Desperate Measures

Hermione left Curt with Snape at 11 the following Saturday morning, and it was slightly easier this time, both because it had gone so well the previous week and because she expected to be back sooner. She told Snape that she was having lunch with a friend in Hogsmeade, kissed Curt, and then left quickly, not repeating the lengthy instructions.

She really was having lunch with a friend. Sirius Black was waiting for her just inside The Three Broomsticks, and she greeted him with a warm hug and kiss on the cheek. Or at least she thought there was a cheek in there somewhere. He was wearing a beard these days, and she teased him that he was trying to look like Professor Dumbledore.

“When it’s down to my belt, you can say that,” he said. “Right now the word you’re looking for is ‘distinguished.’”

“Oh, is that so?” She laughed and squeezed his hand. “It’s good to see you, Sirius. Thanks for agreeing to meet me.”

“Happy to. But I suppose it’s too much to hope that you invited me here just because you missed me.” He gave her a knowing look.

“Well…” she admitted. “In truth, there’s something I wanted to ask you about.”

"I had a feeling." He pulled out her chair and then took his own seat. “All right, Miss Hermione. I’m all ears.”

“Let’s…wait until we order,” she said, forcing a smile.

Sirius sobered immediately. “One of those, eh?”

“Well, maybe. Before we get to all that, catch me up on what’s going on with you.”

Sirius was an Unspeakable, so talking about his work wasn’t an option for him, but he had a gift for maintaining a running patter of conversation about virtually any subject. Harry said - privately - that Sirius was making up for thirteen years of enforced silence, years in which his mind had managed to stay sharp whilst all those around him had descended into madness. During the war, he had regularly ingested Polyjuice and spent hours in pubs and public houses, chatting up the regulars in search of information. Most people never realized, after an evening with Sirius, that he had talked himself nearly hoarse yet given nothing away about himself. On this day, his pet subject was his motorcycle, and Hermione heard all about his latest trip: He’d flown to Paris to meet a lady friend; the rendezvous hadn’t ended well, but the new invisibility spell on his motorcycle had worked beautifully and allowed him to slip by French Ministry officials, who had banned all forms of charmed Muggle transport. Sirius moved from charmed motorcycles and the French Ministry to a new dessert he’d tried on his trip, and that led to house-elves (“Wheredo they learn to cook like that, anyway?”) a jab or two about SPEW, and then on to Harry and Ginny and Sirius’s plan to give them a house-elf when the new baby was born.

“Couldn’t they afford one now?” Hermione asked, mentally cringing at the thought of ‘buying’ house-help, yet knowing that she would never have survived the past weeks without Winky.

“Oh, of course they could. Ginny’s just been stubborn about it - says it’s a waste of money when she can do it all herself. I figure if I  make it a gift, she’ll take it just to keep from looking ungrateful.”

The waitress delivered their food, and Sirius immediately changed the subject. “All right then, Hermione. We’re here, we have the food. Now what’s up?”

“Well…” Hermione toyed with her salad, uncertain of how to begin. “I wanted to ask you about someone you knew a long time ago. The Headmaster told me you two had dated.”

“You’ll have to narrow that down a bit, I’m afraid,” Sirius said with a cheeky grin, teeth flashing in the midst of the dark beard. “I didn’t stay home much in my younger days.”

“Her name was Diana Fletcher.”

The name was enough to wipe the smile from his face, and Sirius put down his fork and looked at her more carefully. “What’s this about, Hermione?”

“I…can’t tell you. I’m sorry Sirius. I truly can’t tell you why, but I’d really like to hear about her.”

Sirius sighed. “All right, then. Diana Fletcher.” He paused for a moment to gather his thoughts. “Yeah, Diana and I dated for a while – the better part of a year, it was, back in ’79 or ’80. No, it was ’80, mostly, because that’s the year Harry was born.”

“What does Harry have to do with it?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” Sirius admitted. “But Diana and I broke up not long after Harry was born. The better I got to know her the more I realized that there was something a bit off about her, and it was never more obvious than when she was around Harry. Diana wasn’t really a part of our circle when we were in school, but we all got to be friends once she joined the Order, and she and Lily were pretty close. We hurried over there right after they brought Harry home from St. Mungo’s and had a bit of a party. Remus and Peter were there, too, and we were all celebrating - passing around cigars and a bottle of Ogden’s. We needed a reason to celebrate just then, you know? Anyway, Lily and Diana soon wanted no part of us, so they took little Harry off to a corner to try to escape. Di had seemed fine when we got there, but after she’d held Harry for a bit she came to me and told me she was ready to leave. I couldn’t understand why, as we’d only just got there, and the party was still in full swing. We had a bit of a row about it, and it ended with her Apparating home alone.

“I didn’t think much of it at the time, to tell you the truth, because she’d always been moody and I just figured this was another one of those days. But after a while I noticed that she didn’t seem to want to go to Lily and James’s place much anymore, and when we did go there she could hardly take her eyes off of Harry. It was almost disturbing the way she stared at him. But she didn’t want to hold him, and later she didn’t want to talk about him at all. I was proud of having been named the godfather, but she would get annoyed with me whenever I mentioned his name. It was strange.”

“I can imagine,” Hermione murmured. The sight of a dark-haired baby boy must have been like acid on an open wound.

“Well, eventually it was just obvious that we weren’t going to make it as a couple, and we parted as friends. I never got to the bottom of what was bothering her, but I can’t say that I really tried. We were so busy with the battle against Voldemort back then that our personal lives just weren’t a priority for any of us. We had work to do.” He shrugged. “And to tell you the truth, Diana and I weren’t really in love. We were in the same place at the same time doing the same thing, and we gravitated to one another for a time, but we didn’t really love each other.”

