sam_storyteller (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-08 03:24 pm
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-08 03:24 pm
Entry tags:
Three Galleons, chapter 1/4
Summary: After the war, Hermione has settled into a quiet if unorthodox life with Severus -- until a small problem in the form of a refugee spy calls for an even more unorthodox solution.
Rating: R for sexual content. (Hermione/Snape, Hermione/Snape/Lupin)
Notes:arsenicjade challenged me the other day to write Snape/Hermione/Lupin in a hurt/comfort scenario, and VOILA. Blame her. :D
Warnings: None.
Originally Posted 12/16/2006
Also available at AO3.
***
It was in the dark time after the war, after the funerals but before the grief had passed. It was in the air, sat on the tongue like raw onion, slept in their beds at night. The war itself was gone, but the shadows were still burnt into the world, and no amount of scrubbing would erase them. Only time would do that.
Ron had tried to stay, for Hermione's sake, but they ended up screaming at each other with such tiring repetitiveness that finally one night she sat down on the bed after another screaming match and told him if he didn't leave her, she would leave him, so it was only a matter of whether his pride could tolerate the latter. Ron got up out of the bed that moment and left, throwing on clothing over his pyjamas and going to Harry's stylish Bloomsbury flat. They were three, that could never have changed, but they were friends before lovers and it would always have to be that way. Ron lasted two months there before he finally picked up again and went to Tibet, where Charlie was apprenticed to the Dragon Monks in the high mountains. He sent postcards.
Hermione thought of him often and hoped he was finding his peace with the dragons, like Charlie did. She saw now, with the backwards glance of maturity, that she and Ron could never have functioned as lovers. She hadn't respected his intelligence (how could she? he was so thick sometimes) and he hadn't respected her strength, always wanting to protect her, wanting children already. Wanting her to be Molly Weasley, with a brood of children and a bookshelf of cooking and cleaning manuals.
The day Ron left, Hermione and Harry both saw him off, all three crying and promising to write. Harry never did, but that was Harry, and Hermione always phoned him before sending a letter to Ron so that she could include anything he had to say.
That day she had gone to Diagon, trying to retrace the patterns of their younger life, meeting in the shops to buy school books, preparing for the long and pleasant journey to Hogwarts each year. She thought mostly of the times she and Ron had come here, wondering what she could have done differently, how she could have fixed things. By the time dark fell, she'd wandered into Knockturn, which held no terrors for her now.
There was the apothecary shop, the one Ron always glared at with cold hard eyes; she'd begged him to go in once, some time she'd actually needed an ingredient for some potion, but that was another shouting match.
She felt like an idiot, knowing she was courting trouble, but she pushed the door open anyway.
"No, you fool!" someone was saying as she walked inside. The shop was never empty, which was a shock considering the way Professor Snape -- Proprietor Snape now, she supposed -- ran his business. "I suppose you wish to cock your potion completely up and blame substandard material. Well, I shall not allow that. I have a reputation to maintain."
She wandered behind barrels of mysterious insects and racks of glass jars, watching through the gaps. At the long polished-wood counter a slip of a woman was trembling, clutching a sheet of parchment in one hand. Snape, his face creased with fury, took it from her hands and began writing on it furiously.
"This is the proper measurement, and you will need dogsblood by weight, not by volume," he snarled. "Emulsify -- emulsify!" he said the word as if it were unspeakable. "You cannot emulsify the potion! WHISK! Do you own such a thing as a whisk, you incompetent harlot?"
"Y-yes," the woman stammered. Snape thrust the paper back at her.
"Bring me your whisk," he ordered.
"What?" she asked.
"BRING ME YOUR WHISK! When you have shown me you own a whisk, I will provide you with the proper ingredients," he shouted.
Hermione giggled. She couldn't help it.
Snape looked up sharply. "You find the idea of emulsifying amusing, do you?" he demanded, peering through the shelves. "Come out, and tell me what is so bloody godforsaken funny about improper alchemy!"
Hermione emerged as the woman fled, taking her place at the counter.
"I was imagining you in class, demanding that we bring you our whisks," she said. Snape looked at her, really looked, and then his sallow skin turned pale.
