Roman Holiday

Chapter Twenty-Five

Palestrina, as Hermione had discovered in the course of her research, had been heavily influenced during the development and brewing of his Illuminata Elixir by the elaborately illustrated sacred manuscripts of the Middle Ages. As a matter of fact, she imagined that’s where he’d gotten the name for the potion, as the old vellum books were so intricately inked with red and blue, so saturated with gold inlay, that the texts were said to be ‘illuminated’.

Of course, there wasn’t much information on them in the Muggle Studies section of the Hogwarts library. But Hermione had seen one or two under treated, ultraviolet-resistant glass, in one of the chapels in Vatican City. And she’d read somewhere that the decorative gold leaf, seemingly an afterthought to the other illustrations, had to be laid in and burnished before the page was inked, to avoid smears.

From what she knew of the Illuminata, it worked in much the same way. That frisson of beneficent magic only seemed to be the finishing touch on music that was glorious and masterful and moving in its own right. In reality, it was the base coat. The primer. Not only had Palestrina drunk it before sitting down to compose, but he’d also mixed it with ink and loaded it into his quill.

It made sense, then, that the potion’s base would be its most strongly, subtly magical element. The two initial and most essential ingredients were distilled, concentrated essence of lemon balm - an herb used for millenia to lift the spirits, allay anxiety, and bring on restful sleep and pleasant dreams - and the ashes which resulted from the molting cycle of a phoenix.

Hermione had asked Professor Dumbledore to collect and save for her the ashes from Fawkes’ most recent Burning Day. Now, having wolfed down dinner and run down to the Potions lab to sieve the lemon essence through linen one final (and probably superfluous) time, she was on her way to the Headmaster’s office.

She’d done the research. Now it was time to see if she could act on it.

“Jelly rabbit,” she said to the gargoyle - she’d acquired the password ahead of time from Professor McGonagall - and ascended the circular staircase to Dumbledore’s office. He was waiting for her.

“Ah, Miss Granger,” he said, beaming, and nodded to the padded armchair in front of his desk. “Won’t you sit down?”

Hermione perched reluctantly on the edge of the chair, casting one worried eye at her wristwatch. “Thank you, sir,” she said, “but I have an appointment, and I’d rather not keep Professor Snape waiting.”

“I daresay that Severus will wait for you,” Dumbledore said dryly. “He’s as interested in your project as you are. And I’ve been wanting to have a word with you, Hermione, regarding young Mr. Malfoy.”

Hermione froze.

Boy, did that come out of left field.

She gulped. “Um …”

What should she say? What did he know?

Dumbledore twinkled kindly at her. “You needn’t look so nervous,” he said gently. “It’s in our very nature to be drawn to one another, whether we’re wizard- or Muggle-born, or some combination thereof. And I shan’t pry into your … personal affairs, never fear.”

His wise old face settled suddenly into grave lines. “I must ask you, though, Hermione, whether you know something that I do not. The staff and I have been rather concerned about Draco’s state of well-being, as of late. Do you know, perhaps, what it is that may be troubling him?”

Shit. She’d been afraid of this.

Why couldn’t Draco have gone to Dumbledore himself, when she’d urged him to? Why did he have to put her in this awkward position, caught in between what she wanted to do and what she’d promised she wouldn’t?

Well, she couldn’t lie.

“I do know, Professor,” she said, and fought to keep her eyes steady under that perceptive blue gaze. “But to say what it is would betray a confidence.”

“I see,” Dumbledore said, and he wasn’t smiling. Hermione spread her hands in unconscious frustration.

“I’d like to tell you, truly I would,” she said. “But it’s not my story to tell.” She paused. “If it helps, Professor …”

“Yes?”

“I think,” she said, “that we may have solved at least part of the problem ourselves.”

He digested this without comment. “Hermione?”

“Yes, Professor?”

“Is it fair to say,” Dumbledore inquired softly, “that whatever has been troubling Mr. Malfoy is not a lovers’ quarrel, but something else entirely?”

Hermione swallowed hard. Impossible to read those eyes - they reflected back to you like her mum’s Blue Willow china. Wordlessly, she nodded.

Dumbledore studied her for a moment longer, looking as visibly troubled as she’d ever seen him, and then turned his attention to selecting a lemon drop from a candy dish on his desk. When he looked up again, his twinkly Santa mask was firmly in place.

“Draco is fortunate to have you as an ally,” he said. “And I won’t test your loyalty to him any further, except to remind you that I am always available to you - and to him - should either of you have need of me.”

Hermione nodded again, silently, and took the small enamel box he handed her.

“Good luck with the Illuminata, Miss Granger,” Dumbledore said quietly.

“Thank you, sir.”

Once out in the hall, she glanced at her watch again and yelped. Two minutes to six.

If she hurried, she’d almost be on time.

