor, how are you?" She sat up, and he saw her crestfallen face when he moved away quickly before turning to the window at the far end of the room, his back to her. He heard her voice. As different and rough as it was, it was still as irritating at it had been, those seven years she sat in his classroom. To him it still said: Like me. Please like me; love me.
"Molly said you were fine but I couldn't tell if she was just trying to reassure me. You know how she can be. I couldn't believe her until I'd seen you for myself."
"I'll thank you not to change the subject," he snapped at her reflection on the windowpane. "And I'll thank you not to lie. You have a damaged lung and are unable to move the fingers of your left hand. A curse that was meant for me caught the left side of your body and it has now left you with a disfigured face—" She looked as though she had been slapped—"scar tissue in several places, and years of pain. You are most certainly not fine," he snapped, turning his head to look at her over his shoulder.
"Am I—am I to take that as concern, Professor?" she ventured, as though trying for flippancy. The look on her face betrayed her.
"No," he responded mercilessly, "you are to take it as nothing more and nothing less than a rebuke!"
"But what for?" she said. She was cradling her left hand in her right, stroking it, as though in the intervening days this had become something of a nervous habit. She sounded genuinely surprised, and the corners of her usually smiling mouth were turned down. He shook off a pinprick of guilt. "It's exactly what you would have done, had our positions been reversed," she added thickly.
"You fail to see the difference," he reminded her briskly and with barely suppressed fury. "You were my charge, under my care. Do you know what shattering nonsense I have had to endure from your friends and from your fawning ex-professors? As though it were my fault that my silly goose of a former student chose to risk life, limb and an Oxford scholarship—not to mention an entire future—by performing a completely unnecessary and foolish stunt of Gryffindor recklessness!"
"That's—that's completely unfair," she said, gasping, leaning forward in incredulity. "I never expected you to brim with gratitude, and I did expect you to call it recklessly Gryffindor, but I never thought you could be so—so cruel about it." For the first time since he had entered she looked away from him, biting her lip in a familiar and irritating gesture.
He drew breath to speak but was interrupted. When her voice came it was soft. "I didn't think it was so unnecessary," she said quietly to the vase of flowers to the left of her bed. "You and Harry were the most important people there. I knew that and I know that the others are beginning to recognize that, too. I was unconscious for the rest of the battle—that you already know—but I know there's a fair chance we would have been lost without you."
"Don't you dare!" His hands slammed onto the foot of the bed, startling her as he suddenly loomed over her. She shrank back as though out of terror. "Good," he told himself. "Things are as they should be." Her eyes were wide and brown. On the left side of her face, close to her jaw and temple, was a lattice of scars, but her eyelashes and the look of her skin where she was unharmed were the same as they had always been. He fought the urge to pull away from her, from the sweet smell of her shallow breathing. Instead he loomed closer, aiming to intimidate, drawing from the rage that had fuelled his trek to her hospital room.
"Don't you dare," he said, more quietly but no less deadly, "make out that your little stunt was entirely noble. I'm not afflicted with any false self-consequence when I say that in light of what you told me last summer, in light of what you said you felt, it's only natural for me to assume that your motives may not have been—"
"Professor Snape!" For the first time she interrupted him. He seemed to have genuinely shocked her. Her face was paler now than it had been when he entered the room. "How could you even think—"
"Was it for my gratitude?" he continued savagely. "Was it for the satisfaction of knowing that you had something to hold over my head? Was it to keep me from leaving England as you knew I had been planning to do?"
"How could you—"
"--Or did you save me because you thought that I might grow to love you out of that same misguided gratitude?"
"No! I'd never do that." She collapsed back onto her pillows. "Any of it. I just wanted you free—free to decide what to do with your life. Free, uncontained by illness or servitude or obligation. Free to be happy."
"Didn't it occur to you that by taking that curse you only gave me yet another debt to pay?"
"I didn't have time to think of all that," she said. "It was only a split second. If you must look at it in that mercenary way, you can think of it as a repayment of all my debts to you." Her fingers played with the duvet and her eyes watched their progress. "For all of those times you saved our lives. Think of it as my—my own clearing of debt."