"What do you want, Granger?" he demanded. "I suppose with you here, Weasley and Potter are a step behind."
Hermione meant to reply smartly, something devastating and crushing to the horrible, ugly, and cruel man in front of her, but instead she burst into tears.
"What are you doing?" he hissed, looking around the shop to see if the other patrons had noticed. Tears ran silently down Hermione's cheeks. "Stop that infernal weeping! Stop it this instant!"
"I can't," she replied. "Ron's gone to Tibet."
Snape leaned back, and she could see perplexity on his face. "Good riddance, I should say," he growled. Hermione felt fresh tears well up. "Don't you -- you are weeping in my dandelion reduction!"
Hermione looked down and saw her tears landing in an unstoppered glass jar, the sort that normally held sweets. Snape flipped up a trapdoor in the wooden counter, reached under it, and pulled her through, shoving her into a back-room with one hand.
"If you must weep, be useful," he ordered, handing her a wide wooden salad bowl. She stared at it. "Sit! Sit! Don't stand there like a fountain. Into the bowl," he added, tipping it up so that her tears landed in the broad bottom. She sat obediently and sniffled.
"You will stop now, just to spite me," he muttered, but she didn't stop; the tears rolled down without any willingness or assistance on her part, splashing into the bowl. He went to the shelves and began taking down paper-wrapped packets, laying them in front of her along with a brass scale and a wooden spoon.
"You will crush the aconite into the bowl until a thick paste is made," he said, "adding more when it becomes too wet. I trust you can at least manage that simple task?"
She nodded, wiping her nose.
"Very well. I suppose it's too much to hope that you're a virgin?"
Hermione, who had grasped what he was about now, shook her head morosely.
"I suppose Weasley's to blame for that -- the bowl!" he ordered, as she began crying anew. He left her sobbing in his storeroom and disappeared through the door, where she heard him haranguing everyone who dared approach.
"Goldfish! Do I look like a pet shop?" "Beetles' wings are costly, that is not my lookout. If you want them properly fresh you must breed your own, as any idiot ought to do." "Merlin save us from amateurs -- I suppose you were educated at Beauxbatons, where they teach Potions as if it were a lesson in sauce-making." "Out! Out! Are you illiterate? Do you see the sign? I am closed!"
The last was said over his shoulder as he returned. She was still crying but it had slowed at least, and she had not neglected the aconite. A greyish paste clung to the spoon and pulled away from the sides of the bowl when she stirred.
"Sufficient," he said, throwing her a reasonably clean handkerchief. She dried her face and blew her nose. "One ounce of belladonna, if you would oblige," he drawled.
Hermione damply measured the belladonna on the scales while he opened the other packages and began making small piles on the steel workbench.
"The ingredients must not touch glass," he continued, his hands working busily. Hermione watched them, then followed the line of his arm upwards. He did not dress so differently from their school days; plain black shoes and trousers, with a stiff-collared black shirt. But his sleeves were rolled to the elbows now, and over it all was a worn brown leather tradesman's apron, pitted and scarred from the waist up.
"What are you staring at? Stir, damn you," he commanded, and she stirred. He did no work himself, except for the measuring, merely barked orders at her until all thought of Ron was gone from her mind. In fact, she had forgotten Ron's existence and the outside world by the time he commanded her to pour the mixture into a wooden jar and sealed it. A scrap of parchment and a paste-pot were flung at her.
"Label it. Clarifying -- "
"Clarifying Concentration," she said. "I know."
"Some mote of education has clung stubbornly, I see," he replied ungraciously from the other room. He returned with a small linen sack and slid it across the table at her. She picked it up and tipped three Galleons into her hand.
"For the potion," he said.
"I don't want paying for it," she retorted.
"Then send it to the devil for all I care, I have book-keeping that must be maintained. You will be paid for the ingredients and your time, and what you do with it is your business. It is dark out. Do you require an escort home?"
Hermione opened her mouth to say she didn't want his money or his protection, and who was he to assume she was even going home, but the artless way in which he'd said it caught her under the gut.
