Quite a bit happens in this one... the plot thickening again...

"You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you do not trust enough."
– Frank Cane.

A cold February evening brought the event Severus had been dreading. It happened with almost frightening suddenness; the only warning he had was a slight headache, and as he crossed his dimly lit living room in search of a suitably mild painkilling potion his vision suddenly blurred and went dark as a vicious spasm of agony shot through his bad knee. The leg buckled beneath him and he fell heavily with a startled oath that became a grunt of pain as the damaged joint collided painfully with the unyielding stone floor.

When the pain of the impact lessened, he tried to sit up carefully, and the muscles of his left arm began to jerk and twitch in a horribly familiar manner that neatly prevented his attempts to push himself upright. Cursing softly, he took inventory; right leg very painful, left arm not functioning. He wasn't going to be able to stand up for a while yet.

Better now than in the middle of a lesson, he told himself resignedly, stretching out on the floor where he had fallen and preparing to wait it out. How the brats would have stared if the disliked Potions master had collapsed in front of them – but if that was going to happen, surely it would have occurred during the war; he'd come close on several occasions. Once he had a sufficient number of functional limbs, he could get to the bathroom; until then, there was nothing he could do except wait. Another tremor shook him hard enough that his teeth rattled, and he clenched his jaw to try and stop himself accidentally biting his tongue. Black spots danced across his vision; he hadn't had an attack this bad in more than a year.

It probably served him right, he considered as the pain increased. If he'd made more of an effort with his research, he might have made a cure by now. Well, he could learn from his mistakes; tomorrow he would start work in earnest. He might even let Granger help as he knew she wanted to. The next tremor was more of a convulsion, and he realised that he would actually be spending tomorrow lying very quietly in a darkened room unless he managed to do something about it quickly.

Another convulsive spasm shook him, hard enough that he hit his head painfully against the stone floor, and a shiver of nervous unease slid down his spine. An attack this bad could disable him for a week unless he got help, but... The fireplace was too far away, and there were no portraits in his rooms, and there was no chance of his being able to summon his Patronus in this state. That severely limited his options.

In fact, he could only think of one possible source of help, who probably wasn't in earshot anyway.

"Crookshanks..." he hissed weakly, trying to lift his head. It was actually a bloody stupid name for a cat, really, when you thought about it. "You moth-eaten furball... are you skulking around in here again...?" Oh, Merlin, this hurt. "...Crookshanks?"

Hermione was a little surprised at her own detachment as she knelt by her colleague. She wasn't sure if he was conscious, but the spasms shaking his body made it obvious what was happening to him. "Severus?" she asked softly. "Can you hear me?"

His eyelids fluttered; he had surprisingly long eyelashes for a man, she noted dispassionately, or maybe it was just that they stood out vividly against his bloodlessly pale skin. He opened bloodshot and slightly unfocused eyes and blinked at her. "Yes, Granger," he replied hoarsely, shivering.

"Good. I need you to tell me how to treat this. I don't know what you usually do."

"Potion," he croaked. "Blue one... the one I gave you. Tall cupboard. Top shelf." His speech was a little slurred, but he seemed cognizant of his surroundings, which was a relief. She didn't much fancy trying to treat the attack on the fly; she didn't even know where to start. Fetching the bottle, she held it where he could see it, and he nodded.

"How much?"

"All," he rasped. Given the small doses he'd told her to take, that seemed a lot, but she didn't try to argue. Uncorking the bottle, she slid an arm beneath his shoulders and helped him lift his head, tilting the bottle to his lips. He got most of it down, but another spasm shook him and the rest spilled onto his clothes. After a few minutes the convulsions had slowed and seemed less severe, but she could tell by his breathing that he was still in pain.

"What now?"

"Bath. Cold water. Don't levitate," he added as she reached for her wand. Puzzled, Hermione put it back into the pocket of her robe and began trying to get his arm over her shoulders, bracing herself as she tried to help him stand.

