LAST TANGO IN PARIS
Chapter Thirty

Severus wasn’t exactly thrilled with the state of his household, upon returning from Cairo. For one thing, he had two guests too many, and they weren’t his favourite people on the planet by any stretch of the imagination. Worse - for a couple of urbanites circumstantially stuck in the sticks - they looked irritatingly content, nay, blissful. He thought he knew why, too - Joséphine Dessources might play her romantic cards close to that capacious, well-defined chest of hers, but Longbottom’s discretion came harder won; he had the stunned, disbelieving air of a man who had fallen asleep in the Catskills, á là Rip van Winkle, and woken up in Caesar’s Palace.

That - that look of shocked, I’m-going-to-wake-up-any-minute-now-somebody-pinch-me-please awe - that was the most annoying bit of all. If Severus couldn’t act on his own desires, it was a sure bet that he didn’t want anyone else getting laid, either.

And then there was Sal, who had returned from Hogwarts much more subdued than was ordinarily his wont - apparently his research hadn’t gone as well as he had hoped. Severus, worried, had broken a lifelong habit of feigned indifference to inquire after him ("Everything all right, then?") and gotten only a terse nod in reply. Even making dinner - normally the pinnacle of Sal’s day, made even more euphoric an act of gastronomic theatre now that he had an audience of four - hadn’t cheered him up. Now, from the tiny broom-closet Severus had painstakingly Expanded into a laboratory, he could hear the piqued sounds of deliberate crashing; Sal was taking out his annoyance on the washing-up.

Disturbing to his equilibrium as all this was, it was nothing compared to his concern over Hermione - as always, she’d managed to worm her way out of the sideshow acts and onto centre stage. She’d been silent on the way out of Gringotts, made herself scarce before dinner, and had only shown up halfway through the pudding course, rain-soaked and red-eyed and bearing along with her carefully-guarded packet of letters a look of chin-jutting determination he knew only too well. Clearly she’d made a decision of some sort, and it was all he could do, after the morning’s events, not to jerk her away from her caramel flan and demand to know what she was thinking.

As it turned out, however, he hadn’t long to wait for enlightenment. There was a knock on his study door, a perfunctory pause, and then she slipped into the laboratory, wary and watchful as a child ghost. For a moment, she might have been a first- or second-former, and he back in his immaculate dungeon classroom, cynically awaiting her inevitable, earnest queries about whatever it was they’d covered that day - could he recommend any additional reading, would he mind if she followed up with an experiment of her own using similar ingredients as substitutions, might she possibly add another scroll to her report?

He thought about the responses with which he’d greeted her overtures, nine times out of ten, and smiled grimly to himself. Perhaps it wasn’t such a tragedy that some memories, at least, were presently beyond her reach.

"Do you have a moment?" she asked, snapping him back to the present. He slipped what he’d been working on out of sight underneath a splayed-open Brewer’s Journal of the Alchemical Arts, put on a look of long-suffering, as if he hadn’t spent an impatient half-hour waiting for precisely this interruption, and sighed.

"Apparently."

She shut the door behind her, eyed him uncertainly, opened her mouth, and closed it again. Severus arched one eyebrow.

"Shall I say ‘Once upon a time?’" he queried nastily. "Maybe that would shake something loose in there."

Bastard, her gaze said, but she didn’t look nearly so apprehensive now. "I’ve spent the afternoon going through Bill’s letters."

"And?" His eyes dropped to the envelope in her hand. "You’ve come for show and tell, I suppose?"

"This one was unopened," she said, turning it over and over in her fingers as if it was a talisman. "I read it for the first time today." A deep, steadying breath. "It’s about you."

This rattled him a bit, though he wasn’t about to show her that. "How random. I can’t imagine why."

Her head came up with a snap, and he saw with a start that her eyes were blazing. "You didn’t tell me everything."

Oh, yes, he thought - now this was vintage Hermione, not the first-former anymore but the self-assured, not-even-remotely-intimidated-by-him harridan she’d been after her adventure in Rome, cutting right through all the niceties and directly to the matter at hand. "No?"

"No." She thrust the envelope under his nose as if it contained a death warrant. "You haven’t even come close."

Severus regarded the envelope warily, but made no move to take it.

