Roman Holiday

Chapter Thirty-Five

Except for her regular appearances in Potions, Severus hadn’t seen Hermione in nearly two weeks.

He couldn’t say he blamed her; the situation was decidedly awkward. On the other hand, it was oddly out of character for her to sidestep an issue, rather than confronting it full-on. And she was definitely going out of her way to avoid him; more than once, he’d come back to his classroom after the lunch or dinner hour to find that she’d been there in his absence to tend to the Illuminata.

The weeks of simmering had thickened the potion to a creamy, shimmering substance the color of celery and the consistency of Alfredo sauce. According to Snape’s calculations, it was ready for the final ingredients to be added.

If anyone had asked him why he was eating dinner in his classroom tonight, he would have pointed to the stack of ungraded essays in front of him. In reality, he was waiting for Hermione.

He had history with this potion now. He wanted to see it finished.

He sighed. After tonight, the Illuminata would be bottled and stored, and the Potions classroom would be back to normal. That thought didn’t cheer him; the faint hint of lemon exuding from the storage cupboard had kept the atmosphere of his classroom uncharacteristically pleasant. No Ravenclaws sneering at Hufflepuffs, no Slytherin whispering or Gryffindor hijinks. Even the other Heads of House had noticed, at the meeting Snape had hosted the previous week; Minerva had lost her look of perpetual disapproval, and Sprout was almost tipsy by the time they adjourned.

He himself had to admit that his days were presently more enjoyable than his nights. Withdrawing from the scent of the simmering Illuminata wasn’t like the initial crash he’d suffered after the first wave of explosion-induced euphoria - it was more like a caffeine headache, a vague throbbing sense of discontent that crept back into the edges of his consciousness like wolves circling a dying campfire.

He didn’t want to think about what would happen after the light went out altogether.

He was drawn from his reverie by light, quick footsteps, and looked up to see Hermione standing in the doorway. Apparently she’d come from outside; her cheeks were pink, and she was clutching a slightly wilted bouquet of autumn chrysanthemums.

“Good evening, Professor,” she said, as if she hadn’t been ducking around corners to avoid running into him for weeks, and to his immense shock, handed him the flowers. He frowned at them.

“What are these for?”

“Professor Sprout asked me to bring them down to you,” she said. “She seemed to think you’d have a use for the stems and the seeds, once they’re dried.”

“Ah. I see.” He propped the chrysanthemums in an empty beaker. “Is that all?”

She studied her shoes. “No.”

He’d been afraid of that. “Well, then,” he said. “To what do I owe the interruption, Miss Granger?”

“Two things,” she said. “Well, three.”

She had an odd hesitant look on her face that filled Snape with inexplicable outrage. “Well, what are they?” he snapped. “You may have nothing better to do with your time than come down to annoy me, but I assure you that my evening is very well-planned. So if you don’t mind, can you get on with it?”

To his chagrin, she didn’t so much as flinch. In fact, his needling seemed to lend her new resolve.

“Right,” she said crisply. “First, I need to finish the Illuminata. Second, I wanted to give you this, to thank you for helping me with it.”

She withdrew a small parcel from an inner pocket of her robes and held it out. Snape felt his ears burn with her silent reproach as he accepted the little package and silently removed its wrappings.

It was a small leather-bound book with blank lined pages from Flourish and Blotts; originally it had probably borne the word ‘Diary’ on the cover, but she’d charmed it off and replaced it with her own title. Inside it was page after page of neat copperplate script: she’d copied over her translation of Palestrina’s notes, including the recipe for the Illuminata and the key to the code.

Hours and hours of work, Snape thought, and felt immediately guilty for snapping at her earlier. He traced his finger over her signature on the flyleaf.

As far as he knew, hers was the only translation in existence. The fact that she’d presented him with a copy of her secret made him weak in the knees; few would have been so generous.

“Do you like it?” She looked anxious, as if she’d come to the bridal shower with Tupperware instead of Waterford. The twinge of self-doubt Severus saw on her face twisted unpleasantly in his chest.

