Jewel Of The Nile

Chapter Thirty-Three

Well, they’d finally done it, Sybil thought, and turned her head in the semi-darkness of Snape’s dungeon apartments so she could see him more clearly.

He wasn’t weeping, which was a distinct relief - from his state of mind earlier, she wouldn’t have been surprised if he had, but all the same she was glad that the Fates were sparing both of them that particular potential embarrassment. And he didn’t seem to be angry, either at her or at himself - which would have been the easy way out, had he chosen to take it.

No, if anything the sex had steadied him, acted as a lance for his poison - and now that the athletics were over, he’d taken refuge in an oddly formal sort of courtesy, rather as if she were an unexpected visitor or a long-absent distant relative, come to call on him from out of town.

In a way, it was sexy. It made her want to tilt at his equilibrium, to knock that careful decorum all to pieces … and yet it was admirable too; it gave her a little shiver down her spine, that the steel of his control could still shine so brightly through its velvet gloves.

"Tea?" he asked now, from across the room. His lithe, slim body was securely belted into a green damask dressing-gown.

Sybil, still naked and pleasantly limp with the after-effects of orgasm, grinned and stretched luxuriously under his corduroy duvet. "Please. If it isn’t too much trouble, that is."

He looked faintly surprised. "Trouble? No, no trouble at all. Mint or chamomile?"

"Surprise me," Sybil suggested, and stacked some pillows behind her back so that she could pull herself up into a reclining position. As she reached for the stoneware mug he handed her, the duvet slid south to pool in her lap; his eyes flicked to her bare breasts, then resolutely away.

"Here," he said shortly, not looking at her. "There are biscuits too, if you’d like, so long as you don’t scatter crumbs. I’ve had trouble with mice."

"Biscuits?" Sybil steadied her mug and took a sip of the tea - Moroccan mint and syrup-sweet, just the way she would have gotten it in the Djemaa el-Fna marketplace. Yum. "What kind?"

They turned out to be Italian pirouline - crunchy, delicately flaking tubes of fragile pastry rolled up with chocolate hazelnut filling. Sybil demolished one, then licked her fingers and selected another.

"Ha," she said, almost to herself, and he frowned, his polite mask slipping a little to reveal a hint of annoyance underneath.

"What?"

She grinned at him. "You’re a closet hedonist, aren’t you, Severus?"

He slanted her a repressive glare. "I’m sure I don’t know what you mean."

"Uh-huh." She bit into her second biscuit. "Sure you don’t. You swoop around twenty-six hours a day like Hieronymous Bosch in too-tight underwear, you elevate the Perpetual Bad Mood to a bloody art form, you look like your face will break if you crack a smile."

She gestured grandly with the remainder of her pirouline. "Quidditch heroes quail at your approach. The mere curl of your lip sends the faint-hearted into torrents of weeping."

He made an unpleasant sound deep in his sinuses. "Get to the point."

Sybil took another bite. "And here it turns out that you’re just a master of disguise - you’re into down pillows and chocolate cookies, just like the rest of us. What’s the world coming to?"

Severus scowled.

"Like you’re one to talk." He took a grim sip of his tea. "With your amber jewelry and your Concealment Charms and your goddamn fucking Inner Eye that gets you out of every faculty meeting you don’t want to attend. Don’t think I haven’t noticed." He looked murderous. "Not to mention that bloody annoying way you have of talking for hours and never saying anything."

"It is rather off-putting, isn’t it?" Sybil agreed cheerfully. Snape glared at her.

"Rather off-putting?" he echoed. "That’s like calling Dumbledore ‘slightly eccentric’. Or saying that Hagrid’s a ‘bit fond of animals’. Honestly." He neatly guillotined the first half of his biscuit and chewed irritably.

"Grey hair," he said at length, sounding disgusted. "Granny glasses. You’re six years younger than me, for Merlin’s sake."

"One does wonder how it managed to take you so long to figure that out," Sybil commented mildly, setting her mug aside for the moment and stretching in a way designed to draw his eyes back to her breasts again. It worked, though he didn’t look too happy about it.

"Well, it’s not like I knew you that well," he said, sounding a bit cross. "Name me one seventh-year who knows all the younger students in his House by name—it’s just not something you think about, even under normal conditions." He cut his eyes away. "And then, so many people aged prematurely during the war—look at Hopkirk; look at the Wattles—well. You wouldn’t have been the only one to go a bit old and mad, by the time it was all over."