"Wouldn't warm water feel better?"

"Yes. But wouldn't help." He grunted with effort and staggered more or less upright, leaning on her heavily. "Cold to stop it. Then warm later."

It seemed to take a very long time to get to the bathroom. Hermione found that Crookshanks had gone on ahead; she hadn't realised the cat could turn taps before, but the huge tub was already half-filled. Severus huffed out a breath in what might have been a laugh at the sight before hissing in pain and stumbling; she barely caught herself against the wall.

"Try not to do that again," she told him. "You're too tall for me to catch you." He ignored her, sinking to the floor and shivering. Once the tub was filled, Crookshanks pawed at the tap and shut it off before looking at her expectantly; Hermione looked down at the semiconscious man and felt annoyed with herself when she started to blush. "Um, Severus...?"

"What?"

"The bath is ready. But... your clothes..."

He mumbled something that sounded like a slurred, "Bloody Gryffindors," before looking at her as best he could. "Boots and coat. The rest... doesn't matter."

Okay. She could cope with that. Stupid to be worrying about it, really, but nothing in her life to date had prepared her for the surreal experience of partially stripping her former Potions teacher. Once he had emptied his pockets and was down to trousers and shirt, and after another particularly nasty convulsion that resulted in her narrowly avoiding being hit in the face, he half-crawled to the sunken tub and virtually fell into it with a gasp at the cold. "What else do I need to do?" she asked uncertainly. He had closed his eyes, his head resting on the edge of the bath.

"Try not to... let me drown," he replied with a weak attempt at sarcasm.

"Should I get Poppy?"

"No." The slurred vehemence of the reply was unmistakeable. Sighing, she didn't argue, settling down by the edge of the tub and staying close enough to grab his hair or something if he went under.

"How long will this take?"

"Don't know." He opened one eye, looked at her, then closed it again. "S-somewhere else to be?"

"Depressing as my social life is, Severus, I can think of better things to do," she replied wryly, studying him. The cold seemed to be working; it was making him shiver uncontrollably, but he didn't seem to be twitching so much. "Why did you stop me levitating you?" she asked curiously, reasoning that if he was talking then he was still conscious.

"Thought it would be funny to... make you c-carry me."

"You can't lie properly when you're like this."

"Levitation... makes it worse. Don't know why. F-found out the hard way, a few times. Poppy used to help t-treat me."

"So why won't you let me call her now? She must know more about it than I do."

"No. She knows... the direct after-effects of the c-curse. Not whatever this is. By the time this st-started, I was... the enemy. Nobody else knows about this." His speech was evening out, less slurred and disjointed, although the cold was making his teeth chatter. "That's why I c-called you. You already know it. I'm not letting anything new slip."

"And Crookshanks was in your rooms."

"That too," he agreed, shivering.

"Is it easing?"

"Yes." He breathed out slowly. "The t-tremors are stopping."

"What do I do when they stop?"

"Warm the water up slowly, to j-just under blood heat. That helps with the p-pain."

"Would a painkilling potion help?"

"No. Well, it would ease the p-pain, but it would also react with the potion I've already t-taken and make me violently ill." He smiled faintly. "I learned that the hard way, t-too."

"How did you do this when you were by yourself?"

"I didn't," he replied laconically. "You've s-seen the bathroom in the caravan. I generally s-stayed wherever I c-collapsed, until it had eased enough for me to be able to s-stand under the shower. It took days, sometimes."

"God, Severus." She shook her head and stopped asking questions; she had a feeling she wouldn't like any of the answers. Whatever his reasons for being so honest with her, she sometimes wished he wouldn't. After a while he seemed to have stopped twitching and was just shivering; she began to slowly warm the water, and gradually the shivering stopped as well, his face relaxing. "Better?" she asked softly.

"Yes," he sighed. After a moment he added quietly, "My apologies for interrupting your evening."