"It's not so easy as that," he said. "You've bound me. You're here, in need of tending with all of the cuts and bruises that should have been mine; and what else can I do but do the tending? You Gryffindors use guilt like a weapon." His fury was beginning to drain away.
"Surely you don't believe your house immune from using guilt," she retorted. "And surely you don't believe that I'd ever force you to stay." Her voice was a whisper.
"You don't see at all. You are such a very simple child. If I cannot be here to tend you then somebody else will have to. Madame Pomfrey is not at your disposal at all times. Who will you contract to play nursemaid? Miss Weasley is tucked far away in Italy, safe with an aunt. Will you ask Mr Weasley? Or perhaps Harry Potter would suit. Whoever you ask or whoever volunteers, I assure you, you will owe them a debt. This hex is no trifling matter. You will be recovering for a very, very long time. How can I let anyone else do this for you?" He was livid with a rage for which he could not account, and he grew angrier still upon seeing that she was calm, unterrified, if slightly shaken.
"You call me simple; and yet sometimes I think it's you who's simple, you who simplify all of your human interactions as though every good deed were an investment, every heart a Gringotts account. People don't work that way, Professor," she said, suddenly, gently. "When people care about each other, they don't think of acts like these as—as debts." As though suddenly realizing what she had said, she turned a brilliant shade of pink, which was not exactly a welcome change from the pallor of earlier. And yet she was not a Gryffindor for nothing; she ploughed on. "Love is so creative that it finds ways to express itself all of the time, without measure or account. Is a child indebted—truly indebted—to the parent who raises him or her, no matter in what manner? Of course not. When a suitor buys a woman a ring, can the woman be called indebted?"
"It can work both ways. If she accepts the ring then she is indebted to him, because he asked her, and he is indebted to her, because she accepted and made him—happy."
She laughed, then. "So I suppose it cancels out?" she said, amused. "That's a strange way of looking at it. Almost true, and yet not quite." She leaned forward again and took his hand. Stiffly, he tried to withdraw it, but her grip was strong. "You might think it's foolish of people to behave in this way, Professor, but the truth is that humans, while they can be stupid and selfish and cruel, also have a great capacity for love. For forgiveness—for forgetting debts incurred." Her thumb stroked his hand; alarmed, he withdrew it, winning from her a deprecating smile.
"I'm not a child," he said sharply. "You needn't explain those things to me."
"I thought so, too," she answered, "until I realized that even someone as intelligent as you can misinterpret the simplicity of another person's caring." She smiled, sadly. "The simplicity of gratitude without indebtedness."
"You sound like an utter fool," he informed her.
"Perhaps," she said. "But do please think about it, Professor." It was nearly time for the nurse to come stumbling back in. She held her hand out to him. He looked at it coldly and she let it drop. Her watery smile faltered for one moment before resurfacing, shaking.
He turned his back to her and moved to exit the room. He heard her say, "Goodbye, Professor Snape."
When he had returned from his discussion with Madame Pomfrey—when he had successfully argued the need for Hermione Granger's transfer to a room that was more accessible to him—when he had thought at last of a suitable retort to the nonsense she had been spouting, she was gone.
- - -
The presentHe felt better, more composed, when after a long silence Miss Granger turned her back on him and began to shrink the boxes stacked behind her desk. It wasn't like her to give her back to a guest, from what he remembered, but he imagined that her manners, usually impeccable, had taken a holiday for the moment. It was startling to realize that, much as he had been surprised and disturbed by her sudden reappearance in his life, she was probably more shaken than him.
"You must excuse me," she said, waving her right hand, floating the shrunken boxes into her left. He saw that hand, a hand immobilized three years ago, and was surprised by a rush of gladness that the hand had not been permanently injured. "I was told to clear off before five o'clock. We must get you out of here soon. You can't meet the new OA head."
"Italy," he heard himself saying, suddenly. "It was to Italy you went."
She paused in her movements, leaving a small package dangling, as though by invisible string, from a hand. "Yes," she said finally. "As I told you a while ago."
"What was in Italy?" He was not aware when he had moved, but now he found himself leaning on the edge of her desk, so close that, had he wanted to, he could have reached round her and touched the boxes in the palm of her left hand. The edge of the desk that stood between them pressed against his thigh. "What was in Italy that you had to shoot over there at your first opportunity, leaving everyone behind to wonder where you went?"
