LIONHEART

by A. Vulgarweed

(Usual disclaimers: JKR rulz, I droolz. The sequel to "Ravenous." I had hoped this would turn out to be a series of short stories that would stand on its own, but alas, this one will make a lot more sense if you read that one first. The tale has grown in the telling, and this is not the last story in the series by a long shot. This one, in which moral ground gets shakier still, is rated NC-17 for violent point-of-view shifts and a left-field plot twist.)

"So what do you think about this? It should be nearly ready if I've done everything correctly." The Head of Gryffindor looked up at the much younger wizard leaning against the wall with his arms folded--her tutor at the moment.

The Head of Slytherin looked at the bubbling golden plasma in the cauldron first, then at the copious spills and crumbs on the lab table, then at the notes spread everywhere. For some reason, he hadn't expected the Deputy Headmistress to make such a mess of his laboratory. "The colour looks just about right," he said. "I still think it's audacious. I'd be very surprised to learn anyone's seriously attempted to brew the Lionheart in fifty years."

McGonagall shrugged. "You should have seen the dust on some of these scrolls."

Snape's eyes glittered with something resembling admiration. "And wouldn't the Ministry love to test the fingerprints in it?"

"Now, now," McGonagall said, shaking her index finger. "We had an agreement; I'm not to ride you about being an unregistered Animagus and you're not to say anything about my brewing a potion that's erroneously classified as Dark."

"I thought that meant we don't mention it to anyone else until it's necessary, not that it was a forbidden topic between the two of us. Erroneously?"

"We've been through this before. It's classified as Dark because it removes fear, and obviously it has unsavoury uses, but...."

"Fear is important, Prof--Minerva. It's very much like pain, it's a sensation that warns you that something is wrong. And this potion hasn't been in widespread use since Grindelwald thought it would give him an army that would always fight to the death."

"I know that, Severus, I've read the same books on the subject you have. I also believe you're dissembling about its use in the more recent past, but I know you have your reasons. Now, how much do you know about lions?"

He blinked. "Not terribly much."

"Do you know who does the hunting? Is it the males or the females?"

"I believe I heard somewhere that it's primarily the females."

"Precisely," she said and turned back to the steaming pot, lifting it from the flame just in time. "This potion was invented by a Gryffindor witch."

Snape's dark eyes narrowed. "And of course a Gryffindor witch can do no wrong."

McGonagall rolled her eyes behind her protective goggles. "Now you know I don't mean that at all. I only mean that this magic could never have been Grindelwald's or even You Know Who's…or, begging your pardon, yours, not to put you in such company. Not in the same way it can be mine."

Tidying her notes, stacking her books, wiping the table down, McGonagall set the potion aside to steep for the night. She'd be back a little before noon to collect it and present it to the sun as per the ritual.

When she was gone, Snape sat down at his desk, rested his head on his hands, and exhaled. It wasn't Minerva's potions skills or even her ambitions that had made him so nervous.

Not a single stern peep from her: if her beloved Gryffindor Head Girl had squealed, he certainly would have heard about it. Nor had there been any commanding summons from Dumbledore, nor had anyone in the Great Hall whispered or stared any more than usual in the past three days. He had to conclude that Granger had not told a soul that she'd caught him watching her bathe. More than bathe. That he'd done more than watch, he'd touched. That he'd done more than touch, he'd tasted...Could still taste that kiss on his lips and call the sensation of her damp velvet skin to his fingertips. He continued to do so involuntarily, and had nearly balked in public when, as was the tradition, the Head Boy and Girl waltzed their way through the opposite-gender faculty at the accursed Valentine's Ball. She'd managed to save him for nearly last. The tension had shimmered in the inches between them like a heat mirage on a summer road; she had, just once, drawn in a little sigh and clenched her fingers spasmically into his shoulder, and then how aware he had become of the suppleness of her waist beneath his arm. Damn it, he had thought, Dumbledore can do this. I, however, am not yet an old man. He hated himself for the thought as soon as it cleared its moorings to list, unpiloted, across he wine-dark sea of his brain.

