Hermione Granger's concentration was broken by a persistent scratching at the window of her office, an abrasive noise that brought the drumming of the winter rain back to the forefront of her conscious mind. Sighing a little, she looked up to see a brown and white speckled post owl clinging precariously to the window ledge, its outline blurred by streaming water and the rapidly failing daylight.

Not that it had been very strong to begin with, she thought wryly, as she reached for her wand and muttered Lumos. The ambient light in the room increased a notch and the scraping of the owl's claws became more insistent. Easing out from behind her desk, she went to the window and opened it. The bird flew inside in a squall of wind and water. Hermione hastily closed the window and turned to find that several, very soggy packages had been deposited on top of her papers. The owl, having delivered itself of its burden, hopped to the edge of the desk and flapped its wings, like a very small, very wet dog shaking itself off. A shower of droplets hit Hermione's work and small, pale inkblots began to form on the uppermost parchment. The owl looked at her expectantly.

"After that performance, you still expect me to feed you?" she asked, her irritation only half feigned.

The owl blinked once and didn't move.

"I'll take that as 'yes', then."

Crossing back to her desk, she opened a container full of owl treats and pulled out a handful. The owl blinked again.

"The desk is wet enough already," she pointed out. "If you want these, you're going to have to come back to the window."

The owl obediently took off, overtaking her so that it was perched and ready for her by the time she reached the window. Giving it only enough time to wolf down the scattered treats, she put her hand on the catch and opened the window again, flinching against the weather's fresh onslaught. The owl contrived to look reproachful.

"Out," she ordered it, firmly.

It took flight with as close to a flounce as a bird was capable of.

Hermione shut the window again and wiped the water from her face.

Sighing again, she looked at the mess on her desk. As her train of thought was now well and truly interrupted, she decided that she might as well have a cup of coffee. She wandered over to the fireplace, which, instead of the customary fire, held a cast iron stove. She picked up the coffee pot and tested its weight, judging that there was just about enough left for one more cup. She collected her mug from the desk and poured the remnants of the pot into it. Cradling the rough earthenware, she sipped at the strong black liquid meditatively. The taste for coffee strong enough to caulk timbers was a legacy of her final year at school and was now so firmly established that she had almost forgotten the time when she hadn't drunk it. Almost.

She sat back down, pushing the wet post to one side, and looked resignedly at the essay in front of her. The page which she had been reading was now smeared to indecipherability. For a moment she had contemplated leaving it like that, and ascribing the damage to tears of uncontrollable joy, but the sad truth was that Miss Lucinda Crampington would not appreciate her treatise on the Legality and Morality of Memory Charms being returned to her looking as if it had been used as a dishcloth. Not only was Miss Crampington's prose leaden and her arguments poorly presented, she had absolutely no sense of humour. Shifting her coffee to her other hand, Hermione picked up her wand, pointed at the page and murmured, "Restoratio". The parchment dried out, the ink splotches faded and the words reformed themselves in a readable form.

Duty done, Hermione abandoned Miss Crampington's rescued words of wisdom in favour of the more interesting owl delivery. She tossed a couple of damp journals to one side for later reading, and concentrated on the two other envelopes. One was large, brown and rectangular and she could see that it was from her mother. The other was long and pink and addressed in an unfamiliar hand. She dried them both off.

She would open the one from her mother first, she decided. It intrigued her; it was too late for a birthday card and too early for Christmas. Opening the envelope, she pulled out a large piece of card with a picture of an angel on it. Not a cute cartoon angel with wings, a halo and a long white nightdress, but a golden, pre-Raphaelite angel with voluminous robes, abundant hair and a seraphic face. Printed across the picture in neat white type and in no apparent order, were the numbers one to twenty five. Each number corresponded to small square perforations in the card. Hermione turned the card over. Her mother had written on the back:

Darling,
I know you haven't had an advent calendar since you were little, but I saw this and I thought of you, especially since your father and I aren't going to be at home this Christmas. I hope this will take your mind off this awful weather.

Lots of love

Mum.

Hermione smiled. Only her mother would ever see an angel and think of her. She might wear robes a lot, and she certainly had the hair for it, if the picture was anything to go by, but there the resemblance ended. She turned the card back over and looked for the number one. Finding it by the bottom left hand corner, she picked carefully at the perforations, opening the door to reveal a picture of a star, a small detail from an oil painting. She propped the calendar on her desk.

That just left the mysterious pink envelope. She couldn't begin to speculate as to the sender; of all her correspondents, both regular and intermittent, she could safely say that none of them were the pink envelope sort. For a moment, she wondered if it was a rare owl mis-delivery. But no. It was clearly addressed to her.

