Roman Holiday

Chapter Fifty-One

When it came right down to it, Severus thought to himself, his difficulty in forming friendships had always stemmed from his opinion that most people, deep down, weren't really worth getting to know.

Superiority, of course, had its drawbacks - loneliness being the most obvious - and he had to admit that his sense of isolation was exacerbated by his profession. As a student at Hogwarts, he'd at least moved on the periphery of the social scene, merely by virtue of proximity. His status as a dubiously-ex- Death Eater hadn't done much to endear him to the rest of the faculty, however, nor had he made any efforts to help himself in that regard. Those first months back in Dumbledore's fold, he'd existed on caffeine and nightmares, in his own way as shaky and paranoid as old Mad-Eye himself.

They were a soft-hearted bunch, naturally - Severus knew in his soul of souls that any overture he made would be instantly returned, even now, if only out of sympathy. But that knowledge in itself made him cringe inwardly; better to be that great malevolent bat, or even that insufferable ass, than poor dear Severus. And Albus, while a brilliant Headmaster and a better-than-average pop psychologist, was still the man who signed his paycheques ... not to mention the one who'd plucked him from the gates of Azkaban into the welcoming, motherly bosom of AcadÀme.

Best to keep a little distance there, if only for his own sense of equilibrium.

There had been exceptions to the rule, over the years. Lily, for instance. And, for a few brief happy months, before the business with Potter and Black blew up in their faces, Remus. And then, of course, there was Lord Voldemort himself, whose ruthlessness had been matched only by his charm - back then, anyway ... he certainly wouldn't win any points in the Witch Weekly polls, these days.

But for the most part, Severus had cultivated his solitude until habit became preference, and buried any regrets in the all-encompassing, ever-present truth that Things Could Have Turned Out Worse.

Which was why his instant rapport with Salazar Slytherin came as a bit of a pleasant shock.

He hadn't intended to go back, after that first evening in the subdungeons. Hermione was ... well, Hermione, and he could understand completely why Slytherin would find her intriguing. But his own curiosity was another affair entirely - he wasn't a pretty little gamine with big liquid-caramel eyes and a persuasive barrage of questions that would make a skeleton leap to its feet and dance. And he, of all people, wasn't about to intrude on someone else's privacy - if Slytherin wanted company, wouldn't he have sought it out by now?

But the very next day, as if Summoned by that mental query, the old ghost came wafting through the wall just as Severus was sitting down to tea in his solitary suite of dungeon rooms, his shadowy hand upraised in a pantomime of knocking.

"Ah, Severus," he'd sighed, and found himself a chair by the hearth without waiting to be invited. "I hope you'll pardon the intrusion; you're just the man I've been wanting to see."

And that was that.

They had a lot to talk about. Sal, after his centuries of self-imposed hibernation, had the air of a man just rescued from a desert island - many of their subsequent teatime chats, which in the weeks between Halloween and Christmas had increased in frequency to nearly every day, centered around the topic of Progress: when it came to magical theory and practice, what had been gained over the last millenium? what had been lost? Severus found himself expounding on subjects he'd never voiced before, talking so much that afterwards his throat ached. More than once their conversations went straight through the dinner hour without either of them noticing.

And, in return for his information, he had a confidant - one who was inflappable, unshockable, without current political bias; one who'd seen in his centuries of life and afterlife so many would-be Dark Powers wax and wane that the name Voldemort, to him, was the laughable affectation of a megalomaniac. The much-feared, much-hated Dark Mark, that scourge of Severus's young adulthood, Sal brushed aside as a youthful indiscretion - as if Severus, in a drunken fit of short-sightedness, had stumbled into a tattoo parlor, egged on by catcalling friends.

"The young do stupid things," he'd said dismissively. "And commit, in groups, acts they'd never consider individually." He'd studied Severus shrewdly. "You think six months of bloody-mindedness when you're eighteen makes you an ogre forever? Rather an overstatement of your case, I'd say."

"Six months of bloody-mindedness?" Severus had snapped in response. "I don't think so. Because of what I did, the innocent died. Don't you play your moral-relativist games with me."

"You were in a war," Sal pointed out. Severus scowled into his teacup.

