A Dish Served Cold

Chapter 29 – Inhale

“I beg your pardon?” Sabine choked out.

“Marriage – you, me, would you care to?” Albus was evidently amused by her reaction, but was also visibly serious.

“Whatever for?” Sabine shot back, quite appalled.

“Well, the Ministry’s law applies to all of us, you know,” he informed her. She gaped at him in shock.

“You must be joking,” she insisted. Surely the law only applied to young people!

“Any unmarried witch of childbearing age and all wizards capable of fathering a child,” he replied, his tone now devoid of any humor. His eyes were chips of blue stone, and he had a look on his face that she hadn’t seen since the battlefields of Germany.

She sat back hard in her chair in sudden comprehension of her own danger. She was over a hundred years old, but still had her menses quite regularly. Technically she could bear another child, although the thought was abhorrent to her. What a joke on some poor child that would be! A hundred some-odd year old mother and father. She gave Albus an appraising glance as she thought about it.

“Why me?” she asked, certain that he had some angle that she hadn’t figured out yet.

“You won’t be boring.” It was an answer, but it was only a fraction of the whole, she knew. She studied him and calculated the cost benefit ratio with the beginnings of amusement.

There was an appeal to moving into the first circles of society. As a Dumbledore she would outrank all the catty bitches that had sneered at the Snape name for so many years. It wasn’t as though she was going to be inundated with offers. It was true that she was a half-blood and Albus a pureblood, which would fit the criteria of the law, but she somehow doubted that that idiot Fudge had had this in mind when he drafted that silly act. Still, her children would be descended of Merlin and there were dynastic considerations that appealed to her.

Albus was sitting and waiting for her to answer, letting her work it all out in her own mind. She wasn’t certain if it was the potential rank or the fact that she had known him all her life, but she was seriously considering it.

Besides, she was curious. It had always been her besetting sin, as Albus well knew, and her brain was running in circles trying to figure out why he was offering.

“The law requires at least two children doesn’t it?” she asked with more gentleness than was her wont and he nodded, still looking rather grim around the mouth.

“Yes, Sabine, it does.”

“Are you certain that you are willing to produce ‘hostages to fate’?” She waited while he digested that question, his face shifting from hunger to anguish.

“I have fought all my life to avoid just that, but I cannot require others to do what I will not,” he answered finally. Still, he wasn’t telling her the full truth, she knew it. For a Gryffindor he lied quite well and she was at a loss to guess what he was withholding from her. Still, if she lived another twenty years it would be a miracle, so what did she have to lose really?

She thought for long moments more, trying to figure out if he was playing her somehow, then slowly nodded.

“I will be pleased to accept your offer, Albus.” His expression of relief made her wonder what ulterior motive could be so important that he would marry a dried up, bitter, old stick like her to achieve it. She looked forward to unraveling the mystery. She knew that he too would never be boring.

Georgian Tamarind paced back and forth in the narrow confines of his personal study. The room opened off of the Defense classroom and was a charming circular space that, up until now, he had liked a great deal. Every defense teacher for a thousand years had used this office. It was steeped in history and magic.

Georgian had put all his most cherished possessions on the shelves around him. He had hung his family coat of arms – a hippogriff, argent and rampant on a field, vert, of wands – over the door and portraits of his ancestors snored in their frames on the walls. Sneak-o-scopes and foe glasses, ancient tomes on defense and a few trinkets placed there just for decoration made this sanctuary both elegant and comfortable. It was much as his father’s study had been, and normally it made him smile just to be there.

At the moment though, nothing could make him happy. He had spent hours and hours perusing the lists of available brides and couldn’t find a single one that didn’t make him want to curl up in the fetal position and weep.

Albus was announcing his personal choices for pairings today and Georgian suspected that whatever choice he’d had before was rapidly vanishing. He regretted not having kidnapped Therese and force fed her potions until she had agreed to marry him. If he had only done so then all his current problems would be nonexistent.

Why did one have to get married just to have a few children? This was doom-ridden and ill conceived; he just knew it and all his previous optimism had vanished in the wake of reading the ministry’s lists.

