Becoming

Chapter Two

by snarkypants

She arrived at Hogwarts a month later with little fanfare and less welcome.

The grounds were dark and silent as she walked up from Hogsmeade; she could practically feel eyes glaring at her from just inside the forest, and there was no comforting glow or smudge of fire smoke from Hagrid's—from the groundskeeper's cabin, rather.

The castle itself was similarly dark and silent; the only time she could remember such a tomblike feeling about the place had been those morose days before Dumbledore's funeral, before the closure of farewell and after the shock of ostensible murder.

She was surprised that the gates would actually admit her, but admit her they did, with a rusty shriek of protest at being made to work at this lamentable hour.

The castle sat in silhouette in front of the setting sun, rendering the light dazzling if she looked up at the towers; she concentrated instead on keeping her footing in the deepening shadows.

She was much more nervous about falling than she had ever been as a girl; she had belly-flopped spectacularly with the twins when she was seven months along and ever since the slightest wobble in her ankles was enough to make her hands shake and turn her perspiration to ice. Not blessed with natural grace, she lit her wand with a murmured Lumos and picked her way carefully up the ragged cobble of stones that masqueraded as a path.

She told herself that she was much too sensible to be cringing like some maiden in a Gothic romance, but she had to admit that the trappings were quite effective. If Professor Snape wanted her off-balance and unsettled when she arrived he was succeeding admirably.

Lone woman, walking fearfully up rocks to dark, forbidding castle, populated solely by dark, forbidding man, she thought, suppressing a giggle. All the picture needs is jagged streaks of lightning and a roll of thunder for the impression to be complete. She paused, waiting for the weather gods to issue a "take that, you" for her cheek, but the day had been gloriously clear for once and the sky beyond the castle was a deep shade of apricot, melting into a velvety dark aubergine overhead.

She looked back towards the castle, and jumped, a startled scream dying in her throat. No one had been in front of the building just a moment ago, and now here was the dark, forbidding man himself. He had changed little since last she had seen him; he was still lean, saturnine, with black robes and greasy hair, now liberally streaked with silver. He wore a goatee, neatly trimmed, with a narrow vein of silver running just to the left of his chin.

"Professor Weasley," he said, rather frostily, she thought, although she had expected nothing less.

I will not giggle now, I will not giggle now, I will not giggle now, she thought furiously, trying to compose her expression to one befitting an Arithmancy Mistress rather than a silly teenaged girl. "P-professor Snape," she said, nearly choking with the effort. "I'm sorry, you startled me," she said with a rush of breath. "How did you know I was here?"

"The gates were charmed to admit you and to alert me," he said.

"Oh, of course. Silly of me."

He said nothing, but even at ten yards' distance she could see his eyebrow rise in agreement.

"Your belongings arrived this afternoon; the house-elves have put them into Professor Vector's old quarters. I'm sure you can find the way," he said in a tone that told her she was dismissed, thank you.

"Uh, actually I can't. I don't know where any of the staff quarters are."

"Really? There is a part of this castle you don't know about, Mrs. Weasley? I find myself astonished," he said, abruptly turning and sweeping up the corridor, theoretically in the direction of said quarters. She had little choice but to double her speed, following meekly in his wake.

He sailed ahead of her, his black robes flying and she trudged along behind him, feeling very much like an out-of-shape, middle-aged, frumpy witch in her sensible trainers and casual Muggle clothing. It was enough to put her in a sour frame of mind, indeed.

The gemstones in the great house-points hourglasses glinted sleepily at Hermione as if they, too, were resting up for the new term. She was feeling annoyed enough with Professor Snape that she waited until he was out of earshot and then aimed her wand at the Slytherin glass. "Ten points from Slytherin," she muttered and was dismayed when nothing happened.

"They're not charmed to work yet," he said mordantly, his voice carrying loudly from somewhere up ahead.

Professor Snape wasn't any more welcoming to her now she was a professor than he had been when she was a student; big surprise.

She had spent most of Monday setting up her classroom. Professor Vector didn't seem to have thrown away anything in more than twenty years of teaching, so Hermione's first task was to banish trash, broken equipment and ripped textbooks. She was thoroughly grubby by lunch, but by dinnertime she felt that the space was ready for students.

