LAST TANGO IN PARIS
Chapter Thirty-Nine

A million things happened at once, some of them completely unrelated to the matter at hand. Such is the way of the world.

Among the pertinent:

Martina Granger, in the midst of her morning crossword, froze with her pen halfway to 13 Across (Negates strongly), set it down on the table, then shook her head slightly as if to clear it and took another sip of tea, engulfed by a sudden strong urge to look through her photograph albums and – just as suddenly – utterly mystified as to why she’d given her favourite one away to that strange young medical researcher who’d come round to interview her the other night.

You’re getting old, Martina, she told herself, amused, and took the time to spread her toast with marmalade before returning to the crossword, and the answer she’d been about to write: denies.

A silver photo-frame on the Weasleys’ mantel, housing the image of a smiling red-headed boy in Hogwarts robes and a Head Boy badge, shimmered for a minute and then realigned, its shiny surface now home to four engraved words instead of two.

(The new inscription: Beloved Son And Husband.)

The man who had walked into a bar – not presently wearing his trench coat, but rather a pair of blue-and-white-striped cotton pajamas – frowned and murmured in his sleep.

At a desk in a hidden office, far underneath the city of Cairo, a goblin smiled and raised her coffee-cup in silent salute.

And Bettina Thrush – once the longtime caretaker of the Fourth Floor, now careening toward an increasingly-more-comfortable retirement as the grateful Mr. Malfoy’s personal assistant – heard him gasp a familiar name – "Hermione?" – and froze with her ear still pressed to his office door.

A tense few minutes later, she had ascertained exactly which patient folders were missing from her meticulous files, and – grateful for once that Mr. Malfoy had put in phones, to supplement the old Interoffice Floo – was flipping hastily through her Rolodex for an international number she hadn’t dialed for at least six months.

"Sophie," she said, hand cupped over the mouthpiece. "Bettina here." A pause, and a grim smile.

"You’re going to want to alert him," she said. "It’s about to happen again."

**

By lunchtime, the necessary paperwork was completed and locked in Draco’s office safe, and the thrill of reunion was rapidly giving way to the need for stealthy haste. A letter had been owled to Dumbledore, and Neville and Joséphine were back in Paris, the better to place a series of wards on Hermione’s flat in the Rue des Arènes. Best to go ahead and break Sal’s bit of the Fidelius, they’d all decided, and put the address back into the public domain; that way, they’d have forewarning the minute the Knights of the Golden Wand picked up their trail.

Draco had stayed behind at St. Mungo’s to make a few calls to the nearest Muggle hospital regarding the loan of the equipment they’d need for the tests, to re-establish contact with Areli at the Consortium’s new offices in Cairo, and to arrange a safe-house for the Longbottoms. It wouldn’t do, he’d pointed out, for their test subjects to go missing, or worse, while they got all their ducks in a row.

Sal, whiskers bristling with unholy excitement, had taken himself off to the Fourth Floor to stand guard in the meantime.

And Hermione herself, despite initial protests that she could be doing a million more useful things elsewhere, was back in Montana, with Snape.

They sat at the kitchen table, wrapped in wary, all-too-knowledgeable silence, and ate the reheated beef Stroganoff that Sal had intended for last night’s dinner. Hermione kept her eyes carefully averted, and noticed that Snape did the same. Once, they both looked up at the same time, and their glances met and held with an almost-audible click; in the next instant, they’d both flushed a guilty brick red and ducked back into their lunch.

She wasn’t sure how to name the feeling that kept creeping over her when she looked at him. The cool objectivity that had been hers while her memory was lost – wherein he’d been just a man, albeit a darkly intriguing one, with whose body her own had reacted in incendiary and unexpected ways – had vanished along with the cloud-cover of the Obliviate. Now that she had herself back again, she’d lost her handle on him.

On the other hand, he didn’t look any more comfortable than she felt. Which was its own form of consolation. She watched him stab a strip of green pepper with his fork and swirl it around in a stray pool of cream sauce, then consume it – adroitly, but with scant evidence of enjoyment. He’d been wearing the same faintly-aggrieved expression since they’d arrived back at the cabin.

Part of her found this endearing. The rest of her, recognising it for the evasion it was, was drumming its metaphorical fingertips on the table … and gathering its courage for a frontal assault.

"What do we do now?" she asked finally, more to break the silence than in any real expectation of an answer. He looked up, shrugged, and stabbed another slice of pepper.

"Wait."

"For what?"

Another upward flick of his eyes, this time with a hint of annoyance. "For something to happen," he said, laying down his fork. "For Sal to find the papers he’s looking for. For someone to breach the wards on the flat in Paris. For Draco to locate the machines you need, and deliver them somewhere safe so you can get started with your research."

Hermione considered this new thought with interest. "Mm. Cairo, do you think?"

Severus snorted and jerked a thumb toward the kitchen doorway. "Hardly. My study, more like." He picked up his water glass, contemplated its depths, and set it down again untouched. "More’s the pity. Merlin knows it was bad enough having Longbottom himself sleeping on my sofa, without having to play nursemaid to his vegetable parents now as well."

Hermione glared at him. "It’s unfair to call them that," she said. "They came by their condition honourably."

A twist of his expressive mouth. "A fact which doesn’t change the condition itself – now, does it? Don’t play politically-correct with me, Miss Granger; it’s a game I’ve never been able to abide."

I’d forgotten, thought Hermione, how much he pisses me off, most of the time. How could I have blocked that out? "Not Miss Granger," she said, clenching her jaw so tightly that she could feel the muscles tick in protest. "Mrs. Weasley. In case you didn’t remember."

