Chapter Text
The kitchen at Grimmauld Place was the only room in the house that had successfully shed its ancestral gloom. Thanks to several coats of bright whitewash, a massive scrubbed-oak table, and Ginny Potter's aggressive banishment of any artifact that even looked like it might hum ominously, it had become the undisputed anchor of their post-war lives. Every alternating Thursday, without fail, the wards were set to admit exactly seven people.
Tonight, Hermione Granger sat at the far end of the table, nursing a glass of red wine and watching the familiar, chaotic ballet of her friends.
To her left, Harry was squinting through his glasses as he attempted to carve a roast beef under Ginny's strict, hovering supervision. Across from them, Neville was listening with a patient, soft-eyed smile as Luna explained the social hierarchy of a newly discovered colony of freshwater plimpies. And right beside Hermione, Ron was defending his territory with the focus of a Keeper in a cup final, his elbow planted firmly on the wood as he fended off Pansy's attempts to steal his roasted parsnips.
It was comfortable. It was loud. It was completely domestic.
And, as Hermione was acutely aware, she was the only person at the table who had arrived alone, would leave alone, and currently had a bed that was utterly devoid of anyone else's stray socks.
"Ronald," Pansy said, her sharp, aristocratic voice cutting through Luna's monologue like a silver letter opener. She had a fork poised over Ron's plate, her dark bob swaying as she glared at him. "If you do not relinquish at least two of those parsnips, I will hex your fingers together."
"Get your own," Ron muttered, not looking up from his plate as he shifted his shoulder to block her. "There's a whole bowl of them right in front of Harry."
"The ones in front of Potter are charred. You took all the caramelized ones." Pansy rolled her eyes and turned her elegant chin toward the rest of the table with a sigh of profound suffering. "Honestly. Ronald approaches romance the way he approaches chess. Aggressively, and without apology."
Ron didn't even pause his chewing. He reached for his butterbeer, took a deliberate swallow, and said, "And yet you've never once asked me to slow down."
Pansy went instantly, utterly silent. Her fork remained suspended in midair.
Across the table, Ginny's eyes widened to the size of Galleons. Harry dropped the carving knife with a dull clatter against the platter. Hermione nearly inhaled her wine and coughed into her napkin as a choked silence fell over the kitchen.
Ron, unbothered by the conversational devastation he had just caused, reached across the table for the bowl of mashed potatoes, looking unbearably pleased with himself.
"Well," Luna remarked serenely, breaking the silence with her usual airy calm. She reached out to pat Neville's large, calloused hand where it rested on the table. "I think not rushing is very important. Neville is wonderful in bed because gardening has given him such patient hands."
Neville didn't so much as blink. He finished buttering his bread roll with careful, even strokes, set the knife down, and nodded as though Luna had just remarked on the weather.
"Years of repotting Mandrakes," he said mildly. "You learn not to rush. If you grip them too hard or pull too fast, they scream at you."
He took a bite of his roll.
Ron, for once, was the one who went red. His smug satisfaction evaporated on the spot, and he buried his face in his butterbeer as though he hoped to drown in it.
"Exactly," Ginny added cheerfully, leaning her chin on her hand and grinning at her husband. "Though a bit of urgency has its merits too. Harry's very thorough. Years of being hunted taught him never to leave a single thing unfinished."
Harry opened his mouth. His lips moved for a moment, but no sound came out. He looked at his wife, looked at the roast beef, closed his mouth, and managed only a weak, strangled, "Ginny."
Ron muttered into his bottle, "Mate, you have to say something."
Harry looked hopelessly lost. He glanced around the table for any kind of tactical escape route, found none, and finally cleared his throat.
"...Pass the salt?"
Neville passed it to him without comment.
"Oh, honestly," Hermione laughed. But her chest tightened with a familiar, bittersweet pang as she watched Harry accept the salt cellar like a man accepting a lifeline.