"You can be infuriating at times, and you're still a snarky git, but you're my friend and I'm not going to leave you in pain," she told him matter-of-factly. "Even if you deserve it."

He huffed a quiet laugh, his lips twitching, but didn't answer. After a while he lifted his head and gingerly sat up. "Enough. I'll fall asleep and drown if I don't move soon." He seemed recovered enough to stand unaided and drag himself out of the tub; Hermione was getting tired by now – hardly surprising since it was gone two in the morning by this point – and limited herself to a simple drying charm before helping him limp to his bedroom, where he crawled under the covers and collapsed.

"Do you want me to cover any classes tomorrow?"

"No," he mumbled drowsily. "I've nothing until the afternoon. I'll be all right by then."

"All right. I'll let you get some sleep."

She was almost out of the room when he called softly, "Hermione?"

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

"You're welcome, Severus."

It wasn't until she was curled up in her own bed with a purring Crookshanks and was right on the edge of sleep herself that Hermione realised that when Severus had stepped out of the tub, with water streaming off him and making his clothes cling to him and his hair likewise clinging to his face... he'd actually looked extremely good for his age. Not bad for any age, come to that.

I really do need some kind of social life.

Despite her resolve to 'avoid turning it into a tragedy', the first thing Hermione said to him when she saw him the following evening was, "Are you all right?" and as soon as she had said it, she felt stupid.

He seemed more amused than anything else, no doubt because he had seen the edge of self-directed annoyance in her face. "Yes," he replied noncommittally. "In fact, last night was... useful."

"How so?"

"Talking you through the attack made me pay more attention to the symptoms. I know what sort of healing potion I need to make now – or, rather, what existing potions I need to combine."

"Can't you just take the different types?"

"What on earth did Horace teach you for your NEWTs?" he muttered. "My final-year syllabus dedicates a full term to healing potions alone. No, I can't. They would react with one another, making them ineffective at best and toxic at worst."

"Then how do you combine them?"

"Slowly," he replied wryly. "It involves breaking each potion down into its component parts and isolating the active ingredients that are needed, discarding the ones that are unnecessary, then working out possible combinations and whether any additional ingredients or processes are needed. Once that is done, much of the rest of the procedure is trial and error. It takes a very long time to achieve a reliable combination, which is why so many treatments rely on generic potions rather than more specifically targeted remedies."

"So which potions do you need to combine to treat... whatever it is you have?"

"A standard Nerve Tonic, a more specific potion that aids myelin regeneration, and an anti-inflammatory."

That really was going to be a tremendous amount of work, and she knew it would be beyond her capabilities – annoying as it was to admit it, even only to herself; she certainly didn't intend confessing it to him. "A myelin-regeneration potion? I've never heard of anything like that."

"You wouldn't have done," he replied sarcastically, "as it doesn't actually exist. That is another reason why this is going to take some time."

"You're going to invent a potion and combine it with two others. Well, I suppose things like that are how you got your Mastery," she muttered. "Am I going to be able to help at all?"

"I don't know," Severus replied frankly. "You don't have the – the instinct for potion making."

"Thanks," she replied flatly.

He sighed. "It wasn't an insult, merely the truth. I am glad I did not teach you during your NEWTs – neither of us would have enjoyed the experience. You found the subject more difficult under Horace; you would have struggled far more had I been your teacher then. You achieved excellent grades up to your OWLs solely because you possess an excellent memory and the ability to follow instructions accurately, but you never had the... the deeper understanding of why or how a particular thing worked, the spontaneity needed to create something different." He looked at her. "It is one reason I marked your work so harshly and why I tried to avoid letting you answer a question in class."

"I don't understand."

"I was trying to make you think. If all I wanted was an answer regurgitated directly from the textbook, I could have asked anyone. Even the real imbeciles could read and repeat, at least most of the time. You were the brightest student in the class, with absolutely no competition – you should have left them in the dust, and instead you fed me back the same answers they did." He chuckled softly, shaking his head. "Do you have any idea how frustrating it was? For the first time in years I had a student with real intelligence, and you weren't using it."