It had been galling to still feel like a hormonal teenager hours later even though, in the evening just after the encounter, he'd flown straight back to his chambers and found he had to set about himself with the masculine answer to what he'd watched the unaware Hermione doing. That would have been a fitting hex for me if she knew that one, he thought, Autoeroticus, the Wanking Curse: causes compulsive "interfering with oneself," as it used to be called. A hardy perennial among Slytherin schoolboys. Side effects can include soreness, exhaustion, and dehydration. But she did it to me the old-fashioned way that has no counterspell.

Worst of all, what he'd imagined in that sordid convulsion was that she had resumed her task after he'd left, and that they'd climaxed together in time, though half the castle apart. It was not something he had ever done in his mind with a student before--nor ever thought he would, having always been disgusted by the mewling, swotty lot of them; nubile but vacuous, brimming with the sort of clumsy arrogance combined with petty timidity that only naivete could produce. To Professor Snape, eroticism and even beauty had always been incompatible with what some people call "innocence" and he could never interpret as anything but "ignorance." So there had to be something about the irrepressible Miss Granger that wasn't terribly innocent after all.

***

Hermione pored over the desk in her solitary bedroom, parchment scattered about the desktop and around her feet on the floor, as she worked through the fourth and penultimate sequence of Arithmancy equations. Her final project in Advanced Gematria wasn't due for another two months, but if she didn't get the Hebrew correlations and their Latin translations worked out soon, there wouldn't be a project at all. The wavy calligraphy was starting to swim before her eyes. More than once she'd laid her head down on her papers, only to have to wipe smeared ink from her forehead and repair a damaged letter on the worksheet.

There was a knock at the door, and Hermione jumped. She adjusted her rumpled robe and padded softly to the door, opening it just a crack. Professor McGonagall stood with an armload of books, spilling parchment. Hermione opened the door wider. "Hello, Professor. What...?"

McGonagall leaned in the doorway, shifting her burden. "I didn't mean to bother you, dear. I was just coming by and noticed your light was still on. I don't want to intrude, but only to tell you that if you're still up studying, you might want to give it a break. I myself have trouble absorbing complex information when I'm exhausted."

Hermione glanced back at her desk, and took note of the titles on McGonagall's books (Forbidden Chemistrie of Darkest Potiones was on top) and the smells that lingered about her robes (Eau de Snape's Classroom). "Well..."

"Quite alright, I'm up late myself. I just thought you might want permission to rest from an official source. Good night." McGonagall turned into the hallway that led to the long curving staircase to her own chambers and was gone without a look back. Hermione sighed and closed the door. The sad thing was, if not for that visit, she might have stayed up until dawn, and she knew it. She knows me too well, she thought, not for the first time. Hermione tossed her robe across the chair and settled down into the large feather bed, drawing the quilts around her before the chill air had a chance to slither under her nightgown.

She meant to sleep but found her hand reaching under the nightstand for the hidden book she'd been devouring late at night. The infamous Memoire of Cabrano, it was, the very droll political, magical, and erotic diary of an eighteenth-century secret agent wizard and libertine who'd fingered and frigged and encunted and buggered his way across Europe collecting secrets of magic and state and sex. She'd kidded herself she was reading it for the history, but in all honesty....and last time, she'd just been getting to the part where the teenaged Cabrano would be getting a bit more of his education from the middle-aged Sister Perdita, whose convent earned a good bit of income by the industrious hands of its novices and orphans, who shaped the soft wax of candle ends into the most lascivious and functional shapes. She opened the book to the page she had marked with a black feather, and her eye fell open this passage:

'This is among the grandest of them, that which is, as they say, forbidden, though by whom, I wonder--certainly not by God, for here we are. By those whose nature it is to forbid things, and to classify things according to whether or not they are allowed; whether they are so pleasurable that the jealous cannot allow a person to keep both those jewels of desire and a respectable reputation. Some part of us clings to sanity by admiring these long lists of the law, as perhaps well we should. But passion is no sanity; passion grows in the defiance of sanity; as a fire feeds on wood and hair our lust grows wilder as it escapes its fences, drunken with illicit freedom. Indeed I say the fire outside burns far brighter; the lust without blessing, that is unlawful, by its light gives shape and meaning to the well-ordered life.'

