The Love Department

“Look, look, look!”

Severus looked. Draco pressed a series of buttons on the grey, brick-like device in his left hand. An identical device lying on the Malfoy dining table emitted a shrill musical tone and vibrated with such force that it inched forward across the tablecloth like an oversized beetle.

“And if I do this…”

Draco pressed a red button on the ringing phone on the table and the noise ceased. He then input a string of numbers via the keypad and the phone in his hand began to ring.

“...It makes a different sound, see?”

“Fascinating,” said Severus, not wishing to spoil Draco’s enthusiasm by telling him that he’d used a telephone before, as growing up there had been one permanently affixed to the wall of his house. “Does it do anything else?”

“Not at the dinner table, darling,” Narcissa scolded gently, spooning soup from a tureen. “Put them away, please.”

Draco slipped one into his pocket and shielded the other from his mother’s line of sight, indicating to Severus a green-tinged screen the size of a postage stamp. “It carries voices. Like a floo call, but without a fireplace! And it even works at a distance, supposedly, only I haven’t been able to try it out because Mum refuses to touch them. Pansy won’t either. Here, you take one. When it sings at you, press this green button…”

“Yes, Severus, please take one, then there’ll be one less of them in the house. And if you have need of a bread-ejecting machine, pray take that as well.”

Draco rolled his eyes with extravagant verve. He’d inherited pantomime mannerisms from his father’s side and none of his mother’s sang-froid.

“Mum, it’s called a toaster…”

For all Narcissa’s admonishments, Severus knew that her support for her son’s endeavours outweighed all dislike of Muggle culture. He wasn’t even sure she held any dislike towards Muggles, merely indifference – that same as she would feel towards wizards in the Himalayas, perhaps: a class of people she had never encountered and didn’t intend to. Her husband, on the other hand, harboured egregious and unwarranted prejudice.

“Let us drink,” said Narcissa, ignoring her son totally and raising a glass of sparkling elderflower wine, “to new beginnings. Congratulations, Severus.”

Draco momentarily stopped fiddling with the phone in his pocket. “Oh, yes, that reminds me: I heard a rumour from Storie Greengrass, who heard from Theo, who works with one of the Patils, that you’re working with Hermione Granger on Level Nine. It can’t be true. Can it?”

Narcissa started, as much as a woman of her elegance and breeding could start, which translated into no bodily movement except for a fierce blinking. “You didn’t mention that.”

“I’m not at liberty to share details,” he said.

Draco laughed. He always got silly when he was allowed wine at dinner. “We all know what that means! You are working in Mysteries, and with Granger! That’s got to be a challenge.”

“Whatever do you mean, why would it be a challenge?” 

“Because she hates you?”

“Draco, don’t be absurd!” Narcissa scolded.

“Yes, Draco, don’t mistake her conduct towards yourself as representative of her feelings towards others. What possible reason would Miss Granger have to hate me?”

Severus had been searching for the answer to this question ever since her abrupt outburst in his sitting room.

“Because you used to embarrass her in class all the time. You always told her off for helping Longbottom.”

“That was, in essence, cheating. It was robbing him of the chance to succeed. How are students supposed to learn if their classmates do the work for them?”

“Don’t ask me, I’m just saying it’s why she hates you. Besides, any enemy of Potter’s is an enemy of hers, and you always picked on him. And I think you were rude about her teeth. She’s just the type to hold a grudge.”

“Her teeth? Why on earth would I have said anything about her teeth?”

Draco shrugged. “And you called her a know-it-all all the time.”

This, Severus did remember. “Doubtless you called her worse,” he said, for want of an excuse. 

Draco squirmed in his seat and met his eyes with some reproach. “I was twelve. You were, what, fifty-five?”

“Cheek.”

No more was said about Hermione Granger, and after a rich dessert Draco disappeared upstairs while he and Narcissa moved to the drawing room and played a game of whist that, thanks to another bottle of wine shared between them, dissolved into insensible laughter as the night went on.

＊

As Severus was walking down the manor drive at the end of the evening, Draco, who he thought had gone to bed hours ago, accosted him at the gates, which were as far from the house as his ankle bracelet would allow him to go.

“Do you think the telling-phone would work across an ocean?”

Severus studied his pale, anxious face under the moonlight. “Across the North Sea, for example?”

“Any sea.”

Draco tried to appear nonchalant, but as always, whatever emotion he was feeling was writ large upon his face. Severus squeezed his shoulder.