She didn't turn to face him. "I didn't leave everyone wondering where I went," she said. "The Weasleys knew perfectly well where I was. It was Molly who suggested I stay there, with an aunt on her father's side. The aunt was a kind old lady who hadn't had anyone to care for since her children got married. It was quiet and I saw very few people for a year. I recovered." She flexed her left hand, having slid all of the tiny boxes there into a pocket of her robes. "As you can see."
"You could have recovered perfectly well in Britain," he pointed out. "You knew that I would have taken you under my care. I was prepared to. The best mediwitches and mediwizards were made available to you. One of them even took a personal interest in your case and was getting ready to meet you when you departed so suddenly!"
"I couldn't have recovered as fast," she said. She was no longer removing her boxes and had no business facing away from the desk and yet she remained as she was, not looking at him, arousing in him a desire to reach out and turn her harshly to face him again. It was how he knew she was different. Years before she would have held her end of the conversation facing him, often with tears brimming in her eyes that—to her credit—she would never let fall; still, she would have been facing him, sincere and eager and completely open. Now she was a woman—the realization struck him suddenly, and gave him no pleasure—and she was calm and her voice was level, and he was beginning to realize that she wasn't telling him everything that there was to tell.
"I could never have recovered surrounded by people and everything that remained to be done after the war. I would have tried to help out—would have wanted to help out so badly, and not entirely for noble reasons—" the words, his words, repeated to him made his gut clench—"but because I hated to be useless. Minerva didn't mince words. She said I would be more of a hindrance than a help. She was probably right. I wasn't fit to help anyone in my condition, and would have made things worse for me and others." Even though she wasn't facing him, he saw her make a gesture that was once familiar and different—she spread her hands out in front of her, as though in entreaty. "So I went away. I needed to be—isolated for a while. From Hogwarts, from my books, from Oxford and all it promised."
He was unrelenting. "If it was isolation you needed, I could have taken you to Spinner's End."
At this she broke into a short laugh. "You would have grumbled the whole time. All about debts and debt collection. Or else there would have been a steady shower of silent criticism on your part, every day. And I was a needy patient. We would have killed each other within weeks."
"You wouldn't have killed me." She would never have harmed a hair on his head. This he knew with true clarity. "You were my assistant for a year before the battles began. You knew what I was like. You'd grown—used to me, by then."
"And for your part, you would have hated being kept prisoner in your own home by a student who was fool enough to want to save your life."
It was so tempting to say, "At least it would have relieved me of a debt." Perhaps even, "I would have endured it." Or, "I served two masters before; what's a third?" But he was unable to say any of these things. It struck him, suddenly, as bizarre that he had come into the office and walked past horse-faced Bertha expecting to meet a spotty-faced X, and been confronted instead by a woman who refused now to look at him, a woman who declared without difficulty that the life she had saved had been restored to him.
Snape was at a loss as to how to continue. He thought of her face, back then, the last time he had seen her—the way her eyes tracked his progress across the room. He wondered, as he had wondered for three years, how it could have been the same person—that earnest-faced youth, deferential and eager to please, and the cold-blooded young thing who had packed her bags, without a word to him and to most of her friends and professors, and left for some obscure countryside on the continent. It struck him now as an unquestionably strong thing to have done. But what could have propelled her to leave so abruptly—to uproot herself so thoroughly?
"It's a quarter to five," she said then. "I'm sure you have better things to do, sir. Thank you for granting me this interview." She began to walk around the edge of the table and her face came into view. She smiled at him—the same smile as that of earlier, composed, adult. She shrank and summoned the things remaining in the room, all but for the vase with the orchid. She held out her right arm and the owl flew to her, sinking its talons gently into the cloth of her dark robes. She flashed him another smile and walked out the door. He was motionless for a few moments, before he came to his senses and darted after her, Bertha peering at him from behind a magazine.
"So that's it, then," he called after her as she navigated the not-entirely-empty hallways. Passing Unspeakables, the hoods of their robes obscuring their faces, betrayed no interest but Snape knew they were listening. He did not at the moment care. "You called me to your office to tell me you'd relieved me of a life-debt, and now expect me to trot home saying to myself, 'By George, I'm free'?"