"Oh, I remember, all right." A faint, deliberate smirk. "Though I think you, of all people, are rather ill-equipped to lecture me on issues of memory."

This, as well-timed a verbal dart as he’d ever aimed, was delivered in his most satiny of whispers. Hermione remembered this tone of voice rather well; she could hear it now, floating down the corridors of her subconscious in delightedly malicious echoes from the Potions classroom: Ah. Miss Granger – how unexpected. A pause for the Slytherins’ obligatory snicker. Do enlighten us, won’t you?

Detention – that was another word she associated with this tone, yes … that, and his cruellest cut of all: I see no difference. At the time, Hermione-the-schoolgirl had assumed he found genuine pleasure in tormenting her, and reacted accordingly. Now, with so much water under the bridge that she might have died and reincarnated herself in the interval, she merely rolled her eyes and waved the sarcasm away.

"Nothing wrong with my memory now," she said, in as mild a tone as she could muster, and answered his suspicious glance with an innocent look: who, me? "Everything’s coming through quite clearly – and it’s not as if the new’s pushed out by the old, either." She took a sip of water. "Take two nights ago, for instance. I remember quite a lot about that."

He went very still. "Do you, now."

"Indeed," Hermione said, feeling suddenly reckless. "A tall dark stranger made me a declaration. Not the sort of thing a girl forgets."

A muscle ticked in his cheek. "Some things are better left unremembered."

"Train’s left the station on that count, don’t you think?"

That had come out more shrilly than she’d intended; sarcasm made for thin gilding on an urgency this great. Hermione wanted to look away from him, but didn’t dare.

"So," she said. "Did you mean it? Or not?"

**

He stabbed a chunk of beef and put it in his mouth without answering her, presumably to buy himself a few seconds’ thinking time; Hermione could almost see the wheels turning behind those dark, implacable eyes as he chewed, swallowed at length, and took a deliberate sip from his water goblet. Finally, he met her eyes and shrugged.

"I find," he said, "that life is short enough as it is, without cluttering the air with words I don’t mean." Another pause; Hermione thought him about to continue, but he only clamped his lips together and settled back in his chair.

Typical.

"Well?" she prompted, impatient, and immediately wished she hadn’t as his carefully-blank face arranged itself into more-familiar, more-sardonic lines.

"Well, what?"

Only one way out of this hole, Hermione decided, and picked up her conversational shovel with gritted teeth. "Well, what do we do about it?" she asked, knowing even before the words were uttered that they’d be greeted with a contemptuously arched eyebrow and another one of those Gallic shrugs.

They were.

"Why should we do anything about it?" He was toying with the heavy sterling handle of his coffee spoon, his long steady fingers tracing the intricate scrollwork of the design while his eyes, cool and shuttered, never left hers. Hermione let out a little huff of annoyance, and saw his gaze spark with an instant of speculative humour.

He’s playing with me, she thought, and curled her lip at him.

"That’s an excellent question," she snapped. He bit the inside of his cheek, presumably to suppress a smile. "And stop smirking at me! This isn’t something to laugh about!"

Immediately he sobered. "No, it’s not, is it," he said, and his voice was so uncharacteristically gentle that Hermione’s mouth fell open. "But you’ll forgive me if I take what humour I can from the situation. We were at a similar crossroads some years ago, you and I – need I remind you how that turned out?"

"It’s not the same," Hermione said, her throat burning. Snape sent her a long, level look.

"Isn’t it?" The coffee spoon clattered to the table; neither of them glanced at it. "Look at me," he said,"—really look at me, Hermione, and see what’s there, instead of what you want to be there. And then, if you’re able, take a long hard look at yourself, and tell me – regardless of the passage of time and the events that fill it, are that woman and that man really well-suited to each other?"

Hermione stared at him, stony-faced, for a long tense moment, then dropped her eyes to the table.

A basket of Sal’s five-grain dinner rolls sat, as yet untouched, at her elbow. She chose one, split it, buttered it methodically, set down her knife – then drew back her arm and threw it at him. It hit him in the middle of the forehead, butter side first, and bounced.

"Look at you?" she asked, incredulous. "Look at you, and see what’s there? You utter, utter bastard. How dare you condescend to me?"

Later, she’d wish for a camera; the sight of Severus Snape sitting speechless and open-mouthed at a butcher-block kitchen table with butter all over his forehead would have fetched unheard-of amounts at silent auction. Right now, however, she was on a roll.

So to speak.

"You think I’m some whinging little romantic?" she demanded. "You think I don’t know exactly who and what you are? All personal interaction aside, I sat in your class for six years, and if that didn’t give me an inside handle on your less commodious aspects, I don’t know what would. You’re an autocratic, self-indulgent, inflexible prick of a human being, and I’ve known that all along."

He opened his mouth. She threw the other half of the roll at him.

"No, don’t." Somehow, she was on her feet, her napkin sliding off her lap into a disconsolate origami puddle under the table. "It’s you who doesn’t know me. If you did—"

"—Oh, don’t I?" He pushed back his chair and glared at her from across the table. "Let’s not forget who’s had a direct line in to the Granger Subconscious for the last four and a half months, shall we? I’ve seen more of what goes on in your grubby little brain than I care to, believe me."

"That being the case," Hermione snapped, "I’m surprised you didn’t see the Obliviate coming. Or is it just that you like me better when I’m out of my mind?"

For a moment, utter silence – and then a deafening crash, as a rather heavy kitchen table went careening across the room and into the opposite wall. Hermione, mouth already opened for the next volley, froze in mid-breath, took one look at the wizard advancing toward her with his wand out … and then turned and ran.

She got as far as the kitchen doorway.

**