“Yes, it would work, as long as it didn’t get wet. The trouble would be persuading your father to use it.”

There would certainly be no trouble getting it there, as the newly instated human guards of Azkaban were far more susceptible to bribery than the Dementors had been.

“Please don’t tell Mum. I don’t want to get her hopes up.”

“I understand. Speaking of communications, you didn’t happen to give out my address to anyone, did you?”

Draco’s mouth opened in honest surprise. “No, you said my tongue would fall off if I did. Why d’you ask?”

Severus hesitated. “A student came to visit me. But it’s no matter. Goodnight, Draco, and thank you for the telephone.”

He slid through the gap in the gates and Apparated before Draco had a chance to conjecture as to who that student might have been.

＊

Severus entered the office on Monday afternoon to find his alterations undone and a flurry of cherry blossoms flooding the cerise rug, which was twice as bright as it had been, along with a snippy memo from Magical Maintenance fluttering above the gaudy sofa warning him that he was due for a bollocking if he attempted to change the room again.

“Nice try,” said Granger, wearing ruby red robes that brought out the colour in her cheeks.

He sat down resignedly and began writing up the report of last Friday’s date with Fenella Chessington, a highly vain woman whose many Glamours drew more attention to her age than they did conceal it. When she turned her head he caught a whisper of turkey-neck, but in a blink it blurred into an indistinct mass of flesh. Her cosmetics were painted on so thickly that throughout the evening Severus wished to take his butter knife to her face in order to scrape off the layers and gauge the depth of it. It had to be at least an inch of make-up: she was uncannily poreless and unemotive. Suffice to say there had been no spark, except for when her platinum hair extensions had caught fire in the tealights.

What could be gained, he asked himself, dipping his quill in his inkpot and beginning a new section of his form, by going on blind dates with such shallow, vapid people? Perhaps he too, was shallow, to be so repulsed by Madam Chessington’s ersatz appearance that he was unwilling to look beyond it. But if he was ever going to find the recipe for love, which he seriously doubted and was not in any way emotionally invested in doing, it could hardly be found by spending time with witches who hid their true selves to such an extent that they may as well have been Polyjuiced.

At least the food had been acceptable. The gastropub in Nottingham had been small but stylish, and made Severus uncomfortably aware that he hadn’t been out anywhere decent in years, beyond staff drinks at the Three Broomsticks. If he’d had to choose a venue himself for the date he would have been at a complete loss. He would go there again, if only he had somebody to go with.

That afternoon, like most afternoons in the Love department, allowed plenty of time for wool-gathering. As he was forbidden from addressing the aggressive feminine aesthetics of Romantic Love’s interior design, Severus investigated the tawdry novels that Granger had relegated to the lower shelves of the bookcase. Some of them were Muggle, with ignominious titles like Sins of a Duke and The Viscount who Vexed Me. Trash, he thought, cracking open the spine of Enchanted By The Earl to take a scornful glance at it, but he looked up a moment later to find an hour had passed. 

Less than three feet away Granger busied herself applying a clumpy black concoction to her eyelashes from a pink and green tube. The centaur painting above her desk had returned, but she had hung her corkboard directly in front of him.

“How much time do you spend primping yourself for these facsimile dates?” he asked, in a tone that implied no small amount of contempt. He had watched her apply products to her lashes, brows, lips, cheeks, and beneath her eyes, and she was now putting on opaline earrings. The effect was pretty, but minor when compared with the time it had taken to produce. 

“How much do you spend?” she shot back immediately. “Nanoseconds?”

He didn’t deny it. “Why should I bother? I’m not the one who has to look at me.”

“Hmm.”

He thought she might disagree, but she accepted it without further argument. Maybe Draco had exaggerated her dislike of him, or perhaps he mattered so little to her she had decided he wasn’t worth arguing with. At six o’clock he bid her goodbye and left the office without her, as she said she was waiting for a friend.

That friend was presumably Potter, whom he ran into in the atrium while exiting the lift. Potter did a double-take and mumbled gormlessly. 

“Er…”

“Kneazle got your tongue? That must be nostalgia I feel washing over me, Potter, your father also struggled to string two words together.”

“I’ll bet he never walked around looking like that. Is this your new look? Is it your version of a midlife crisis?” 

Midlife? I’m thirty-eight! he shouted internally, blood boiling, but strode away, outwardly feigning indifference to Potter’s comments until he could work out the basis for them.