"You might as well," she replied loftily, "considering the help I've been."
She expected some other sharp answer, but instead a slow grin spread across his face.
"If you had answered me like that ten years ago I would have respected you more," he said. In as long as it took her to gather her once-more shattered wits, he had taken off the apron and slung a deep green cloak around his shoulders, guiding her out of the shop. They walked out of Knockturn and up Diagon in silence, shoes echoing on the cobbled streets. When she reached the door of her building, just outside in Muggle London, she turned to face him and pressed the bag into his hand.
"For your time," she said, daring him to reply but bolting inside before he could.
***
It was an odd courtship to be sure, two-parts fencing match and one part awkward romance, but it dulled and eventually eradicated the memory of her and Ron's failure. The bag and its three Galleons had been passed back and forth many times, at first as a symbolic balancing-of-books and then as a secret coin of the realm, a tacit apology, and once, memorably, a form of foreplay. He paid her with it when she spent increasing amounts of time in his shop, and she passed it back to him if he paid for dinner or lent her a book she decided not to return.
One morning she woke to find him dressing, buckling his belt and buttoning the last loop on his shirt. The bag lay on the pillow next to her.
"What's this for?" she asked, lifting it up sleepily.
"Last night," he answered, and then...amazingly...he winked. Hermione of a year ago might have taken it as some kind of insult, payment for services rendered in the form of sex, but the money had long ago ceased to be money to her. Her sleepy brain tried to recall what she had even done that would deserve The Bag, and her nipples tightened against the sheet as the memory rose.
Severus was not an easy man to live with, but in that respect he was less difficult than Ron. Ron had not seen her clearly, perhaps not his fault; he would never have been able to trust her intelligence as Severus did, even when he berated her for this or that foolishness. Ron wanted to save her, but Severus expected that if she needed saving she would jolly well tell him, and the rest of the time she could solve her own bloody problems.
She had not seen herself clearly, either, too caught up in the idea of fumbling teenage sex with Ron to understand her body. Oh, she knew she had breasts, and had used them on a few occasions when nothing else would have been effective persuasion; she had been too long in a war to dismiss the power of a subtle sexual hint. Now, though, she discovered why men made such a fuss over them -- the swell of one cupped in a long-fingered hand, the rasp of a tongue just under her aureole. She discovered too that she had hips, round and sensual in their own right, curving down into thighs. She stopped thinking of herself as a girl, and started noticing that men watched when she walked past.
She wondered if all men were like that -- intensely sexual, intently erotic. Ron had been considerate when they had sex, something Severus was not, always, but Ron had never made her scream so loud the neighbours knocked on her door to make sure she was all right. Severus, answering it with a bed sheet wrapped around his waist, sent them on their way so thoroughly that they stopped speaking to her altogether. Have you never heard a woman orgasm? I assure you that you will become familiar with the sound, given time.
Sometimes, a delicious infraction on her idea of sex as lovemaking, they even fucked.
At first he waved off her concerns of age difference and temperament with an impatient snort, and when she persisted he took to declaring that she believed him to be a dessicated skirt-chasing pantalone of a pervert. What could she do? She gave up.
She had not even thought of her old objections in a long time, as she lay drowsing in the afternoon light her bedroom window allowed, Severus working shirtless at the writing-desk, trying to fabricate an old poison remedy from fragments of some Latin text. They had afternoons together almost as often as evenings; he could close his shop whenever it pleased him, and Hermione's job in the archives of the British Museum's Wizarding Wing was hardly time-sensitive. The Emperor Julian of Rome's scrying glass would still be there tomorrow, as it had been for the last seventeen hundred years.
"Owl post," he said, seconds before there was a clatter of claws on glass. "One of your idiot admirers, one assumes."
"If it's Ricardo, tell him I have to get rid of you for the weekend before I can go to Italy," she replied as he opened the window, took the letter, and shooed the owl off his books.
"If I ever meet your imaginary Ricardo I shall slit his throat," Severus announced, slitting the envelope with a very sharp letter-opener for emphasis.
"Good luck," Hermione yawned. "He's Italian. Who's it from?"