At some point, he’d gotten back into bed with his mug of tea, setting the tin of biscuits down on the duvet between them. It was all very cozy, Sybil thought; all they needed to complete the illusion of Domestic Tranquillity now was a purring, sleepy familiar and a copy of the Daily Prophet Sunday edition, strewn about on top of the bedclothes.

Scary, that.

"I wasn’t in the war," she said softly, her face turned away from him. Severus shot her a quick hooded glance over his tea.

"I was," he said shortly. "On one side, and then on the other, though for all the good it did anyone once I switched, I sometimes wish I’d never gotten involved—that I’d just walked away, like you did."

"You couldn’t have," Sybil said without thinking. He frowned.

"What?"

She shrugged. "I worked hard at being ordinary," she said. "The last thing I wanted was to be noticed. That’s how I got out." She studied him intently. "You couldn’t have done it. You were too smart. Too powerful. He wanted you too much."

Snape rolled his eyes. "Oh, I hardly think—"

"—Well, that much is obvious," Sybil cut in. "Be honest, Severus - if you’d turned him down, do you really think you’d have even made it to the door?"

"Maybe." He thought for a moment. "Maybe not. Not that it matters anymore."

They both glanced instinctively at the inside of his left forearm, skim-milk pale and exposed where the sleeve of his dressing-gown had fallen down to his elbow. Sybil let her eyes trail back up to his face.

"Is it strange, to be rid of it?"

"In a way." His mouth twitched sardonically. "Feels about the same way you’d feel in your own skin, I imagine."

Sybil shuddered. "Naked, you mean."

"Something like that." He traced an absent figure-eight on the place where the Mark had been with one long slim forefinger. "Don’t misunderstand me - I’m glad it’s gone. But I’m a bit at sea without it. It’s been a long time since I had any options at all, and now …"

He shrugged. "Well, now there’s everything."

"I know how that feels," Sybil said, and picked up her mug again to warm her suddenly-cold fingers. "Don’t ask me how I’m going to shoehorn myself back into that tower room, after this little adventure. It was bad enough the first time, when I didn’t know what I was getting myself in for."

"Mm." Severus set his empty mug aside on his bedside table and repositioned the pillow under his back. There was an odd look on his face.

"Sybil?" he ventured finally, and she turned on her side to face him.

"Yes?"

"Do you like to teach?"

**

Of all the questions he could have asked, that was the one she’d least expected.

"Do I like to teach?" she repeated dumbly. He nodded.

"I guess so," she said. "I mean, I’m not sure. I mean—"

"You don’t, do you?"

She bit her lip. "Um. I’ve had some good moments, I guess …"

"You hate it. Admit it."

For another second, she hesitated - this was a precipice she’d never allowed herself to even ponder. "I … "

Stymied, she glared at him. "Well, do you like it?"

Snape laughed again, without mirth.

"Sybil," he said. "Every so often, when the Fates are kind, and Neville Longbottom is on the opposite side of the castle, I catch a momentary glimpse of what it must be like to enjoy the act of teaching." He had lowered his voice to a bare whisper, as if confiding some great secret. "Every so often, there’s a glimmer of understanding. A peg of knowledge shoved into the corresponding hole in some ordinarily impenetrable head. This encourages me."

He paused thoughtfully. "And of course I will be eternally grateful to Albus for the offer of employment, given the circumstances under which he offered it."

Sybil raised her eyebrows. "But …?"

"But. As Sal is my witness"—Sybil smirked at this; their House had long sworn their most serious oaths by Slytherin himself, but it seemed a bit comic once you actually knew him—"I tell you this: the last nine years have been the longest and most bloody miserable of my life. I’d rather walk Fluffy for a living than walk back into that classroom."

They stared at each other, in a moment of perfect understanding. "Oh, God," Sybil said fervently. "Me, too."

His lips twitched.

She stifled a giggle.

And then they were roaring.

Given all of that, it wasn’t so surprising at all that she should find herself underneath him again. Sybil let out a last hiccuping chuckle, and fitted her mouth to his.

When the universe chose to be serendipitous, sometimes it was a mistake to examine your good fortune too closely. She was just going to run with this, as long as it lasted.

**