"Well—yes, I suppose," she said, seeming genuinely surprised as she replied over her shoulder. She didn't stop walking, as though she couldn't be bothered to stand around listening to him now that she had said her piece. "Was there something else you were expecting?"
Not particularly, actually, but Snape was conscious of an anticlimax. Years ago this same girl had looked at him over a bubbling cauldron and asked him out to dinner. He had dropped the roots he was holding into the potion as a result. In the ensuing explosion, both of them were saved the embarrassment of replying. She had been a smart girl even then, though. When both of them were free from the hospital wing, she had immediately known the meaning of his stony silence inside his lab and his steady avoidance of her out of it. She had never mentioned the topic again.
In the present, the owl on Hermione's arm peered at him. Snape walked in the hallways some distance behind her, trying to figure out what it was he was trying to say before they both emerged into the afternoon sunlight. There was something—something he needed to know…
Just before she stepped over the building's threshold, he swooped around her—for a moment missing the billow that his teaching robes had created, so many years ago—and blocked her passage.
"Meet me tonight," he snapped at her. He hadn't meant to snap, and hoped she wouldn't refuse.
She looked mystified. "But whatever for?" she said. The owl hooted.
"There are things I'd like to know," he equivocated with a scowl. It was partly true. At the uncertain look on her face he added, "You may think of it however you like. Perhaps a celebration of your quitting the OA. Or perhaps an opportunity for me to return those things you'd left in my laboratory long ago, those things that are gathering dust."
"I—yes. All right," she said with a shrug.
- - -
He was entirely composed when he met her later that night. He met her at the door of her building and Apparated them both away to a glittering restaurant on the other side of London. There had been a moment of disorientation on his part when he had turned to see her in a black blazer and skirt, looking so adult that her appearance threw him. It only reinforced the impression that he was dealing with an altogether different person—where the young Hermione might have been nervous or fidgety or insecure, this grown-up version of Miss Granger met his eye squarely, and conversed intelligently and with a confidence that told him that she no longer cared about his opinion. She was well-dressed and neat but her face was unpainted. This was not, after all, a date.
He met her eyes across the table. Conversation so far hadn't touched on his real object. He had asked her what she had been doing with herself—why she had left the Office of Assignations, what about her plans for Oxford. He was careful to do all of the above without giving the impression that he was overly concerned about the answers. There was a good chance he was succeeding.
"I've actually been in the process of getting a degree," she said over the soup. He might not have liked her when she was younger but he had always been an admirer of her table manners. "It was the first thing I was set on doing when I returned to Britain. I'll be finished in a year. I could have finished sooner but work at the OA took up substantial amounts of my time." He also admired her politeness. Even though she could have, in Gryffindor brusqueness, asked him again what she was doing here, she didn't.
Now he looked at her over dessert, but she wasn't looking at him—she was looking at the dancing couples under the bright yellow lights. The younger Miss Granger had kept her eyes trained on him at all times; now the adult let her eye wander, bored, across the room as though only waiting for the night to end. He wanted to snap at her to get her attention, as though she were a student daydreaming in his class when she ought to have been looking at the blackboard. This was when he had an idea.
"Would you like to dance?" he said. He struggled not to make his tone bored or disdainful. It would not work otherwise.
Startled for the first time that evening, she nodded. It was something of a relief that he could still catch her off-guard. She followed him to the floor—put her hand in his, let her other hand rest on his shoulder with not a hint of nervousness. They swayed in time to the music, her skirt brushing occasionally against his legs, both of them making little conversation. When the music shifted to a fast jazzy pace, she made as though to pull away, but he held on.
He had caught her by surprise, and therein lay the genius of the idea. Five minutes later Hermione Granger was laughing and dancing in his arms. Her cheeks were pink and she held on to him while she laughed and he told her, in interrupted bits over the fast music, what he had thought X would be like. He spun her and twirled her, strangely gratified by the sound of laughter that he hadn't heard since before that incident with the cauldron when they had been—he was sure he hadn't imagined it—almost friends.