He held up another envelope from within the first, examining it. "Telegram office. Sent through the London Magical Post Office...they must have forwarded it. Geroff," he added to Crookshanks, who had leapt into his lap and was removed post-haste. Crookshanks, with catlike perversity, had decided that Severus was his chosen slave, and was indomitable in his quest for ear-scratching and tuna-feeding.
Severus slit open the second envelope and removed a piece of printed onionskin paper.
"In trouble, no money, please come at once," he read. "Bring reinforcements. The old platform."
Hermione sat up, no longer sleepy. "Who's it from?"
"Avis Incendii." Severus tilted the page slightly. "Whom do you know by that unlikely name?"
"Nobody. Could it have been misdirected?"
He gave her a withering look. "Do you know many women named Hermione? Avis Incendii...rotten dog latin for Firebird."
"Someone from the Order?" she asked. "The old platform -- must be Platform 9 3/4."
"A trap?" he asked. "So late in the game?"
"The game's done," she said, sliding out of bed and going to her closet. "Who's left alive who'd come after me? And ask for reinforcements?"
"Someone who was after me," he replied darkly. She turned to look at him as she pulled a shirt over her head. "Someone who knew you'd bring me."
"Well, they'd have plenty of chances to garotte you in your sleep, the way you snore," she said, kissing his cheek. "Come on. We'd better hurry. If it's a trap we might as well get on with it and if it isn't, someone needs us."
"Bloody Gryffindors," he muttered, but he dressed with as much haste as she had, and in fifteen minutes they were arriving in King's Cross Station.
"We can't get to the platform now," she said, watching with caution as people passed by. "It's closed in the summers."
"Just as well, it's likely to be deserted," Snape replied. The station was bustling as people left work and made their way home; buskers were doing a brisk business, and so was the news-stand. One man, not busking but begging, had the hood of his tattered coat pulled over his head, shadowing his face. Hermione didn't notice him, her eyes passing over with the practice of a longtime city-dweller, until he was close enough that she could hear him breathing. It sounded like a death-rattle. She ought to know.
"Sickle for a veteran, miss?" he asked, and she was about to do her usual head-shake-and-sorry-look when the words finally triggered in her brain. She looked at him, hunched and hooded, and clutched Severus' arm. She felt him turn too.
"Did you send a telegram?" she asked.
"Hermione," the voice said, sounding obscenely relieved. "Thank god."
Severus, who hadn't heard the words above the roar of the station, pushed the man back by one shoulder. "Shove off," he said firmly. The man staggered a little but held his ground and reached up. He didn't shed the hood entirely, but he pushed it back enough so that they could see his face, fingers clenching on the sides of the fabric.
It was a terrible face, gaunt to the point where his bones seemed to jut through his skin, with a short bristle of grey hair dusting his scalp. His nose had been broken at some point, and his lips were chapped and split bloody in places. Hermione thought for a terrifying moment that it was Voldemort returned, but the light caught the man's eyes and turned them dusky orange for a second before settling into hazel brown.
"Don't say my name," he said hurriedly, as Hermione stared at a ghost she thought they'd buried years before. If you could call it that, when there was no body to be put in the ground. He resettled the hood so that it shadowed his face, and cupped his hands like a beggar. "Keep walking. I'll follow."
"The lavatories," Severus said, while Hermione made a show of searching her pockets. "I can take you from there."
He shoved him rudely away and kept walking, not once looking back. Hermione fought the urge; when Severus leaned over and murmured, "Meet you at home," in her ear, she nodded and went to the bathroom herself. It was at least somewhere nobody would see her apparate.
She stepped into the nearest stall and counted to thirty before Apparating; she didn't trust her nerves and didn't want to splinch, not now of all times. Once home, she went directly to her living room and ran to the kitchen door, where she heard Severus speaking; she found him half-supporting the other man, easing him into a chair at the breakfast-table. He deftly unzipped the coat and wrinkled his nose as he removed it.
"You reek," he said. The other man looked up at him, blinked, and managed a rusty, rasping laugh.
"I might have known it would be you," he replied.
