Disclaimer: I do not own any characters or ideas which you recognise as being from JK Rowling's Harry Potter series or any other trademarked or copyrighted work. The plot of this story is my own, but I have no intention of making any money from it.


Chapter 9

7 pm, the 15th of December. Hermione was once more in front of her mirror, giving herself the final once-over before her date arrived to pick her up at 7:30. She had been loath to give Snape her address when he asked, what with him being Snape, but she reasoned that since his best friend was the leader of her party, and therefore her boss, it wasn't as though he'd have any trouble finding it out for himself if he wanted to.

She twirled in front of her mirror, shaking her head slightly. Honestly, she thought, I've dressed up to go out more times in the last week than in the previous year! She had never really been a girly girl, and then as an MP, she had an image to maintain so going out of an evening to party was out of the question.

In addition, she supposed, if she were being honest, it wasn't as though she had any friends to go out partying with. Aside from her colleagues, she didn't really know anyone in the Muggle world. Working had always been more important. And she couldn't exactly socialise with her magical friends, for obvious reasons.

She watched the green dress follow her spin, then come to rest. She giggled to herself. Green, Slytherin, snakes... all the associations she had put aside years ago came back in a flash, as she waited for the ex-head of Slytherin to pick her up. For a date.

Not that that wasn't surreal enough in itself! Hermione had decided that the best way to get though the evening without collapsing into giggles at the sheer absurdity of the situation was to pretend it wasn't happening at all. Which reminds me. With one last look into the mirror, she declared herself satisfied and went to sort out her Occlumency before he arrived.

Going into the lounge, she sat back on the leather settee and shut her eyes, descending into her own mind, which, no one who knew here would have been surprised to note, took the shape of a library. Specifically, the Hogwarts library.

She carefully visualised all the moments which involved Snape as her teacher, as an Order member, and on the night he murdered Dumbledore, and imagined them as images in a large, black, leather-bound book. Then, she walked to the Restricted Section, and shut the book away in one of the chained cabinets, used for restraining the more dangerous Grimoires.

Hermione brushed her hand along the spines of the imaginary books as she wandered back to the main open area of the library. Right in the centre of the open space, there was a lectern, with on it a large blue tome. She flicked through it, seeing only the usual innocuous thoughts which she kept there, such as her commute to work, sitting in the Commons, making dinner, walking in the park. She carefully interspersed these with her memories of Snape on the night of the Malfoy ball – the beauty of his dark eyes as he cut into her dance, her shock at his discovery of her magic, the joy that she had felt in talking to him. Hermione tried not to think about what it meant that not all of the emotions she was inputting were fake.

Making sure that the book was open, she imagined herself apparating and opened her eyes. Just to check, she considered the night of the Battle of Hogwarts. Though she could remember what had happened, and felt the same anger when she thought about Voldemort or the Death Eaters in general, her emotions towards Snape himself were somewhat more ambivalent. This was a technique she had read about years ago, but only used rarely, because it was so specific. It was possible to lock away memories of one person in order to change your instinctive emotional response to them, but to do this for more than one person at a time, or to hold for more than a few hours, was almost impossible. As it was, she would probably get a migraine in the morning. Hermione sighed. It would probably be all the worse because she had used it only five days ago before the Malfoy ball, to allow herself to shake his hand without wanting to spit in his face.

The doorbell rang.

Hermione felt vaguely impressed by that as she buzzed him up to the flat. It had taken Ron three weeks and several explanations before he'd managed to figure out how the bells on a block of flats worked. For a pureblood, Snape clearly knew his way round Muggle London.

He was standing outside, hair tied back in a ponytail, wearing a dark suit with a black shirt. She almost gasped aloud – he looked rather handsome and much less sallow than usual.

"Good evening, Helena."

"Hello." She picked up her coat from the stand by the door and stepped outside to join him, shutting the door behind her with a click.

He smiled at her, clearly nervous. "Um, I wasn't sure what precisely to go for... or even if I should go Muggle or Magical, but I thought you might prefer to remain incognito and Muggle so I booked a table at the top of the Gherkin. Is that alright?"

