30. Roses and Cupcakes
He and Warbeck had begun researching protective substances almost immediately. On the morning they returned to Hogwarts, they were still debating - or rather, arguing - about which ingredients to include in her Cruciatus "vaccine." Referencing a text on the use of crystals in potion-making, she declared, "Black tourmaline is stronger than onyx for protection against external forces."
"By 'external,'" Severus replied, "they're referring to magic which targets the physical body. The Cruciatus is a mental attack."
The girl considered that, then shook her head. "No, that's not what they mean. 'Internal forces' refers to psychological issues. That's why onyx is often used in potions aimed at treating emotional disturbances."
"And why it would be more effective against a curse that targets the mind."
"I don't think so. It works to destabilize harmful energy that arises from within you. The Cruciatus is something you're subjected to by another person; it comes from outside yourself. Hence the term 'external force.'"
Severus sat quietly a moment, pondering her stubbornness. She was certain that she was correct, and in cases like this she would refuse to back down and accept that she might not know everything. With a sigh, he reminded her, "You asked me for my expertise. I have twenty years' worth of experience on you. I was an expert on advanced potion-making before you were even a thought in your parents' minds. Perhaps it would do you good to consider the outlandish possibility that I may just be a bit more knowledgeable on the subject than you are."
She held his gaze, looking mildly irritated, before she threw up her hands and said, "So we'll try it with both. One brew with onyx and one with black tourmaline."
Rolling his eyes, he replied, "Which will be a waste of time and resources."
"Or maybe neither will have an effect," she countered, "and then we can both be wrong."
"I'm not wrong," he insisted.
"You don't know that. For God's sake, you call me arrogant?" She leaned forward, keeping her eyes on his, and sassed, "I bow to the king of arrogance."
"Arrogance pertains to individuals who hold an exaggerated opinion of their own abilities. I do not exaggerate. I am, objectively speaking, a master in our field."
Cocking a brow, Warbeck asked, "And I'm not?"
Certainly not to the extent that he was. He'd been working with potions longer than she'd been alive. Coming to stand before her, he folded his arms across his chest and replied, "You are a fetus in the world of professional potion-brewing."
She didn't respond right away, but stood glowering at him. Then her expression turned cool and she said in an airy tone, "Ya know what all the students call you? 'Severe Arse' Snape. I used to rebuke them for it, but it does have a certain ring."
A slight smirk curled his lip, but then his face fell as he detected a curious scent in the air. With a furrowed brow, he leaned forward to give her a whiff, and asked, "Have you been drinking?"
She appeared to be quite puzzled by the question, as well as a bit offended. "No!" she exclaimed. "It's eleven o'clock in the morning, I'm not a lush!"
But he remarked, "You smell like Firewhisky."
She sniffed herself and replied, "No I don't."
Yes, she did. It was subtle but he definitely recognized it. Eyeing her suspiciously, he said, "Well... have a peppermint before you go up for the staff meeting."
"I haven't been drinking!" she insisted. "And I smell like..." she gave herself another sniff "...incense and rainfall."
"And liquor and cinnamon," he added flatly.
There was a beat of silence, before she shrugged and said, "Well... I suppose that's kind of sexy, too."
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Severus always dreaded the Sorting Ceremony. With a hundred-plus students to be placed, the whole thing could last up to two hours, and he couldn't have cared less who ended up in what house. "This is mind-numbing," he mumbled to Warbeck. A blond boy whose name he hadn't bothered taking note of had been sitting there for three minutes and a decision still hadn't been made. "If you really don't know, then send them to Hufflepuff."
"Why Hufflepuff?" Warbeck whispered, keeping her eyes on the boy.
Severus explained, "Obviously he has no discernable talents. Hufflepuff is the house of the unexceptional." The potions mistress kicked him under the table.
Finally the Hat shouted out, "Hufflepuff!" Warbeck gave Severus a pointed look, and he smirked to himself.