Hermione, frozen in the doorway, took in as a portrait what she had only seen sketched in the train station: Remus Lupin, dead two years and more, now sitting in her kitchen and laughing at Severus Snape.
Continue to Chapter 2
Rating: R for sexual content. (Hermione/Snape, Hermione/Snape/Lupin)
Notes:
arsenicjade challenged me the other day to write Snape/Hermione/Lupin in a hurt/comfort scenario, and VOILA. Blame her. :DWarnings: None.
Originally Posted 12/16/2006
Also available at AO3.
***
It was in the dark time after the war, after the funerals but before the grief had passed. It was in the air, sat on the tongue like raw onion, slept in their beds at night. The war itself was gone, but the shadows were still burnt into the world, and no amount of scrubbing would erase them. Only time would do that.
Ron had tried to stay, for Hermione's sake, but they ended up screaming at each other with such tiring repetitiveness that finally one night she sat down on the bed after another screaming match and told him if he didn't leave her, she would leave him, so it was only a matter of whether his pride could tolerate the latter. Ron got up out of the bed that moment and left, throwing on clothing over his pyjamas and going to Harry's stylish Bloomsbury flat. They were three, that could never have changed, but they were friends before lovers and it would always have to be that way. Ron lasted two months there before he finally picked up again and went to Tibet, where Charlie was apprenticed to the Dragon Monks in the high mountains. He sent postcards.
Hermione thought of him often and hoped he was finding his peace with the dragons, like Charlie did. She saw now, with the backwards glance of maturity, that she and Ron could never have functioned as lovers. She hadn't respected his intelligence (how could she? he was so thick sometimes) and he hadn't respected her strength, always wanting to protect her, wanting children already. Wanting her to be Molly Weasley, with a brood of children and a bookshelf of cooking and cleaning manuals.
The day Ron left, Hermione and Harry both saw him off, all three crying and promising to write. Harry never did, but that was Harry, and Hermione always phoned him before sending a letter to Ron so that she could include anything he had to say.
That day she had gone to Diagon, trying to retrace the patterns of their younger life, meeting in the shops to buy school books, preparing for the long and pleasant journey to Hogwarts each year. She thought mostly of the times she and Ron had come here, wondering what she could have done differently, how she could have fixed things. By the time dark fell, she'd wandered into Knockturn, which held no terrors for her now.
There was the apothecary shop, the one Ron always glared at with cold hard eyes; she'd begged him to go in once, some time she'd actually needed an ingredient for some potion, but that was another shouting match.
She felt like an idiot, knowing she was courting trouble, but she pushed the door open anyway.
"No, you fool!" someone was saying as she walked inside. The shop was never empty, which was a shock considering the way Professor Snape -- Proprietor Snape now, she supposed -- ran his business. "I suppose you wish to cock your potion completely up and blame substandard material. Well, I shall not allow that. I have a reputation to maintain."
She wandered behind barrels of mysterious insects and racks of glass jars, watching through the gaps. At the long polished-wood counter a slip of a woman was trembling, clutching a sheet of parchment in one hand. Snape, his face creased with fury, took it from her hands and began writing on it furiously.
"This is the proper measurement, and you will need dogsblood by weight, not by volume," he snarled. "Emulsify -- emulsify!" he said the word as if it were unspeakable. "You cannot emulsify the potion! WHISK! Do you own such a thing as a whisk, you incompetent harlot?"
"Y-yes," the woman stammered. Snape thrust the paper back at her.
"Bring me your whisk," he ordered.
"What?" she asked.
"BRING ME YOUR WHISK! When you have shown me you own a whisk, I will provide you with the proper ingredients," he shouted.
Hermione giggled. She couldn't help it.
Snape looked up sharply. "You find the idea of emulsifying amusing, do you?" he demanded, peering through the shelves. "Come out, and tell me what is so bloody godforsaken funny about improper alchemy!"
Hermione emerged as the woman fled, taking her place at the counter.
"I was imagining you in class, demanding that we bring you our whisks," she said. Snape looked at her, really looked, and then his sallow skin turned pale.
"What do you want, Granger?" he demanded. "I suppose with you here, Weasley and Potter are a step behind."