"Wow! Don't you usually have to wait months for tables there? Especially this time of year!"

"Well," he looked slightly abashed. "Being the best friend of the future Prime Minister helps. As does a substantial bribe and the confundus charm."

She laughed at that. Nervously, he joined in, and the ice was broken.

"Would you prefer to apparate or walk?" he asked her.

She looked down at her feet, which were ensconced in the same high heels as Friday night's ball. "Considering the height of these shoes, apparition might be simpler! But you'll have to Side-Along me, I'm afraid. Apparition was the one bit of magic I could just never get the hang of." This, of course, was a complete lie, but there was no way that she was going to apparate with the Ministry records showing the name of every person who did so.

He smiled down at her. "I'm happy to oblige." They turned on the spot, and suddenly they were standing in the shadows below London's major business landmark.

The food was excellent, but the prices were as high as the building. Hermione winced. This would wipe out her budget for the month – lucky she had some savings! He must have noticed her face, however, because he looked up from his menu to say,

"As the instigator of this... evening... I will be covering the costs, of course."

She started a little, feeling uncomfortable at his blunt way of putting it. Severus Snape, being blunt! Besides, some part of her felt that she ought to object on feminist grounds. However, on the other hand, surely Voldemort's right hand man, scion of a very old pureblood family, could afford it.

Seeing her dilemma, he smiled slightly. "Please let me be a little old fashioned."

She laughed, and acquiesced. "But next time, we're having fish and chips, my treat."

He laughed aloud. "I look forward to it."

The meal passed almost in a blur. Though they were both naturally taciturn, there always seemed to be another issue to debate, another problem to solve. Hermione was very flattered when he asked, as they were waiting for dessert

"Is there any subject you don't actually have a Mastery in? By the sounds of it, you're knowledgeable enough in both Transfiguration and Charms that you must have done at least one of them, and your Arithmancy's not bad either!"

"I don't have one at all, actually. Though if I'd had the chance, I'd have done the double, Charms and Transfiguration."

"Why didn't you?"

She thought fast. Because your mental egomaniac bastard boss destroyed my life, and made me go into hiding before I could even take my NEWTs probably wasn't a very good answer. "My mother was ill, so I stayed with her instead of going to university. I did all the required reading from home, but never had the formal training."

He murmured his condolences and looked uncomfortable. "Ah."

"What about you?" she asked curiously. "I mean, obviously you did potions from what you've told me, but you seem to know an awful lot about charms, too."

"I started with Charms, but about two years in decided that my true calling was potions. I was still interested in spell-work, but after a while, all the foolish wand-waving in Charms was somehow less, how shall I put this, real and grounded than Potions work."

"I see what you mean," Hermione said thoughtfully. "But to my mind, that was part of the joy of Charms and Transfiguration. The way in which I could instantaneously see the results of my magic gave me an adrenalin rush, made me happy. Besides, I was never brilliant at potions. I mean, I could follow the instructions, but that was about it, it never interested me as much. And,"

she added mischeviously, "my teacher always told me I was a dunderhead."

"A good choice of vocabulary." He smirked. "So you're one for instant gratification over patience and hard labour?"

She batted her eyelids, giggling a little. "Perhaps."

He smirked. "Good to know."

Realising that she was flirting rather obviously and clumsily, Hermione reined herself in. "Actually, I wonder whether I could ask your advice on a minor intellectual exercise."

Looking intrigued, he leaned towards her. "By all means."

"Well," she considered how precisely to frame the question so he would not consider her motivations too deeply. "I enjoy crafting illusions, perhaps more of that instant gratification tendency you noted a minute ago. I was wondering whether one would be able to make, for example, an exact replica of a human being."

He frowned a little. "I suppose so. It wouldn't be autonomous, of course, and could only follow a certain series of pre-prescribed movements, because of Alexei's Omnipotence Principle-"

She interrupted hastily. "Oh, that's not a problem. I'm talking more as a work of art, as it were. The image itself – I can worry about animating it later."

He raised an eyebrow. "I've never heard of charms used as art, before!"