Hermione let the book fall open across her lap, obliviously fondling the feather, and then suddenly focusing her attention sharply on it as the physiological pleasure of epiphany washed over her. Yes, that was what it was--courage demanding its freedom, revolting as the thought might have objectively been. Courage that came not with the safe historic nobility of a statue or a medal for the respectably dead--this courage was a wild thing with dirty feathers and a musky smell; courage that perched on the corpse of sentimental virtue and plucked out its blind eyes.

And with that shudder of wild courage came his face: pointy, hook-nosed, proud, and sneering, and what his eyes looked like when they had momentarily lost their hard black sheen like a beetle's shell when she'd stood before him indecently not-covered-quite in the prefect's bathroom, calling him on the obvious--desire. And once she had seen it, she could never return to her state of never having seen it, nor her state of never having felt it; never mind how horrid he was in class. And he was horrid, oh yes, as much as always, looming and lurking, terrorizing. Making their hands shake and then excoriating them for shaking with his voice that was made out of velvet but lashed their backs like leather. His heavy classroom desk was about on a level with his hips. Hermione had noticed that. She would never be able to un-notice it again. It triggered images--no, more than images, sensations, or at least insinuating ghosts of them, murmuring beneath her robes and into her flesh and blood.

She leaned back into the pillows, pressing the heels of her hands into her strained eyes, trying to calm down her belly. But the revelation wouldn't fade. It animated her hand as she reached for the wand on her nightstand; it cast the spell for her to duplicate the page; it activated her voicebox as she carefully accio'd the ink and quill from her desk to encircle the relevant passages; it added the note for her that said, "I think I shall need another bath tomorrow at midnight. --H.G." and rolled the parchment into a ribboned scroll; it even activated the charm that would ensure the incriminating note would fall into dust if opened by any person but the right one. It hauled Hermione out of bed and her robe onto her shoulders and slippers onto her feet, and it moved her out silently of her room and towards the Owlery.

***

The cold air was purifying. The starry night was liberating. Why had no one ever told him the sky was so much larger than the ground?

A rush of silent brown-and-white feathers blew past the raven, and he glimpsed a roll of parchment on the passing undertucked leg. Though the owl's night vision was far better than his, the glisten of starlight on snow clearly silhouetted the bird headed for the base of the castle, disappearing into the lowest window nearest the dungeons. The raven wheeled around to follow, just in time to see the owl flutter its way towards the raven's own chambers. He caught up with the owl just outside his door. The owl looked professionally affronted at first, and then staggered backwards in a comical way as the raven grew and elongated and turned into the very person his message was for--with his great beak and his black hair and robes looking rather unchanged for all that transfiguration. "Thank you," said Severus Snape to the owl after collecting the parchment, and made a quick, strangely avian half-bow. As he unscrolled the message and read it right there in the hall, his eyes and to some extent his complexion changed. Though his hands shook slightly and his body seemed to freeze, the corners of his mouth rose into something like a frightening smile.

"No thank you, little friend," he said to the waiting owl. "I think I will deliver my reply myself."

***

As soon as the owl had left on its errand, something small and quailing within Hermione had wanted to call it back. But instead she made her way slowly down the hallways that had seemed so much shorter on her way up; she stopped in a loo that had never been there before for a quick pee, and found herself sitting on the toilet pondering what McGonagall could have been doing with a thick guide to forbidden potions. She was near to making a connection of some sort--Animagi popping into her mind; if they were so rare why did she seem to know so many of them? Seven registered this century, but she alone knew of five who weren't registered and only one who was--when a cackle from Peeves outside startled her into trying to even keep her thoughts silent. When it seemed safe she ventured out and promptly got misdirected by a moving staircase. By the time she got back to her own room, she felt she had made quite a journey. Indeed, she had--the rash thing she had done had already settled into her memory with an almost comfortable resignation. Of all the terrible things he could do, and she imagined he had quite a repertoire, ratting her out wasn't one of them. She pushed open the door with an audible relief, and immediately her hackles rose. Had she left the window partly open? The lights out? Fumbling in the dark, she tried to find her way round to her nightstand and her wand.