This was the rhythm now. They had all paired off, one by one, settling into the comfortable, sharp-edged intimacies of adulthood. Harry and Ginny had been inevitable since roughly Harry's sixth year. Luna and Neville had happened so quietly that nobody noticed until there was a wedding invitation printed on pressed lavender. And Ron and Pansy, a match that had caused Harry to choke on his breakfast when Ron first confessed it, had found a bizarre and highly functional language of their own.
Hermione loved them. She loved these Thursdays. She loved watching Ginny bully Harry into eating vegetables and watching Pansy pretend she wasn't charmed every time Ron did something stupid.
She just occasionally wondered when exactly everyone else had learned how to do this, and why no one had thought to send her the notes.
"So," Ginny said, her bright brown eyes suddenly snapping toward Hermione. The gleam in them made Hermione instantly regret lowering her guard. "Speaking of people who don't rush. How's the new Ministry research project going? You started this week, didn't you?"
Hermione picked up her wine glass, kept her posture perfectly upright, and made her voice as neutral as she could manage.
"It's going quite well, actually. The Department of Mysteries is finally funding a full restructuring of the ancient potion-ingredient archives. Half the historical recipes in there have never been tested against modern standards, so we're re-brewing the important ones to see which still hold up. It's very technical."
"And your research partner?" Pansy asked. She had recovered her composure, and her eyes locked onto Hermione with the focus of a hawk spotting a field mouse. "The Ministry didn't just leave you in a dark room by yourself, did they?"
"Oh, no," Hermione said, taking a sip of wine and concentrating very hard on keeping her hand steady. "I'm working with Severus Snape."
She said it a little too casually. The name dropped into the room like a stone into a still pond.
Ginny and Pansy didn't say a word. Instead, they slowly turned their heads and exchanged a long, heavy, terrifyingly synchronized look across the table. It was a look that contained three volumes of silent speculation and a fourth volume of footnotes.
"What?" Hermione demanded, her cheeks warming despite her best efforts. "He's the foremost Potions master in Europe. It makes perfect sense that the Ministry brought him in as a consultant."
"We didn't say anything, Hermione," Ginny said, in a voice so innocent it wouldn't have fooled a Flobberworm.
"You didn't have to. You're doing that thing with your faces." Hermione turned to Ron for solidarity, but Ron was busy pretending to be fascinated by a piece of gristle. "Ron, tell them. It's strictly professional. Snape and I barely spoke after the war. And you and I settled things ages ago, so there's no reason anyone should be looking at me like that."
"Oh, completely settled," Ron agreed quickly, raising his hands in surrender. "We dated for three weeks, realized we argued like an old married couple without any of the fun parts, and called it off. Best decision we ever made." He paused. "And for the record, I don't want to think about your research, Hermione. I don't want to think about Snape. I don't want to think about any of it."
"Thank you," Hermione said firmly.
"I want to think about it," Luna offered.
"Luna."
"He has very interesting hands," Luna went on, as though no one had spoken. "I noticed it in fifth year. Most people only noticed the shouting."
Hermione's face went hot so fast she thought she might actually combust. Pansy, across the table, slowly raised one perfectly shaped eyebrow.
"Interesting," Pansy said.
"It isn't interesting," said Hermione. "Nothing about this is interesting. Harry, how was the Auror training exercise?"
Harry, who had never been so grateful for a change of subject in his life, launched into a long and detailed account of a training exercise involving a Boggart, a cupboard, and a very unfortunate trainee named Higgs. The conversation drifted to Quidditch, and then to Luna's plimpies, and then to whether Pansy could legally be banned from the Burrow for what she had said to Molly about the Christmas pudding.
Hermione laughed in all the right places.
But she felt a strange, lingering restlessness in her chest for the rest of the evening, and twice she caught Ginny watching her over the rim of her glass with an expression that suggested she was simply waiting.
The reality, which Hermione spent the next three weeks trying very hard to hide from everyone, including herself, was that the research project was not going nearly as smoothly as she had led them to believe.
On paper, it was going beautifully. On paper, Hermione had already catalogued four hundred and twelve historical recipes, flagged sixty-three for re-testing, and drafted a preliminary report for the Wizengamot's Committee on Potion Standards, which expected a full presentation by the end of the spring.
