Roman Holiday

Chapter Sixty-Seven

He meant for her to laugh, and she wanted to - oh, did she ever. If there was anyone on earth who deserved to end up walking funny for the rest of his life, it was Lucius Malfoy.

But there were some major holes in Snape’s story that needed clearing up first - at the very least, Hermione thought, he’d been seriously disingenuous.

“Why didn’t you tell me that before, then?” she asked him stubbornly.

“Tell you what?”

She curled her lip at him. “That you and Sal had things all figured out. That there wasn’t a chance in hell of me ending up in Azkaban.”

He looked innocent - well, as innocent as was possible. “Didn’t I?”

Her lip-curl turned into a full-on glare. “No,” she said acidly, “you bloody well did not.”

“I told you not to worry.”

“But you knew I would.”

He glared back at her for a moment, summoning the full force of his Potions-Master ire; when she didn’t back down, he rolled his eyes and turned his attention to conjuring the buttons back onto the collar of his robes.

“Well, yes,” he said reluctantly. “But you had to worry. It was bad enough that Poppy sabotaged the Sneakoscope; bad enough that Sal had Malfoy scared enough to lose his breakfast on the way up to Dumbledore’s office. You, at least, had to be apprehensive enough to convince Fudge the inquest was on the level.”

Hermione goggled at him. “You mean … it was fixed?” She didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or hit him. “The five of you fixed the inquest?”

“Well, Minerva didn’t know anything about it,” Snape said, a touch defensively. “And nothing was said to Albus either, though I’m sure he had us figured out well beforehand.” He shook his head in what appeared to be disbelieving admiration. “Why else would he have had that … that thing enchanted in his office and ready to go?”

Hermione’s lips twitched. “You mean the Hula Dancer of Truth?”

Severus snorted. “Yes - that,” he said. “That’s no more a Sneakoscope than it is a unicorn horn. He bought it in a Muggle souvenir shop the last time he went on holiday, then brought it to a staff meeting and enchanted it to … uh, gyrate like that every time Binns said the word indubitably.”

Hermione’s mouth fell open.

Surreal.

“But - what’s the point?” she said faintly. “Why bother?” Snape raised one eyebrow.

“Oh, you’ve got enough Slytherin in you to figure that out,” he said. “Fudge is a loose cannon, and he’s in Malfoy’s pocket, right?”

Hermione nodded. “Right,” she said slowly.

“So what better way to defuse him, then to make him out as a liar before the inquest even starts?”

Snape finished buttoning his collar, propelled himself gracefully off the rumpled duvet, and began meticulously to brush wrinkles out of his robes.

“The one thing we had in our favour,” he said, “is that Malfoy had been in our custody at Hogwarts since the incident occurred, and hadn’t been able to confer with Fudge. Fudge had no idea what Malfoy would say - or, indeed, what had actually taken place - so there wasn’t a chance in a million that he was going to let Veritaserum be used, not in front of all those Aurors. There had to be a Sneakoscope in that bag - he would rather not have used anything at all, but he would have looked like even more of a fool if one of us had called him on that technicality and he hadn’t been prepared for it. And knowing Fudge, it probably was tampered with from the beginning; he looked mad as hell when Dumbledore brought out that ridiculous figurine, but you’ll remember that he didn’t seem particularly surprised.” He shrugged. “Poppy just made sure of what we already suspected, that’s all.”

“No Veritaserum?” Hermione grimaced. “That,” she said ruefully, “would have been useful information twelve hours ago, when I was plowing through that damn book instead of sleeping.”

“Book?” Snape looked momentarily distracted, then laughed unexpectedly. “You don’t mean to tell me you read When Potions Fail?” He looked contemptuous. “What utter rot.”

“You mean -” Hermione swallowed hard. “You can’t really fool the potion? The book’s not true?”

Her head was beginning to hurt, and the sardonic look he’d given her in reply to that bit of apparent naïveté didn’t help matters. She backtracked through the conversation until she found what she thought was the main point, and doggedly jumped on it again.

“Azkaban,” she said slowly. “Back to Azkaban. You told me that he wouldn’t send me there - but it sounds like all of you were worried, too.”

“I said,” Snape said testily, “that we wouldn’t have allowed it. As for what Fudge will and won’t do, that’s always a bit up in the air - or at least it was, before we subdued his witness and made him look like a liar in front of his Aurors.”

“Subdued his witness?” That sounded interesting. “What exactly did the two of you do to Malfoy, anyway, to make him look so sick this morning?” She narrowed her eyes suspiciously at him. “Not more Unforgivables?”

“Unforgivables? You wound me, milady.” Now he looked more amused than annoyed. “Give us some credit for imagination. Torture is a subtle art.”

“Torture?” Hermione echoed.

“A Hovering Charm, to be exact,” Snape clarified. “With a bit of random Rotation thrown in, just to keep it interesting.”