In the years since they had last met, he had had plenty of time in which to examine her actions—her motives for leaving. He had been unsatisfied by any of the scenarios that had danced before his eyes, but not before long, he was sure of one thing. It had been completely unfair to accuse her in the way he had. In the succeeding days after her abrupt departure, her words came back to him innumerable times. I just wanted you free. Free to decide what to do with your life, she had said. Free to be happy.
It had been so easy to imagine that she had done what she had done to entrap him. When she left he saw his great error. She had never tried to force her feelings on him—had done her best to keep him from being uncomfortable. To all intents and purposes she hadn't even told Harry Potter or Ron Weasley, both of her feelings and of her ill-timed, ill-thought proposition. She had behaved impeccably as someone could who had cut herself open for both ridicule and rejection. Despite this, when she had saved his life and risked her own, he had done her the injustice of suspecting her motives instead of allowing himself to feel the gratitude that she ought, by right, to have earned.
He had replayed their last conversation over and over again, in his head. Free to decide what to do with your life. Before he'd known it he was standing in front of Minerva's desk with his resignation, Albus peering at him from his portrait over the Headmistress' chair. Uncontained by illness, or servitude, or obligation. He had emptied his Gringotts vault and packed his few possessions and traveled for half a year getting, at turns, blistered with cold and browned with the sun of the tropics.
He had written few letters and had been determined to put the war from his mind, for the time being. He was less successful in forgetting Hermione Granger.
After six months he settled into a job as an Unspeakable. He had been hired on the spot. Harry Potter's repeated attempts to establish Snape as a hero had at least one agreeable consequence; his (Snape's) ability at espionage and similar activities was now acknowledged. For the next two years he had made a few but, he thought, valuable friends, and had enjoyed his work. He had been content enough, he supposed, although Miss Granger's words kept ringing in his ears. He thought of them every night when he settled down to sleep. Free to be happy.
And that led him here. He allowed himself to feel amazement at the fact that a woman he thought he'd never see again was here, and that a light sheen of sweat was beginning to collect on her skin from their dancing. He hadn't danced for a long time and knew that he probably looked a fool, but there was something he needed to know. He didn't allow the almost unreal feel of her blouse wrinkling under his fingers to distract him.
The song was beginning to end. It would be a most uncharacteristic gesture and there was a possibility it would not work. It was now or never.
He took her hand and spun her and, as the last notes sounded, tilted her until her abundant hair nearly reached the floor and she was laughing, held suspended, her back resting precariously on his arm, arms locked around his neck. That was when he knew for certain.
The eyes of his Miss Granger, his competent but slightly high-strung assistant, who loved him in her devoted way, looked at him from beneath a layer of sophisticated fringe. Her eyes were bright and her skin was flushed. She was looking at him as though he were the only person in the room. She was laughing girlishly. It didn't annoy him. It was as though time had turned back three years, and no awkwardness had ever existed between them. He allowed the warmth of elation, of understanding, to spread to his fingertips. She still loved him.
Eventually her laughter subsided and the two of them joined the rest of the couples in applauding the band. He led the way to their table, careful to take her arm as he did so. His heart was beating to the rhythm of the song. She was composed again now, and the flush in her cheeks had disappeared. With one hand she straightened some errant curls and with the other she picked up her bag as he left a handful of galleons on the table.
He Apparated her home, and a plan, a new one, was beginning to take shape in his mind as she shook his hand good-night.
- - -
The next day, he took the stairs two at a time, and was careful to appear unhurried and composed when she opened the door to her smallish flat.
She wasn't doing anything to hide her surprise. "What on earth are you doing here, Professor Snape?" she said. Behind her, a cat (or a Kneazle) sounded a meow. A muggle television played tinny music in the background.
"I realized I'd forgot give you these," he said, holding out a paper bag.
She let him in and he followed her down a cramped hallway that led to a tiny kitchen. Her walls were painted in shades of yellow and covered with few photographs, mostly of her parents and of herself when she was very young. There was only one of her during her Hogwarts years, and in it Harry Potter was on her left and Ron Weasley was holding her hand, on her right. He was conscious of a scowl forming on his face, but it was interrupted by her exclamation.
"I've been looking for this," she said, holding up a blue cardigan. "I didn't realize. I must have left it in your office. How horribly untidy of me."