As the next student took her place on the stool, Warbeck said, "Five galleons on Ravenclaw. She looks bookish."
Professor Vector, who was seated to the left of Warbeck, piped up, "You're taking bets on this?"
"Gotta make it a little bit interesting," the younger woman replied.
Vector considered the first-year, and said, "Five on Gryffindor. She's got a 'Hermione Granger-ness' about her."
"Slytherin," Severus guessed. "I imagine she's determined to prove herself." He turned out to be correct, and his colleagues' faces fell.
"Teacher's pet," Warbeck commented. "You watch. She'll be the one to ask for extra assignments."
"By the way," Severus said, as Professor Sprout called the next student forward, "you asked about agrimony versus ague? The answer is neither. Both substances have curse-breaking effects. We're going for prevention. What you want is angelica."
She gave that a moment of thought and countered, "Angelica is a curse-breaker, too."
"Yes, but it also acts as a barrier against harmful influences. Agrimony and ague would be useless against the Cruciatus."
"Hufflepuff!" the Hat called out, but Severus and Warbeck weren't paying attention.
"You always have to make me wrong, don't you?" the girl asked, a hint of attitude in her tone.
Casually, he replied, "Your error in judgment in not my doing."
She rolled her eyes at that, and after a pause, "Actually it is. Almost everything I know about potions, I learned from you."
Next, Sprout read out, "Levingston, Harper!" Warbeck whipped her head around to have a look at the dark-haired girl who came forward, and Severus saw the potions mistress's expression turn to one of surprise. With her eyes set on the first-year, she breathed, "Oh, my God."
Severus furrowed his brow and asked, "What?"
"I..." she stammered. "I know that girl. She's one of my cousins."
The Defense teacher was taken aback by this. He knew very little - almost nothing - about Warbeck's extended family. "Father's side, I take it?"
"Mm."
If he'd have given the matter any thought, he would've assumed that David Warbeck had been an only child. "What was her name?" He hadn't caught it the first time.
"Harper Levingston."
"Did you know she was coming?"
"No."
The man found it curious that she wouldn't have know her own relative would be starting school at the place where she worked. Ultimately, Levingston was sorted into Ravenclaw, and after the ceremony, Warbeck explained. "I haven't spoken with my Dad's side of the family since he died. The last time I saw any of them was at his funeral. And that was five years ago now."
"Why the estrangement?" Severus asked.
She thought back on it and replied, "There was no falling out or anything, we just..." she shrugged "...lost contact." Looking out over the Ravenclaw table, she said, "Harper is my Aunt Diana's daughter. My Dad's got two older sisters - Diana and Rosalyn. Auntie Roz has two sons, but they both went to Durmstrang. Guess I assumed that Harper would, too."
Severus surveyed the Levingston girl, noting certain similarities she shared with her cousin, such as the dark, wavy hair and arched eyebrows. "You have the same mouth," he remarked.
"Yeah, the bee-sting lips," she agreed. "I think we got that from Grandma Circe." With her eyes on the girl, "Does she even remember me, I wonder. She'd have only been five or six the last time I saw her."
"Are they aware that you work here now?"
She pondered the thought, and replied, "I suppose they wouldn't be." A pause. "Do you think I should... go and talk to her? She if she knows who I am?"
Severus considered it, and said, "Not now. Not here. Perhaps a private conversation would be more appropriate." Five years of no contact with the family; neither side had reached out to the other. He found that strange. "Were you close with them before your father passed?"
"Yeah, close enough, I think. We'd see each other at Christmas and Easter. All three families would spend two weeks in the summer at Grandma's estate. Good times, we had."
Curious now, he asked, "What about your mother's side?"
"She's got one sister - Cathy. Cathy and Uncle Pat have two kids, Adrienne and Forrester. None of them know I'm a witch, but even so we've got a good relationship." She paused to take a bite of food. "They think I'm a governess."