"Miss Granger," he said in his most repressive, professorial tones, "if you feel yourself kept in the dark, perhaps it’s time for me to remind you once again that you brought all this on yourself. Your ignorance of your own personal life is hardly my problem, now is it?"

She flinched, then rallied sufficiently to glare at him.

"As if I haven’t had that pounded home to me enough already today," she said irritably. "Look - I’m not trying to saddle you with the responsibility for this mess; I’m well aware that I got myself into it all on my own. I just want to understand, that’s all."

She shrugged impatiently. "Anything. Everything. It’s hard to explain. Here."

She was waggling the envelope under his nose again. Severus, overcome by foreboding, took it reluctantly. "What’s in it?"

"Just read it, will you?"

He would have recognised Bill Weasley’s handwriting even without a signature - the only child in that family to possess talent, creativity and inclination for the subject all three, he’d been one of Severus’ best students. Somewhere in his files, he still had one of Bill’s essays, a neatly-crafted little gem on the various uses of powdered willowfine. It had been that rarity of written student assignments - a pleasure to read.

Somehow, he didn’t think he was going to be so lucky with this sample.

He read it through twice, then took his time refolding it. It took him two tries to get it back in the envelope. "Why did you show me this?"

If she was surprised by his shaken tone, she didn’t show it. "I thought you should see it."

He felt the beginnings of a migraine coming on. "Why on earth would I want to? It’s got nothing whatsoever to do with me."

"Liar." She swept the letter off his desk and held it protectively against her body. "It’s got everything to do with you, whether you choose to admit it or not. And I want to know if it’s true."

"I’m hardly the man to tell you," Severus said harshly. "Bill Weasley’s the only one who could have answered that question with any degree of accuracy at all. And you’ve managed to kill even the memory of him. A bit late to be curious now, don’t you think?"

She paled at the deliberate cruelty of this cut, but didn’t back down. "I know he thought it was true," she said steadily. "But I want to know if it really was."

Her voice shook a little on the last word; she bit her lip to steady herself, and leaned a little closer. "Was I in love with you?" she wanted to know. "Were you in love with me?"

Bloody hell.

**

There were probably millions of ways in which those two questions could be asked, Severus mused. Hermione Granger chose to ask them looming at him over the top of his desk, small hands fisted firmly atop the reading he’d been set to begin that afternoon and hadn’t gotten to, nostrils flared and brown eyes narrowed to gimlets: the truth, said those eyes, or the consequences. You choose.

Incongruous as this might have seemed to the casual observer, it reminded Severus so strongly of the pre-Obliviate, pre-Fidelius Hermione that he could have cheered. He didn’t, of course - mostly because there was another voice taking up space in his head at the same time. This one was his own, but so excited, so charged with urgency that he hardly recognised it: you let her walk away once before, it said, and look what’s happened - the gods threw her back in your lap. You have her damaged now, when you might have had her whole. Are you going to let it happen again?

It wasn’t easy arguing with that logic, but he tried. This isn’t the time. Or the place. I might not even be the man.

You keep telling yourself that, but the proof is standing right in front of you. When are you going to admit that it’s meant to be, and take what’s yours?

"Now," he said aloud, surprising himself. Hermione frowned at him, more out of bewilderment than irritation.

"’Now?’ What’s that supposed to mean?" She scowled, wiping hair out of her eyes. "Not to spell it out for you, but I was rather hoping for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’."

Severus barely heard her for the rushing of blood in his ears. That long-buried devil’s-advocate bit of him, scenting victory, pushed harder: You caused all this, in a way. Here’s your chance to make it right.

"What a pity," he said thoughtfully, reaching out to grasp her by her shoulders. She goggled at him, stunned.

"What? What’s a pity?"

He came out of his seat and yanked her a little closer - oh yes, this felt good, this felt very good indeed, and she felt good too, glorious mess of hang-ups and pheromones and world-class contradictions that she was. What a pair we are, eh?

"Limiting yourself to ‘yes’ or ‘no’," he said, and was astonished to feel his facial muscles stretching into the largely unfamiliar territory of a full-out grin. "When there’s such a world of possibilities in between."

He bent to kiss her, and she let him do it.

**