With a snarled curse, he grabbed his papers and stormed out of the room. Today’s staff meeting should be unforgettable, he thought darkly as he stalked down the corridors. Students, startled by his unexpected demeanor, scattered before him and Georgian had a dim realization that this is what it must be like for Severus all the time.

That understanding shocked him into stillness and he ventured a smile and general apology towards the wide-eyed students who had flung themselves against walls in order to get out of his way. Calmer and in a somewhat more rational state of mind, he continued on to the staff meeting.

The shouting could be heard from halfway down the corridor. Georgian braced himself and entered.

Hermione sat on a ledge and looked out the window at a grindylow as it paddled past, glaring balefully at her. She absently stroked the huge orange feline in her lap and was comforted by the rumbling purr that vibrated her bones. A book lay open beside her but for the first time in a long time she had no interest in reading it. Her own life was too tangled and confused for her to be moved by the abstract theories of Paracelsus.

She had found this room a few days ago and took it as her own. She suspected that some Slytherin Head of House had once had a ladylove living here, because it wasn’t decorated in Salazar’s medieval bordello style, but in a delicate feminine palette. It was all blue and copper with touches of silver instead of the ubiquitous greens, and there was nary a snake in sight.

It was two rooms really, a sitting room with blue velvet couches and a small alchemical laboratory off through an archway. The sitting room had one whole wall that opened out on a view under the lake, with a padded bench stretched across the entire length. Hermione had found both the laboratory and the sitting room to be a perfect place to get away from everything.

She watched as kelp waved gently, stirred by unseen currents, and fish darted through the murky blue water. Shafts of sunlight pierced the surface far above and sought in vain to illuminate the depths far below. Hermione was in a perpetual twilight, suspended halfway between the surface and the deepest places of this underwater world.

It suited her mood perfectly.

“Madame Snape,” the Baron’s sepulchral tones wafted towards her and she turned her head to see him floating in the doorway.

“My lord?” she enquired. She wasn’t sure when it happened, but somewhere along the way, the Slytherin ghost had earned her respect. There was something profoundly tragic about him that called to her. She could feel his grief the way she could feel her own and she had begun to treat him with as much kindness as he would allow.

“You have visitors,” he informed her. His eyes darted around the room as though he expected something to attack him. She rose – dumping Crookshanks off of her lap in the process – wondering about the ghost’s discomfort.

Her school robes swished about her ankles as she moved and it seemed to her that there was an echo of the rustling sound arising from somewhere unseen.

She turned around, trying to find the source, and found nothing. Frowning, she turned back to ask the Bloody Baron, only to find that he had vanished as suddenly as he had appeared.

Curioser and curioser, she thought to herself as she headed down one of the winding green stone passageways back towards the living room.

She heard the shouting from halfway down the corridor.

“You will not say anything of the sort, Ron!” Moira’s sharp voice snapped out and Ron’s subdued muttering replied.

“It’s not right!” It sounded like Neville’s wife, Helena, Hermione thought.

“Of course it isn’t, that’s not the point!” There was Harry, his voice so much more mature than it ought to be.

“What could he have been thinking?” Ron sounded disgusted, but then, when didn’t he lately?

“What could who have been thinking?” Hermione asked, and was shocked by how very weary she sounded. Harry turned and smiled at her, but Ron shot her a look of appeal, and she knew that he wanted her to agree with him about something.

The room was filled with her friends, which was an unusual sight. Harry, in jeans and a red t-shirt, glasses reflecting the firelight in flashes, stood by the hearth like a young king addressing his subjects. Moira, stood tall beside him in plain blue robes, her hair like burnished gold and her eyes the same blue as the lake’s deep waters. Neville, looking entirely unlike the pudgy boy he had once been, filled with a calm strength now that eased her soul to look upon, sat in a deep green armchair. Helena, with her autumn coloring and summery smile, was perched on the arm of Neville’s chair with her arm around his shoulder. Ron, still in school robes and looking grubby with a line of rearranged dirt behind his ears, perched on the couch, turning his wand over and over in his hands.