Directly after the war, when Severus had been recovering from Nagini’s bite, Potter had succumbed to a brief but painfully sincere hero-worship phase, which had thankfully lasted only half an hour. He’d then returned to treating Severus like he was still his professor, although with a little less disrespect than he used to. Potter would never act appropriately deferential toward him, but nor would he invent something purely to be spiteful.

Other wizards in the atrium were looking at him now. Arthur Weasley waved at him and then stopped, staring at him most peculiarly. Wensleydale at the Wand Weighing Desk even laughed. 

Severus found out what had happened ten minutes later when he Flooed home and caught sight of his reflection in the stainless steel kettle in his kitchen.

Somebody had charmed his eyebrows pink, and he suspected he knew just who had done it.

＊

He lingered beside Granger’s desk on Tuesday morning until she deigned to look up, and then spoke the line he had been crafting since the previous night. 

“Miss Granger. You could do with spending less time worrying about looking professional, and more time being professional.”

She laughed. “You want to lecture me about being professional. I see you changed your eyebrows back.”

“Yes, point made, it is occasionally necessary for me to be aware of my own appearance, which is not equivalent to excessive preening. You must use up a bottle of Sleekeazy’s each morning to change the texture of your hair to that extent. Save your money and come as you are.” 

He cast his eyes over her sleek, tamed plait. He missed her mane of curls. Her present style was unnaturally still, it was too contained: she was a force of nature, and it couldn’t be safe to bottle that up.

Granger smiled, sweet and sarcastic. “I’m afraid I’m not accepting unsolicited advice at the present time.”

He ignored this. “What is the point of changing your hair? Everybody knows what you look like. It seems an utter waste of time to hide what makes you unique. Imagine Potter Glamouring his lightning scar.”

She pursed her lips. “He does try to hide his scar, actually. I know you think he likes the attention, but he doesn’t.”

“Alright then, imagine the Weasleys without red hair.”

This mental image produced the intended effect. She shook her head. “Oh, no, that’d be bizarre.”

“Exactly.”

“But I don’t want to be recognised for my appearance, thank you very much. If that’s what makes me unique, then I’m in dire straits. There’s more to me than my hair, for goodness’ sake.”

Severus suddenly feared they were talking at cross purposes.

“Of course there is,” he said impatiently, “That is my point. Your appearance is of no relevance to your achievements, therefore you needn’t change anything. It’s completely unnecessary. Especially for the office, when it’s only me looking at you. And the vampire, I suppose,” he said, referring to the portrait above his head. “If your dates can’t accept how you look, that’s their problem. I can’t imagine they’re putting as much thought into their appearance. You should come as you are.”

“Because it pains you to see anyone putting a bit of effort in?”

“Because I happen to know you look perfectly attractive without alteration.”

Granger shut up immediately. She tried to busy herself with her work, but had forgotten to dip her quill in ink before writing. For a long while she cast him brief and suspicious glances. 

“I’m not taking beauty tips from you, Snape,” she said firmly. “But… thanks.”

“It’s not a compliment,” he said. “It’s simply a fact.”

For some reason, this made her cheeks turn even redder, and she began to blend in with the rose-hued wall behind her.

Uncomfortably aware of her continued glances, Severus hastened to busy himself with something. He spent the remaining hour skimming the “novels” in the bookshelves. Voracious Veela, Sultry Succubi, Flesh-eating Gremlins and the Women Who Love Them…

At the end of the day Granger stretched and reached for her cloak.

“Where to, tonight?” he asked.

“Oh, now this should be interesting. They’re sending me to a blackout restaurant in St James’s. Dark dining, have you heard of it? No natural or artificial lighting, and the wait staff are all blind or visually impaired. Diners get to experience life how they do for an evening and savour the taste of the food, rather than judge it on appearance. I’ve never been to one before but I read about it and it sounds very intriguing.”

Severus managed not to remark that in a blackout restaurant, getting dolled up really would be a waste of time and money.

“What about you?” she asked.

“Riverboat restaurant in the Henley area. Our supervisors are certainly getting creative with the locations.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that, I’d be seasick. On the ferry to France once I spent the whole time hanging over the deck.”

They reached the door at the same time and Severus stepped back to let her pass. He ended up colliding painfully with the desk, but luckily she didn’t notice. He leaned an elbow on it and pretended to have been lounging deliberately. 

“Have a nice time,” Granger said shyly, waving goodbye.

She flitted off, while Severus steeled himself for another simulacrum of human connection.