"Do you have any idea how many hours I spent on those damned essays?" she snapped.

"Hours in the library looking up what other people had already discovered," he snapped back at her, "and giving me other people's research, which half the time was only vaguely relevant to the original topic. Had you spent less time memorising your textbook and more time trying to understand the principles involved – had you been able to give me something original, even if it was wrong – I would have been far more impressed."

"Nothing I did would ever have impressed you."

"You have no idea how wrong you are," he replied quietly. "I have been a teacher since I was twenty. In all that time, I have had less than half a dozen students with any real, genuine aptitude for my subject. It is incredibly disheartening to have to struggle and fight to get a class through their exams, knowing that they will never actually achieve anything beyond a passing grade. None of my students have ever gone on to Master-level. Most of them weren't capable of it, and the few who could have really done something amazing weren't interested. Like you."

"I was interested!" she protested, less angry now in the face of this more wistful mood. "I liked Potions – I'd have liked it more if you weren't such a bastard to me and my friends."

"You know why I was."

"Most of it, yes. But sometimes, Severus, you were just plain... cruel. For absolutely no reason."

He started to protest, then closed his mouth with an audible snap. "You are referring to when Malfoy hexed your teeth."

"Not that alone, but that was certainly the most memorable occasion," she replied quietly, a little surprised that he had remembered it. "I never liked you much, Severus, but I did respect you, and I never hated you – until you said that."

There was a long silence. Severus avoided her eyes, and finally sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose tiredly. "I don't blame you. It was cruel, vicious and unjustified, and I assure you I regretted saying it – not that I expect that to be much comfort. I am genuinely sorry."

"It wasn't even what you said that upset me, not really," she responded more softly, calming down a little in the face of the unexpected apology. "I just didn't understand why you would say something just to hurt me. You'd never even been that hateful to Harry, let alone anyone else."

"You're right," he replied calmly. "It was inexcusable."

"Why did you say it?"

"Not because I believed it. I was hardly in a position to make fun of anyone's teeth, was I? I'm still not, come to that. Truthfully, it wasn't about you at all. I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse. I was... it was just days after Potter's name came out of the Goblet. Dumbledore and I were the only ones who knew what it meant. The Mark had started to darken; I knew he would be returning, and what it would mean. That lesson... I had just come from yet another pointless meeting with Dumbledore. I was sick of his empty platitudes and his attempts to cheer me up and reassure me, as if he could. I had absolutely no patience for your childish, petty squabbles when the world might well have literally been coming to an end, and I lashed out with the most hateful comment I could think of at the first available target. Unfortunately it was you who paid the price for my temper on that occasion; you were neither the first nor the last."

Hermione felt very stupid. She had spent so long obsessing over that incident, and never once had the timing occurred to her; she'd just assumed that it had been personal. "Oh," she replied in a small voice. "I don't know why I didn't think of that."

"Because I was a complete and utter bastard so often that I scarcely needed a reason to be spiteful," he answered quietly. She wanted to deny that and tell him that he hadn't been, but she couldn't make herself say it. He had been spiteful.

A brief, brittle half-smile crossed his face; she suspected it was because he was pleased that she hadn't tried to lie to him. "We seem to have wandered far afield from the original topic," he observed. "Had I been less... less like myself, if I am honest... and behaved better towards you, it would not have made you a Potions prodigy. The subject was not for you. It took me some time to accept that, but I did, eventually. Your true interests lay elsewhere; liking the subject isn't enough."

"I suppose you're right," she agreed. Now that they had both calmed down, she knew he was right – she had never really considered spending the rest of her life working with potions. "So, back to my original question – will I be able to help you?"