She heard a sound of wings in the darkness. No, she thought, the owl couldn't be back with his answer already, could it? No. It's not an owl. Owls are silent. She began to tremble. She heard a fateful click as the door locked, like the exaggerated sound of a gun being cocked in a Muggle gangster movie.

She felt him behind her more than she heard him; he raised her gooseflesh like a phantom but with a heat in place of a chill. She waited for his voice to fall upon her like a gentle blow.

"Cabrano, Miss Granger?"

The flurry of terror that rose in her like bile was quickly and sternly dismissed; she turned on it in rage like her professor himself might have done. What replaced it was a fiendish excitement that was just as likely to put a high shiver in her voice.

"I wondered what you would think of that passage, Professor," she said, fighting herself not to turn around just yet. "I see you're familiar with it."

"I am. Did you bring me here to discuss literature?"

"I didn't bring you here at all." Score one for me, she thought, or is that two? Slightly emboldened by his slip, she started to turn slowly, hoping to step out of her fuzzy slippers without drawing his eyes to them. She got halfway round just in time to see his wand arm shoot forward, and she jumped. "Ignitio," he said softly, and a flame bloomed from the candle on her desk, casting the room into chiarascuro.

In the second it took, she snatched her own wand from her nightstand. Meeting his gaze at last, she calmly said, "Contraceptio," pressing the tip to her abdomen. She let the wand fall back to the tabletop with a clatter.

For a second he let her win, with his face emerging from shadow, the slightest gasp of admiration and arousal at her pragmatic boldness. But the mask was still waiting, and smirked as was its habit. "Do you get all of it from books, Miss Granger?"

"No, Professor. Not all of it." She'd been tempted to call him by his given name, just to see what he would do. But it was better this way, in their standoff in which, almost imperceptibly, they were circling each other; she stalking towards a pounce, he coiled, poised to strike.

"Why didn't you go crying to Dumbledore?"

"Why would I? No harm was done."

"Why didn't you drop the subject?"

"I tried. It wouldn't fall. Would it?"

They stared, Snape's dangerous black into Hermione's challenging hazel, he with a muscle in his cheek twitching slightly, she managing to confine her trembling to her hands and her knees. What have I been thinking?, something shrieked in the back of her head. This is wrong. This is so wrong. Out of an echo tunnel of the past she heard her own fourteen-year-old voice on another night of revelation years ago, crying "We attacked a teacher!" Yet the world had not fallen in then, nor would it now.

They lunged. They would never be sure later who had moved first (it was she, by a hair), but they both imagined they heard a sort of psychic sound like a thunderclap as they seized each other. She latched her claws into the back of his robes; his long fingers tangled in her hair, knocking pins loose and freeing wild strands of curls. None too gently he turned her face up toward his; she closed her eyes, and her nervous system crackled when his lips landed on her throat, not her mouth. Wrong wrong wrong she sang to herself as her neck arched to meet his sensing tongue and scraping teeth; with a shaky sound it slipped out loud enough for him to hear.

"I daresay so," he hissed into her ear, with strands of her hair clinging to his lips and his hot breath shivering her skin. "Not the worst I've done, by far, but not my finest hour either."

She lifted a leg slightly to brush the side of his thigh and he shuddered. Scrabbling at his robes she pulled him against her as hard as she could, standing on her toes now, squirming, "Please don't stop," she said.

***

The fog in his mind eddied about in laughter as he weighed that, spinning for a moment in moral vertigo: by all accounts in a normal world the right thing to do would be to stop, yes? Even to shove her away and say something cruel, crushing her so viciously she wouldn't think of sex again for months, so as to absolutely and finally discourage this...whatever it was that had possessed her to want so much to possess him. But no one knew more than he how right and wrong could change places like partners in a complex and archaic dance. When the Heir of his House, Old Scaley-Face, stopped playing his games and gathered in his forces to strike with all his venom, not a rule in the cosmos could guarantee another night of life for any of them; against that onslaught of weeping and screaming, every cry of even slightly honest pleasure became precious.