"I was on the wrong side."

"A fact you rectified, once you figured it out." Sal shrugged. "Look, all I'm saying is this: as a wizard, you've got another hundred years ahead of you, easy - and who knows what happens after that? I certainly didn't intend to end up being able to walk through walls. If you don't come to terms with what's inside your own brain, you're going to be a miserable old man."

"Maybe I deserve to be a miserable old man," Severus shot back. Sal laughed shortly.

"Being miserable," he said in a tone of voice that was suddenly, surprisingly gentle, "doesn't make you any less guilty. Take it from one who knows. But then -" and here he smiled - "being at peace with yourself doesn't make you any more so, either."

That, Severus supposed reluctantly, made a certain amount of sense.

**

Sal's tendency to give gratuitous advice didn't stop there. A certain amount of their conversation was necessarily devoted to the girl who'd introduced them; it hadn't taken him ten minutes on the topic to deduce what was really going on, and to Severus's great surprise, he was all for it.

"You're a perfect match," he declared now, sipping from his Perlucioed teacup. In honour of Christmas Day, he'd conjured up a garland of ghostly pearl-gray ivy for his head; shortly thereafter, it had slipped down over one ear, giving him the look of a dissolute fraternity alumnus. "Illuminata be damned. Much better-suited for her than that puppy she's running with now."

Severus's lip curled. He might secretly agree with that statement, but damned if he'd admit it.

"She and the ... puppy," he enunciated crisply, "are exactly the same age, exactly the same year in school, and they're the smartest students in their class. I'd say they're fairly well-matched."

Sal dismissed this with a contemptuous wave of one transparent hand. "Bollocks," he said, "and we both know it." He winked slyly. "How far apart are you - twenty years? How much difference is that to a wizard, really?"

"Enough," Severus said shortly. "She's still a child."

"She's on the cusp of womanhood," Sal persisted, grinning. "She's the prettiest rosebud in the garden."

Severus narrowed his eyes menacingly, a trick that sent his students running for the nearest exit but didn't, regrettably, seem to have any effect at all on cheeky ghosts. "I," he said with as much dignity as he could summon, "prefer my roses in full bloom, thank you."

Sal chortled. "Go back to the garden later, my boy," he said, "and you'll find that particular blossom plucked and sitting in someone else's buttonhole."

True, certainly true, but all the same, not a welcome thought. Severus could feel his teeth begin to grind. "I don't like the flower analogy, not for Hermione," he said stiffly. "She's got a brain, after all, and a choice in the matter - probably more choice, truth be told, than whatever poor sap she decides to fix her sights on."

"Of course she does," Sal agreed, his mouth twitching. "And as pigheaded as you are, that's probably very fortunate."

Whatever he meant to imply by that, Severus had no idea.

**

By the time Dobby brought up their lunch, Draco and Hermione were decorously showered and dressed and sitting cross-legged in the middle of Hermione's freshly-made bed, surrounded by glass phials and bits of foam packing material. Peter Granger had been kind enough to include a few books on the subject of chemical and genetic thumbprinting, and Hermione was immersed in the most likely-looking of these, while Draco studied the contents of the jars, frowning over the scientific-sounding names and occasionally unscrewing one of the lids to sniff at the contents.

Their food was cold by the time they got to it. Ruefully, Draco muttered a Warming Charm at the turkey and stuffing, and they dug in, barely caring that the cranberry sauce was runny and the rolls no longer warm ... after all, they'd had a busy morning. And a few Chocolate Frogs apiece weren't adequate fuel for the sort of intellectual calisthenics they had planned for the rest of the day.

In retrospect, it was just as well they were too busy eating to talk much - halfway through their jam tarts, there came a sharp rap on the door, followed by a questioning, "Miss Granger?"

Hermione froze, the last bite of her tart halfway to her mouth. "McGonagall," she mouthed silently, and Draco's eyebrows shot halfway off his forehead.

Dumbledore could twiddle his thumbs at them and sing "Matchmaker, matchmaker," until the cows came home. If Minerva McGonagall found the two of them alone, unchaperoned, in Hermione's bedroom, their elevated status as prefects wouldn't be worth an aluminum Knut.