"Hmph."
"But I've always thought Adrienne might suspect something. A few years ago I told her I was a Wiccan. That explained all the potion bottles."
"You let her see them?"
With a devilish grin, she replied, "I gave her one, too."
He simply gaped at her a moment, then asked, "What the hell were you thinking? She's a muggle."
"So?"
"So it's a breach of the Statute of Secrecy. You could've been arrested."
Waving her hand dismissively, she said, "Nobody had to find out. It was only a small dose of Wit-Sharpening Potion. She had an exam coming up."
As if that somehow made it all right. Shaking his head at her recklessness, he kept quiet and went back to his meal. But after a minute or so, he asked, "How did she do?"
"Top marks in her class."
Well, at least something good had come out of it. "And how did you explain that to her?"
"I said it was a placebo effect. 'The power of positive thinking, the law of attraction,' all that pseudoscientific stuff."
"Don't you ever do that again," he warned.
Smirking to herself, she said in a mocking tone, "Yes, Father."
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At breakfast the following morning, Warbeck mused, "I should talk to her before our first lesson. I mean, she may not recognize my face, but she'll know my name."
"Why are you putting so much thought into this?" Severus asked. "Simply take her aside and introduce yourself."
With a pensive expression, she replied, "It's just odd. The whole thing is making me wonder why exactly no one's ever written or visited."
"It isn't a one-way street. You haven't done that either."
"Well... I had a lot going on after Dad died. Voldemort returned that same year, remember. Then the war..." She paused, before remarking in a bitter tone, "You'd think they would've made it a point to check up on me. I wasn't even of age and I had no other magical relatives."
Severus had to agree that that was rather callous. Where exactly were these people when she'd sent her mother into hiding in America, or when she was living in the virtual prison that Hogwarts had become that year, or after she'd fought for her life in two battles? Did they have any idea of what their seventeen-year-old niece been through during the war?
Did they care?
He pondered the thought until the mail arrived, and one of the owls dropped an envelope in front of Warbeck. Severus furrowed his brow as he saw there was a red rose affixed to the seal. What's this? he wondered, looking from the envelope to her. As she gazed at it, there was a slight blush on her cheeks, but she didn't seem particularly surprised by the flower. After a moment she opened the envelope and read the letter that was inside.
Severus kept his eyes averted, feigning disinterest in what certainly looked like a love note. The girl had made no mention of any new man in her life, and he threw a glance down the table at Freddie Cross, who had never been quite so subtle regarding his fondness for her. However, the Muggle Studies teacher was paying her no mind.
Warbeck smiled softly as she pocketed the note, then removed the rose and twirled it between her fingers. After a minute or so, she spoke up, not meeting his eye. "You're not going to ask?"
He hesitated, but replied nonchalantly, "If you want me to know, then you'll tell me."
She looked over at him, but he avoided her gaze. Tell me, he thought, desperately curious to know who she was apparently involved with. He'd seen her a handful of times in the last several weeks - why hadn't she ever let it him on the fact that she was seeing someone?
Because it's no business of yours, he told himself.
"Well..." she said. "You don't seem particularly interested. I won't bore you with the details."
He shot a sideways glance at the rose, which called to mind the tattoo on her foot, and in turn, the night he'd spent with her after her birthday. As it turned out, he couldn't wait ten weeks; seeing her nearly every day for a year had spoiled him, and it hadn't taken long for him to start missing her company. Fortunately, delivering her gift had provided a good excuse to visit her.
Throughout the summer holidays, he hardly ever left his father's house, and he had no one to speak to. The isolation had never bothered him in the past; in fact, he'd welcomed it. But this time around, he'd found himself so maddeningly bored and craving human contact, to the point that he'd sat through that inane Gregory Peck film just so he could spend another two hours with the girl.