He slid his hands inside her robe, down her back, feeling her smooth skin burning through the thin nightgown. "Say yes to me three times, Miss Granger."

"Yes," she whispered firmly, plucking at the buttons of his collar, sliding her fingers underneath to trace along his collarbones and stroke with a slight scratching down the flat expanse of skin just above where a dusting of straight dark hairs began. He crushed her against him so hard he lifted her slightly off her feet, claiming her mouth in a wicked kiss, and backed up until her bed brushed the back of his legs.

As he sat down with her atop him, he landed on a lump beneath the blankets and jumped right back up again. The lump screeched and shot out from under the covers in a beige blur, fixing his mistress and her mate with first a glare, and then a double-take; his hiss caught in his throat. Then he seemed to shrug and trotted off to the chair with his tail in the air. Hermione laughed softly and licked her lip where Snape had accidentally bitten her, and then she pushed him back down. "Yes," she said, straddling his lap, lifting her nightgown over her head in one smooth motion and leaning forward, letting her breasts fall into his hands while her own fingers worked downward, as she thought that she had never seen so many buttons on one man in her life. _Purebloods_, she thought scornfully, _think they're too good for zippers_. She won a ragged gasp in her ear as her fingers tightened around a cylindrical bulge still wrapped in too much fabric; she leaned forward and nibbled his neck rather-not-gently; he countered by pushing her backwards roughly and taking one pinkish-tan nipple into his mouth and nipping. "Oh!" she shuddered, and she thought she felt him laugh against her wet skin. And where had his other hand gone--oh. There, invading the elastic of her not-terribly-sexy, she thought, cotton knickers, the tips of his fingers trailing slowly between her lips, making waves in her wetness...there. Oh. She bit him again.

He grabbed her hair. "Say it one more time, my little biting mongoose," he hissed.

"Oh...yyyesss," she said, her head thrown backwards.

With a heroic effort he lifted her hand away from his crotch. "I think you do this at least as well as I do. Work with me," he said, placing her hand under his between her thighs, making her circle her own clit, their fingers brushing and entangling amid her juices. They worked together to bring her closer and closer to the edge; her eyes involuntarily closed but she knew his were wide open, and this enflamed her further and further. And then he muttered, "You like this, then?" and suddenly drove a finger deep inside her, and there she went, fading into blue, bursting and breaking overfull of sharpedged sweetness, her free arm clenching tightly around his neck, patina of sweat, strength of his arms and body so fine to lean on while she erupted.

"Yes," she said when she had caught her breath. "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes," she said firmly as she finally got to the last of the buttons on his inner robe, leaving him naked to her gaze and yet clothed still, the outer robe still hanging on his shoulders. And he gathered it around his arms and wrapped her in it as he stood up and lifted her to her feet just long enough to yank her sodden underpants down to her feet.

For a moment he faced her, and for just a moment his hungry face looked nearly grave, an effort he tried to maintain even as she closed her fingers around the velvet shaft of his cock, meeting his eyes with a look both weak with pleasure and oddly smug, and he uttered the first nearly awkward question: "Miss Granger, are you...? I mean, have you...?"

A heartbeat elapsed. "Oh! No. I mean, I'm not. I mean, I have."

"Good," he said, and shoved her onto the bed, still wrapped and entangled in his robes, pinning her beneath him and shoving her thighs apart with a quick move of his leg. The sound she made when he entered her was almost like singing--it was melodious and haunting like the lullaby of a Maenad, and he feared it was entirely too loud; he clapped a hand over her mouth as he moved in her, hard and deep. For her part she found it shocking how deliciously easy it was to take seven years of hating and fearing him and transmogrify that energy into fucking him. It was not polite; it was not formal; it was not even the least bit gentle. For his part that annoying little girl was gone forever; she was now all wicked mind and hungry muscles and wet heat, grasping eagerness, probably if paradoxically the most pure thing he'd been anywhere near in years, and none the less pure for entangling him, somehow--sheer heaven. When he made her come again, she scratched his back fairly badly while she tried to keep her cry low; when her contractions set off his own he sank his teeth into the tendon binding her neck and shoulder and held fast until his skyrocketing spasms calmed.