On Tuesday, she had moved books and parchments into her new office. She was finished by lunch and rewarded herself with a walk down to Hogsmeade. She purchased quills and ink at Scrivenshaft's, popped into The Three Broomsticks for a bite to eat and ended up having a pleasant visit with Madam Rosmerta.

It had been two days and she realized that she had forgot how cut off from the rest of the world Hogwarts was. Even the castle ghosts seemed to be on holiday, with the sole exception of Peeves. Peeves was so delighted to see someone else in the castle besides Snape and the house-elves that he followed Hermione around with an endless supply of inkwells, lobbing them at her whenever her guard was down.

Despite the need to keep out a weather eye for the poltergeist, Hermione slipped easily into a soothing rhythm. She hadn't slept well since Ron's death; she would awaken at the slightest noise and struggle to return to sleep.

But the noises, creaks and groans of the ancient castle were familiar to her; she had slept alone here for years and knew she was safe. She awoke rested and ready for a brisk walk around the grounds.

She met Professor Snape in the staff room for breakfast on Wednesday morning after dodging Peeves through the corridors. Severus nodded curtly when she entered, taking in her woollen jacket and pink face with a raised eyebrow.

"It's chilly in the mornings after living in Egypt," she said.

He nodded and turned his attention back to his remaining piece of toast.

"Would you mind terribly if I light a fire?" she asked, rubbing her hands together.

"Suit yourself; I'm finished." He folded his napkin and tossed it to the table.

She shrugged and lifted the cover from her breakfast.

Her task for Wednesday: to set up her quarters.

It was nearly lunch and she hadn't accomplished a blessed thing. Just the thought of creating a home that she would share with neither her husband nor her children filled her with melancholy. She would lift something out of a box and spend minutes, hours, remembering just where she and Ron had acquired it.

Here was a framed photograph of Ron taken a few years after their marriage. There was a marked difference between the pictures of him before and those taken after they were married. The later ones were much more confident; in them, his body language and the smiles he gave her were cockier and more intimate. These were her favourites: his slow, lazy smile, his thumbs hooked over his hips, his fingers flat and pointing not so subtly towards, well, his crotch.

She certainly missed that aspect of her marriage. She and Ron had been somewhat inexperienced when they came together, but by dint of much reading (on Hermione's part) and much experimentation they had rubbed along quite well together. Ron's image winked at her, smiling in invitation.

She withdrew several lengths of beautifully woven silk in sunset colours, from violet to fuchsia to cognac to topaz. She had purchased the sari fabric when she and the twins accompanied Ron on his first business trip to India. Originally, she had intended to have them made into tropical-weight robes, but she just couldn't bear to cut into them and had instead used them as window treatments in their home. She planned to use them here to separate the workspace in her quarters from her relaxation space. Hermione lifted the silk to her face; she still could smell the sweet, slightly fetid scent of the night-blooming jasmine that draped their house in Cairo.

One box was devoted to touristy souvenirs that she had bought for the fun of it. Miniature sarcophagi, plaster scarabs, 'ancient' papyrus, stone rubbings, that sort of thing. Now that she had a proper British dwelling she intended liberally to pepper her surroundings with tacky bits of oh-so-authentic artefacts.

There were some genuine treasures as well; her mentor, Professor bin Daoud, had given her an exquisite bronze of Anubis when she left Egypt. She had no idea as to its monetary value, but the professor told her that it had been in his family for 'quite a long time,' which, to an elderly man who thought in millennial terms, was probably a heroic understatement.

Gringotts' Tokyo office had commissioned three beautiful calligraphy paintings for Ron after he dealt with some particularly stubborn curses for them, followed a few years later by a small collection of charmed ivory netsuke that re-enacted Japanese mythological stories.

The Beijing office had given them a statue of the goddess Kwan Yin when the twins were babies; in those days, she had travelled with Ron to many of the exotic locales in his territory, and the Chinese Wizards and Witches had been delighted by the babies' red-gold hair.

There was the periwinkle blue silk kimono Ron brought her after a business trip to Japan had sparked a nasty row; she couldn't remember the reason for the fight, other than being stuck in the house with cranky toddlers while he travelled the world, but she did remember the make-up sex.