"To be honest, I just wanted to see if I could do it," she replied shaking her head. "I got the image to copy from a pensive, transfigured grains of sand to match it, then used engorgio to bring them to life size. I even managed to make the humanoid impervious to touch, so that people can't walk through it by using a variant of the repelling charm on the sand before it was transformed."

Severus was staring at her now, what could be a look of respect in his eyes. "That must have taken a while! I've never heard of such an in-depth animation before. Most people just leave illusions at the stage where they are permeable to touch."

Of course, Hermione couldn't explain that her actual reasoning was more to do with the fact that it would be rather difficult to practice battles in Harry Potter's basement if you could just walk through all the Death Eaters. She just smiled vaguely. "I was curious."

"So what's your problem, then? It sounds like you've got all bases covered."

"Weight. The illusory person still weighs the same as the sand, and I can't think of a way to alter that without breaking some fundamental laws of physics."

He frowned at her. "So why not just use a larger block of rock to start with, weighing the same as a person?"

She thought back to the basement. Considering that she had animated 200 people, and assuming the average weight of a person to be 70 kg, that would be 14, 000 kg of stone to maintain the illusion of Tokyo for their battles. Not counting all the buildings she had created as well. Aside from the fact that that would leave no space for the Order to actually enter and fight, she thought that someone would probably notice if a famous Premiership footballer started airlifting the equivalent of a small quarry into his home.

He was watching her musings with a small smile, waiting for a reply. She couldn't exactly tell Severus that she would be making the golems into replicas of him and his cronies in order to practice shooting spells at them, so she simply replied, "That would be cheating! I want to finish using the same five grains of sand with which I started. The whole point was to find out if there was a way of doing it, so..."

He frowned. "Hmm. I admire your spirit of intellectual curiosity, and agree there must be a way of doing it. Leave it with me, and I'll try and think of something."

The waitress arrived with the sweets, and the subject was dropped.

About an hour later, Severus apparated Hermione back to her flat. At the doorway, there was an awkward pause.

"So..." he said, colouring slightly.

"Um..." she replied, just as eloquent and just as flushed.

They both laughed.

"I had a fantastic time," he said. "Can we do this again some time?"

Hermione didn't think her face could get any redder. "I really enjoyed it too. I'd love to meet you again."

His face broke into a huge smile. "I'll owl you. Um..."

He appeared to consider her for a moment, then leaned down awkwardly and kissed her full on the mouth.

Hermione squeaked in surprise, but this was rapidly overtaken by enjoyment. She felt as though she was melting, flying and drowning all at once, and in the most pleasurable possible way... She kissed back as best she could and was rewarded when he moaned into her mouth.

All too soon, she felt the pressure on her lips cease and, bereft, she opened her eyes to find him standing, staring at her.

"That's enough for one evening, I think," he gasped. "If you want to retain any virtue at all, that is."

He raised an eyebrow to show he was joking, and she laughed weakly. "I think so. Good night, Severus. Owl me."

"Good night, Helena. I will."

Hermione closed the door behind him, and collapsed in a heap on the floor, clutching her mouth. The occlumency barriers she had been holding up with the last of her strength gave way, and she found herself suddenly overwhelmed by the events of the Battle of Hogwarts, seeing his face as he pushed past her up the stairs, Dumbledore's body as it fell, fell, fell...

Hermione Granger dropped all pretence and cried uncontrollably on the floor of her hallway. She had just had the best kiss of her life, following the best date of her life, with a Death Eater. Not just a Death Eater, but Severus Snape. Her ex-teacher. The one who murdered Dumbledore in cold blood. Her migraine began to burn, compounding her emotional pain.

And in a week or two, she would be seeing him again. Hermione couldn't decide whether that was the best or the worst thing about the whole god-damned situation.


Author's Note:

Well done to Arioso Dolente, the only person to get the Monopoly reference in the last chapter. "Go to jail. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 pounds" is written on the Chance / Community Chest cards when they want you to, well, do just that. Ten points to the house of your choosing.

I hope that this chapter didn't get too technical on the magic and bore anyone - I was trying to get across what I think their conversation might be like. If it did, not to worry, there shouldn't be much more like that, though I will delve further into my ideas about how the magical education system works later in the story. Much later, that is.