And when they lay together trembling waiting for rhythms to return to normal, they took a gentle stock of each other's minor wounds. He couldn't restrain a snort of laughter when out of the blank blue, his brain coughed up: fifty points to Gryffindor! She caught it and giggled without knowing why, except it felt good.

"So," Snape said, reaching down to the floor for the discarded volume beneath her nightgown. He quirked his eyebrow when he encountered the black feather, but said nothing about it. "You are aware of the...story behind this book? The hoax, some would say?"

Hermione was too bleary-minded to play it cool. "Hoax? No, what do you mean?"

His grin got wider as he leaned over her, letting his hair trail almost to her face. "You thought it was exactly what it purports to be? No surprise there, it's very good. And honestly, no one knows for certain how much of it is pure fiction. The real author was a woman of genius."

Hermione blinked and started to sit up. She reached for the blankets lazily to cover herself; he stayed her hand and made it clear he wanted to keep gazing at her nakedness. "English, as it happens; her real name was Charity Mortlake. She was best known as a naturalist--her book on the magical birds of the British Isles is still considered definitive two hundred years later. I had recourse to it recently myself when I discovered my Animagus form. She lived to a ripe old age--she was still very active on the Hogwarts board when the brothers Dumbledore were students."

"How do you know this?"

"It's in The Conflicting Histories of Slytherin House, of course. Miss Mortlake's Sorting caused some controversy, as she came from an old and respectable Ravenclaw family and was certainly clever enough to continue the tradition. But in those days, Ravenclaw tended to be rather staid, and Slytherin was a bit more...avant-garde. Miss Mortlake had some philosophical notions that are uncommon even now."

"Such as?" she asked.

"Many, she was quite the freethinker. Free love, as they called it in those days, and the fitness of witches not only to be equal, but to rule."

"Hmmm." She reached up and grabbed his hair playfully. And then he did something amazing. He apologized.

"For what?" she cried.

"For slapping my hand over your mouth to shut you up. That was rude of me. I was angry at myself for forgetting the Silencing Charm, that's all. And," he smirked, "I hadn't guessed you for the screaming type."

She smiled and rolled her eyes. "Well, I found it very sexy."

He reached out to touch her face.

She caught his thumb in her mouth and closed her lips around it suggestively. "We'll remember the charm next time," she muffled.

"Next time?"

She held his eyes for a long time. "Yes. Next time."

Don't try to get cautious now, you stupid prick! he told himself while he looked into her uncompromising face. He nodded, almost grudgingly.

"Good. Now go now, or you can't leave again for at least an hour. This is your window of opportunity," she said, gesturing to the literal open window.

Buttoning his robes, he stood up, and without another word, changed into a raven. Without a look back he launched himself through what he was already afraid he would think of as the Window of Opportunity.

Hermione dragged the down comforter over her sticky self and pointed her wand at the guttered candle that was spilling wax all over her Arithmancy notes. The bed shifted as Crookshanks hopped up, sniffed the sheets curiously for a few minutes, and curled up in his usual spot behind her knee. "I don't believe you," she murmured. "You didn't care about that one bit, did you?" The cat was already asleep. Before long, so was she.

***

"So will you stand with me or not, reservations aside for a moment? Can you, in honesty?", McGonagall asked, turning her face up to Snape as they trudged across the hard-packed snow in the courtyard, the heavy covered cauldron levitated just ahead of them.

"Certainly I will," he said. "My reservations seem to be exaggerated in your mind, and they certainly have nothing to do with your ability or judgement."

"I hear an unspoken coda."

He rolled his eyes at her and stopped up short, whirling to face her. "Minerva, you are a fundamentally good person, one of very very few who has consistently proved herself to be such over a long lifetime. And sometimes the fundamentally good--whom, I repeat, are a rarity--do not really comprehend or accept just how many there are who want nothing more than to do foul things, violent things, profoundly selfish and greedy and petty and nasty and ignorant and reckless things, but are prevented from unleashing unfathomable chain reactions of blind idiot havoc only by fear."