“Professor Dumbledore is moving to protect all of the Order members by making certain that they are married off safely. At the same time he has to marry off a lot of non-members to disguise what he is doing.” Harry informed her gently. Hermione thought this through and nodded slowly.

“I can see the necessity. Voldemort has to be watching to see where he will interfere, certain that will show him where all Dumbledore’s cards are,” she murmured. She looked over at the red-faced Ron. “You’re right, it is awful, Ron, but to be honest I don’t know what else he can do. Fudge’s weakness has pushed us all into a corner.” Her clinical, detached tone didn’t soothe Ron, but he bit his lip and visibly restrained himself.

“I just hate this whole thing. I love being with Luna, but I never expected to be married so young.” He began pacing across the snake embossed rug with an agitated stride.

“This place is much nicer than I expected,” Harry commented as he looked around. Hermione imagined that he was looking for the iron maiden and the branding irons and smiled.

“It’s huge too, there are at least a dozen rooms and probably more that I haven’t even found yet,” she replied. Harry raised an eyebrow in surprise.

“Never took Snape for an interior design type,” he quipped and Hermione grinned at her friend, trying to picture Severus in a leisure suit picking out plaids.

“Slytherin himself did the whole place, Severus had nothing to do with any of this,” she admitted.

“That crime at least you cannot lay at my door,” Severus barked out as he came into the room, a pile of scrolls under one arm. “Though the possession of these may yet get me a spot in sunny Azkaban,” he continued dryly. He was dusty and a smear of dirt marred his cheek. With a dramatic gesture he poured the scrolls onto the coffee table.

“You got them!” Harry exclaimed joyfully and Hermione eyed her husband in surprise.

“What have you been up to, Severus?” the tone was so very housewifely that the room stilled and every head pivoted to stare at her. She clapped her hands over her mouth in shock, waiting for her husband to spear her with some sarcastic remark. Instead he merely arched an eyebrow and replied to her quite civilly, for him anyway.

“Merely doing a small favor for Mr. Potter,” he sneered with all of his usual disdain, but behind that Hermione could glimpse a suppressed excitement. He was also quite obviously enjoying confounding her, because that little twitch at the corner of his mouth was a dead giveaway.

“These are brilliant, sir,” Harry muttered as he unrolled the parchments and began scanning them quickly.

“What are they?” Hermione asked, deciding to skip the whole landmine of how Harry had gotten Severus to do anything for him.

“Dark magic, technically,” Severus answered with an airy wave. Hermione’s jaw dropped open and then she shut it again with an audible snap. He was baiting her and the only answer to that was to ignore him.

“They are a possible cure for werewolves,” Helena told her with a small frown. She was nibbling on a lock of her auburn hair and looking nervous.

“There is no cure for Werewolves,” Hermione retorted. She herself had searched for such a thing ever since second year and never even heard a whisper of an answer.

“It’s called ‘Rivening’. It was in use about eight hundred years ago as a technique to remove magic from Muggleborns and half-bloods.” Severus had adopted his lecturing tone, but even so Hermione’s horror must have been readily apparent. ‘Rivening’ was something that she had indeed heard of. She had read the medieval accounts of those who had been thusly stripped and had read of the very scrolls that now lay upon her coffee table.

“Those scrolls were supposed to have been destroyed five hundred years ago. That’s utterly proscribed knowledge, not to mention that it’s the sort of thing that Voldemort would love to get his claws on,” she nearly shouted. The idea of Voldemort stripping all but the pure of their magic shook her to the core. She loved being magical, it was an intrinsic part of her soul that she would rather die than lose.

“What safer place than Hogwarts for it then,” Harry countered with a shrug.

“Its Lupin’s only hope,” Ron added.

“I told them it wasn’t a good idea,” Helena muttered. Severus raised an eyebrow at her.

“Now you tell me,” he grumbled and Helena started, as though Severus had never spoken to her before. Well, he probably hadn’t been civil to her before, Hermione admitted to herself. It wouldn’t be safe to do that in public, anyway.