On paper, Hermione Granger was a force of nature. She was the bright, efficient future of the Ministry, a woman who could draft three pieces of legislation before lunch and reorganize a multi-departmental archive with her eyes closed. She was not a woman who got flustered.
The trouble was that none of that applied in the presence of Severus Snape.
It had started on the very first morning.
Hermione had arrived forty minutes early, which for her was practically on time. She had brought three color-coded binders, a project timeline charmed to update itself, a forty-page proposal she had written over the weekend, and a box of the good biscuits from the Muggle shop on the corner of her street, because her mother had always said that you should never start a working relationship empty-handed.
The laboratory they had been assigned was deep in the subterranean levels of the Ministry, a long, arched stone room lined with rows of glass jars, ancient parchment scrolls, and three separate cauldrons that had apparently been simmering since before the Ministry was built. It was quiet. It was isolated. It smelled of old stone and dried nettles.
She had spent the first ten minutes arranging her binders on the workbench in order of importance. She spent the next ten rearranging them in order of color. She was halfway through a third arrangement when the door opened behind her.
"I see the Ministry has sent me a librarian," said a voice she had not heard in several years.
Hermione turned around.
She had prepared for this. She had prepared for this the way she had once prepared for her O.W.L.s, which was thoroughly and with a written list. She had expected him to look older. She had expected the scars from the snake to be visible. She had expected the sneer, the black robes, and the general air of a large and disapproving bat.
She had not expected him to look good.
He had traded his teaching robes for a sharply tailored black frock coat that made his shoulders look broader than she remembered. His hair was shorter, though it still fell forward to shadow his face. The scar at his throat was pale and silvered and somehow made him look less like a former professor and more like a man who had survived something and decided not to apologize for it. He had come through the war by the skin of his teeth and a massive infusion of rare anti-venoms, and though he moved with a slight, barely perceptible stiffness, he carried himself with the authority of a man who had looked death in the face and told it to wait its turn.
"Good morning, Professor," Hermione said. Then, because that didn't seem right anymore, she added, "Mr. Snape. Master Snape. Sir."
He regarded her for a long moment.
"Any of those will do," he said. "Though I would prefer you settle on one before lunch."
"Right. Yes. Of course." She gestured at the binders. "I've put together some preliminary materials. There's a proposal. And a timeline. And biscuits."
His gaze moved slowly from the binders to the biscuits and back to her face.
"Biscuits," he repeated.
"They're the good ones," she said, and immediately wanted to Disapparate.
He picked up the proposal instead of the biscuits, which Hermione chose to take as a compliment. He read the first page standing up. Then he pulled out a stool, sat down, and read the second page. Then the third. Hermione stood beside the workbench with her hands clasped in front of her like a first-year waiting to be Sorted, and watched him read.
It was a mistake to watch him read.
He turned the pages with two long fingers, not licking them the way Professor Binns used to, just sliding each one over with a precise, careful flick. When he reached a passage he disagreed with, the corner of his mouth tightened. When he reached one he approved of, he made a small sound in the back of his throat that was barely a sound at all. At one point he took a quill from his coat pocket and made a note in the margin without asking, and she found herself staring at his hand as it moved across the page.
She had never noticed how large his hands were. In school, they had mostly been attached to things that were pointing at her.
"Your section on the Ashwinder archives," he said, without looking up.
Hermione blinked. "Yes?"
"You propose to re-test every recipe that uses Ashwinder eggs as a primary ingredient."
"Yes. Because the eggs from before 1850 were harvested from a different subspecies, so the potency would have been..."
He looked up at her.
And whatever she had been about to say simply left. It walked out of her head and closed the door behind it. She was aware of the dark, steady weight of his attention, of the faint line between his brows, of the fact that she had been halfway through a sentence and now had absolutely no idea how it ended.
"...different," she finished weakly.
"Different," he said.
"Yes."
"That is the full argument? Different?"
"No," said Hermione. "There's more. It's on page twelve."
He held her gaze for a moment longer. Then he turned to page twelve and read it in silence, and Hermione went to stand by the cauldrons and pretended to examine a jar of pickled Shrake spines with intense academic interest until her face stopped burning.