"It was in the laboratory, actually," Snape said, seating himself on a kitchen stool as she spread out the contents of his tiny paper bag on her round breakfast table. He observed her as she took inventory of hair pins, quills, a small notebook, and various paraphernalia that had found their way into his workrooms. If she had, the night before, looked like an adult, the effect was very much lost now.
He became aware that she was looking at him. "Is something the matter?" she said.
"You look as you did, back then," he replied. "Exactly the same."
Her hand went to her hair and she glanced down at her apparel. She was wearing an Oxford University sweatshirt and faded jeans and on her small feet were equally small white socks. She flushed momentarily. She does look like a schoolgirl, he thought. In some ways she is still one.
When she met his eyes again she was laughing, completely cool. "Not quite the same," she said. "Scar tissue is difficult to banish, even with magic." As though to emphasize the effect, she smiled wider, stretching the scar on her eyelid and a hair-thin one down the side of her cheek. He cleared his throat and she returned to her inventory.
"There was a can of cat food in there somewhere," he said, watching her. "But I thought I'd throw it out." Her hair was in a braid down her back. He remembered long afternoons of watching potions bubble, long days of sipping tea in the lab and talking quietly as she did and redid that selfsame braid to her satisfaction. In the hospital they had had to shave some of that hair away to treat the injuries on her scalp. Now it was fully grown and vibrant, and shone in the light that streamed from the window above her sink.
"Thank you for keeping this," she said, opening a small pocket book she had brought into his office for long waits. "All of this. I thought that you might have thrown them out."
"I almost did," he said. "I certainly never expected to see you again."
"I'm sorry I called you over so abruptly yesterday," she murmured.
"It couldn't have been helped," he said dismissively. "There was no way you could have done it that wouldn't have surprised me."
" Would you like to stay for lunch?" she said suddenly. "You've come all this way just to return my things. The least I can do is offer you food, even if it's only take-away."
Her flat was messy. This was because she had just moved in, she explained. Upon leaving the OA job she had decided to live somewhere closer to Oxford and her college. There were stacks of paper on the floor of her unremarkable (but adequately spacious) living room, but as in the kitchen, there were already a few pictures. There was one of Professor Dumbledore and not a single one of himself, but he had never suspected otherwise. When he had come upon her, she had been organizing stacks of notes for her dissertation. Crookshanks the ancient cat lay sleepily on top of a red sofa while Snape's old friend the unnamed owl dozed on a perch by the window. When the pizza came Hermione moved to take it into the kitchen, but he took the box from her grasp and laid it on the coffee table.
"We can work while eating," he said, ignoring the puzzled look she gave him at the word we.
They ended up eating pizza seated on the floor, Hermione still in socks and Snape, feeling every year of his age, taking off his shoes and shoving them beneath the coffee table. It was bizarre, he thought, looking at her over the pizza; when she caught his eye, he realized that she was probably thinking the same thing, and smiled at her wanly.
"You needn't look at me like that," he told her. "We were—friends, once, of a sort."
"I know," she said. For the first time since their bizarre reunion she looked uncertain, as though she was possibly floundering. "But I might have been imagining things, the way you wrung me dry that day at the hospital."
"I hadn't meant to," he said. It was his brand of apology. "I just didn't understand."
She fed a bit of cheese to Crookshanks, who purred contentedly. "What part?"
"The part where you leapt in front of a potentially deadly curse to save a man who was probably good as dead anyway," he said.
She shrugged. "I acted out of instinct, I suppose," she said. "I don't mean to reduce it into something as unplanned as a reflex. I don't know if I could have done the same thing for Crabbe or Goyle, for example. Honestly. I only mean that I saw you in danger and thought of nothing but removing you from it."
He hesitated. Sincerity. Sincerity was important. "I was grateful," he muttered.
"It didn't sound like it," she countered. "You sounded as though you'd rather you were dead. Was owing me a life-debt so horrible?"
Yes. "No," he said. "It took me awhile to sort out how I—how I felt. You know that life-debts are different in the wizarding world."
"Don't give me that," she said, but her tone was conversational. She picked off a piece of ham from her pizza and dangled it in front of Crookshanks, who swatted at it. "What was it you were afraid of? Did you think I was going to hold the debt over your head for the rest of our days? 'A man in debt is so far a slave'?"