Presently, he wondered if she'd already been involved, at that point, with whoever sent the rose. But either way, he was relieved to know that she had somebody else on her mind. Ever since that drunken kiss, he'd been afraid that her feelings for him weren't entirely chaste, and thankfully, he could now put those ideas to bed.
On the other hand...
No, he insisted. I am not jealous.
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Callie's first lesson with the new Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs came on Wednesday, and she still hadn't spoken to Harper. But she'd kept her eyes on the girl as she introduced herself to the class, and there was a definite look of recognition when she told them her name.
Do they ever talk about me? Callie wondered. They must know what happened at Hogwarts. And yet they never wrote to find out if I was all right.
But as Snape had pointed out, she hadn't written to them either. In fact, she rarely gave them any thought at all. It was as though they were old friends who she'd drifted apart from over the years. But they weren't merely friends - they were family.
What happened? she asked herself. Why did we lose touch?
At the end of the period, Harper hung back while the rest of her classmates cleared out. When they were alone, she said, "Professor Warbeck?" approaching Callie.
The potions mistress gave her a friendly, but somewhat nervous smile. "Harper," she greeted with a nod. "Welcome to Hogwarts."
"Thanks." The girl seemed quite anxious as she asked, "Do you know who I am?"
"I do," Callie replied. After a moment's hesitation, she added, "You and I used to have tea parties together."
A delighted smile came upon her face. "So you're Uncle David's daughter! I thought maybe it was just a coincidence. Your name, I mean."
"I wasn't sure you'd remember me." A pause. "Do you?"
"A little. Think I was about..." she scrunched up her face in thought "...maybe five that summer at Grandma Circe's house. I was afraid to go into the swimming pool, 'cause Uncle Gio threw me in there the year before, trying to teach me how to swim, and I almost drowned."
"Yeah," Callie said, "he tried that method on me, too."
"And it was you, wasn't it?" Harper asked. "You let me ride on your back while you swam. Told me to pretend you were a mermaid. Even fashioned a tail out of a beach towel."
"Yep, that was me." She was amazed the girl remembered that so vividly, and it gave her hope that she hadn't been forgotten by her father's family.
"I can't believed Mummy didn't tell me you work here."
"I haven't seen her in a while, she probably didn't know. Decided against Durmstrang, eh?"
"Yeah, she wanted me closer to home."
"Well, you ended up at the better school."
Harper inclined her head and asked, "You went here, right? Were you a Ravenclaw?"
"No, Slytherin. My dad was a Ravenclaw. I think your Mum and Auntie Roz were, too."
"And Grandma and Grandpa." In a teasing tone, she added, "I guess you're the rebel in the family."
"The wicked one," Callie said, shooting her a wink. "I know you've gotta get to class, but... maybe you could come by my office later? Have a chat, you and I?" Perhaps she could find out what all had been going on with the rest of the Warbecks.
"Yeah, I'd like that," Harper replied. "I've got Charms next, with Flitwick. He's my Head of House."
"You'll like him. He's a real nice bloke and he's easy-going."
"Cool." Turning to leave, the girl smiled and said, "See you later, then."
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They met up after last period, and Callie treated her to tea and cauldron cakes. Shivering a bit, Harper commented, "It's freezing down here."
"You get used to it," Callie said. "This'll warm you up." She handed her a cup of hot liquid. "Chocolate chai."
Harper took a sip and muttered, "Mmm." As Callie settled in beside her, she said, "So, I've had Flitwick, Sinistra, Sprout, and Chamberlain. And you. Who else is left?"
"Professor Binns for History of Magic," Callie replied. "He's a ghost, but other than that he's insanely dull. I used to have to pinch myself to stay awake during his lectures." She sipped her tea before going on, "And then Professor Snape for Defense Against the Dark Arts."
"What's he like?"
The potions mistress hesitated. Most students - even many Slytherins - didn't have very positive opinions of him. "It... sort of depends on the day," she said vaguely.
"I've heard he's tough."
