Roman Holiday

Chapter Twenty-Three

“No,” Draco said flatly. “We’re not going to Dumbledore with this.”

Hermione studied him curiously. It was as if her suggestion had erected an invisible barrier between them. “Why not?”

“Because,” he snapped, “I don’t want to. And because it’s not necessary.”

Hermione rolled her eyes.

“You sound just like Ron and Harry,” she said, and Draco bristled, the spots of colour on his cheekbones growing even more pronounced against his pallor.

“I’m nothing like them,” he spat. “If they want to keep the Headmaster in the dark, it’s usually because they’re doing something they shouldn’t be.”

(At this, Hermione gave a hum of grudging assent. He had a point there.)

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” he continued. “But the very fact that I have blood in my veins makes me a threat to society, apparently, and to be honest with you, Hermione, I’d really rather not advertise that. Even to Dumbledore.” He paused, then laughed humorlessly. “Especially to Dumbledore.”

“He might be able to help,” she persisted. Draco made an impatient sound in his throat and shook his head.

“He might be. And he might decide that the world’s safer if I’m not in it.” The look he gave her was cold and appraising and so unlike the boy who’d shared this same bed with her only two nights ago that it made her shiver. “It’s easy for you to trust Dumbledore,” he said with a touch of bitterness. “You and your little charmed circle. The fearless, death-defying Quidditch star. The brilliant, talented future Head Girl. One of the noble, penurious Weasleys.”

He sneered, and Hermione would have taken offense if he weren’t directing his malice mostly at himself.

“You don’t wear your last name like a fucking albatross around your neck,” he said, each word more caustic and embittered than the next. His eyes were stony with rage. “You don’t share a face with the man who’s tried to have the Headmaster sacked for the last five years. Who loosed a Basilisk on the school. Who sent the school gamekeeper to Azkaban on trumped-up charges. You’re not the spawn of a homicidal maniac and a society junkie, and you don’t have poison pumping through your heart sixty times a minute, and as smart as you are, you really don’t have a clue about this.” A muscle was ticking in his cheek, and he’d compressed his mouth into a line so thin that his lips were white.

“Draco -“ She brought up her hand as if to caress his arm, then dropped it again without touching him. He closed his eyes wearily, rubbed his hand over his face.

“I’d rather not chance it,” he said, after a long awkward pause. “My life might not mean much to anyone else, but it’s still pretty valuable to me.”

“You trusted him about what happened in Rome,” Hermione said quietly. “Why can’t you trust him about this?”

He managed a tight smile.

“Because I don’t share your faith in the system,” he said. “I wish I did. But I honestly don’t trust it to work for me.”

Seeing the worried look on her face, he sighed heavily and gave her hand an apologetic squeeze. “Look,” he said. “You’re the best researcher in the school, and I’m not so bad myself. If we can’t find a solution between the two of us, we’re an insult to our education.”

“But …” He cut her off.

“But nothing,” he said. “This is the way it is. My father, my problem, my bloody destiny, so we play it my way. Okay?”

Hermione, feeling a heavy sense of déja vù overtake her, bit her lip and reluctantly acquiesced.

“Okay.”

Long after he’d gone, she lay awake, cuddling Crookshanks and thinking hard.

If there was an easy way out of this, she certainly couldn’t see it.

**

There were no secret-admirer envelopes in the owl post the next morning at breakfast, but Hermione did get a curt little note from Snape, informing her that he’d looked over her translation and was available to discuss her extra-credit project that evening following the dinner hour.

Whoo, boy, she thought. Rough waters ahead. Ready the life preservers. All hands on deck.

Ron, who had been reading over her shoulder, shook his head incredulously. “I can’t believe,” he said, “that you’re willingly doing extra work for Snape. You’ve obviously been reading too much; the library paste has gone to your brain.” He paused thoughtfully. “Or maybe,” he said, “Lucius Malfoy really DID manage to curse you, and you just don’t know it yet. Maybe -“

“Oh, put a cork in it, Ron,” Hermione snapped, suddenly irritable. Trust him to be indiscreet about her Roman adventure; Parvati and Lavender were only two seats away, and all four of their delicate little seashell ears were perked for gossip. “You may be prepared to go through life without a working knowledge of Potions, just to spite Snape, but I am not,” she continued, her voice rising despite her best intentions. “So why don’t you leave me to it, since you disapprove so much, and just go polish your broom or something?”

The whole table fell silent. Hermione, finding herself the object of a long row of surprised Gryffindor stares, flushed slightly and ducked under her chair to fish for her book bag.

“I have things to do,” she said shortly, shouldering the bag. “I’ll see you in class.”

As she stalked away, she was aware of two things: smothered giggles from the female Gryffindors, and Ron’s reddening face. She smiled in grim satisfaction.

In the wizarding world, ‘polishing the broomstick’ was a common, if crude, euphemism for male masturbation. She doubted that she’d hear any more nonsense from Ron for at least a week, where Snape was concerned anyway.

She blew out a long breath, suddenly feeling very shaky.

Dealing with Snape wouldn’t be nearly so easy.

**

He was already in the Potions classroom when she arrived that evening after dinner, barricaded securely behind his desk with a stack of partially graded essays in front of him. “Hello, Professor,” she said from the doorway, and he waved her in impatiently with one hand while continuing to write with the other.

She perched herself on top of one of the tables - unconventional, she knew, but she felt braver when he wasn’t towering over her, and this way she actually had a slight height advantage - and waited for him to finish. Finally, he pushed the essays to one side, withdrew from a drawer a roll of parchment that she recognized as her translation, and raised his eyebrows inquiringly at her. “Well?”