Another treasure was the ancient preserved lotus in a crystal case, an anniversary gift Ron had found in the Liaoning Province in China. She unpacked an early-seventeenth-century Snitch from Sri Lanka, a gift from the Sri Lankan National Team after he removed the curse from their practice pitch. Ron had been particularly proud of that story despite the fact that Sri Lanka lost more matches after he broke the curse than before.

Finally, after several hours of unpacking and reminiscing and several dampened handkerchiefs, she had placed things, more or less, where she thought they would live during the school year. She hung pictures and paintings in eye-level groupings and relocated torches to take greatest advantage of the light. She moved her clothing and toiletries into the capacious wardrobe in the en suite lavatory. There was little left to do in her rooms but build up the fire and shelve all of her books, which was more pleasure than chore.

She changed from her grubby jeans and jumper into a casual set of violet robes for dinner. She had missed lunch earlier and was now ravenously hungry; more than that, she was lonely as well. And while Severus Snape might resent the hell out of her for merely breathing, he was someone to talk to; the house-elves remembered her from her student days and studiously avoided her.

Her casual robes were rather chilly, truth be told, and she briefly debated whether to wear a cardigan to keep herself warm before imagining Hermione-as-Dolores-Umbridge, down to a frilly purple Alice band in her hair. She shuddered. "I'd rather freeze," she said aloud and left her rooms.

She walked briskly, mostly to keep herself warm en route to the staff room. Swinging her arms also helped and by the time she arrived she was breathing quickly and her face was flushed.

"Good evening, Professor Snape," she said breezily.

He froze, arrested in the act of raising a glass of wine to his mouth. "M-mrs Weasley," he said thickly.

"I hope you didn't hold lunch for me this afternoon," she said. "I was busy unpacking."

"Not at all," he said, starting as he remembered the glass in his hand. "I'm not accustomed to having company the week before term starts."

"What do you do during this week? I've been so busy I haven't noticed anything else."

He looked at his glass as if inspecting it for flaws. "I spend a few days testing all of the wards and ensuring the necessary structural repairs have been made over the holidays. Receiving shipments of supplies." He shrugged. "Nothing too burdensome."

"It sounds peaceful," she said. "Thank you for allowing me to intrude."

He nodded, examining the glass.

Their dishes appeared before them. The standard meat-and-two-veg. She laughed. "I'm really starting to miss Molokhiyya soup with bits of lamb in it, or pigeons stuffed with rice, with baklava or basbousa for afters." She speared a squishy bit of carrot with her fork. "Or at the very least, a nice curry. Pity there's no Indian nearby."

"There is an Indian restaurant in Hogsmeade now," he said.

She wrinkled her nose. "Really? I missed it yesterday. Do they deliver?"

"Regrettably, no," he said.

"I'll have to seek it out tomorrow," she said.

"You're going to the village?" he asked, still fascinated with his glass.

"I have some errands to run," she said. "I'll need a few more supplies to feel ready for students." Her forehead wrinkled. "Do you fancy a trip?"

"No," he said slowly, looking up at her. Just as quickly he looked down again. "You may wish to stop in at Gladrags'." He cleared his throat. "Your robes… not quite the thing… teenaged boys…" His voice trailed off, and she saw he was blushing. "They're rather revealing," he finished sternly.

"Really?" she asked blankly, looking down. These robes had a very modest neckline, she thought, what could he be— oh!

There, covered only by dark whisper-thin silk, were her nipples in bold relief, erect and projecting through the fabric, highlighted and shadowed with every flicker of the fire. She gasped and tucked her hands into her armpits, which succeeded only in thrusting her breasts up and out, cleavage clearly revealed. Snape looked away again and she put her elbows on the table, concealing herself.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," she said. "I haven't got heavier robes yet and it's so cold—," she said and stopped, blushing anew at her body's explicit response to the chill and her own faltering explanation. "Of course I'll drop in at Gladrags', Professor; I've been wearing mostly Muggle clothes since I left Egypt, and—"

"Perfectly, ah, all right," he said, sneaking a glance upward to see if it was safe to look across the table again. It was; her head was in her hands. He stabbed at his roast, cutting a piece of the tender meat with his fork. "The students might just, ah, find them—it—it, ah, somewhat distracting."

She squeezed her eyes shut in mortification.

A/N: Thanks to my flist, especially revena, persephoneflame, and pinkyheather for the inspiration and encouragement.

And, as always, thanks to selened for being my beta reader.