He did not eat the biscuits that day.
But when she came in the next morning, the box was half empty, and he did not say a word about it.
The first week, she lost her train of thought eleven times. She knew it was eleven because she started keeping count on the back of an inventory sheet, in the hope that recording the problem would help her solve it.
It didn't.
She lost it when he rolled his sleeves to the elbow before handling a jar of Bundimun secretion. She lost it when he leaned over her shoulder to check a measurement. She lost it, humiliatingly, when he simply said her name from across the room in a slightly lower voice than usual, and she answered, "Yes, the beetles," even though no one had mentioned beetles and there were no beetles anywhere in the laboratory.
He had looked at her for a very long time after that one.
"There are no beetles, Miss Granger."
"I know," she said. "I was thinking ahead."
"To what? Beetles?"
"Possibly."
He returned to his work without comment. But she could have sworn she saw the corner of his mouth twitch.
The second week, Augustus Pye from the Department of Mysteries called them both upstairs for a progress briefing.
Hermione had prepared. Of course she had prepared. She had written cue cards. She had rehearsed in front of the bathroom mirror two nights running while Crookshanks sat on the edge of the bath and judged her. She had a chart. The chart had a legend.
The briefing room was small and windowless, with a long table and a wall of enchanted shelves that kept rearranging themselves whenever someone looked away. Pye sat at the head of the table with two junior Unspeakables who took notes in total silence. Snape did not sit. He leaned against the back wall with his arms folded and his weight on one leg, looking bored, which was apparently a perfectly normal way for a person to stand and had absolutely no business looking the way it looked.
Hermione began her presentation.
It went beautifully for four minutes. She explained the methodology. She explained the flagging criteria. She explained why the 1924 manual should be treated with caution. She raised her wand to illuminate the chart and glanced up to check that everyone could see it.
Her eyes went straight past the chart to the back wall.
Snape had tipped his head slightly to one side while he listened. The light from her wand caught the sharp line of his cheekbone and the dark fall of his hair, and he was watching her, not the chart. Steadily. Without blinking.
"...and so the..." Hermione said.
The room waited.
"The..." she tried again.
One of the junior Unspeakables stopped taking notes.
"The Billywig," Hermione said, which was not what she meant. "Stings. Billywig stings. Are on the chart. You can see them in blue."
Pye squinted. "I don't see any Billywig stings, Miss Granger."
Hermione looked at her chart. There were no Billywig stings on the chart. There were no Billywig stings in the entire proposal.
"No," she agreed. "That's because they're... not in this phase. That's phase two. I'm getting ahead of myself."
"I see," said Pye, in the tone of a man who did not see but was too polite to say so.
She did not look at the back wall again for the rest of the briefing. She stared at Pye's left ear for twenty-two minutes and finished her presentation with such grim determination that one of the Unspeakables actually applauded at the end, then looked deeply embarrassed about it.
When they walked back down to the laboratory together, Snape did not say a word about the Billywigs.
He didn't need to. He walked a half-step behind her the entire way, and she could feel him not saying it.
That night, Hermione sat on her sofa in her flat in Islington with a cup of tea going cold in her hands and Crookshanks sprawled across her feet like a disapproving orange rug.
"It's ridiculous," she told him.
Crookshanks flicked one ear.
"It is. I'm twenty-five years old. I helped bring down a Dark Lord. I have argued with the Minister for Magic in front of the entire Wizengamot and won. I am not the sort of person who forgets how to finish a sentence because a man leans against a wall."
Crookshanks yawned, showing every one of his teeth.
"I know he leaned well," Hermione said irritably. "That isn't the point."
She set the tea down and pulled her knees up to her chest.
The point, which she had been circling for two weeks now like a Snitch around a pitch she didn't want to land on, was that she had no idea what was happening to her. She understood attraction in principle. She had read about it. She had, at one point in her fourth year, made a fairly comprehensive study of it in the Hogwarts library, purely for academic reasons, after Viktor Krum had started showing up at her table.
