Chapter 10
Granger is a remarkably considerate housemate. She never leaves her things lying about the common areas, which she uses mostly when he has classes and she won't be in his way. She keeps the place free of cat hair, and he sees little of her familiar. When Severus is in, Granger is mostly out. If she is at home, she's in her own rooms, which he enlarged at a time when her schedule showed that she had a tutorial with Minerva.
He heard her draw in a surprised breath when she opened her door that evening, but she didn't say anything, just wrote Thank you in her charmed journal a few minutes later.
During their Defence and Potions tutorials, she speaks little, and only in response to direct questions. Any scheduling changes are made in writing in the charmed journals. She doesn't act as though she's upset with him, but her demeanor is never other than coolly polite. She asks questions, but not as many as he expected. During their lessons she makes notes in another notebook, not the one charmed so he can read it. Once, when she went to use the loo—presumably, not that she told him, and not that he asked—he sneaked a glance at it, and found that it was filled with questions and notes to look up this or that, things she thought she could find the answers to on her own and therefore decided not to ask him.
All of this is a surprise. She was such an annoying pain the arse when she was younger, with her ceaseless hand-waving and showing off and her mind-numbingly long, pedantic essays that he got used to thinking of her that way. Now that he thinks about it, though, he realizes that she wasn't doing those things this school year, and perhaps not even the year before. He's not sure when she outgrew being annoying, but she did, and he just failed to notice.
When she arrives for her Defence tutorial, she's all business, as always. Her hair is tightly braided and her clothes are tight enough to be practical for dueling without being deliberately provocative. She puts her things down and waits quietly.
"Your Protego is sufficiently strong now for me to test it with spells that are darker than any you've previously encountered."
She nods, picks up her wand, and casts. The shield shimmers around her.
"This is NEWT level," he says. "You don't get a head start."
She drops the shield and takes a dueling stance. At his signal, she casts again, this time barely getting her shield in place before his first spell hits. He watches for her reaction. She can feel that it's Dark, even as her shield repels it. Her expression is calculating, and then it shifts. Her eyes go dead and flat as she waits for his next attack.
She is Occluding. She doesn't do it often, and she hasn't during a duel before, but he hasn't used a truly Dark spell, either. It's a good way to defend against them, just one he wasn't sure she had in her arsenal.
He casts again, and she deflects it easily. He takes his time, watching her reactions—or, rather, her lack of reactions—as he increases the intensity of his hexes. She's getting tired. He can see it. He fires a series of hexes so fast and furious that her shield rips right in two. He waits while she recasts, but now she isn't using Occlumency, obviously too tired to maintain it.
He starts slow again, gauging her reactions to the darker spells. When her shield begins to shimmer under his attack, she sends a barrage of stinging hexes at him, and he almost doesn't get his own shield up in time.
"Fucking hell," he says.
She smiles. The first time she's ever smiled during one of their duels. In fact, it's the first time he's seen her smile since their marriage.
"Did I say you could use offensive spells?" he asks.
"Did you say I couldn't?" she counters.
He raises a brow. "Game on, then?"
She nods. "Game on."
He holds back, of course. He has to, or the duel would be over instantly. But he doesn't have to hold back nearly as much as he thought he would. He told them in class that physical fitness would amplify their magical power, and Granger, swot that she is, obviously took note and has been working out. He's seen her schedule, seen how much time she spends beating the crap out of practice dummies in between her sessions with him. Now he's seeing the fruit of all that preparation.
He assumes that most of the spells she's casting are ones she's only read about, or at best cast on the practice dummies. You wouldn't know it, though—just as he wouldn't have known she'd never cast that damned engorgement spell before either. Gods, when he thinks about how she could have gelded him, using a spell like that for the first time, and in anger, he shudders.
It would have made the last few weeks easier to bear if she had. He can't get the image of her, eyes flashing, breasts heaving, out of his mind. Or the one of her on her hands and knees, muttering curses under her breath as she waited for him to take her.
That image distracts him so much that Granger is able to slip a truly nasty hex past his shield, and he lets loose a string of profanity that sends her into a fit of laughter, and while she's laughing he disarms her easily.
"You swear like a Muggle," she says, still laughing.
"My father's rather dubious legacy."
Her eyes widen. "Your father's a Muggle?"
He nods.
"I assumed you were Pureblood."
"Being Sorted into Slytherin, it made things easier when people did."
"When you were turning the air blue just now, you sounded almost like a Northerner," she says.
"I grew up near Manchester," he admits, not sure why he's telling her any of this.
"Really? I'd never have guessed."
"I never intended anyone to guess. I worked hard at ridding myself of that accent my first year at Hogwarts. Lucius Malfoy helped tremendously, playing Professor Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle."
"You weren't that bad, surely?"
"Not quite. My mother did her best to teach me to speak properly, but my father was the lowest sort of Manc you can imagine, and my running wild with the other street urchins didn't do anything for my diction."
Granger looks at him for a long moment. "Thank you for telling me about them."
He shrugs. "You deserve to know what you've married into, nice upper-middle-class girl that you obviously are."
"Only in the Muggle world." Her lighthearted expression disappears. "In ours, I'm just a filthy Mudblood and you got the short end of the conjugal stick."
"Don't ever use that word in my presence," he snaps.
She's startled, but not cowed. "Since I'm the one routinely called that slur, I really don't think you ought to be lecturing me about who is and isn't permitted to say the word."
"You're right," he says, and notes her surprise. She expected him to keep yelling at her, he supposes. "Still, I would prefer you didn't use it in my presence. It has…unpleasant associations."
"All right," she says, then, a moment later, "What was your mother's family like?"
"I never knew any of them. She was disowned by the Pureblood Princes because of her unfortunate marriage."
"Prince," she says, then gasps, "Oh, my God. You're the Halfblood Prince!"