"If you still wish to, yes; probably not with the analysis and speculation, but certainly with the mundane work involved, and perhaps with brewing the final potion once I've worked out how to do it. It won't be interesting," he warned.

"That's not why I'm doing it," she replied, and he looked at her sharply before finding something to look at to one side, his fingers twitching restlessly.

"I intend to start this weekend," he said finally. "It is a Hogsmeade weekend, so the students will be out of the way, and I should have caught up on my paperwork by then."

She heard the unvoiced question – I'm getting better at translating Severus-speak – and answered it. "I'm free all weekend."

"Very well. And it will not take as long as you think – I hope to have something concrete by Easter."

"Just under two months, to do all that?"

"Healing potions are quick to brew – this isn't Polyjuice that has to sit for a month. And as you said, it is one of the reasons I attained my Mastery," he replied with the faintest hint of a smirk.

That Saturday, Hermione let herself into his rooms (the current password was "Iscariot"; she wondered just how many passwords he could come up with that were related to betrayal and double-crossing) and followed the distant music down to the laboratory. Meat Loaf, today, which made her smile as she hummed along. Entering the lab, she stopped humming abruptly and stared. "Good God, Severus."

"Hello to you too," he replied vaguely, not looking up. He was scribbling notes on a piece of paper; the bench he was working at was literally covered in dozens of sheets of his dense, spiky handwriting. What looked like half a rainforest was spread out around him.

Of the half-dozen questions that had presented themselves, the one that made it onto her tongue was, "Why are you using Muggle paper and not parchment?"

"It's cheaper," he answered absently. "And biros don't leak or drip."

"And you can't chew on a quill so easily?" she suggested tartly, looking critically at his pen, which bore clear teeth marks.

He snorted softly in reply, entirely unrepentant. "True."

Curious, she examined some of the closer sheets. Some of his work looked like Arithmancy calculations; other parts resembled Muggle chemical equations; the rest was written notes. Circles and lines linked various parts of the page to other parts, and there was a great deal of crossing-out. "This must be what Chaos looks like."

"Don't ask me to explain. Even I don't understand it all yet. This is the literary equivalent of thinking aloud."

"What do you want me to do?"

He gestured vaguely at his laptop. "Look into methods of treating MS or other neurological damage. Beta-seron is the most common treatment I have found, but it has no magical equivalent, so I need an alternative. Try and find out exactly how they treat myelin degeneration. And don't touch the music."

"Yes, sir," she muttered, suppressing a grin as he scowled at her.

Working in the lab was surprisingly peaceful, she decided some time later. Severus didn't talk to himself constantly the way Ron did when he was trying to work something out, or huff and sigh endlessly like Harry did. Aside from the scratch of his pen, he was almost completely silent. It was nice to work with someone else who took it seriously.

It took all of her self control not to react when he started humming along to the music, though. One startled look told her that he wasn't aware that he was doing so, and she suspected he would be furious if she drew his attention to it. It was... well, in anyone else, she would have said it was adorable, but that word so didn't fit Severus Snape. Smothering a smile, she kept her attention focused on the keyboard, although she couldn't quite stop herself wondering what his singing voice might sound like.

He'd been right that it didn't take as long as she had thought it would, although she had overlooked his somewhat obsessive nature. He had been working every spare moment he had, including well into the night almost every night, and on a few occasions had worked straight through from early evening until his first class the next morning. Her contributions once the real analysis and preparation had started had mostly consisted of reminding him to stop long enough to eat, providing fresh paper and acting as a sounding board during the really late sessions when his concentration wavered and he needed to voice his thoughts aloud.

The myelin potion itself had been fairly simple to make. Severus had explained that he wasn't trying to make a complete potion, only a compound that would act within the triplicate potion he would be using eventually to treat himself. It didn't need to actually work, only to show that it would work when the finished product was ready. He couldn't explain how he knew when he'd got it right, on the fourth attempt at creating it; he had apparently just felt it when everything came together. Hermione supposed he'd been able to sense the latent magic in the brew and could therefore tell when it was correctly aligned, but whether it was magical ability, instinct or simply experience, she wasn't sure.

