Chapter 8

When Severus wakes, there is a cup of tea under a stasis charm, a crumpet, and two bottles of pain reliever on his bedside table. Granger obviously ignored what he said and went to the hospital wing for more of the potion. Why did she bother asking if she was only going to do what she wanted anyway?

He pulls himself gingerly to sit up against the headboard. He doesn't feel as bad as he thought he would, but still bad enough to swallow half a bottle of the pain reliever. When he looks at the label, he frowns. That's Granger's handwriting, and today's date. She must have brewed it herself. He added her to the wards, so she does have access to his private lab, but he didn't give her permission to go mucking about in there. Clearly, he and Granger are going to have to discuss boundaries.

He pours milk in his tea and takes a sip. It tastes like the tea his mum used to make the Muggle way, not the elf-brewed tea he's become accustomed to at Hogwarts. He's missed this kind of tea. He makes it for himself once in a while, but usually can't be bothered. He takes a bite of the crumpet, which is soft and buttery, and closes his eyes in pleasure.

Pleasure that lasts only until he hears Potter's voice coming from the sitting room. "Are you all right, Mione?"

How dare she invite that brat to his private rooms? He throws back the bedclothes, wincing a little at the pain from the sudden movement, pulls on his dressing gown, and storms into the sitting room.

The voice is coming not from Potter himself but from his Patronus, the same stag as his father's, naturally. "Ron and I were worried about you when you didn't come to breakfast," the stag says in Potter's voice. "We just wanted to make sure you were okay. We're sorry we upset you yesterday."

The object of Potter's concern is sitting on the sofa next to her hideous familiar, which has shed all over the upholstery. Granger is surrounded by books and parchment, inkstains on her fingers and a quill stuck in her hair. The remains of her breakfast are on the coffee table. She picks up her wand and casts, but only a few wisps of silver emerge. She draws a deep breath, then tries again. This time, a silver otter gambols from the end of her wand. "I'm fine, Harry, just studying for NEWTs. I'll see you at lunch." The otter rushes away through the wall, and Granger puts down her book and looks at him. "How are you feeling?" she asks, then adds, somewhat tentatively, "Professor?"

Severus suppresses a shudder. Having her call him that reminds him of things he'd rather not be reminded of, but he's not going to invite her to call him Severus. He wishes she wouldn't call him anything at all, the way she didn't last night when she healed his injuries. "Well enough," he says. "Why didn't you go to breakfast?"

She bites her lip, hesitates. "I wanted to make sure you were all right."

He snorts. "And it did not occur to you that your idiot friends would assume you were too battered by your ordeal with your Death Eater husband to drag yourself to the Great Hall?"

She lets out a horrified gasp.

"Or perhaps," he sneers, "that I still had you chained up in my sex dungeon?"

"As if you'd want to," she mutters under her breath, shooting him a disgusted glare as she gathers her books and stomps off to her room. She returns to Vanish the cat hair from the sofa and collect her breakfast dishes and take them to the kitchenette. When she returns to the sitting room, she's gotten her temper under control, and says with exaggerated courtesy, "I apologize, Professor. I did not think about what others might assume. I will appear at all meals in future, and let my friends know that I am unharmed and that you do not in fact have a sex dungeon. Beyond that, I will share no details of our…less than romantic wedding night."

Before he can formulate a sufficiently sarcastic reply, she sweeps off to her room and shuts the door.

Severus looks at the sofa and coffee table, which bear no evidence that witch or cat were ever there, irrationally annoyed that she has denied him even a pretext for resenting her. He retreats to his bedroom to finish his tea and crumpet, both of which are cold now. He'd rather call Mipsy for fresh tea and breakfast than reheat it with his wand, which is never as good, but he's still brassed off at the elf for defying him last night. He hopes she's ironing her ears right now.

He doesn't, actually. As much as he took the piss about SPEW along with everyone else, he privately agrees with Granger about elves. It does seem like slavery, even if the creatures claim to be happy with the arrangement. Stockholm Syndrome, Granger called it in one of the flyers that his Slytherins amused themselves no end mocking. Most Purebloods have no idea what that term means, but it's probably how some people will characterize Granger's marriage to him, if she appears anything other than miserable and coerced.

After the debacle he made of the consummation, that's exactly how he expected her to behave, but instead she healed his wounds, brewed him more pain reliever, and skipped breakfast to make sure he was all right. Stockholm Syndrome, indeed.

As he always does when he fucks something up as badly as he did their wedding night, he thinks wistfully of what he has, since seeing the Muggle film a few years ago, come to think of as the Groundhog Day potion. His obsession with the potion—which he called simply the do-over potion, at the time—began on Halloween 1981.

The idea came from a note scribbled in the margin of a very dark eighteenth century grimoire he found in a second-hand book shop. The witch or wizard who wrote it had been experimenting with a potion brewed with time sand, and designed to avoid the complications of having two versions of the time traveler, as happens with the use of a Time Turner. In theory, the potion would, rather than sending a person back to an earlier time, re-set time itself to the previous day. Only the person who had drunk the potion would remember the original version of the day when the potion was drunk, with everyone else living out the day as if it were the first time. In other words, exactly like the film, except that the spell lasted only one day, and another dose of the potion would have to be drunk to repeat the day a third time.

Severus came into possession of the grimoire in the summer of 1981, and when he read about the do-over potion, all he could think about was the day he called Lily a Mudblood, and what his life would have been like if he could start that day over. Until Halloween, it was just an if only fantasy, but that night, as he sat on the floor of that ruined house in Godric's Hollow, weeping over the body of his childhood friend and first love, he cursed himself for not trying to brew it, so he might have saved her.

Not that he could have, without time sand, but he tortured himself at the time with the accusation that he might have been able to find some, if he'd only tried hard enough.

In the years that followed, he learned that was not true. He spent years trying to gain access to time sand, which the Department of Mysteries guards jealously, but without success until the battle at the Ministry last year. Amid the chaos, Severus collected as much time sand from the ruined devices as he could, enough to start experimenting with the potion.

He didn't have time to do much work until the summer, and even then worked slowly and meticulously because the time sand is a non-renewable resource, as far as he knows. The notes in the grimoire were not a complete recipe, just speculation about how one might be developed. The last weekend in August, he tested it on himself, taking the potion on a Saturday, and waking up on Saturday morning in his own rooms instead of on Sunday morning in the flat of the woman in whose bed he'd fallen asleep Saturday night.

He woke with a bit of a headache, but he'd work on that. The most encouraging thing was the absence of any injuries sustained on the day to be repeated. He'd deliberately nicked himself shaving on the first Saturday morning, and when he woke the next day, again on Saturday, the cut was gone. He couldn't be sure that death would be un-done just as injuries were, as in the film where the cantankerous weatherman plunged to a fiery death and was no worse for wear the next day—or, rather, the same day all over again. The cantankerous professor was not quite confident enough of his brewing abilities to put the potion to the suicide test.

Last night, after he made a hash of deflowering Granger and before he went to confess to the Dark Lord and endure the consequences, Severus found himself wishing the Groundhog Day potion didn't take three days to brew. He told himself he was being ridiculous, that being embarrassed in front of the wife he didn't want was a trivial thing on which to waste precious time sand. After all, Granger seemed undamaged by the experience, and Severus's only injury was to his pride.