Chapter 3
The wards tingled across Severus’ skin, alerting him to the fact that a friendly visitor had invaded his sitting room. He came downstairs to find Narcissa firing aggressive scouring spells at the sofa.
“You haven’t given up, have you?” she asked.
“On?”
She looked pointedly around the room and fixed Severus’ dressing gown with a look of motherly disapproval.
“Life.”
Severus rolled his eyes and summoned a packet of biscuits from the kitchen. They arranged themselves on a plate for Narcissa to turn her nose up at. His house was the same as it always was; the mildew couldn’t have gotten worse since she last saw it.
During the war he had seen no point in wasting energy on something as inconsequential as redecorating, when he didn’t know if he’d live to see the next week. But Narcissa, with all the infinite hours of a bored housewife, had dedicated herself to renovating the manor and removing all traces of her houseguest.
“We don’t all have house elves waiting on us. How’s Draco?”
Narcissa gave up on the sofa and perched primly in an armchair, fingers moving absent-mindedly to a string of jewels around her neck.
“Oh, still obsessed with these Muggle contraptions,” she sighed, “taking them apart and putting them back together again. It can’t be good for his health to be around all that electricity, I keep telling him. But you know how he is.”
“What is he taking apart this time?”
Narcissa waved her hand as if shooing a persistent fly. “Goodness knows, some sort of voice-transporter, he says. It requires a numerical code.”
“A telephone? That’s not dangerous. As long as he doesn’t call 999.”
“Be sure to tell him that, since he won’t listen to me. Anyway,” she said, reaching forward and clasping Severus by the hand, “Darling. Don’t you think it’s time to look for another job? Being a gentleman of leisure doesn’t suit you. In fact, you’re quite terrible at it.”
He squeezed her hand. “I got a job.”
“Really? Where?”
“I couldn’t possibly tell you.”
Narcissa tilted her head ever so slightly, then narrowed her eyes.
“With the Unspeakables?”
“I can’t say.”
“Oh, congratulations! I heard through the grapevine that they’d been hiring in Mysteries. To be honest, I wondered if Harry Potter… Well, this is a cause for celebration. Won’t you come to ours tonight? I’ll have Miffy put on a spread.”
“I can’t, I work evenings.”
“Saturday, then. You’re not getting out of it. We must celebrate, this really is good news.”
She stood and swooped down again to place an air kiss on either cheek, then stole a pinch of floo powder from the Japanese sake cup on the mantelpiece.
“And what will you nag me about, now that I’m in employment once again?”
Narcissa raised an exquisitely groomed eyebrow and smiled wryly. She pointedly ran two fingers through the thick layer of dust over the fireplace and blew the particles in his direction.
“I’m sure I’ll think of something.”
＊
Why, pray tell, had Severus swapped one job in a dungeon for another? The waiter at The Grosvenor fish bar in Lower Goat Lane had directed him downstairs and seated him in what was indubitably a cave. Not a basement floor, but carved stone tunnels scattered with cheap stacking chairs. He sat itchily in a claustrophobic corner, feeling the cramped and dripping ceiling pressing down on him like a pair of hands. The shrill laughter of other diners bounced off the walls, echoing and amplifying.
His date had hair the colour of smog and skin to match. Add to that an accent that sounded like a poorly Kneazle trapped in a washing machine. He nodded at Agatha Bagshaw for a long time before realising he had been asked a question that required a response.
It was only a job. He wasn’t really attempting to find love, so it didn’t matter that he had taken an instant dislike to his date, nor that she had likely done the same. Getting paid was the important thing, nothing else of value could be gleaned from the experience.
He waited until Agatha left for the ladies’ room and got the hell out of there.
＊
The next day Severus came into Romantic Love to find his working space radically altered. Granger was a one-woman administrative tempest, swapping borderline-pornographic artwork for cork boards and replacing seventy percent of the books on the shelves. Every inch of her desk was laid out with gleaming stationery placed at right angles to one another.
The sudden neatness of the room was inversely proportional to the neatness of her appearance. Her wild hair was escaping its plait and her cheeks were flushed with exertion. She caught him watching and stopped, holding a stack of Post-It notes.
“Do you mind? If you miss the mermaid, she’s in the kitchen.”
“Not at all,” he said, dropping into his chintzy chair. He opened that day’s file and sighed.
“How was your date?” Granger asked politely.
It was perplexing to Severus that she was so willing to talk to him after calling him foul and miserable. He couldn’t tell if she sincerely wanted a good working relationship, or if she simply couldn’t stop talking.
“Fine,” he said. She looked entreatingly at him, and he continued, “Unusual venue. Underground.”
“An underground what?”
“Restaurant.”
“Oh, really,” she said, clicking her tongue. “At least you could sit down. Mine was an escape room. You know, a puzzle room? They’re all the rage, apparently. You and your date are locked in and have to look for clues to find your way out of it.”
His quill hovered over his parchment, and a smile hovered on his lips. “Let me guess, you solved it in three minutes and spoiled all the fun.”
