The clock struck 13; one of Dumbledore's conceits, signalling the end of the day, although Snape was sure no-one else noticed. Too subtle to notice, unless you were expecting it - generally, the melée only spotted it when a dance was held on the 30th. Rather hard to overlook a clock striking 30.

Midnight. Perhaps now he could go to bed, get some sleep, try not to think about how Hermione had felt in his arms as they danced. Try not to think of the memories that had re-surfaced, oddly skewed by the shift in perspective. Try not to think about the fact that she had spent so much of the evening with that buffoon, Queroz.

Snape took scant pleasure in noticing that Hermione had slipped away from the dance alone, immediately after they had danced. She had, after all, been on the verge of leaving when he had approached her to dance. Few others had left, so far, ebbing and flowing in a congested mass of bodies in the room before him.

"How goes it, Severus?"

The voice came from his left and Snape resisted, barely, the urge to close his eyes and grimace. A banal question and he had no recollection of ever inviting the speaker to use his first name. He settled for an abrupt exhalation before he turned to the speaker.

"A ballroom full of teenage hormones, Queroz. How else would it go but badly?"

The acid required no effort to conjure. The man standing beside him was sufficient inspiration; tall, dark and handsome would no doubt be the usual description with, again no doubt, some comment about his personality. Affable, perhaps. Charming, of course.

Pain in the bloody neck, definitely. But Snape thought he might be alone in that particular description.

"Not an admirer of young love?"

Good grief, the man could ask the most asinine of questions. What was he doing here, anyway? Snape had expected that he had killed the tendency to small talk last year; Queroz had largely left him alone after attempting some initial forays into conversation when he had originally arrived.

"If any students were indeed in love, perhaps it could be admired. Although, speaking personally, I find nothing admirable in an emotion which is chiefly manifest in profoundly stupid actions and inevitably results in one person irritating another. That aside, what is undoubtedly taking place on the floor in front of us owes rather more to lust than any so-called finer emotion. All it will do is distract them - whether it goes well or badly - and consequently make my next few lessons even more of a trial as I try to prevent some love-sick idiot from blowing the castle and all of us from this world to the next. So, no, Queroz, I am not an admirer of young love."

The DADA teacher simply laughed, and Snape could feel his teeth grinding painfully. He wondered whether the stressed enamel could be heard by others, or whether it was a cacophony for his ears alone.

"Surely they're not all idiots, Severus? The young woman you danced with just now, Miss Granger, for example ..." the question trailed off.

Finally, thought Snape. There had to be some reason for Queroz to have sought him out; he rather thought it had just been unveiled.

"Miss Granger? She is no longer a student but I am certain that she is just as capable of making an idiot of herself over a man as any another woman," he drawled. At Queroz's look of pleasure, Snape winced inwardly. He was tired, slipping, or he would have realised that Queroz would interpret that comment to his advantage.

"You think so? I suppose you know her well, as she's working in the dungeons with you."

What was the man after? A written invitation from Snape to pursue Hermione? He seemed to be doing well enough without one. It was past time for this conversation to end.

"Miss Granger has been provided with laboratory space in the dungeons of this school. I neither know nor care what she does with that space. I would suggest that you direct your questions to Professor McGonagall. Miss Granger was, after all, Gryffindor." Snape punctuated the statement with a low glower before turning and stalking out of the Hall. Supervision duties be damned, and he rather thought that they had ended at midnight anyway.

He stalked through the corridors of the school with characteristic stealth and malevolence, torn between a desire to find someone - something, anything - to punish and an equal desire to encounter no-one. Pity it was too late in the year for the roses to be blooming.

He snorted, startling the picture that he was passing at the time. The young girl in the portrait whirled around, gasping silently and then subsided as she saw the tall figure in black scowl and mutter to himself. "A perfect metaphor, all told." She watched him retreat down the corridor, all precise movements and frustrated energy, and wondered just what it was that he was upset about now. He rarely seemed to be anything other than unhappy but this was unusual, even for him, these days. She slipped from the frame in search of other news, other rumours.

The corridors were silent, students all either in the Hall or in bed. Snape chose not to speculate as to whether they were in the right beds. Much as he would have liked it to be different, when he reached the dungeons no House had fewer points than they had started with at midnight. The echo of silence picked up as the ceilings grew lower with each passing step, the soft rustle of his cloak and dull step of his boots on the stone floor amplified by temper and self-disgusted awareness.

Snape found himself in Hermione's lab at last. She was no doubt asleep, elsewhere; the room was empty of her physical presence for all that she was evident everywhere. Notes in a careful handwriting familiar from her letters were stacked on the desk, ingredients ordered in a characteristic fashion - identical to his own, a point that brought back memories faster than anything else about the lab when he realised it.

Suddenly Snape looked down at his hands, half-checking to make sure that they still were his hands, that they hadn't suddenly metamorphosed in a pair rather less masculine. The sense of the past, history unspoken, permeated the stone walls and careful order in experimentation set out in front of him. Months of experimentation, more desperate, more futile than this exercise in consumerism were written in the chill damp air and no less present for the passage of years.

Why now? Why notice it now? He had been working in here for the past few nights, checking and refining Hermione's work - not that she had apparently noticed. Churlish of him to find it annoying that she hadn't, as he had been careful to remove all evidence of that work - apart from his self-tests, although even those apparently weren't in evidence, for all the reaction he had had from her; he wasn't inclined to think that the testing had made all that much of a difference to his appearance but, in the end, it didn't really matter. Much of this was smoke and mirrors in any case, and more than half of those who tried out the promises either didn't need them or wouldn't use the potions for as long as necessary to have the desired effect. Charms were so much quicker, if completely ineffective below the glamour and surface. He was half-surprised that Ms Patil hadn't chosen to package charms for her magazine - instant superficial results seemed more likely to appeal to her. But then, the success of charms depended on the caster; no amount of packaging and explanation would make them work for those without talent. Potions were more egalitarian in that aspect; as long as the potion maker knew what they were doing, the abilities - and more likely lack of abilities - of the user were irrelevant.

This potion maker knew what she was doing; always had done. The neat annotations to the recipes were unnecessary proof of that, but Snape scanned them again, concentrating on the ideas and experiments, trying to put out of his mind the recollections that the dance had pulled to the fore. No success; the handwriting simply drew the memories further into the night around him, images circling him.