Miss H. Granger
Senior Lecturer in Magical Ethics
Amergin College
University of Oxford

There was nothing for it. She was just going to have to open it.

The headed notepaper inside made her blink. And not just because it was an even more violent shade of pink that the envelope.

From the desk of Ms Parvati Patil,
Editor-in-chief
Ms Magic Magazine
The Magazine for the Twenty-First Century Witch.

Hermione blinked again.

She had seen Ms Magic Magazine on the shelves next to Witch Weekly and the like, but had always passed swiftly over it. She wasn't quite certain which piece of information her brain was reluctant to fully process; the fact that Parvati Patil was the editor-in-chief or that fact that Parvati Patil and/or Ms Magic Magazine were writing to her. Both seemed equally implausible.

She read on.

Darling Hermione!

Hermione blinked once more. She couldn't help it. Since when had she and Parvati been on "darling" terms?

Remember me!! Parvati from school! That's silly, of course you remember me! You know I always said I wanted to go into fashion? Well, I did! And now I'm editor-in-chief of Ms Magic Magazine! Isn't that just amazing! Wouldn't McGonagall be surprised if she knew?! And can you imagine what Snape would say??!!

She certainly could. She imagined that something to the effect that Parvati's grasp of punctuation appeared to have come to a standstill at the exclamation mark would come into it. She returned her attention to the letter with a growing mixture of horror and fascination.

Well, Hermie darling, - Hermione suppressed a shudder - the thing is this. I've been thinking for the longest time about how I can make Triple M just the most successful magazine ever, and I was thinking about school and all my old friends and then I had a brilliant idea! Do you remember that utterly amazing stuff you used to make for us at school? The shampoos and creams and conditioners and things? I miss those even now!

Hermione was beginning not to like the way this was heading.

So, my proposition is this. How would you like to make some more of that stuff - in commercial quantities - and we'll market it under the Triple M label. Obviously, we'd pay you something for it - and I'm sure that you could do with a bit extra if you're only on a lecturer's salary!

Hermione gritted her teeth.

Let me know a.s.a.p. if you're interested. I need an answer pretty soon as I want to put a package together to take to my board. I do hope you'll say yes, because I just know they're all going to love the idea!
Hope to hear from you soon.

Your friend,

Parvati

Hermione put the letter down very slowly. It was astonishing, she thought, how Parvati could switch from gushing pseudo-teen speak to a commercial proposition in a few dizzying paragraphs. The deconstruction of the style of the letter gave her mind a few essential moments to comprehend some other aspects of the proposal.

Well, one other aspect of the proposal to be precise.

Severus Snape. And the aftermath of a very strange few months at the beginning of her final year.

They had been ... companions in adversity might be the best term for it. Friends of a sort, perhaps. After "it" was all over they had maintained the expected open hostility in public and avoided any other form of contact. Then Voldemort had finally been defeated and they had progressed to a kind of guarded cordiality. A few letters had been exchanged during her time as a student; requests for information, double checking an argument or a conclusion, never anything more personal. Time passed, the letters dwindled and Hermione, for her part, found herself increasingly reluctant to revisit a situation that ten years of hindsight told her was capable of so many different sensible and logical interpretations. So she corresponded with him about twice a year, drank her coffee strong and black, used a stove not an open fire, and had generally got on with her life. And if there was a hint of regret buried inside, she was wise enough not to dwell on it.

The letter from Parvati changed things somewhat. Not the least because it hadn't actually been she who had founded her small cosmetics empire. Neither had she forgotten that the profits from the enterprise had all been paid into her Gringott's vault. If she just accepted Parvati's proposal - and that was a big if, she reminded herself - she would once again be profiting from Snape's work.

Simple decency required that she put the proposition to him before she responded to Parvati.

She reached across her desk for a clean piece of parchment and a fresh quill. This was going to be an interesting letter to write.

Dear Severus,

She had never returned to "Professor Snape" in their private correspondence.

She chewed the end of her quill in thought.

Today I received a ....

What would be the word for this? Bizarre? Terrifying? Deranged?

She started again.

I don't know if you remember Parvati Patil from my class at school, but today I received an unexpected letter from her, which I enclose. I apologise for the colour, but trust that it is self-explanatory.
As it was you who actually started making the cosmetics that she refers to, I thought that the offer should be made to you as well. I haven't replied to her yet. Perhaps you would let me know your thoughts on the matter.

With best wishes