Hermione meant to reply smartly, something devastating and crushing to the horrible, ugly, and cruel man in front of her, but instead she burst into tears.
"What are you doing?" he hissed, looking around the shop to see if the other patrons had noticed. Tears ran silently down Hermione's cheeks. "Stop that infernal weeping! Stop it this instant!"
"I can't," she replied. "Ron's gone to Tibet."
Snape leaned back, and she could see perplexity on his face. "Good riddance, I should say," he growled. Hermione felt fresh tears well up. "Don't you -- you are weeping in my dandelion reduction!"
Hermione looked down and saw her tears landing in an unstoppered glass jar, the sort that normally held sweets. Snape flipped up a trapdoor in the wooden counter, reached under it, and pulled her through, shoving her into a back-room with one hand.
"If you must weep, be useful," he ordered, handing her a wide wooden salad bowl. She stared at it. "Sit! Sit! Don't stand there like a fountain. Into the bowl," he added, tipping it up so that her tears landed in the broad bottom. She sat obediently and sniffled.
"You will stop now, just to spite me," he muttered, but she didn't stop; the tears rolled down without any willingness or assistance on her part, splashing into the bowl. He went to the shelves and began taking down paper-wrapped packets, laying them in front of her along with a brass scale and a wooden spoon.
"You will crush the aconite into the bowl until a thick paste is made," he said, "adding more when it becomes too wet. I trust you can at least manage that simple task?"
She nodded, wiping her nose.
"Very well. I suppose it's too much to hope that you're a virgin?"
Hermione, who had grasped what he was about now, shook her head morosely.
"I suppose Weasley's to blame for that -- the bowl!" he ordered, as she began crying anew. He left her sobbing in his storeroom and disappeared through the door, where she heard him haranguing everyone who dared approach.
"Goldfish! Do I look like a pet shop?" "Beetles' wings are costly, that is not my lookout. If you want them properly fresh you must breed your own, as any idiot ought to do." "Merlin save us from amateurs -- I suppose you were educated at Beauxbatons, where they teach Potions as if it were a lesson in sauce-making." "Out! Out! Are you illiterate? Do you see the sign? I am closed!"
The last was said over his shoulder as he returned. She was still crying but it had slowed at least, and she had not neglected the aconite. A greyish paste clung to the spoon and pulled away from the sides of the bowl when she stirred.
"Sufficient," he said, throwing her a reasonably clean handkerchief. She dried her face and blew her nose. "One ounce of belladonna, if you would oblige," he drawled.
Hermione damply measured the belladonna on the scales while he opened the other packages and began making small piles on the steel workbench.
"The ingredients must not touch glass," he continued, his hands working busily. Hermione watched them, then followed the line of his arm upwards. He did not dress so differently from their school days; plain black shoes and trousers, with a stiff-collared black shirt. But his sleeves were rolled to the elbows now, and over it all was a worn brown leather tradesman's apron, pitted and scarred from the waist up.
"What are you staring at? Stir, damn you," he commanded, and she stirred. He did no work himself, except for the measuring, merely barked orders at her until all thought of Ron was gone from her mind. In fact, she had forgotten Ron's existence and the outside world by the time he commanded her to pour the mixture into a wooden jar and sealed it. A scrap of parchment and a paste-pot were flung at her.
"Label it. Clarifying -- "
"Clarifying Concentration," she said. "I know."
"Some mote of education has clung stubbornly, I see," he replied ungraciously from the other room. He returned with a small linen sack and slid it across the table at her. She picked it up and tipped three Galleons into her hand.
"For the potion," he said.
"I don't want paying for it," she retorted.
"Then send it to the devil for all I care, I have book-keeping that must be maintained. You will be paid for the ingredients and your time, and what you do with it is your business. It is dark out. Do you require an escort home?"
Hermione opened her mouth to say she didn't want his money or his protection, and who was he to assume she was even going home, but the artless way in which he'd said it caught her under the gut.
"You might as well," she replied loftily, "considering the help I've been."
She expected some other sharp answer, but instead a slow grin spread across his face.
