Narcissa tries to decide whether shaking or strangling Severus is more likely to make him stop cackling in righteous schadenfreude and start being helpful.
St. Mungo's, London
"Do I look as blown up as all that?" Narcissa asked. Sounding playfully mournful instead of homicidal was exceedingly difficult: every time the irritating man tried to say something, he dissolved into laughter again.
This time, probably because he had a very well-developed danger sense, Severus just about managed a, "N-not you," before he folded up again, very nearly crying with it.
Narcissa sighed with emphasis, and said, "Severus, darling, I don't mean to be an imposition, but as you will insist on doing this here, and we haven't long before you have to trot back to your little lab…"
Severus waved an apologetic hand and made a more concerted effort to pull himself together. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he said, scrubbing at his eyes and trying to twitch his mouth back into place. "It's just, I saw Potter in the hallway, and…" he didn't quite dissolve again this time, but a few more body-shaking snickers overwhelmed him.
Alarmed, she drew herself up as straight as the beloved-but-inconvenient bulk rearranging her organs would allow, and pressed out furiously, "Severus Snape, you idiot, if you've let that insignificant worm provoke you, in public in the hospital!"
He waved a hand, still grinning like a wicked loon, and assured her "Innocent. I even managed to keep a straight face until he was out of sight."
Mollified, she settled back and remarked, "Gracious. Whatever has happened to the poor man?"
Her favorite hatchet crumpled into glee again, and he said, "There was—Belby wanted me to fetch a new crate of vials before I came to meet you, and when I came back, I saw Potter fixing these floppy things like white footprints in the doorway. So I ducked around the corner—"
"Vision-sharpening spell?" she asked.
Nodding, he said, "And a noise-catching mirror. It's always helpful, when defusing one of his charming surprises, if you can catch anything of the trigger spell." She nodded. She'd stood over his shoulder asking foolproofing questions while he'd developed the mirror charm in the summer before their sixth year, as she often had.
It still made her eyes nostrils flare hotly and Evan's smile turn chilly and worrying when they remembered the weeks of numb, hollow silence, and later the way his hands had shaken all the time, the way he'd choked and turned blind and white-eyed at the most random times and would bite his cheeks until they bled when asked questions, the fit they'd been afraid was a heart attack by the Three Broomsticks, near that horrible shack, the way he'd had to drug himself every day to get through the second half of his OWLs even with the House closing ranks around him. How telling it had been that he'd let them shield him, after years of refusing to be seen in public with anyone he liked, in case it made them targets.
Reggie had been even more in the dark than they were, poor pet. About the month of silence, at least; the appalling business by the beech tree afterwards had been outrageously public, not a secret at all. The silence, though, no one knew what that had been about, not even Evan. Along with everything else that had been going on in Reggie's unhappy house, it had driven him madder and madder until something over there had snapped. After that, his parents hadn't left their new heir any time to think of anything but his summer homework and family responsibilities.
On the other hand, Lucius had obviously quite enjoyed swooping in with a summer post and library and stable access and potions commissions and invitations for Severus to join his private dueling lessons. His suave-and-sophisticated-rescuer attitude had been entirely laughable, and he hadn't in any way succeeded in pulling a veil over the several things he'd wanted out of it.
And that mattered. Narcissa had thought about that very hard, even after Bella started teasing her about frown lines.
But he'd genuinely wanted to help as well as to earn credit, and one of the things he'd been trying so hard to gain was Narcissa's good opinion. That mattered, too. And even if he'd been grandiose about it, he'd evaluated the target and the situation accurately. The measures he'd taken had been of significant help, both morale-related and practical, and impeccably timed. And that wasn't only a point in his favor, but a talent that was vanishingly rare.
And he was rather decorative.
Now, Severus had covered his face with his own talented hand, black eyes shining at her from between his fingers in hapless delight. "And when he got up to leave, they, they, Narcissa, they popped up and turned into these big, hobnailed boots, and there was this sort of rubber-ball-and-chittering noise, and…"
Words failing him, he resorted to a series of expressive gestures. This time she joined him, giggling musically (if she did say so herself) behind her hand. Potter was a good-looking man, and he looked his best, in her opinion, hoist very high on his own petard with his own enchanted shoelaces.
"It was beautiful," he concluded blissfully. They basked together in the lovely, lovely thought of the strutting bastard trying to explain himself to draconic old Evangeline Vance in Spell Damage. She had no sense of humor at all. Furthermore, according to Lucius, she had some unspecified grudge against wizards, especially young ones, who were involved with witches. Vance was as likely as not to send him home to his self-righteous little chit of a wife, still bruised and chewed on all over (by footless shoes!) and with a doxy in his ear.