"You heard correctly. But he's a friend of mine; I'll tell him to be nice to you."
Having a bite of cake, the girl asked, quite bashfully, "And who's... ya know... the handsome one?"
Callie knew exactly who she was referring to, and smiled to herself. "That'd be Professor Cross. Muggle Studies. Unfortunately you can't take it 'til third year." Her little cousin looked disheartened by that. "So..." Callie said, a bit apprehensively, "how are your mum and dad? It's been so long since I've heard from them."
"They're well. Mummy left the publishing company she worked for, and opened up her own unicorn stable."
Cocking a brow in interest, Callie said, "Oh, really?"
"She gives riding lessons and all that. Has a couple of thestrals, too, but I can't see them."
"And your mum can?"
"Uh huh."
Callie pondered that. It meant that her aunt would've had to have witnessed someone die at some point. The potions mistress wondered who it was, and when. "Well..." she said after a pause, "they look like skinny black horses with wings."
"Can you see them?"
"Yeah. After the war, I..." She trailed off, her thoughts turning to Tonks. And then to the man whose death she'd brought about herself, Rodolphus Lestrange. "Well... I saw a couple of people die in the Battle of Hogwarts."
Harper's eyebrows shot up in surprise. "You were in the Battle of Hogwarts?!"
"I was."
Looking impressed, she replied, "Wicked!"
Not really, Callie thought. But young kids were always under the impression that combat was a lot cooler than it was horrific.
"So you're like..." Harper said thoughtfully "...a war hero."
"I wouldn't say that." She'd never found herself important enough to be described as a hero. "But... would you like to see my Order of Merlin?"
"Yeah, I would!" Callie summoned it and handed it over to the girl, who surveyed it and exclaimed, "First Class, wow!" Studying Callie, she remarked, "You're really awesome. And you're my cousin." There was a strong note of pride in her expression. "Didn't know we had anyone so cool in our family."
Callie was tickled by the girl's excitement over her, but she couldn't help feeling like a stranger to her own blood relative. After a long pause, she asked, "Does your mum ever talk about me?"
With a shrug, Harper replied, "Sometimes." Still gazing at the medal, "Never told me about all this, though."
"What has she said?"
The girl thought back on it. "Just... sort of mentions you in passing sometimes."
In passing. As though she were insignificant. Don't read so deeply into that, Callie told herself. You almost never talk about them. "Does she still talk to Aunt Roz and Uncle Gio?"
"Yeah," Harper said. "But not as much since Grandma died."
It took a second or two for Callie to process that, and then her heart went cold in her chest. "Grandma Circe died?" she asked.
"Yeah, last year."
Callie looked off into the distance, having no idea what to say. The last time she'd seen her grandmother, the woman had appeared to be in good health. "H-" she stuttered. "How?"
"She had a problem with her brain," Harper said. Then she muttered to herself, "What's it called? Something 'Hunters...? Stack...?'"
Callie considered it, and offered, "Hunter-Sax disease?"
"That's it."
The potions mistress had a basic knowledge of the magical malady, which was caused by a virus and resulted in irreversible deterioration of the brain. Those affected usually died within a span of about two years. Which meant that not only had nobody thought to inform her that her grandmother had passed, but they'd also kept the illness from her all that time, robbing her of the chance to say goodbye. "When did she get it?" Callie asked.
"I'm not sure. Mum didn't tell me until she was really sick. But we spent the last few months with her, and she was bedbound by then. I think it was April that she died."
Callie took that in, her heart aching as she thought about the woman. All this time - a year and a half - she would never have imagined that her only remaining grandparent was lying in a grave. "Last year," she muttered, still in a state of shock. "Nobody told me." Turning back to Harper, she asked, "Did your mum ever try to write to me or...?"
"I..." the girl said, shrugging slightly. "I don't know."
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Warbeck showed up at his office shortly before dinner, a blank sort of look on her face. "My grandmother died," she announced.