But Viktor had been exciting the way a broomstick ride was exciting: lovely and loud and over quickly, and afterward she had mostly felt windswept. And Ron, bless him, had been Ron. Familiar. Safe. Three weeks of trying very hard to feel something enormous and mostly feeling as though they were both reading from the wrong script.
Neither of them had ever made her forget the word "Billywig."
Neither of them had ever made her so aware of her own hands that she didn't know where to put them.
"It's because he was my professor," she said aloud, trying the theory out. "It's some sort of leftover authority response. A conditioned reflex. I spent six years being terrified of him, so naturally my nervous system is confused."
Crookshanks looked at her.
"It's a perfectly sound theory."
Crookshanks rose, stretched, turned around twice, and lay down again with his back to her.
Hermione glared at the back of his head. Then she picked up her tea, discovered it was stone cold, and drank it anyway out of spite.
The rest of the second week was spent in the archives.
The ingredient archives occupied a long, low vault two floors below the laboratory, lined from floor to ceiling with shelves of jars, ledgers, and boxes of brittle parchment, some of which had not been opened since the reign of Uric the Oddball. It was the kind of place Hermione would ordinarily have considered paradise. There were ladders on rails. There was a card catalogue the size of a wardrobe. There was a ledger from 1611 written entirely in a dialect of Latin that no one had spoken in three hundred years.
And there was Severus Snape, in his shirtsleeves, reaching for things on high shelves.
It was deeply unfair. She had come down to the archives to escape the laboratory, which had become far too small. Instead, she found that the archives, for all their length, had a way of putting him exactly where she was trying not to look.
On Wednesday, she was on the third rung of a rolling ladder, reaching for a box labeled Dragon Liver, Assorted, 1740 to 1790, when the ladder shifted on its rail.
It wasn't much. It was the kind of small, wobbling lurch that she would have corrected without thinking if she had been paying proper attention to her footing. But she had been paying attention to the sound of his quill scratching two aisles over, and so instead of correcting it, she made a small, undignified noise and grabbed the shelf.
A hand closed around the ladder beside her ankle and held it still.
"You appear to be determined," Snape said from below her, "to damage either yourself or the Ministry's property before the end of the month. I would be grateful if you could choose one."
Hermione looked down.
He was standing at the foot of the ladder with one hand braced against the rail and the other, she realized, resting lightly against the back of her calf to steady her. It was entirely practical. It was the sort of thing any colleague would do.
Her brain did not seem to care.
"I'm fine," she said. "It just moved."
"Ladders do. It is one of their defining characteristics."
"Thank you, I'm aware of how ladders work."
"Are you?" He did not move his hand. "Then come down slowly, Miss Granger, and let us find out."
She came down slowly. Each rung brought her closer to him, and by the time her feet touched the stone floor, she was standing inside the small space between his arm and the shelves with her back nearly against his chest. For one long, ridiculous moment, neither of them moved.
Then he stepped back, reached past her, lifted the box of dragon liver from the shelf with no apparent effort at all, and handed it to her.
"Assorted," he said dryly. "As promised."
Hermione took it. She walked back to her workbench with great dignity, sat down, opened her bottle of ink, picked up her quill, and dropped it straight into the inkwell.
It sank with a small, defeated plip.
From two aisles over, the scratching of his quill paused for a moment. Then it resumed.
By the third week, Hermione had developed a set of coping strategies.
She would arrive before him so that she was already focused on work when he came in. She would keep the workbench between them whenever possible. She would avoid looking directly at his hands, his mouth, his forearms, or any part of him while he was reading, brewing, writing, or doing anything at all. She would stop rehearsing conversations in the shower, because it was making things worse, not better.
The strategies lasted roughly as long as it took him to walk through the door each morning.
He would say "Miss Granger" in that low, dry voice, and she would say "Good morning" a little too brightly, and then she would spend the next eight hours acutely aware of exactly where in the room he was standing. She knew the sound of his footsteps on the stone. She knew which cauldron he favored and which stool he liked and the precise, irritating way he tapped his quill twice before he started writing. She knew he took his tea black and strong enough to strip paint.