“This is a most welcome addition to my library,” he said stiffly. “Thank you, Miss Granger. Um. Hermione.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, clearly relieved, and favored him with an unexpected glimpse of that impish smile she’d worn nonstop in Rome. “I almost got you candy instead, but I wasn’t sure if you ate chocolate.”

“Not in great quantity,” Severus assured her. “And in any case, I much prefer the permanent to the ephemeral.”

That, he thought, had been exactly the right thing to say; she looked immediately delighted.

“The third thing,” he prompted her, and she shot a nervous glance at the open door. Snape locked it with a word and a wave of his hand, and Hermione pulled a chair up to his desk.

Here it comes, he thought, the discussion that he’d been both chafing to have and dreading with every molecule in his body. He schooled his features into implacability. “Yes?”

“It’s about Draco,” Hermione said. “He came to you, he said, and told you about the … well, about his problem.”

Oh. Apparently not.

Snape assented with a jerk of his head. Hermione clasped her hands on top of his desk and leaned forward.

“I’ve been wondering,” she said, “if there isn’t a way to use the Illuminata to help him.”

That was unexpected, Severus thought; foolish of me, to expect the predictable from her. “I don’t know how it could,” he said. “I know you’ve built it up to be a panacea to all ills, Hermione, but against a curse like that …”

She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “Not the Illuminata by itself,” she said. “But we’ve been studying the Armoring Potions in class, and I know that the Illuminata is supposed to mix well with other substances. I thought that perhaps in combination - since it has all those preservative ingredients -“ She trailed off.

“But preservatives have been added to the Armoring Fluid before,” Snape pointed out, “without success. What makes you think that the Illuminata will be any more useful?”

Hermione frowned. “It’s mostly a gut reaction,” she said. “When I try to come up with logical reasons for it, they seem to slip away from me as soon as I corner them.” She bit her lip. “It’s just that the Fils du Couteau, at least as it stands now, was conceived with evil intent. It seems to me that sheer chemistry won’t cancel that out; it’s going to have to be counterbalanced with something purely good.”

At least as it stands now? What the hell was she talking about? Snape started to say something scathing, but she just kept talking over him.

“And then, there are the phoenix ashes,” she said. “Fire is so powerful, and they were made by fire. And after all, the phoenix saved Harry from the basilisk … and phoenix tears heal wounds. How do we know the ashes won’t stop a knife?”

Her eyes shone with conviction. Snape sighed. Who was he to play pessimist?

“Should Hogwarts ever decide to form a Debate Club,” he said, “I will personally recommend you not only for membership, but for the presidency.” He reached for a quill and a bottle of red ink. “All right, we’ll try a small batch and see how it goes.” He paused. “Tomorrow.”

Her face fell. “Tomorrow?”

“Best you test the potion by itself, before you go mixing it with other things,” Snape said. “Go ahead - finish your Illuminata; by the time you’re done, I’ll have finished grading these essays and we can begin.”

**

Elsewhere in the castle, the gossip mill was buzzing with unbelievable news.

Citing a need to devote more time to his studies, Draco Malfoy had just quit the Slytherin Quidditch team.

The Slytherins were half-baffled, half-angry. Pansy and Avery were seen to exchange a number of knowing smirks across the table at dinner. The other three houses were in roiling, whispered uproar. Only Draco remained calm, sipping pumpkin juice and forking in pork chops and candied yams as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

Ron’s eyes had flicked to the Slytherin table more than once during dinner; now, as they crossed the great hall, he pulled Harry aside.

“What’s he on about?” he muttered. Harry shrugged.

“Maybe they’ve got some new talent they want to showcase.”

Ron dismissed this with a rude noise. “He wanted that slot,” he said. “Enough to buy his way onto the team. Why would he step down now?”

“Because,” Draco said, coming up behind them, “competition isn’t everything in the world. I seem to have lost my fighting spirit.” He sent the scowling Ron an even look. “Evening, Weasley. Potter.”

“Evening, Malfoy,” Harry said as Draco turned to go down the steps to the dungeons. Ron elbowed him hard in the ribs.