**

She burst breathlessly into the Potions classroom, clutching at the stitch in her side. “Sorry I’m late,” she panted. “The Headmaster - wanted to talk - got the ashes -“

She held up the little lacquered box as if it were the House Cup. Snape prised it deftly out of her fingers and steered her toward a chair.

“Sit down,” he said, “and catch your breath.” His voice was so uncharacteristically mild that she gaped at him. “We’ll both need steady hands tonight.”

He twisted the lid carefully from the little box and inspected its contents closely. “More than enough,” he said with visible satisfaction, and Hermione realized that Dumbledore was right.

Snape, in his introverted, peculiar way, was as excited about this as she was.

“Have you made an Illuminata before?” she asked, and he shook his head absently without looking at her. He was swirling the ashes deliberately in the box - checking, she suspected, for size irregularity in the fragments.

“No. Nor do I know anyone who has,” he said. “It’s obscure. Palestrina was more well-known by Muggles than by wizards, as you know. And then there’s the problem of his coded notes.” He stopped swirling, apparently satisfied, and put the box down on the table. “Someone, at some point, may well have deciphered them for their own personal use. But then again, perhaps not. Certainly a translation has never been made public.”

“That’s odd.”

“Why?”

“Well, you’d think that everyone would want this,” Hermione said thoughtfully. “It seems like such a worthy thing to know, even if it is a lot of work.”

Snape stopped inspecting the cauldron she’d prepared for cleanliness, and sent her a sideways look.

“You’ll find,” he said flatly, “that most of us will go to far greater effort to do mischief, than to do good.”

Hermione didn’t believe that for a second, but she didn’t say anything. Clearly, he believed it. He had a bleak, faraway look in his eyes that made her feel unaccountably melancholy on his behalf.

“Well,” she said, overly brightly. “Shall we get to it, then?”

**

The Illuminata was meant to hold its magical properties, even when combined with other substances. In addition to mixing it with ink, Palestrina had indicated that it could be combined with other liquids, such as paint, or added to food or beverages - though he had recommended, in a rather terse footnote, that it not be used in direct combination with alcohol.

On one hand, Hermione wondered why that was.

On the other, she was prepared to take his word for it.

Because stability was so necessary to the character of the potion, the base ingredients had to be combined slowly and with care, over very low heat, then left at a bare simmer for a period of weeks before the remainder of the ingredients could be added.

The complication was this:

The lemon balm couldn’t be heated more than a couple of degrees beyond room temperature, but the ashes had to dissolve instantly upon contact; otherwise, they’d clump together and render the potion uneven and dangerously volatile. This meant that they had to be added a mere sprinkle at a time, and that the potion required constant stirring, to help regulate the temperature throughout. For this purpose, four hands were better than two.

Hermione carefully poured the essence of lemon balm - the color of Pernod and impossibly fragrant - into the cauldron. “Incendio,” she whispered, with the slightest possible flick of her wand, and blew out a relieved breath when a bare flicker of blue flame licked around the cauldron’s bottom.

“You stir,” Snape said. “I’ll sprinkle.” Hermione nodded.

The ashes were pearl-gray, vaguely iridescent, with flecks of scarlet and gold. Snape took a scant pinch from the box and let them filter slowly between his thumb and forefinger into the cauldron, where they floated for a millisecond and then vanished. Hermione was surprised to immediately feel a slight tug of resistance in the liquid, as if the pinch of dust had thickened it, and see a faint shimmer of peacock blue across the potion’s surface.

“So far, so good,” she murmured. “Keep going.”

With the next pinch, the resistance increased. The potion was now silvery green and thick enough to cling to her wand.

Another dusting of ash, and it flashed vermilion. It now felt as if she was stirring a rather stiff cake batter, and her arm was beginning to ache.

Snape caught her eye. “Are you all right?”

She nodded. “Arm’s a little tired,” she said truthfully. “But it’s okay. It’s right on track, don’t you think?”

“According to the notes,” he said, “it’ll get very thick and quite a dark plum color. When that happens, we add one more pinch.”

Hermione nodded again. “Right,” she said. “Do it, then.”

As the potion thickened, it took longer for the ashes to dissolve on the surface. Hermione was now using both hands on the wand to drive it through the thick navy-blue glop.

“One more,” she panted. “I think it’s almost there.”

And then there it was, the rich dark aubergine that meant that they’d made it.

“All right,” Snape said softly. “The minute I put them in, stir twice around, very quickly, and then take your wand out. It’s not clear what exactly is supposed to happen, but there’s going to be a reaction of some kind.”

Hermione nodded. “Ready.”

The ashes gleamed silver on the plum-colored surface.

Once around.

Once more.

She summoned all of her strength and yanked the wand out of what felt like hardened concrete.

And was enveloped in a blast of warm lemon steam that left her reeling.

**

Oh, my.

Oh, MY.

Hermione considered her existence to be a fairly happy one.

But she’d never felt like this.

There was no way to describe it, not really. Once she’d woken up with a stiff neck, from falling asleep propped up on her pillow with a book - it had hurt for the first hour or so that she was awake, then quieted to a dull throb as she became accustomed to it.