“I care about the Professor too, but these scrolls need to be destroyed! Where on earth did you find them anyway?” she asked her husband with fury warring with curiosity in her heart.

“Düsseldorf,” he answered with his face a mask of indifference. She had no way of telling what he was thinking right then. He had spent too many years being unreadable as a spy for a mere teenage girl to be able to penetrate his defenses.

Harry however, pierced right to the heart of it.

“Grindelwald’s lost library,” he breathed out in awe. Every eye was on Severus and for a change there was no hostility or hatred, merely wonderment and curiosity.

“Lost is such a vague word,” Severus murmured. He swirled over to the window and gazed out at the deep azure waters. His reflection in the glass made him look ghostly, as though he was a drowned mariner staring in at the warmth and light. “Lost only means that the location is not generally known,” he finally continued after a long pause.

“Besides yourself, how many people do know its location?” Harry was suspicious, Hermione could tell, and it made her want to roll her eyes in exasperation.

“Professor Dumbledore, the late Marcus Tamarind, Neville’s parents and myself were the only ones who ever knew its location,” he informed them and Neville’s mouth dropped open in horror.

“Was that what Bellatrix Lestrange was torturing them for?” he asked in a shaky voice. Severus met the boy’s eyes and frowned.

“To be honest, I very much doubt that there was any reason at all for what she did. That creature loves pain, humiliation and degradation. She tortures puppies for fun,” he rapped out with a voice devoid of emotion. Harry bristled, but Hermione could see the pain behind his eyes, the rage in his blood that burned so fiercely.

Strangely, Neville seemed to as well.

“I understand, sir,” the boy answered in a compassionate tone that addressed the words unsaid more than the flat statement Severus had given him. “Do you have to see her often?” It was a blow so gently delivered that if she hadn’t been watching Severus closely she would have missed it altogether.

“Once is too often, Mr. Longbottom,” he said in a voice so tired and grieved, so fraught with anguish and bitterness, that it shredded the listener like flaying knives. Harry winced and Hermione could see the exact moment that his unreasoning dislike for the Professor died in his heart. He might never be Severus’ biggest fan, but he would also never be able to despise him utterly ever again, not after glimpsing the depths of pain that lurked in the other man’s heart.

Harry turned and looked at Hermione, and their eyes were locked for a long time. Something passed between them at that moment that was nameless but profound. She sank into her usual green chair by the fire and set her feet on the hearth grate with a sigh.

“I can’t believe that my ankles are swelling already, that shouldn’t be possible,” she muttered, deliberately breaking the tension with mundane thoughts. Severus shot her a look that might have been gratitude, but could also have been irritation; she couldn’t tell.

“All pregnancies are different, my mum says,” Moira shrugged. “Guess we are all going to find that one out for sure.” Silence met that comment and the boys looked even more acutely uncomfortable than the girls did.

“So how is this ‘Rivening’ supposed to cure werewolves,” Hermione finally asked with a sigh. After all if they were all going to Azkaban, they might as well do some good before they were arrested.

“I am so very glad that you asked, Madam,” Severus replied with a nearly gleeful tone of voice.

“Let me guess, there is a potion involved,” she interrupted dryly. He gave her an arched eyebrow of reprimand for breaking into his obviously rehearsed lecture.

“What makes you think so?” Severus asked.

“Because you sounded happy. You only sound happy when there is a really difficult potion involved,” Hermione shot back with some asperity. Looking rather taken aback by her comment Severus straightened his robes and tried to pull his dignity around him in front of his students. The aforementioned students were trying not to gape at Hermione. The easy banter between them was obviously not what the others had been expecting, but Hermione was tired of playing a role and just wanted to be herself for the moment.

“Yes there is a very tricky potion involved. However, you are quite wrong about everything else for I am never happy.” It was such a childish statement that she nearly laughed but controlled herself just in time. Harry’s slack jaw and wide eyes almost made her lose the battle, but she kept her face straight despite it.

“As you say, sir.” She answered her husband quite serenely and leaned back to hear the rest of the lecture.