“What’s all that about?” he demanded. “Are we on social terms with that git now?”

“Well, he wasn’t rude to us,” Harry said. “Why should we be rude to him?”

Ron, whose mouth had fallen open, evidently found this suggestion too incredible to even favor with an answer.

“Come on,” he said. “Hospital wing. You obviously need to have your head examined.”

**

It was finished.

There was no explosion, no smoke, no insidious lemon fog - with the addition of the last ingredient, the Illuminata had foamed briefly like shaken soda, then subsided into glassy calm. It was as clear as water now, with a subtle patina that caught the light like the sheen on a black pearl. Hermione leaned over the cauldron and sniffed. Odorless.

She and Snape stared at each other for a moment, undecided. A muscle was jerking in his jaw, and she could feel her hands trembling.

What now?

“Palestrina developed this to be mixed with other things,” she said finally. “Ink, paint, medicine. I’m not quite sure how to test it in its pure form; there’s nothing in his notes about it.”

Snape leaned over and scooped up a half-beakerful. He set it on one of the student tables in the middle of the room, and they both studied it nervously. The liquid in the beaker stayed calm and quiet, looking for all the world like water coated with a thin layer of motor oil.

“Well,” Hermione said, “we know it’s nontoxic. Perhaps I should just drink some, and see what happens?”

“No,” Snape said firmly, catching her wrist as she reached for the beaker. “Don’t do that.”

“Why not? Someone has to.”

“Yes,” he said. “But not here, not now.”

Hermione looked baffled. Snape frowned impatiently and ran his hands through his hair.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “that my nerves can’t take another encounter like the one we had a few weeks ago. If there’s any chance that … that could happen again, I’d rather you test the potion in other company than mine.”

“Oh.” Hermione was silent for a minute. “Was it so bad, then?”

At his half-angry look, she shrugged expressively. “I’m not fishing for compliments,” she said. “I didn’t mean the sex. I mean … afterwards. After I left. Was it very bad?”

Snape bristled. “What would you know about it?” he demanded.

Hermione shrugged again. “Well, I know how I felt,” she said. “Like I hadn’t a care in the world, first … and then later, like everything was caving in on me.” She shot him a searching, perceptive look. “And from what I saw of you, while it was happening …” Her hands spread helplessly. “I’ve never seen you look like that,” she admitted. “Young, and smiling, and … well, handsome, and so, so happy that you were shining with it.” She swallowed hard. “It must have hurt to fall from so high up, that’s all.”

He didn’t have words to answer her. He barely managed a nod.

This wasn’t the talk they were supposed to have had. She wasn’t supposed to dismiss the sex as the secondary issue and go straight to the angst. Nothing he’d lain awake preparing to say to her was a fit comeback to those incisive, few true words.

It must have hurt to fall from so high up.

Oh, Hermione.

Sentences were piling up inside him, battering at the locked door of his closed throat. If she had asked him anything, anything at all - the weather, the color of the sky, the location of Longbottom’s toad - he might have lost control completely, just opened his mouth and let the long-buried words spill out at her feet.

But she just sat there quietly, studying the beakerful of Illuminata and jotting her observations in the ratty old notebook she carried everywhere with her. After a while, when the lump in his throat had subsided to a dull ache and it seemed like he might breathe normally again, she finally looked up.

“So, then,” she said. “Shall we split it up?”

Severus frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

“So we can both find out firsthand,” she said. “You take some, and I’ll take some. Separately. And we can compare notes tomorrow, before we start the second experiment.”

She was determined to include him in this, wasn’t she? Severus sighed and wearily acceded.

“All right,” he said, and watched as she transferred half of the beaker’s contents into a smaller container with a lid. “But be careful, will you? And don’t do it alone.”

“Oh, I won’t,” Hermione said. “Believe me.” That mischievous glint was back in her eyes; Severus felt pangs of mixed envy and anxiety for the hapless young Slytherin who would doubtless cross her path that night. “Good night, Professor.”

“Good night,” he echoed, and locked the door behind her.

She had been gone for a long time before he finally lifted the beaker to his lips.

**