Severus did a double take, and asked, "Today?"
"A year ago," she corrected. "She died a year ago and nobody told me."
He didn't know what to say to that, other than the obvious. "I'm sorry." After a pause, he asked, "How did you find out?"
"Harper told me. She had Hunter-Sax disease." Covering her face, she exclaimed, "Fuck, that makes it so much worse!"
He knew about Hunter-Sax; victims suffered gradual cognitive and muscular deterioration. By the end of it they ended up a vegetable. "They'd have provided her with palliative potions," he said, attempting to offer a bit of consolation. "She wouldn't have suffered."
But Warbeck replied, "No, that's not what I mean. She was sick for who knows how long. They knew she was dying, and they kept me completely in the dark." Both her tone and expression became angered as she went on, "She's my God damn grandmother! Did they think I wouldn't wanna know?" She lingered in the doorway a moment, before turning on her heel and storming off.
Severus went after her and called out, "Where are you going?"
"That room in the basement with all the old Prophets. I wanna see if there was an obituary."
Five minutes later, they were sifting through a stack of papers from the previous year. Warbeck read over an issue from April and said, "There it is. 'Circe Warbeck, died the 16th of April 1999. Wife of the late Graham Warbeck. Beloved mother of Rosalyn (Giacomo) Angelini, Diana (Ari) Levingston, and the late David Wa-'" Suddenly she fell silent, her eyes still on the announcement.
Furrowing his brow, Severus asked, "What is it?"
"They mentioned both my aunts' husbands but not my mum. Luca, Dmitri, Harper and I are in here, too, but Mum isn't." She was clearly troubled by the omission. "Do... do they leave out the spouse if they're widowed?"
He considered it, and replied honestly, "I don't know." Beside the obituary was a photograph of the woman, who must've been around eighty years old. Severus studied the image, searching for resemblances between her and her granddaughter; there were two that stuck out. "You did get the mouth from her," he remarked. "And the eyes." That explained it; both of her parents were brown-eyed.
Warbeck gazed down at the photo for a long moment, then looked skyward and said dispiritedly, "Grandma Circe's gone." There was a pause, before she added, "She was good to me." Severus struggled to come up with words of comfort, but before he could figure them out she made a huffing sound, shaking her head to herself. "No more tropi-cakes," she muttered.
"'Tropi-cakes?'"
With a far-away look in her eye, she explained, "Special cupcakes she used to make. Vanilla cake batter and passionfruit icing, topped with coconut flakes. One time I was visiting her and she taught me how to make them. Or - tried to. I overestimated what a 'sprinkle' of ginger looks like."
The Defense teacher smiled, very slightly, and remarked, "Sounds like you."
She appeared to be in a state of deep thought, and he wondered if he ought to let her be alone. After a while she asked, more to herself than to him, "Why didn't they let me say goodbye? Why didn't they tell me?"
He wondered about that himself. What sort of family was this? Although she had never spoken of them - not to him, at least - her relationship with her father had obviously been happy and loving. Why would the man's sisters have kept her grandmother's passing from her?
Glancing over at the potions mistress, he saw that her eyes were shining with wetness. She took a deep, shaky breath, then tore the obituary out of the paper, folded it up, and set it in her pocket.
Say something, he told himself. He hated this feeling of uselessness that plagued him whenever she became emotional. But he'd always believed that in times of great sorrow, words were empty. So instead he rose up and said, "Come with me."
Without questioning where he was taking her, she did as told. He led her up to the third floor, and then to the music room, where he sat at the piano and began to play Für Elise. She stood watching him for a minute or so, then joined him on the bench and took over, a soft smile curling her lip.
She's been practicing, he mused. Her movements were quicker and more relaxed than they'd been in June. Upon reaching the end of the song, she started over from the top.
Not looking up from the keys, she asked, "Did you ever know your grandparents?"