She knew that because of Tuesday.
On Tuesday, she had been bent over the 1611 ledger for nearly four hours, translating a recipe for Wiggenweld Potion one painful line at a time, when a cup and saucer appeared at her elbow. She stared at it. It was her own mug, the chipped one with the Muggle bookshop logo that she kept by the sink. The tea in it was the exact shade she liked, with a splash of milk and no sugar.
She looked up.
Snape was already walking back to his cauldron with his own cup, black as tar, as though nothing whatsoever had happened.
"You haven't moved since ten o'clock," he said without turning around. "I am not prepared to explain to the Ministry that their consultant allowed you to fossilize."
Hermione looked at the tea. She looked at his back. She thought about the fact that she had never once told him how she took her tea, which meant he had watched her make it. Possibly more than once. Closely enough to get the milk right.
"Thank you, Severus," she said.
The words were out before she heard them.
His hand stilled over the cauldron.
Hermione's mouth stayed slightly open, as if she might be able to pull the name back in if she moved quickly enough. In three weeks, she had called him Professor, Mr. Snape, Master Snape, and sir. Once, in a moment of panic, she had called him "you there." She had never called him Severus. She had not even known she was thinking of him as Severus.
He turned his head, very slightly, and looked at her over his shoulder.
He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. One eyebrow lifted perhaps a quarter of an inch.
Hermione stood up.
"I need to check the stock levels of dried knotgrass," she announced to the room at large, and walked directly into the ingredients cupboard and closed the door behind her.
It was very dark in the cupboard. It smelled strongly of knotgrass and faintly of mice. She stood with her back pressed against a shelf of jars and her hands over her face and waited for the heat in her cheeks to subside, which took a little over six minutes. She counted.
When she came out, he was writing notes at his workbench as if the last six minutes had not occurred.
"Knotgrass?" he asked, without looking up.
"Plenty," said Hermione.
"Excellent," said Snape, and tapped his quill twice before he went on writing.
He had not mentioned it since.
He commented on her chopping, her measuring, her handwriting, her choice of reference texts, and her apparent belief that the 1890s were a reliable decade for anything. He did not comment on the cupboard, or the Billywigs, or the beetles.
Somehow, that was worse.
On Thursday evening, she sat at dinner at Grimmauld Place and told everyone the project was going brilliantly.
"Brilliantly," Ginny repeated.
"Yes."
"And Snape?"
"Very professional."
"Professional," said Pansy.
"Yes."
Ginny and Pansy exchanged another look. Hermione ate her potatoes and pretended not to see it.
After dinner, she volunteered to help with the washing up, mostly because it meant standing with her back to the room. Ginny, inevitably, followed her into the scullery with a stack of plates.
For a while, they worked in companionable silence. Ginny charmed the sponge to scrub, Hermione charmed the towel to dry, and the sound of Ron and Harry arguing about the Chudley Cannons' new Seeker drifted in from the kitchen.
"You know," Ginny said casually, handing her a dripping gravy boat, "you used to talk about work for hours."
"I still talk about work."
"You said 'brilliantly' and 'professional' and then asked Neville about compost for twenty minutes."
"Neville's compost is very interesting."
"Hermione. Nobody's compost is that interesting." Ginny leaned her hip against the sink and studied her. "Is he being awful to you? Because if he is, I'll have Harry go down there and..."
"No," Hermione said quickly. "No. He's not awful. He's..." She searched for a word, and every word she found was the wrong one. "He's fine. He made me tea."
Ginny's eyebrows rose.
"Snape," she said slowly. "Made you tea."
"It was a practical gesture. I hadn't moved in four hours."
"Mm," said Ginny.
"Don't 'mm' me."
"I didn't say anything."
"You said 'mm.' That's not nothing. That's a whole sentence in your family."
Ginny grinned and went back to the plates, and Hermione dried the gravy boat four times before she realized it was already dry.
When she left that night, Pansy kissed her on both cheeks at the door, the way she did with everyone she grudgingly liked, and murmured in her ear, "Whenever you're ready to tell us, darling, we'll be here."