He paused for a moment of wicked, utterly satisfied self-reflection. “After all, how were we to know he’s afraid of heights?”

Hermione subsided into silence, digesting this. The image of Lucius Malfoy rotating in midair like a rotisserie chicken was funny - the thought of the sedate Madam Pomfrey teaming up with Sal and Snape to incapacitate Fudge’s Sneakoscope, on the other hand, was nothing short of unbelievable.

Indubitably, she thought, and had to stifle a snicker at the mental image of old Professor Binns droning on and on in his reedy voice, while Dumbledore’s cheap plastic souvenir did the bump-and-grind in the middle of the conference table and the rest of the faculty fought for composure.

Bizarre, really. And then there was Snape himself - relaxed, self-assured, his snarkiness intended to amuse, not to wound - and so gentle, so uncharacteristically tactful, in his deferral of her seduction attempt, that she’d ended up feeling more highly valued than before, and not unwanted in the slightest.

What had happened to him?

Maybe, a little voice in her brain whispered, he’s not changed, as much as your perception of him has. Hermione frowned.

Maybe.

“I need to ask you something,” she said, propping two of his pillows behind her and pulling the duvet back over her legs with a little sigh. He looked suspicious.

“What?”

“Do you know who Areli Ben-Nadir is?”

Whatever he’d expected her to say, that must not have been it; his look of puzzlement was genuine. “I’ve heard the name,” he said. “Why? Who is she?”

“She runs a program for advanced magical study in Cairo - I got an owl from her a few weeks ago,” Hermione said. “Professor Dumbledore sent her a sample of the Protection Potion, and now she wants me to come apprentice with her in Egypt next year.”

Snape’s face cleared. “I think I know of that program,” he said. “CCPMS, right?”

Hermione nodded, and Snape looked satisfied.

“I thought so. She has an associate by the name of Friedrich von Fluegel - one of Durmstrang’s Arithmantic enfants terribles - who’s formulated a magical version of the chaos theory. I was at a symposium with him, a few summers ago, and managed to finagle a copy of his paper. Brilliant.” He gave her a sideways look. “According to him, they’re unusually well-funded for a research group. Is she offering you money?”

Hermione nodded. “Loads.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Are you going to take it?”

“I don’t know,” Hermione said truthfully. “I’ve been trying to figure that out.” She sent him a sideways glance. “Do you think I should?”

He raised one shoulder in a careful little shrug. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

Oh, now she’d done it - he’d gone all closed-off and unreadable again. “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know,” she persisted. “I trust your opinion - what would you do, if it was your decision to make?”

“If it was me? In your position? I’d have posted my acceptance before the owl had turned around,” Snape said. A tinge of the old self-denigration was back in his tone. “But then, I was a very different person from you, when I was eighteen.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Hermione said, surprising herself. “Sometimes I think we’re more alike than not.”

He made a noncommittal sound in his throat. “Maybe. But I didn’t have close friends, or a significant other who hung on my every word. I didn’t have two magical patents on file with the Ministry of Magic. And -“ here he looked sardonic - “I didn’t have a Head Girl letter with my name on it sitting on Dumbledore’s desk, waiting to be owled the minute spring term was up.”

Hermione’s eyebrows shot up. That was news, though considering the events of the morning, it seemed oddly anticlimactic.

In any case, Snape had tossed it out as if it was a foregone conclusion, and was studying her thoughtfully. “You’ve got good things waiting for you, Hermione,” he said, “no matter where you go - which means your decision’s that much harder.”

Another shrug, accompanied by a cynical twist of his mouth that, for a split second, gave Hermione a direct window into the face of the boy he’d once been. “You’re just going to have to decide,” he said matter-of-factly, “what it is that you want more.”

**

After that, the conversation fell into a lull - Hermione was feeling drowsy again, despite what her wristwatch told her had been a two-hour nap - and apparently Snape had papers to grade; out of the corner of her eye, she watched him settle himself at a graceful little Louis Quinze writing-table with a stack of parchment, a raven quill, and a bottle of red ink. She folded her hands behind her head, rubbed her cheek against the soft wales of the corduroy duvet, and smiled.

Judging from the faces he was making, the considered cruelty of the smirk at the corner of his mouth as he lifted his pen, the owners of those essays were going to be sadder but wiser, come Monday morning. Apparently he hadn’t lost his edge just yet.

That being the case, she was beginning to think he maybe had a soft spot for her.

Good, she thought, and had just about drifted off into another sandalwood dream when the hearth glowed green and Dumbledore stepped serenely out of it.

“Begging your pardon, Severus,” he said, “but the panel is out of deliberations. Fudge is ready to pronounce sentence - we’re just waiting on Miss Granger.” He smiled in her direction. “Feeling better, Hermione?”

She smiled weakly in response. Well, she thought, I was until now.

“I’ll be ready in a minute,” she said, and resolutely swallowed the pack of manic butterflies making a beeline for her throat. “Just let me pull myself together.”

**