"If you had answered me like that ten years ago I would have respected you more," he said. In as long as it took her to gather her once-more shattered wits, he had taken off the apron and slung a deep green cloak around his shoulders, guiding her out of the shop. They walked out of Knockturn and up Diagon in silence, shoes echoing on the cobbled streets. When she reached the door of her building, just outside in Muggle London, she turned to face him and pressed the bag into his hand.
"For your time," she said, daring him to reply but bolting inside before he could.
***
It was an odd courtship to be sure, two-parts fencing match and one part awkward romance, but it dulled and eventually eradicated the memory of her and Ron's failure. The bag and its three Galleons had been passed back and forth many times, at first as a symbolic balancing-of-books and then as a secret coin of the realm, a tacit apology, and once, memorably, a form of foreplay. He paid her with it when she spent increasing amounts of time in his shop, and she passed it back to him if he paid for dinner or lent her a book she decided not to return.
One morning she woke to find him dressing, buckling his belt and buttoning the last loop on his shirt. The bag lay on the pillow next to her.
"What's this for?" she asked, lifting it up sleepily.
"Last night," he answered, and then...amazingly...he winked. Hermione of a year ago might have taken it as some kind of insult, payment for services rendered in the form of sex, but the money had long ago ceased to be money to her. Her sleepy brain tried to recall what she had even done that would deserve The Bag, and her nipples tightened against the sheet as the memory rose.
Severus was not an easy man to live with, but in that respect he was less difficult than Ron. Ron had not seen her clearly, perhaps not his fault; he would never have been able to trust her intelligence as Severus did, even when he berated her for this or that foolishness. Ron wanted to save her, but Severus expected that if she needed saving she would jolly well tell him, and the rest of the time she could solve her own bloody problems.
She had not seen herself clearly, either, too caught up in the idea of fumbling teenage sex with Ron to understand her body. Oh, she knew she had breasts, and had used them on a few occasions when nothing else would have been effective persuasion; she had been too long in a war to dismiss the power of a subtle sexual hint. Now, though, she discovered why men made such a fuss over them -- the swell of one cupped in a long-fingered hand, the rasp of a tongue just under her aureole. She discovered too that she had hips, round and sensual in their own right, curving down into thighs. She stopped thinking of herself as a girl, and started noticing that men watched when she walked past.
She wondered if all men were like that -- intensely sexual, intently erotic. Ron had been considerate when they had sex, something Severus was not, always, but Ron had never made her scream so loud the neighbours knocked on her door to make sure she was all right. Severus, answering it with a bed sheet wrapped around his waist, sent them on their way so thoroughly that they stopped speaking to her altogether. Have you never heard a woman orgasm? I assure you that you will become familiar with the sound, given time.
Sometimes, a delicious infraction on her idea of sex as lovemaking, they even fucked.
At first he waved off her concerns of age difference and temperament with an impatient snort, and when she persisted he took to declaring that she believed him to be a dessicated skirt-chasing pantalone of a pervert. What could she do? She gave up.
She had not even thought of her old objections in a long time, as she lay drowsing in the afternoon light her bedroom window allowed, Severus working shirtless at the writing-desk, trying to fabricate an old poison remedy from fragments of some Latin text. They had afternoons together almost as often as evenings; he could close his shop whenever it pleased him, and Hermione's job in the archives of the British Museum's Wizarding Wing was hardly time-sensitive. The Emperor Julian of Rome's scrying glass would still be there tomorrow, as it had been for the last seventeen hundred years.
"Owl post," he said, seconds before there was a clatter of claws on glass. "One of your idiot admirers, one assumes."
"If it's Ricardo, tell him I have to get rid of you for the weekend before I can go to Italy," she replied as he opened the window, took the letter, and shooed the owl off his books.
"If I ever meet your imaginary Ricardo I shall slit his throat," Severus announced, slitting the envelope with a very sharp letter-opener for emphasis.
"Good luck," Hermione yawned. "He's Italian. Who's it from?"