This was one of the longest and most impassioned speches Minerva had ever heard out of him. A flicker of a mild sense of insult passed through her, interwoven with her acceptance of his dread, which was of course possibly justified, and all these melted away as she took note of the signs of sleeplessness and strain harshening that sweetly familiar face that had no need of further chiseling. If Hogwarts be a coal mine, its canary is a raven, she suddenly thought to herself, and blurted out: "It can't be an easy job to be such an intelligent bird of ill omen."

His face fell stoney as he turned and kept walking. "Was the gravel in your litter pan this morning not to your liking?"

She swatted at him and pushed ahead.

When they stood in the circle on the center of the grounds, McGonagall carefully checked her wrist-sundial before removing the cauldron's cover, and took out one by one the small bottles that had been clinking in her robes, and slowly shook them out into the golden miasma one by one: the heliotrope, the unicorn horn, the flakes of phoenix feather, the chimera's teeth, the tiny shavings of Golden Fleece, in precisely that order, and she made the last deosil stroke with her wand before the precise ray of noon shone directly down. A solar light rose from the cauldron to meet the sun, and spread outward to the snow all around them until they were standing in a glorious field of gold that profoundly changed the colour of the daylight. The yellow vortex that spun upward from the potion raised a wind that whipped the hair and robes of the witch and wizard standing at south and north, and inspired in them both a sense of elation. They stood in its triumphant fury, feet firmly planted and hands at their sides clenching fists, until the tide peaked and the Lionheart Potion returned to something that looked like an inert state, although it was not, and McGonagall slapped the huge lid back over it with a little regret.

"Excellent reaction," said Snape appraisingly. "Judging from that, without testing it, I've a hunch you've succeeded."

"I suppose it should be tested."

"Certainly. But not now."

"Of course not," she said, and they escorted her great success down to the dungeons to be bottled.

***

That night, Hermione read about the rapidly maturing Cabrano's adventures with a young noblewoman (who was getting no satisfaction from her very rich and very old and sickly husband) and her chambermaid at once. Mortlake had been ingenious with this passage, in effect using it twice as Cabrano relived the event while describing it to the sage and wise hermit-wizard Mithander.

Hermione set the book down on the bed with a down-poufing, cat-startling whump. That's not fair AT ALL!, she raged inside, He knew I hadn't read that far in the bloody book yet! And she realized it was just his way of reminding her that, indeed, even if he had been nice to her for a few minutes of what passed for afterglow in him, he was every inch a Slytherin. Particularly those inches.

She'd thought this...endeavor? (Fever dream? Safety valve?)....would be more difficult than it was. That she'd wake up in the morning unable to believe what she'd done, that she'd want to run screaming out of Potions class even more than usual, that she'd never be able to look Harry or Ron or McGonagall or Dumbledore in the eye again, much less him. So far, none of that was even close to happening.

She'd known all her life she wasn't particularly talented in keeping secrets, so she had developed a trick early on. She had a file cabinet in her mind, which had gone over the years from being a standard-issue Muggleish metal one to its current shape, which was made of dark cherrywood with copper handles and iron locks, and it had grown a lot. She simply put a secret in its proper drawer hidden behind the row of memorized books that rested on top of her mental files for reference, locked the tiny lock, and put the key away. If she wanted to think about the secret again, she had to go to some trouble to get it out. A secret that was stored away out of sight in its proper place was a lot less likely to get blurted, and if that secret happened to be so impossible and inconvenient and for that matter, bizarre, that no one had any reason to conjecture its existence in the first place, there wasn't even any need to go lying about it. Who would have thought to even investigate the possibility she might have been keeping that tabloid skank trapped in a jar in beetle form for months, feeding it only the most carbon-monoxide-drenched roadside dandelion leaves? And who would suspect her straight-laced, protective, bookwormish bluestocking self of having a secret lover at all, never mind his being the single least likely person? Well, after Filch. And the interchangeable Goylecrabbe--at least she hoped her friends would suspect Snape before them; at least he had a brilliant mind. But she chided herself: The last thing a person with a secret can afford to do is get cocky about it.

