Chapter 6
Potter became a fixture in the office on late Thursday afternoons. He arrived before the end of the day to slack off and chat with Granger, as evidently without the threat of Voldemort the Auror Office had absolutely nothing to do. From what Severus gathered, Potter’s pride of Gryffindors had a regular pub night.
Ministry workers outside of the Department of Mysteries weren’t supposed to have access to the Unspeakable offices, but as usual Potter broke rules like twigs. Either that or he had special dispensation. Perhaps his position in the Auror department was a cover for an Unspeakable role? Severus didn’t know, and he pretended not to care.
He noticed that Granger’s hair had returned to its normal bushy state. The familiar sight was comforting, but he didn’t comment on it in case she changed it out of spite. Coincidentally, he’d started taking more care over his own appearance. Narcissa had introduced him to something called ‘exfoliant’.
Potter sprawled leisurely on the striped satin sofa and chatted with Granger while she finished off that day’s work. Over the last month her desk had gone from military levels of orderliness to looking like a bomb site. Towers of books threatened to topple and scatter piles of quills, pushpins, rubber band balls and pots of ink all over the floor.
In a gap in the quiet conversation, Severus decided to make an inquiry.
“Will Weasley be joining you?”
Granger narrowed her eyes. “Ron? Yes. At the Green Dragon.”
“Is he very busy? I see he’s not here with us.”
“It’s good to know you’re not losing your eyesight.”
“Funny,” Severus drawled, “that I never see you together, when you’re such great friends.”
Potter looked up sharply, confused, and then looked questioningly at Granger, whose face had gone stony.
Ah. So she had been lying.
“They’re not–” Potter started, but his voice cut off abruptly as if someone had hit him with a Silencing charm.
Granger slid her wand back into her sleeve. “Careful with gossip, Snape, it might get you into trouble one of these days. Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and weak minds discuss people, or so they say. Tea?”
She stood, smiling serenely, and disappeared into the kitchenette before waiting for a response. When the door slammed shut behind her, Potter cleared his throat and leaned over.
“A word to the wise, sir,” he murmured. “Just because she’s smiling doesn’t mean she’s not planning revenge.”
“Cease your blibbering, Potter,” Severus replied at normal volume. “It’s totally unnecessary.”
Granger returned with two cups hovering in front of her, which she levitated onto Severus’ desk. When neither of the others was looking, Severus quickly summoned the mug that was nearest to Potter, so that Potter would take the tea meant for Severus. Then he waited.
“Aaaaargh!”
Two twin plops signalled Potter’s front teeth falling into his tea. He flailed around, spilling hot liquid on the rug and clutching his face, horrified. Granger swooped down on him, throwing Severus a dirty look.
“Don’t panic, Harry, I can fix it.”
“Oh my go’, wha’ happened!?”
“Just a jinx, it’ll be fine –no, you’re not bleeding– Harry, stop moving! Let me fix it…”
“Oh dear,” Severus murmured gleefully.
＊
In a deserted, dated caff on the Scottish border Severus silently mused on how small talk made him want to gouge his eyes out with a teaspoon. He and Zsuzsanna Waverly had already covered the journey, the weather and the surroundings, and exchanged lukewarm opinions on still versus sparkling water. Now they sat in silence.
Talking was made more difficult by the fact that they didn’t share any mutual acquaintances. He couldn’t mention the Malfoys in case it brought forth a diatribe, and he couldn’t mention Potter or Granger lest his date start begging him for autographs.
They ended up talking about Harold Shipman. Severus got soaked through on the twenty-yard walk to the Apparition point and went to bed with a bottle of wine.
When he arrived in the office on Friday afternoon there was a teacup waiting for him on his desk under a warming charm, which was exceedingly cheering. Very nice of her, he thought, before hearing the sound of his two front teeth splashing into his tea.
“Constant vigilance,” Granger reminded him from across the room, beaming with satisfaction.
Severus spent the day regrowing his incisors.
He also made several attempts at charming his canines and molars straighter than they had been before, and decided he might as well whiten them too, while he had Dental Incantations for the Periodontally Particular hovering open in front of him. In a way, she was doing him a favour.
＊
Severus wasn’t subject to any more didactic hexes in the following weeks, though he noticed Granger becoming more and more subdued. The reason became clear one afternoon.
She lingered in the narrow space between their desks, waiting for him to look up and give her his full attention. Her figure blocked out light from the skylight, which illuminated an angelic, golden aura around her curls. Cherry blossoms tumbled gently over her shoulders.
“I can’t tell if you’re still planning revenge on me, or if making me endlessly anticipate it is your revenge. Either way, I can’t take it anymore. Tell me what you’re up to,” she demanded.
“Nothing,” he said truthfully, provoked into surprised amusement. He hadn’t known there was want of an armistice between them. “I was impertinent, you got your revenge, I thought that was the end of it. I’m not planning anything.”
“Really?”
“I’d never hex a witch,” he said simply. “Outside of a duel,” he added.
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, is that chivalry? Or sexism?”
“Isn’t chivalry founded on the sexist idea that women are weak and require men to be their protectors?”
Granger folded her arms. A pink petal landed in her hair. She looked like the subject of a Pre-Raphaelite painting: romantic, passionate, and latently maleficent.
“It’s neither,” he answered. “The reason I’d never hex a witch is because it would come back threefold.”
“That is sexist,” she said after a pause, though her lips were twisted into a reluctant smile and she looked rather impressed. She took a step back to lean against her desk and sunlight flooded her features.
“But true,” he pointed out.
She grinned properly now.
“Well, yes.”
＊
Severus couldn’t believe it. It had finally happened. Since quitting teaching and joining the Love Department as a research associate he had finally had a pleasant evening.