They'd be toast.

Another rap on the door. "Miss Granger? Hermione, are you in there?"

"Just a moment, Professor!" Hermione called, scanning the room desperately for the Invisibility Cloak. It was in the opposite corner, where Draco had thrown it into a chair as he came in last night. And the knob was already turning.

Too risky. "Go!" she hissed to Draco. "Hide! Under the bed!"

"What a cliché," he complained, but he was already on the floor, dragging the hem of the draperies over him. And not a second too soon, either, Hermione thought.

She stuck a finger in her book and looked up as her Head of House entered the room, putting on the most fuzzily academic look she could muster and discreetly upending the chemistry set's packing box over Draco's empty plate on the bedspread.

"Happy Christmas, Professor," she said, hiding her nerves by clearing away the foam squiggles from one corner of the bed. "Won't you sit down?"

To her dismay, Professor McGonagall did just that. Hermione immediately realized that she'd cleared the wrong corner; McGonagall was so close to the drapery-covered Draco that should he have been so inclined, he could have bitten her ankle without so much as stretching his neck. "We missed you at Christmas dinner," she said, arranging the folds of her robes around her. "I thought perhaps I'd check in on you, and make sure you were all right."

Ha. If they'd missed her, then it was a pretty safe bet that they'd missed Draco, too - even the thickest of first-years could draw the necessary conclusions from that coincidence, and Minerva McGonagall was anything but thick. Hermione forced herself not to look in the direction of the draperies.

"Oh, erm ... fine," she averred, indicating the melée of books and scientific paraphernalia around her. "I just got a bit ... um, carried away here. Lost track of time." She sent McGonagall a weak smile. "Muggle chemistry set - I asked my parents for it ages ago. I thought it might help me with my Potions extra-credit project."

It was obvious what Professor McGonagall thought of Potions, be they extra-credit or otherwise; her mouth was compressed to the thinnest of lines. She glanced around the room, her gaze lighting on the wreckage of Dobby's dinner tray.

"Well, the house-elves seem to have remembered you, at least," she said. "You must have studied up quite an appetite."

"Mm," Hermione agreed noncommittally; the tray had been large enough to feed four, and she and Draco had made a surprising dent in it. She'd only have been able to eat that much by herself if she were half horse.

That was the least of her worries, however; McGonagall looked uncomfortable but determined, a sure sign to Hermione that the conversation was about to take a sharp turn for the personal.

"Hermione," she began, "I don't believe I've had this talk with you before - you seem so much older than Miss Patil and Miss Brown, frankly, that I've left you a bit on your own when it comes to ... ahem, certain matters."

She was distinctly pink-cheeked. Hermione, who had heard firsthand from a convulsed Parvati and Lavender about the details of that prior encounter, closed her eyes briefly and sent up a fervent plea to whatever deity might prove most sympathetic: please, please, let this not be the conversation I'm afraid it is.

Below her, a lump of drapery was twitching with what could have been either anticipation or suppressed mirth. If Professor McGonagall intended to take this opportunity for a birds-and-bees shtick, Hermione thought she might explode from sheer Irony Overload.

She opened her mouth to say something - confirmation, denial; who knew? - but Professor McGonagall cut her off. "Oh, I know I don't need to go into detail with you, Hermione," she said, studying long white hands that must have been beautiful, once. When she looked up, her face was tense with kindness and worry. "I just want you to know that - well, I understand your position, more than you might think. And my ear is available to you, should you ever have need of it."

Oh. Impulsively, Hermione reached out and laced her fingers with McGonagall's. "Thanks," she said. "I may take you up on that sometime."

**

At the door, Minerva McGonagall turned back toward the bed. "Good luck with the Potions project," she said. "I've heard good things about it both from Professor Snape and from the Headmaster; it sounds like a very worthy goal."

"Thank you, Professor."

"Oh, and Miss Granger?"

Hermione bit her lip. "Yes, Professor?"

"You can wish Mr. Malfoy a happy Christmas from me." McGonagall's snapping black eyes were suddenly, inexplicably alive with knowing amusement. "Once he comes out from under the bed."

And with that, she swept out, shutting the door firmly behind her.

**