The ginger cow was, in Narcissa's opinion (which she was careful never to voice to Severus. He only pretended to be rational on the subject, poor dear), entirely useless as a human being. This might be explained by her filthy blood, but was not excused by it. It could at least be said for her, however, that she'd never once found Potter's malicious little pranks acceptable. Not even when she trying-to-be-secretly thought they were funny.
And she was nearly as far along as Narcissa, by all accounts. Even Narcissa would admit that the combination of hormonal upsets and physical discomfort could make a girl just a tiny, teeny little bit less serene than usual. If Vance sent the infantile bully home to a less than usually stable wife, still covered in the fallout of his vicious folly, just imagine!
"Well." Severus allowed himself one final, happy sigh before pulling his business face on. "How are you and the tadpole getting on?"
"I should quite like to hold him in my arms," she said, with a plaintive smile. "Tomorrow, if at all possible. This very minute would also be acceptable."
"I imagine so," he said, with an expression that said he absolutely could not understand why women wanted to put themselves through what she'd once overheard him calling Self-Induced Parasitic Distortion Hell.
But the lovely thing about Severus was that while he'd gag and make faces, make snide, awful comments, make no bones about how incomprehensible and odd he thought you were (talk about kettles and cauldrons!), none of it ever mattered in the least. Unless you took him seriously, took offense, and ruffled his sensitive little feathers, of course. But who was that oblivious (or bored)? And even then it wouldn't matter once the bludger hit the bat.
"I wish you'd let an actual healer take a look at you," he said, running his softly-glowing wand over her head and torso. He frowned at it, honing in on whatever information the color, luminosity, and wand-feel were giving him, but it was only a concentrating sort of frown. No cause for concern.
"You say that every time," she said fondly.
"I mean it every time," he retorted, even though they'd been exactly no help and he knew it. Her traitor body had rejected three attempts (it was easier to think of them as 'attempts') before he'd looked at her leaden attempt at a smile and hesitatingly offered to do a little reading-up.
The almost bruising euphoria of the first disgusting draught he'd pushed on her had made Lucius coax her into going into social seclusion for a few months. The second had given her obsessive addictions to sunlight and moonlight and the scents of loam and surf. Together, they made two birds easily stoned by long visits to the seaside and the raising-up of a hedge maze she was quite proud of. She was still taking them, but the odd effects had worn off several weeks ago.
Bizarre though Severus's treatments sometimes were, the baby had caught and this one had held on. Clearly, he was onto something so brilliantly twisted no one else could catch a glimpse of it without eating odd mushrooms and listening to fwooper cries. As usual.
He could fuss all he liked about midwifery not being his field and how important it was to meet for this near his lab, so he could take her down to the so-called experts if he found a problem. Narcissa knew the difference between quality and dross. She had no intention of wasting her time or risk her baby on Ministry-approved hacks just because they happened to have taken the particular medimagic classes (womblore and bedside manner) he happened to feel shaky in. He'd read everything they had by now, she was sure of it, and if he'd had access to a living teacher he would have been making fun of the poor thing by the third class.
"Still no side effects from the Devil's Bit preparation?"
"I don't think so," she said hesitatingly.
When Severus asked you a question like that, hesitation was fatal. It was almost certain to result in being exhaustively grilled for, at minimum, five or six tedious minutes. And when he was finally satisfied, naturally there were more questions.
In the end, though, he told her with reassuring callousness that she'd just have to live with the disturbing unpleasantnesses that had been intruding on her life. Like needing the toilet fifty times a day. Just like (according to both his research and his village-witch mother) every other upright-walking female who'd ever attempted her insane experiment since there was such a thing as an upright-walking female. Er, possibly excepting birds. So just all the hairy ones.
"Severus Octavian Snape," she giggled, "I am no such thing!"
"You have more hair than I do."
"…That seems so unlikely, my dear man."
Heartened by his heartlessness and absurd tangents, she let him walk her back to the floo. On the way, she learned only a little more than she was interested to know about the precautions that wise (meaning paranoid) brewers took to avoid overheating and inadvisable particles clinging to the skin. She was quite pleased about it, really; he was getting much better at filtering unnecessary and inappropriate details out of his chatty little impromptu lectures.
He shouldn't have escorted her, and possibly she shouldn't have allowed him. It would make him late—or rather, even later—getting back to Belby, she knew. He could be gallant like that, though, so long as no one embarrassed him by remarking on it, and would go surly if one did whether he was thanked or dissuaded. Besides, she had one indispensable duty to discharge before leaving him. It was one no friend would fail at.
The fire green with powder and her destination set, she turned to him mischievously, in the second before stepping through, and declared, "Boots!"