Adding the anti-inflammatory had been easy, too. He hadn't created a separate potion for it, in the end; he hadn't needed to. A few key ingredients added to the myelin potion would achieve the same effect, he assured her. The Nerve Tonic was proving more problematical – to prevent it reacting with the other potions, several key ingredients had to be removed, which would render it ineffective. The only solution was to either find adequate substitutes for those ingredients, or to find a process that would stabilise the mix. Adding an external stabiliser had weakened the potion and made it significantly less likely to work; Severus had not been happy to discover that.

"Severus?"

"Yes?"

"I was thinking about the different properties you're trying to incorporate into this potion."

"What about it?" he asked distractedly.

"There's nothing analgesic in here. No painkiller."

"I know."

"Why? Nerve Tonic was designed to work in conjunction with painkillers. Why leave it out?"

"Because the tonic and painkiller combination works by temporarily deadening the nerves, almost holding the nervous system in stasis while the tonic acts. That's fine with an experienced Healer standing by, running diagnostics and homeostatic charms to keep everything functioning throughout; it won't work for this. I need to be able to tell that it's working, and the nerves themselves need to be working or the new myelin will be rejected – a bit like an organ transplant."

Hermione winced. "So you're going to drink something that's basically going to be scraping all your nerves raw. Without painkillers."

"Yes," he replied quietly. "That's why I'm pushing so hard. If I can get this done by Easter, I can take it at the start of the holiday, and have a couple of weeks to recover. Otherwise it will have to wait for the summer. I doubt I will be fit to teach in the immediate aftermath."

"Is there nothing you can add to help?" she asked.

"Unfortunately not. Anything strong enough to be of any real use would prevent the potion from working properly, if it didn't simply make me ill. Anything less potent would be pointless – about as much use as taking an aspirin for the Cruciatus."

A depressingly accurate metaphor, she suspected. This potion was going to feel like the Cruciatus. "How long will it take to work?"

"I don't know. Not that long. Nervous impulses take fractions of a second to travel. Repairing the nerves is far more complex, naturally, but it shouldn't be too long. An hour or two at most, I would hope."

"Bloody hell, Severus, that long? It'll kill you long before your nerves are repaired!"

He looked up from his notes and gave her a bleak, brittle half-smile. "If wishing made it so," he said, so softly that she barely heard him.

"I don't understand..."

"I have an extremely high pain threshold, Hermione. I assure you, I have survived far worse than an hour or two of neurological pain."

Swallowing and firmly shutting the door on her imagination, she retorted, "That doesn't mean you should go through it again. There must be another way."

He raised an eyebrow. "If you know of a way to manipulate and repair damaged nerves without stimulating them, by all means enlighten me."

"There isn't one, and you know it," she replied with a scowl. "But there must be a way to prevent you feeling that stimulation." She bit her lip, her mind racing. "Would the potion work if you were unconscious?"

He was courteous enough to at least consider the question before shaking his head. "A sedative wouldn't achieve anything, and a true anaesthetic would react enough to seriously disrupt a lot of physiological processes. My Healing abilities are chiefly limited to wounds; I can't counter something like that."

Nor can I, she reflected. She didn't consider suggesting they enlist a Healer; the only one Severus would even slightly trust was Madam Pomfrey, and if he had wanted her involved he would have done so already. "I could Stun you after you drink it," she suggested, half-seriously.

"That's the best offer I've had in years," he muttered, making her stare at him. She didn't think he had meant her to hear that. More loudly, he continued, "I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think it would work."

Hermione pushed the half-whispered comment to the back of her mind to think about later and focused on the conversation. "I suppose not. Is there a compromise, a way of reducing the stimulation, so it at least doesn't hurt as much?"

