Chapter 10: In Which Snape Debates Dessert

"I'll cook; you bring dessert. I prefer citrus or light chocolate." Those were the last words Hermione said to him before apparating away to meet the Boy who Got Way More Press Than He Deserved.

This left Snape in a quandary. What exactly is light chocolate? Does it mean something with a small amount of chocolate: vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce? Something with a fluffy texture: chocolate mousse? Or something low-fat: chocolate angel food cake? After spending a pleasant half-hour with his mother's cookbooks Snape decided to go with a lemon tart. Light chocolate was a dessert minefield he did not wish to enter.

Snape had begun cooking shortly after he inherited Spinner's End. Previously his mother or Hogwarts had provided him with food. Then, in the summer of 1987, he found himself in a situation where he needed to feed himself. He was not surprised that he was good at it. Cooking and potions were not all that far removed from each other. He was surprised that he enjoyed it. The tactile experience was rewarding in and of itself. Touching the food, the careful application of heat and knife, the smells, and the sounds all provided a thoroughly rewarding experience. A luscious end product was the proverbial icing on the cake. (Not that he was a big fan of cake. He didn't have much of a sweet tooth.)

A properly constructed lemon tart, which balances sweet with sour and smooth with flaky, struck him as an appropriate symbol for tonight's meeting. Like any cooking, he began by popping a CD in the player and then rounding up his ingredients. While Nine Inch Nails (who he had come to know and enjoy by confiscating a CD from a student) pulsed through his flat, he gathered flour, sugar, salt, butter, lemons, eggs and cream.

While cutting butter into the flour mixture for the crust, he wondered about the proper way to go about presenting a tart. Does one just hand it over? Is some sort of flourish involved? How do I do this without looking like a moron? He noticed he was in danger of turning the dough into paste. He stopped his knife work and began to add water to the dough. Concentrating on his efforts, not wanting to end up with a soggy lump, he finished the crust and placed it in the oven to bake.

As the crust cooled, he began to wonder about what to do once he got to Granger's home. He understood the basics of talk and eat, but what else? The more he thought about it the more he realized he had never been on a real date. Madame Puddifoot's as a fifth year, Lily's at the end of seventh, and the occasional one-night-stand did not constitute a real date, let alone dinner at a woman's home. He wished he hadn't discarded the Ministry's pamphlet on courtship. It would have probably been useless, but it might have been able to tell him whether to bring a gift, or expect sex.

He folded whipped cream into the lemon curd while thinking about his visit to Lily's house after seventh year. The closest he had come to a date. The closest he had come to a lot of things.

"That was hardly a date." Like always her voice came from behind him.

"I know, but it's the romantic highlight of my life."

"That's depressing." She came around to lean against the counter while he spooned the filling into the crust.

"While you were shagging Potter, I was infiltrating the Death Eaters and harboring an all encompassing love for you. That left romance pretty low on my to-do list."

"I've been dead for twenty-three years. How hard would it have been to have found someone else in all that time?"

"It's not that simple."

Lily smiled gently at him. "Of course it was. All you had to do was let me go."

"How was I to do that?" He turned towards her; his arms crossed over his chest. "Especially before it was done? I got you killed, remember."

"You know that isn't true."

"It's true enough." He paused, looking wishful. "I got my dreams of you, of us, killed. Is that better?"

"Much. It's hard to live without dreams, Sev, but I think it's more than time for you to get some new ones."

"I'm trying."