Disclaimer:

It's JKR's world, I just play in it.

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Florence was a blessing, even with all it precipitated. I spent mornings attending sessions and afternoons wandering the streets of both the muggle and wizarding parts of the city with Adrimori or Stahl, both of whom proved to be not just interesting characters but ellusive keys to my husband's past.

While Gabriel came with me once or twice for the museum trips, he spent most of his time with Severus, I suspect mainly to be used as a shield against Koureha and in the somewhat absurd hopes that the boy would absorb something of the programs. I wanted our son to be bright, but I was wary of his intelligence equaling Severus' and warier still of accelerating his education just because he had a head start on life at Hogwarts.

Stahl was, true to my husband's warnings, insane, but not in the way I would have expected. He was merely too bright and too aware of it and the limitations that it would always place on his life. As we walked he often muttered numbers and equations to himself, calculating everything as he was trapped by an inability to avoid his arithmancy observations. In retrospect, I suspect he tried not to tell me things and I certainly remember trying not to ask.

Mostly, we talked about Hermione, about how he was clear on the outcome of his relationship with her, which he readily admitted to me, but begged me not to tell Severus about.

"The work is the most important thing to me," he had said, "I wish it were not so, but it is what I am, and eventually, she will realize she is young, and blame me for being both old and obsessed with more than her, and will move on. In time, we will be great friends. Hopefully, she will have learned much, or at least enough, to continue the work." He shrugged then and smiled at me. "Even friendly men can be difficult," he said, and it was a valuable reminder.

Adrimori was, in most ways, the greater puzzle. That anyone could be more formal than my husband was then and remains now an almost staggering thought, but such was the case of this delicate and circumspect wizard who deflected more than one of my questions by saying he would not answer without Severus' leave to do so. I was at least able to learn why though.

Adrimori was twenty years Severus' senior, not that it was easy to tell considering the way my husband wore his life and Adrimori seemed near naked of his. While their relation was distant, Adrimori had been pushed into a certain responsibility for Severus as a child, as a way of perhaps getting him to focus his own life more. He became, through words over great distance, something of a protector and advisor to a man most would have believed to have never needed one.

"You did not know him when he was eleven, Allosia," I was reminded. "So fine boned and strange, he did not know enough to pretend he knew less. Do not ever tell him I told you this, but he spent his first year Hogwarts with the nickname HouseElf, because he had been so foolish as to mention the peoples he would have then wished to be far more closely related to than he is. That is the only confidence of his I will betray. Needless to say, he quickly demonstrated he was no trifle"

I found it hard to imagine, but not implausible, Severus as a child, having heard rumours of his own family and hoping they would give him a most spectacular way out of his most awkward years. That was not to be of course, and I'm not sure if he ever learned to love, without doubt, his face made to cut glass, that was at least to me, as a beautiful as a diamond.

I was always somber by the time we would return to the castle at dusk in time for the formal dinners, full of secrets that were unimportant to anyone but me, and awed by a city so suffuse with such poorly contained magic. It was a place to grow up, to discover yourself and make mistakes in, and Severus and I were both too old for that. What a gift it must have been to him when he was younger.

We were happy in Florence, as much as so many aspects of the event were absurd, and vowed to return yearly, either to a WISP event or to the city itself. As I watched Severus actually smile as he practiced his presentation, voice full of frenetic sternness it was hard for me to believe we couldn't find a way through anything.