Isabella Soul was a witch he wouldn’t mind seeing more of, in every sense of the phrase. She was intelligent (though not a patch on Granger; nobody was), highly attractive (auburn hair, green eyes) and wore perfume of lavender and lemongrass. Her gaze lingered on him throughout the evening and she took every opportunity to touch him on the arm and even rub her leg against his beneath the table. He couldn’t remember the last time a witch had been interested in him, which was as thrilling as it was depressing.
He breezed into Romantic Love on a cloud and floated down into his chair, opening his report file and a Curly Wurly. Across the room, Granger sighed despondently.
“How was your evening?” he asked.
She answered by letting her head fall on the desk, thumping against the wood. “Terrible. Not an hour in and he tried talking to me about baby names.”
“Whose baby?”
“Ours! Our hypothetical future children! On a first date! I don’t even want kids,” she said forcefully.
“That’s what they all say,” said Severus absent-mindedly, filling Isabella Soul’s physical description into the appropriate box on his form.
An icy silence lowered the temperature in the room by a matter of degrees, and he looked up to find Granger shooting daggers at him.
“You think I don’t know my own mind?” she said, incredulous.
What had he said? Oh, yes. Oops.
“It’s common for women–”
He was interrupted by an enraged splutter that sounded like a puffskein being stepped on. “People, it’s common for people, of either sex, to change their minds, that’s all. I’ve been on this Earth longer than you have; I’ve seen it happen.”
This seemed to appease her, and the atmosphere went from hypothermic to merely frosty.
But peace was too much to hope for, as after an hour of silence she asked him:
“Do you want kids?”
“No,” he said shortly. “Definitely not. Teaching was enough.”
Granger smiled sweetly. “Well, maybe you’ll change your mind when you’re older.”
“I will not. The chance of that happening is fatter than Celestina Warbeck.”
“When all your friends are having one, you’ll get the urge.”
“Not likely.”
“Your body clock’s ticking,” she insisted.
＊
There was a baby on his desk. A small, plastic baby about an inch in size, in a white nappy. He vanished it.
“You don’t want it?” Granger exclaimed in mock surprise.
“No,” he said flatly.
＊
More babies started appearing. He found them in the filing cabinet, in the cupboards, in his desk drawers, balanced on his ink pot, and nearly choked to death on one hidden in his mug of tea. When he got home he found them in his pockets.
The plastic infants were vexing and haunting him, springing up almost faster than he could vanish them. Meanwhile Granger spent the afternoons ignoring him, engrossing herself in such valuable activities as neatening the barbs of her quills and winding skeins of yarns into balls for her knitting.
“Alright,” he shouted finally, slamming his hands down on her desk and leaning over her, “I’m sorry I ever suggested you might want to have children.”
“Apology accepted,” she said smugly, reaching for a bucket of plastic baby figurines beneath her desk and vanishing the whole lot.
“It wasn’t an apology, it was a statement of regret.”
Her eyes flashed dangerously. “In case you’re wondering, this type of thing is why I called you a foul bastard,” she spat.
Habit told him to smile superciliously, but his heart wasn’t in it. He returned to his desk in silence, but minutes later heard his own voice escaping him unbidden.
“Do you think I wanted to end up like this?”
Granger looked up from her reports, wide-eyed. “What?”
“Never mind,” he muttered, and fled from the room.
＊
Severus didn't have a destination in mind, but nevertheless got lost because of the stupid rotating doors and ended up in a room full of timepieces. None of the grandfather clocks placed about the floor read the same time, and on a table an emerald green hummingbird fluttered inside a bell jar. Along the far wall water clocks dripped hypnotically.
He stopped in front of a glass-fronted cabinet with its doors thrown wide open. Hundreds of miniature hourglasses with coloured sands tumbled to the floor and shattered, then sprang up fully mended, trapped in an infinite loop.
The futile cycle was mesmerising and sadly apropos.
What was he doing? The worst part of teaching had been the mind-numbing, monotonous routine, broken only by the occasional classroom accident or explosion. The same hours, the same students, the same potions, the same lesson plans he could repeat off by heart, even in his sleep. And now he was stuck in another cycle: one of awkward introductions, painful small talk, mediocre meals and then agreeing never to see each other again.
Had he lost his chance to love? Was his life any more than treading water, growing even more bitter as he watched people around him pair off and find happiness?
After watching the repetitious hourglasses for an unknown length of time, Granger appeared in his periphery. He hadn't heard her come in.
“It’s Harry’s fault they’re doing that,” she said quietly, nodding at the falling time-turners, and touched Severus on the arm, resting her fingertips there. “I’m sorry. I was rude. To be honest, I didn’t think you’d care about anything I had to say.”
He opened his mouth to reply that he didn’t care, obviously, but realised suddenly that he did care, very much. The question of why would probably have to be solved by another team in the Department of Mysteries. He turned his head to face her.
“I’m sorry for calling you a know-it-all when you were a student.”
Her mouth formed a perfect, darling ‘o’ of surprise. She shook her head, her cloud of curls bouncing.
“I am a know-it-all. Only, you made it sound like a bad thing.”
“It is hard for the other students, when one is perfect at everything,” he replied, thinking bitterly of Black and Potter: effortlessly successful, universally adored.
“Oh, so it was for their sake,” she said sarcastically.
“No. It wasn't. I was under stress and I took it out on the wrong people. I do promise, Miss Granger, to try to stop being such a foul, wretched bastard in future.”
She rolled her eyes and snorted, which was not the solemn approbation he had expected.
“Good. And please, call me Hermione.”
She dragged him back into Romantic Love with an arm linked through his.
It was probably only because she knew he couldn’t find his way back on his own, but her touch sparked a hope in his chest that he would be very sorry to extinguish.