"If I apologize to you now," he said slowly, "do you think we might forget about it?"
Hermione looked at him. Snape kept his expression neutral.
"Yes," she said, equally slowly. "Of course."
"Then I'm sorry." It wasn't so hard to say, after a lifetime of saying things he didn't mean.
"For what precisely?"
"For accusing you of motives you never had."
"It was perfectly silly of you. I had only seconds to act. You acted as though I'd planned everything out—like a premeditated life-debt."
"I have apologized," he said.
"True," she conceded.
"I've had three years to think about what I said and if I apologize now it's because I know exactly how foolish those conclusions had been."
"Then I accept." She wiped her hand on a serviette she had produced and held it out to him. They shook hands.
They spent the rest of the afternoon sorting through Hermione's notes and discussing things both academic and personal over tea and coffee. Snape—uncharacteristically, he knew—told her everything he had gathered of her old school friends. Dean Thomas had married a Hufflepuff; Neville Longbottom had acquired a girl-friend in the form of Hogwarts' new school librarian; etc, etc. She listened with interest—more interest, surely, than she had shown him the night before. Even as she laughed at his anecdotes and shared some of her own, Snape was conscious of a curious air about Hermione, as though she were constantly wondering, What are you doing here? but was too polite to say anything.
At a quarter past three, Snape pleaded a headache. Hermione, like a young girl—for she was still young—jumped to her feet and walked to the kitchen. The more time she spent in his company, it seemed, the more she became like that young girl who had asked him out to dinner over the unromantic bubbling of a cauldron. Snape, shoving his stockinged feet into his shoes, trailed after her and found her frowning at her medicine cabinet.
"I seem to have run out of Headache potion," she said, a crease forming between her eyebrows. "I'm sorry, Professor. I have some muggle medicine on hand, though, if you wouldn't object." He nodded and she handed him a small pill. He summoned a glass; she filled it with water and he drank.
"You do know, Hermione," he said, inspecting her medicine cabinet, "that wizarding potions work more than twice as fast as your average muggles ones." It wasn't a question.
Hermione shrugged her elegant one-shoulder shrug. He had expected some kind of reaction to his use of her first name, but apart from a momentary widening of the eyes there was nothing. "I suppose I've never really had time to brew for myself—all the buying of ingredients, all the preparation and the waiting," she said. "And after I lost use of my left hand for such a long time, I just haven't been as confident with my laboratory skills." She hadn't meant it as a remark pointed at him, but he felt the sting of guilt just the same.
"I can help you brew," he said. "Your common household potions, I mean. Headache potion, Pepperup, All-nighter brew. The things you're going to need when you devote yourself to school again."
A part of him took great delight in surprising her. She took the glass from his hand and surveyed his expression. "Are you quite well, Professor Snape?" she said.
"Perfectly, I assure you." He leaned in closer to her. Her eyes widened, then relaxed again when he only lifted an arm to close the medicine cabinet behind her before stepping away. "Tomorrow. I can help you tomorrow. I have no assignments at the moment."
"As I should know." She began to smile, almost hesitantly.
"Tomorrow, then." He nodded and moved back to the living room to pick up the cloak he had draped over a chair. She drifted in after him.
"I'll pick up the ingredients," she assured him as she watched him put on the cloak and scratch Crookshanks' chin.
"Good," he said. "I'll be here around noon."
Hermione's puzzlement at his behavior was nearly palpable. He found himself grateful that she said not a word of it as he prepared to depart. He turned to leave. She followed him to the door, to the accompaniment of Crookshanks' insistent meowing.
"I have one more question," she called after him when he had gone five steps from her door.
"What is it?" he said, his hand on the banister of the building's stairs. He turned to look at her.
She was framed by the doorway, looking—and it was an uncomfortable comparison—like a child, in her stockinged feet, loose sweater, and wild hair. "How did you know where I live?" she blurted out, with wide eyes. It was as though she had been containing herself for a while. "I mean, how did you know the number of my flat."
For the first time in rather a long time, he smirked. The expression felt peculiar and unfamiliar on his face. His plans were going well. He turned to go, flinging a few words behind him.
"I asked Bertha, of course."
- - -