"No," he replied. "Tobias's parents lived in Ireland. We couldn't afford travel, neither could they. As you know, my mother was disowned by her father. And her own mother passed when she was a girl."
"No aunts or uncles?"
"Mother was an only child. Tobias had a sister but he didn't speak about her much."
She was quiet for a moment, before she asked, "So it's just you, then?"
Christ, how pitiful that sounded. Hesitantly, he said, "That's all I need."
Once again, the song came to an end. Warbeck set her hand upon his own, giving it a gentle squeeze. What are you doing? he wanted to ask. But he kept quiet, his heart rate increasing as the memory of her kissing him filled his head. Don't do anything stupid, Warbeck. I don't want you.
But thankfully, she simply placed his hand on the keys and said, "Your turn." He breathed a sigh of relief.
She doesn't want you either - she's seeing someone else. It appeared that any attraction on her part was long gone. In the past year, she'd been with the vampire, had a date with Cross, and now she had the mystery bloke sending love letters. Clearly whatever spell she'd been under as a student had been broken.
And there was that pang of disappointment again.
He played around with the keys, attempting to produce something light and soothing, and after a while he spoke. "All right. I've held out as long as I can." Keeping his head bowed and continuing with the improvised melody, he asked, "Who sent the rose?" She didn't answer right away, and he thought back on his claim that if she wanted him to know, then she would tell him. Which she hadn't. Why the secrecy, he wondered.
But finally she replied, "Theo Nott."
For the briefest of seconds, he faltered in his song. Skinny, quiet, pockmarked, son-of-a-Death-Eater, Theodore Nott? That was the bloke who had left her blushing? "Don't pretend the boy would've had any appeal to you," he'd said the night they happened upon him at dinner.
"Apparently I lean toward the unconventionally appealing." Or else this was simply an elaborate ruse to try and prove him wrong.
After a long pause, he remarked, "I told you he fancied you. Finally plucked up the courage to let it be known?"
"Well..." she said, "actually I approached him. Owled him a couple of days after we saw him in London. Asked if he wanted to meet up."
Meet up. Rather a vague way of putting it, he thought. Then he considered the fact that they may have been seeing each other for five or six weeks at this point. Don't even think it, he told himself. It's no business of yours. But he couldn't shake the question - exactly how "involved" had they become in that time? Still avoiding her eye, he asked, "Is it serious?"
"It's only been a month." As if the answer should've been obvious, "No, it isn't serious."
And yet, that didn't do much to settle him. After all, he'd told her himself once: "Sex and love don't always go hand in hand."
Attempting to sound casual, he replied, "Well... perhaps it should be. The boy is independently wealthy. All the personal chefs, housekeepers, nannies you would ever need, he could provide them."
She scoffed at the idea, but a smile spread across her face. "Independent woman, remember? I can hire my own chefs and nannies."
"Right." They fell silent once more, and Severus was battling with himself. On the one hand, Warbeck's social life shouldn't have been any concern to him. They were friends and colleagues, and he truly wanted nothing more than that. But at the same time, he felt as though he were the most prominent man in her life, and he wasn't quite so thrilled with the idea of someone else taking that place. Someone who could give more than he could; love her in a way that he couldn't. He didn't want a romantic partnership. Not with her nor with anyone else.
But he also didn't want to lose her to somebody who did.
He continued to play, and after a while, she asked, "What song is that?"
"It's nothing, I'm making it up as I go along."
She listened for a moment, and remarked, "It's nice."
He gave it another few seconds, then paused, conjuring a candle, lighting it, and setting it atop the piano. "For Circe," he said, and returned to his song. He could feel her eyes on him, but she said nothing. However, she moved a bit closer and rested her head on his shoulder.
A year ago - six months ago, even - he might've told her to get off. But presently he found himself enjoying the contact, and for the first time he wasn't willing her not to fall for him. Instead he was warning himself not to fall for her.