He held up another envelope from within the first, examining it. "Telegram office. Sent through the London Magical Post Office...they must have forwarded it. Geroff," he added to Crookshanks, who had leapt into his lap and was removed post-haste. Crookshanks, with catlike perversity, had decided that Severus was his chosen slave, and was indomitable in his quest for ear-scratching and tuna-feeding.
Severus slit open the second envelope and removed a piece of printed onionskin paper.
"In trouble, no money, please come at once," he read. "Bring reinforcements. The old platform."
Hermione sat up, no longer sleepy. "Who's it from?"
"Avis Incendii." Severus tilted the page slightly. "Whom do you know by that unlikely name?"
"Nobody. Could it have been misdirected?"
He gave her a withering look. "Do you know many women named Hermione? Avis Incendii...rotten dog latin for Firebird."
"Someone from the Order?" she asked. "The old platform -- must be Platform 9 3/4."
"A trap?" he asked. "So late in the game?"
"The game's done," she said, sliding out of bed and going to her closet. "Who's left alive who'd come after me? And ask for reinforcements?"
"Someone who was after me," he replied darkly. She turned to look at him as she pulled a shirt over her head. "Someone who knew you'd bring me."
"Well, they'd have plenty of chances to garotte you in your sleep, the way you snore," she said, kissing his cheek. "Come on. We'd better hurry. If it's a trap we might as well get on with it and if it isn't, someone needs us."
"Bloody Gryffindors," he muttered, but he dressed with as much haste as she had, and in fifteen minutes they were arriving in King's Cross Station.
"We can't get to the platform now," she said, watching with caution as people passed by. "It's closed in the summers."
"Just as well, it's likely to be deserted," Snape replied. The station was bustling as people left work and made their way home; buskers were doing a brisk business, and so was the news-stand. One man, not busking but begging, had the hood of his tattered coat pulled over his head, shadowing his face. Hermione didn't notice him, her eyes passing over with the practice of a longtime city-dweller, until he was close enough that she could hear him breathing. It sounded like a death-rattle. She ought to know.
"Sickle for a veteran, miss?" he asked, and she was about to do her usual head-shake-and-sorry-look when the words finally triggered in her brain. She looked at him, hunched and hooded, and clutched Severus' arm. She felt him turn too.
"Did you send a telegram?" she asked.
"Hermione," the voice said, sounding obscenely relieved. "Thank god."
Severus, who hadn't heard the words above the roar of the station, pushed the man back by one shoulder. "Shove off," he said firmly. The man staggered a little but held his ground and reached up. He didn't shed the hood entirely, but he pushed it back enough so that they could see his face, fingers clenching on the sides of the fabric.
It was a terrible face, gaunt to the point where his bones seemed to jut through his skin, with a short bristle of grey hair dusting his scalp. His nose had been broken at some point, and his lips were chapped and split bloody in places. Hermione thought for a terrifying moment that it was Voldemort returned, but the light caught the man's eyes and turned them dusky orange for a second before settling into hazel brown.
"Don't say my name," he said hurriedly, as Hermione stared at a ghost she thought they'd buried years before. If you could call it that, when there was no body to be put in the ground. He resettled the hood so that it shadowed his face, and cupped his hands like a beggar. "Keep walking. I'll follow."
"The lavatories," Severus said, while Hermione made a show of searching her pockets. "I can take you from there."
He shoved him rudely away and kept walking, not once looking back. Hermione fought the urge; when Severus leaned over and murmured, "Meet you at home," in her ear, she nodded and went to the bathroom herself. It was at least somewhere nobody would see her apparate.
She stepped into the nearest stall and counted to thirty before Apparating; she didn't trust her nerves and didn't want to splinch, not now of all times. Once home, she went directly to her living room and ran to the kitchen door, where she heard Severus speaking; she found him half-supporting the other man, easing him into a chair at the breakfast-table. He deftly unzipped the coat and wrinkled his nose as he removed it.
"You reek," he said. The other man looked up at him, blinked, and managed a rusty, rasping laugh.
"I might have known it would be you," he replied.
Hermione, frozen in the doorway, took in as a portrait what she had only seen sketched in the train station: Remus Lupin, dead two years and more, now sitting in her kitchen and laughing at Severus Snape.
Continue to Chapter 2