Granger exhaled exasperatedly and began arranging push pins onto her newly hung corkboard. “Six minutes. But only because my date kept disagreeing with me! It was so obvious. I translated the runes over the lintel, and they told me to look at the portrait over the fireplace, and she was pointing at the lockbox holding the key. It was a four-digit code, it obviously had to be her date of birth.”
“And how did you know that?”
“Because it was Levina Monkstanley,” she said scathingly, “inventor of the wand-lighting charm. My date didn’t even recognise her, can you believe that? Even though there was a monk’s cassock hanging on the wall and a stanley knife on the desk. The clues couldn’t have been more heavy-handed. Anyway, I read about her in the Wünderbuch spellcaster dictionary between first and second year and happened to remember when she was born. But even if I hadn’t, her portrait would have told us.”
“You didn’t find romance, then?”
Granger turned around with a push pin held threateningly between thumb and forefinger. “Did you?”
“Not remotely,” he answered honestly. “Couldn’t understand a word she said.”
“Why’s that, going deaf?”
“Cheek,” he scolded, almost taking points from Gryffindor on instinct. “No, because her accent was indecipherable.”
“Foreign?”
“East Anglian.”
“Ah.” Granger stepped back to admire her handiwork. “No, it’s safe to say there will be no romance between me and Bertie Bacharach. Do you think the language barrier is a factor in the Recipe for Love?”
He considered this briefly. “To say it is would be somewhat limiting. Then again, if two people in a relationship can’t communicate effectively, there will always be an element of strife.”
“Yes, I can’t imagine an ideal relationship having any sort of barrier at all. Even if they had total linguistic fluency, someone from another country would have a completely different culture, background, a whole other set of cultural references. It would be an interesting learning opportunity, but I don’t know if I could fully connect with someone if we couldn’t express ourselves in our native tongues. Me and Viktor Krum… Oh, but this research isn’t about what I want, I suppose. There’s plenty of people whose partners speak a different language to them. Fleur Delacour married Bill Weasley, and they’re expecting their first child soon.”
“I think in that instance, being a Veela factors more heavily in the ability to find love than shared language.”
A crease appeared between Granger’s eyebrows. “Well,” she said, “there is that.”
She began making notes in a ring bound journal with a marbled cover, summoning books from the shelf and marking down page numbers.
“How about intelligence?” Severus ventured a while later.
“Hm?”
“As a factor.”
“No, I don’t think so. I wouldn’t judge a potential partner just because they haven’t had the same educational opportunities as me.”
“Psh. Plenty of wizards with the exact same educational opportunities as you have turned out to be complete imbeciles. What was it you didn’t like about this Bertrand Bacharach?”
“Bertram. Alright, I’ll admit a quick thinker is more attractive than someone who guesses 1-2-3-4 as the solution to a four-digit passcode. But I’m not a snob.”
“It’s not snobbish to have standards. You’re not a public institution, it’s not elitist for you to exclude complete idiots from your dating pool.”
She shook her head. “But…”
“But what? Afraid that if you exclude idiots, you’ll end up with no one?”
Granger’s silence spoke volumes. Severus wrote “Intelligence Quotient” on a pink Post-It note and stuck it to her pinboard.
The pinkness of the room was lulling him into a fugue state. It was untenable. In a moment he banished the frilly doily from the top of the filing cabinet and transfigured the Bleeding Heart plant into Sansevieria.
He judged the rosewood desks as being the least offensive items, and the cerise carpet as the most malleable. He began charming it black, although it took several goes at it; the fabric was highly resistant. He persuaded the chintz fabric on his chair to turn plain, but couldn’t convince it to go any shade darker than lilac.
After an afternoon of tiring spellwork he took a break and made them both tea, making a mental note to replace the ridiculous pink sugar with normal caster. The teacups were also ridiculous. The inside was shaped so that when liquid was poured into them, it formed a heart shape, only Merlin knew why. Severus scowled into the curls of rising steam and deposited one of the teacups onto the inch of free space at the corner of Granger’s desk.
He then put his feet up on his own desk and attempted to invent details for that day’s report, until he caught Granger watching him.
“What?”
She tutted. “I don’t know how you can eat those.”
Severus popped another candy heart into his mouth. “They’re perfectly edible.”
“They’re just sugar.”
“And?”
“Do you eat fairy bread for breakfast?”
He frowned. “I’m aware I have been painted as a villain by Gryffindor students over the years, but I don’t actually eat beasts for breakfast.”
“No, not real fairies, fairy bread. It’s hundreds and thousands on white bread, popular in Australia. Completely devoid of nutritional value. There’s also a Dutch version, Hagelslag, but that one has chocolate sprinkles.”
Severus hadn’t heard of fairy bread, but he considered it. Soft, pillowy bread, paired with the satisfying crunch of sugar… Handy if you were in need of an energy boost. The sweet equivalent to the savoury crisp sandwich.
“You want to try it, don’t you? I can see it in your face. I never knew you had such a sweet tooth. Don’t tell me you’ve a hard shell and a soft centre?”
Severus ignored her smirk and crunched another sweet, thinking with a mixture of sorrow and annoyance what Albus would have had to say about that.