It was time for her bath. With or without him.

***

It wasn't generally Snape's way to linger over breakfast, but he'd skimped on sleep for the second night and was now half-dazedly inadvertantly scrying in his black coffee, seeing far more enthralling things there than he'd wager Trelawney ever had in her crystals.

Like the top of Miss Granger's head as he'd seen it last night, bobbing determinedly as she sucked and licked him, not expertly but by no means incompetently, her frizzy mane tickling his thighs and trailing its ends in the bubbly water. And how she'd reacted when he suddenly stopped her, slipped off the edge into the bath, and lifted her up to trade places; the tangy, slightly bubbled-bathed taste of her...

He was scaring himself so well he almost jumped when a wave of owls came swooping through the hall. Out of the corner of his eye where he was not-watching the Gryffindor table, he couldn't miss a large, unfamiliar, and very bedraggled and battered looking owl drop a tattered letter on Granger's plate. He almost looked openly as she read it and gave a miserable whimpering sound. She fled from the hall with a stricken look, with her two bookend boys, the black-haired and the red, at her heels. Snape was sure he thought he heard her tell them, "Dumbledore!"

There was nothing to do for it but get up himself, go about his lesson plan as normal, pull in the fight-or-flight storm-shutters, and hope he had not made the worst miscalculation...well, not of his life, but certainly of his teaching career.

He was in his office, staring at a few small bottles gleaming with a dark gold liquid and labelled only with the astrological sign for Leo, when the summons came through the Floo network: "All Heads of House to my office, please. Thank you very much."

Though his fire was just embers, it was enough to get him to Dumbledore, though he was the last to arrive. Granger sat in his big easy chair, her knees up to her chest, her face tearstained, and Fawkes perched on the chair's back behind her, nuzzling her hair. Sprout, Flitwick, and McGonagall seemed to be going through a range of unspoken emotions, squirming with their faces.

"Ah yes, that's all of you, yes," Dumbledore said, holding the scrap of water-marked letter in his hands. Snape wondered for a moment whether it was his eyes or those hands that were trembling so slightly. "I must thank you all for arriving so quickly, and I also must thank Miss Granger for bringing this matter straight to my attention. She received this letter, you see, from an acquaintance of hers. You will of course remember Viktor Krum from the Triwizard Tournament?" Nods all around, and a few long faces.

"Oh!" McGonagall cried, "How is the poor young man?" They had all heard about his premature retirement last year from the Bulgarian National Quidditch team after his terrible accident; he had lately been heard to have taken a coaching post at his alma mater, Durmstrang.

"Not good, Minerva," Dumbledore said gravely.

For just a second Snape allowed himself to feel profound relief, and a sharp irritation with himself for presuming, once again, that his moral shortcomings were sufficient to merit the attention of the world.

The Headmaster went on. "I will not read the letter to you, as it is personal correspondence, but he has told Miss Granger that he has reason to believe that the former Headmaster, Igor Karkaroff, will do anything in his power to regain Voldemort's favour, and that many within the school itself are still loyal to him, and that the signs of a plan are falling into place; he regrets not seeing it sooner. He wrote to Miss Granger in part as a way to get a message to me; he feels the owls are watched but he could write to an old...friend without necessarily giving himself away. Indeed this one was much delayed, and it's perhaps miraculous that it arrived at all. I fear that by now it may be too late, and I want to begin emergency preparations to take in refugees if need be. I am afraid Durmstrang may have already fallen."

That's it then, Snape thought, feeling the words fall into the base of his spine with a thud like a heavy drum. Yes, Karkaroff would do anything. I should have killed him when I had the chance.

He glanced under his hair across to Hermione, and saw with a bit of a jolt that she was no longer snivelling or crumpled, but her jaw was set and her eyes were alert as a hawk's. She wants to face the war head-on right now, he thought, with all that delusional Gryffindor self-blustering. Yet still, even after everything, he couldn't deny it: a woman like that was a beautiful sight.

~fin~