"Probably, but it would be very complicated to work out, and to be honest it would make little difference. Once pain reaches a certain level, it is all-encompassing, and the precise degree of pain ceases to be relevant." She opened her mouth to argue and he gave her a sharp look. "Be assured that I know what I am talking about."

She subsided, reluctantly. "Fine." Thinking it over, she frowned. "What about Muggle anaesthetics?"

"A sound idea in theory. In reality, I don't know enough about them to predict how it would affect the potion, nor do I have any idea how to obtain them. Unless you have experience with breaking into hospitals to steal, as well as Potions stores?"

"No, I –" Realising what he'd just said, she stopped talking abruptly and glared at him. He smirked at her, and she demanded in exasperation, "Do you know everything I did wrong during my schooldays?"

"I doubt it, but I certainly know most things," he replied smugly. "Your assault on Malfoy during your third year was inspired, by the way. He would have blocked a hex, but he could never have anticipated your punching him in the nose."

"How on earth do you know all this?"

He smiled, removing his reading glasses and absently cleaning them with the sleeve of his discarded robe. "I worked out that it had to have been you who raided the storeroom, simply because neither Potter nor Weasley were stealthy enough to have managed it..."

"How did you know it was us in the first place?"

The smile became a smirk, and he chuckled softly. "Really, Professor Granger, do use your head. Who do you think it was who brewed the antidote to your Polyjuice accident? The effects were not easy to reverse, and had I not been here you would have spent a very long time with whiskers. As for your attack on Malfoy, I saw it. I was passing a second-floor window at the time."

"And you didn't punish me for assaulting a Slytherin?"

His smile widened. "I barely restrained myself from cheering you on," he replied, apparently sincerely. "Draco was a spoiled brat. I spent years wishing that I could give him a clip 'round the ear."

Startled by the words as much as the sentiment, she stifled a giggle. "You know, it's phrases like that one that suddenly make me remember you're a northerner."

He looked at her without expression, his smile fading. Right around the point where she became afraid that she had offended him, however, he said distantly and with a straight face, "Yeah? Got a problem wit' people from up North, 'ave yer?"

"My God," she choked, staring at him in a kind of horror. "What was that?"

He chuckled roughly and replied in his normal voice. "That was what I would have sounded like, had my mother not been paying attention. That was the local accent, and the accent my father had. Incidentally, it is also the accent that 'Tobias Prince' has, since it provides an effective disguise."

"It's... ghastly."

"How very southern of you," he observed, raising an eyebrow.

"I didn't mean it like that. I don't mind northern accents. But in your voice... it just sounds... wrong." His voice had always been his best feature, and that quiet, silken purr just didn't suit the roughened vowels and harsher consonants of the northern dialects. She couldn't have been more shocked had Crookshanks started speaking French. He chuckled again, and she shook her head. "I'm serious. That was bloody terrifying."

Severus snorted quietly. "On the whole, I am pleased my mother saw fit to make sure I did not grow up with that accent. I had enough problems as it was, without sounding like an extra from Emmerdale Farm."

"That's set in the Yorkshire Dales. Coronation Street would be more appropriate, surely – you're from Manchester, aren't you? Somewhere in Lancashire, anyway..."

He waved a hand dismissively. "You're a southerner; we all sound the same to you."

"Racist," she chided him, noting wryly and without surprise that he hadn't answered her question about where he was from.

"What, we're a different race as well now?"

"Oh, shut up. Don't you have an Unforgiveable-in-a-bottle to make?"

He wore a small smile as he turned back to his notes. Hermione found herself smiling as well; it was lovely to see another glimpse of his sense of humour, and she was pleased that he evidently felt comfortable enough around her to make jokes, even at her expense. She hadn't been kidding, though – hearing his wonderful voice suddenly distorted so badly by the thick accent had been utterly wrong.

If you watch Blow Dry you'll hear Alan Rickman having a go at a northern accent. He's not bad.