"There's nothing to tell," Hermione said.
Pansy only smiled.
The breaking point came on a Friday afternoon at the end of the third week.
They were preparing a test batch of Draught of Peace from an 1802 recipe that called for powdered moonstone, syrup of hellebore, and sopophorous beans cut in a very particular way. The original author had been extremely specific about the cutting. Hermione had been extremely specific about following him.
She was concentrating so hard on the beans that she didn't hear Snape cross the room.
"Miss Granger," his voice dragged across her nerves like heavy velvet. He was standing directly behind her, so close she could feel the warmth of him through the thin fabric of her blouse. "If you continue to chop that sopophorous bean with such reckless abandon, you will ruin the entire batch of Draught of Peace before we have even lit the flame."
Hermione froze, the silver knife hovering over the board. She could smell him: sandalwood, bitter herbs, and the faint, crisp scent of ink. It seemed to crowd every bit of oxygen out of the small laboratory.
"I am not chopping recklessly," she said, her voice tighter than she intended. She didn't turn around, because turning around would mean looking directly into those dark, fathomless eyes. "I'm following the measurements in the 1924 manual."
"The 1924 manual was written by an idiot who lost three fingers to an unstable boil-cure," Snape murmured. He leaned in slightly, his arm brushing against hers as he reached past her for a brass scale.
The brief contact sent an electric jolt straight up Hermione's arm. Her fingers twitched. The silver knife slipped.
With a horrific metallic clatter, her elbow knocked squarely into the side of a nearby pewter cauldron. The vessel tipped, slid across the stone workstation, and before Hermione could grab it, crashed onto the floor, sending a gallon of half-brewed Murtlap essence splashing across the tiles.
"Oh, look at that," Hermione gasped, her face instantly burning a fiery, humiliating red. She dropped to her knees and pulled out her wand to begin cleaning the mess, her brain frantically scrambling for an explanation. "The surface must be uneven. I was trying to adjust the angle, and my sleeve..."
"Miss Granger."
She stopped and looked up from the floor.
Snape was standing over her, his hands folded loosely behind his back. He wasn't yelling. He wasn't even sneering. He was simply looking down at her, his dark eyebrows slightly raised, watching her frantic, undignified scrambling with an expression of quiet, unreadable intensity.
"The workstation is perfectly level," he said softly, his voice dropping into a low register that made her stomach do a strange, dangerous flip. "And your sleeves are rolled tightly to your elbows."
Hermione swallowed hard. Her wand trembled slightly in her hand. She was caught staring, directly at the sharp line of his jaw, the severe curve of his mouth, and the way his dark hair fell forward to shadow his face. For three endless seconds, she forgot how to speak. She forgot the incantation for the cleaning charm. She very nearly forgot her own name.
"Are you quite finished dismantling my laboratory?" Snape asked quietly.
"Yes," Hermione whispered, her voice betraying her completely as she looked up into the darkness of his gaze. "Completely finished."
She left at half past five, almost at a run, with her bag clutched against her chest and three cue cards sticking out of the side pocket.
Severus Snape stood alone in the laboratory for some time after the door closed behind her.
He looked at the puddle of Murtlap essence spreading slowly across the tiles. He looked at the abandoned silver knife, and the sopophorous beans, which had been cut quite perfectly after all. He looked at the inventory sheet she had left on the workbench, on the back of which someone had made eleven neat little tally marks in a column with no heading.
Then he drew his wand and cleaned the floor with a single, careless flick.
For three weeks, he had watched the most competent witch of her generation drop a quill into an inkwell, answer questions about beetles that no one had asked, explain Billywig stings to the Department of Mysteries, and hide in his ingredients cupboard for six and a half minutes after calling him by his given name.
He had assumed, at first, that she was frightened of him. That would have been reasonable. A great many people were.
But frightened people did not stare at a man's hands while he read a proposal. Frightened people did not blush when he made them tea.
Severus set the silver knife back in its place on the board, aligned it precisely with the edge, and allowed himself something that, on any other face, might have been called a smile.
How very inconvenient.