Well, what? Hermione wanted to retort, but bit it back. He was probably spoiling for a reason to throw her out, and she didn’t intend to let that happen. She folded her hands in her lap and gave him her most innocent look. “Well, what do you think?” she asked. “Is it any good?”

“Answering one question with another is not only ungrammatical, Miss Granger, it’s rude,” he said. He sounded more triumphant than annoyed. “I’ll tell you what I think of your translation, once I’ve determined whether your background research is sufficiently thorough to merit its discussion.”

Ouch.

Okay, Hermione thought. I can play that game. “Of course,” she said, as sweetly as she could manage, and handed him the rolls of parchment she’d brought with her. “Here’s my history research. And my harmonic analysis.” She beamed at him. “And my mathematical proofs. With which would you like me to begin?”

He grimaced at her, shoving the documents aside as if she’d poured slugs into his hands. “I don’t want to see what you know on paper,” he said impatiently. “I want to hear it. What’s your justification for doing this project? Why does it interest you, and what about it is worth my time and yours?”

**

If for no other reason, you had to admire a man who cut so quickly to the chase. Hermione sucked her teeth for a moment, wondering where to begin.

“My dad used to tell me bedtime stories,” she said finally. “But he didn’t like fairy tales or children’s books. So he told me things that were true, mostly, things that he thought would inspire me. And one night - I think I was six years old - it was this story about Palestrina.”

She shot a nervous glance at Snape. It was odd, telling him something so private and cherished - even her mum didn’t know about this memory of hers, and she wasn’t sure what she’d do if he said something to ruin it. But he just sat there looking at her, his face carefully expressionless. She took a breath and kept going.

“There was a religious convention,” she said, “called the Council of Trent. They’d come together for the purpose of reforming the Church, to make the services more accessible to the common people.” She paused. “I don’t know what you know about Muggle religion, Professor, but -“

“I know enough,” he said. “Pray, continue.”

Was that a joke? She gave him a hesitant smile, just in case. “Anyway,” she said, “the Council said that church music was too complicated, and that people couldn’t understand it. And they were ready to ban music in the services altogether. That’s when Palestrina stepped in and wrote a Mass - the Missa Papae Marcelli - to convince them to change their minds.” She grinned sheepishly. “Dad sold it like a kind of morality play. You know, ‘use your talents’, ‘change the world and make it better’, that sort of thing.”

She was into her story now, her reluctance forgotten. “We listened to some of it, my dad and I,” she said. “And I could hear it - I could hear why it worked.” She paused in recollection. “It was so balanced. So perfect. There was something about the way it went through me … as if it wasn’t just my ears anymore, as if my whole body was standing in line and listening and just … just vibrating right along.” Her eyes were dreamy and faraway. “It had colours in it,” she said. “I could hear them. I could feel them. And then ….”

“Yes?” he prompted, and couldn’t believe he’d done so. It didn’t seem as if she’d heard him anyway.

“We started floating,” she murmured, and he could see the wonder of the memory on her face. “He was sitting on my bed, and I was all tucked in, and then … we were in midair. Bed and all. Both of us. About a foot off the ground. Until the music stopped. And it didn’t seem strange at all.”

She snapped back to the present and shrugged at him, a little embarrassed. “When I got my letter from Hogwarts, that’s the first thing I thought of,” she said. “That night in my room, floating in my bed while the music played. It didn’t surprise me at all when I found out Palestrina was a wizard.”

Silence.

“All right,” he said finally, to break the spell of that tender, eloquent image - he could picture it all too well in his head, a little girl with curly hair and a dark-eyed man, wrapped in a magic soap bubble of music and thin air. “So. That’s why it interests you.” He gave her a long appraising glance. “But why is it valuable? What makes it worth the study?”

She looked surprised by the question, but not thrown off. “That’s easy,” she said. “The Illuminata. The potion. The magic in the music.” Her hands rose expressively in front of her, two fluttering golden birds in the candlelight. “That feeling,” she said. “That emotion. That … that goodness. There’s nothing else like it, anywhere. Not a Cheering Charm. Not a Calming Compound. Not Dreamless Sleep. Not Obliviate.”

She leaned toward him, her face alight. “The Illuminata is pure joy, bottled. What better weapon could we have, in a war against darkness?”

**

Severus stared at her and felt his throat close.

For a moment, he was back in Rome, offering his handkerchief to a girl with an awestruck, tearstained face.

For a moment, he could hear the choir himself.

Pure joy, bottled.

What better weapon, indeed?

“Are you all right?” she asked gently, and he realized that she’d come around the desk, that her hand was on his arm, that her eyes were wide with concern. He stared up at her, a little dazed.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” she said. “If it’s not a good idea, just say so - it’s okay.”

“No,” he said, his voice sounding raspy and distant to his own ears. “No, it’s not that.”

He looked ready to cry, Hermione thought, and was oddly panicked by that thought. Give her back Nasty Snape, Dangerous Sex God Snape, even Kinky Violent Snape, just don’t make her deal with this … this very human-looking man, who was gazing up at her as if he’d never seen her before.

“What is it, then?” she asked, and he just shook his head.

“It …” He paused, swallowed hard. “It’s a good idea, Hermione. A very good idea.”

“Oh,” she whispered, and they stared at each other for another long moment.

His knuckles grazed her cheek. Her lips found his palm.

When he finally spoke, it was in a voice so so rusty and disused that she barely recognized it as his.

“You make me think,” he said, “that there may yet be hope.”

**