Then, mid-morning, she’d been startled by something, turned quickly to look, and in a bright flash of pain, the ache had been gone and she’d felt almost light-headed with the lack of it.

This was something like that. But much, much better. As if her body was a weighted balloon that had just been set free.

Disconnected.

Floating.

Happy.

It worked. She’d done it.

That is to say, they’d done it.

Congratulations on her mind, she took a deep breath of the heady lemon air and groped through the yellow cloud of steam, toward Snape.

And froze.

His eyes were closed. His head was tilted back.

He was surrounded by wisps of golden smoke. Drinking it in. Abandoned to it.

Smiling.

Hermione swallowed hard. And she thought she’d had a weight lifted from her shoulders?

She was looking at a man whose whole existence had been suddenly altered.

Young. Handsome. Blissful.

He opened his eyes and saw her. The smile disappeared, and was replaced by an intense stab of something she didn’t recognize.

“You,” he said, wonderingly. “You did this.”

“Well, actually …” Hermione swallowed hard. “Um, we … that is, you …”

“No,” he said, and took a step toward her. “Not me. Not us. You.”

And then she was in his arms.

**

Conventional wisdom might have suggested that Happy Snape made for Less Intense Snape.

And conventional wisdom, Hermione thought fuzzily, would have been wrong. Happy Snape had soul kissing down to a science.

The door was locked, his body was like a furnace, and that intoxicating yellow steam was still pouring out of the cauldron, creeping along the floor in what was now a waist-high blanket of aphrodisiac fog and rising higher by the minute.

She was flying like a kite - he was only touching her face, but her skin was warm and itching and trying to climb out of itself. His lips on her lips gave her full-body tremors, shaking electric pulses that she couldn’t stop. The only thing that felt good was getting closer to him.

So she did.

His hands fastened in her hair.

They sank to their knees, and the yellow steam flowed around them and closed in on them and went straight to her brain - dear God, even the palms of her hands felt short-circuited and tight, and his tongue in her mouth made her feel like his cock was inside her already.

She moaned. She wanted to crawl inside him.

His hands were on her hips. She was straddling his lap; she could feel him through her robes, as he rocked her back and forth against his body, still kissing like he’d never come up for air, like a screen idol at the end of the last reel, where you just know it goes on for hours and hours even after the credits and you wish they didn’t have to roll the names. “Oh,” he was saying under his breath between kisses - “oh, oh, oh …” as if he were remembering something important, finding something he’d forgotten.

Get naked, Hermione thought. Get naked now.

Better yet, just get naked enough.

Was it the Illuminata? Or just their existing, long-denied electricity, let out to play?

She didn’t know, and she didn’t care.

“Come on,” she chanted, tugging at his clothes, “come on, come on, hurry, hurry …”

Yank the robes up, she thought.

Yank everything else down.

Heat to heat, soft to hard, push to pull, oh GOD yes, yes yes yesyesyes, just keep moving, Granger, up and down, up and down, because no matter where it is, in or out, it’s not enough yet and you have to keep going and yes, breathe in that warm golden madness and feel it bubble out to your fingertips with sheer absolute utter unalloyed getting-what-you’ve-wanted-for-months-now, but no guilt, no angst, no will-he-or-won’t-he-or-what-do-we-do-later, just oh FUCK and oh JESUS and that hard implacable body shaking, yes SHAKING against you and ohmanohmanohmanohfuckfuckFUCKyes …

… and now that you’ve lived through that, there’s nothing in the world that can possibly touch you.

**

Self-possession would be good, Hermione thought, and took a deep breath as she climbed off Snape’s lap and straightened her robes.

Twenty minutes into the afterglow, the fog was just beginning to clear. She ought to be running for the hills, she guessed, but she couldn’t seriously regret what had just happened … for all the heat, there had been something undeniably sweet about it.

Sweet, your arse, Granger, she thought. You’re still vibrating with the aftershocks.

To distract herself, she took a critical look at Snape. Even now that the air wasn’t yellow anymore, there was a look in his eyes that hadn’t been there before, a little spark of light that he hadn’t possessed yesterday.

Not surprising, she mused - the effects of the Illuminata, apparently even the scary aphrodisiac base of it, took a little while to wear off.

Apparently, the more you needed it, the longer it hung around. That was good to know.

She took a peek at the potion in the cauldron, which had reverted to its original color of glassy gray-green. It shimmered innocently up at her. “Wow,” she said aloud, and Snape, having made some adjustments to the front of his robes, got heavily to his feet.

“Wow?” he repeated. “That’s all you can say?”

“That was some reaction,” she said, still looking at the cauldron. “I suppose the other ingredients are meant to calm it down a little.”

Her knees were starting to shake. She needed to get back to Gryffindor Tower before she let that happen.

“We need to talk,” he said, but she shook her head.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Not now. Please?”

She slipped out of the room before he could answer.

**