“How did she die?” Hermione asked softly.

“We’d broken into a house looking for some information,” Sirius remembered. “She and I had done the job together. The man was a Death Eater, and we were trying to find out something about their next planned attack. We did, too, and thought we’d covered our tracks, but they found out about it and came after Diana. I know now that it was probably all Peter’s doing. There’s no other way they could have tracked us so fast. They killed her, and I think it was meant to be a warning to us all. Her death was part of the reason that Lily and James went into hiding, actually. It was obvious that our little group had gotten Voldemort’s attention, and they had Harry to think about.” He shook his head sadly. “So much waste, Hermione.”

“I know,” she said, rubbing her temples. “And it still isn’t over. Voldemort’s been dead for years now, and we’re still finding casualties.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Hermione sighed. “I really can’t tell you,” she said. “Not yet, anyway. But believe me when I say that Diana Fletcher had a good excuse for being a little ‘off.’”

Sirius nodded and made a thoughtful sound. “I suppose I always figured that; maybe I was just afraid to look deep enough to find out what it was. Sounds bad, put like that, but there it is.”

“May I ask you one other thing?”

“Of course.”

“Is this why you and Severus Snape hated one another so much?”

Sirius’s mouth quirked upwards in a half-smile. “Oh, so you know that much, do you? Well then, yes, I suppose that is a lot of the reason. Mind you, we never cared for one another, and after that idiot stunt I pulled with Remus, he had a right to hate me, but I think he hated me even more when he found out I was seeing Diana. And then later, after I went to Azkaban, he and everyone else assumed that I was the one who had turned traitor. It looked all the worse because even though Di and I had broken into that house together, she was the one the Death Eaters went after. Now I think Peter planned it that way – he was setting me up, even then. But whatever else I might say about Snape, I think he really did care for Diana. Albus told me much later that her death was what made him change to our side. I didn’t know that, of course, when I got out of Azkaban, and I blamed him for being one of the ones who killed her.”

“Did you two ever talk about all of this?”

“No,” Sirius said, shaking his head. “But we each know the truth now, and we’re able to be civil to one another. I doubt we’ll ever have occasion to talk it all out. You know, though, however much I might have hated Snape, Diana hated him ten times more. I never did find out exactly how things ended with them, but she absolutely despised him. I think that’s one reason we never could have worked together – she hated Snape far more than she could have ever loved me. I always kind of wondered if she was just with me to get some sort of twisted revenge on him.”

Hermione nodded; yes, that made sense too. She was depressed as she finished her meal and tried to talk with Sirius of other things.

§ § § §

Severus Snape had never had the slightest interest in babies, and the knowledge that Curt was his son had not automatically changed anything about his own disposition toward children. The baby still seemed a foreign and unpredictable creature who, though Snape never would have admitted it, seemed to be more an extension of Hermione Granger than of either Diana or himself. He had felt curiosity about the child, and he had been frustrated by his inability to observe him away from the prying eyes of his colleagues. He had no desire to have his ineptitude with babies and his awkwardness with his own child put on public display, but that was precisely how each of his attempts to see his son had turned out.

He still didn’t know if he wanted to be a father to the child. He had named him more to deny Granger the opportunity than out of any sense of patriarchal obligation. He had chosen his grandfather’s name on impulse and because his grandfather, unlike his father, was someone he still was able to admire. Granger had struck back by assigning the child a nickname, one that was now universally used by the inhabitants of the castle. He was forced to view that round as a draw.

But in his more rational moments, he had to concede that Granger was a far better parent to the boy than he was or likely ever could be. She loved him - that was obvious enough - while Snape viewed him with a potent mixture of guilt and fear but nothing that could be considered love. He occasionally wondered what kind of father he would have made as an eighteen-year-old, had everything been different, but there was usually a great deal of alcohol involved in those ruminations, and he thrust them aside as pointless the moment he was sober. The reality was that he was forty-five years old, alone, and suddenly fatherhood was being thrust upon him by a girl who had been dead for more than two decades. Surely there was some statute of limitations on responsibility in a case like this?

Apparently not, and over the sound of the Fates’ uproarious laughter, he realized that it would soon be time for him to come to some sort of conclusive decision about the child’s future. He had promised the house-elf that he would see to it, and he intended to keep that promise. He had not promised that he would play a direct role.

Before he could give his child away, however, he felt some obligation to know what he was giving up, and thus he had been glad - in an appalled sort of way - when Granger had asked him to watch the boy the previous Saturday. She had probably been prodded by Albus to do so - it was obvious that she would rather have handed the baby over to a Dementor - but he had agreed because he thought it would be such a dreadful experience that it would make his decision an easy one.

Instead it had been…pleasant. Surprisingly pleasant. He still hadn’t felt a tidal wave of love for the child, but neither had he felt the awkwardness that had marked his previous attempts to hold him. Perhaps most astonishing of all was the fact that they had both slept. Usually, sleep only came to him after hours of restless prowling about the castle, when his legs ached with the exertion of climbing so many sets of stairs and walking miles through the hollow corridors. Only when his body was completely exhausted would his mind finally skid to something like a halt. Then he would collapse in his bed, and for a few hours he would sink into welcome oblivion, but toward morning the dreams would come. They weren’t always unpleasant dreams, though he probably had more than his share of those, but neither were they relaxing. It was as if his mind insisted on performing pre-dawn callisthenics, often awakening him with its frenetic activity. But when Curt had drifted off to sleep in his arms, when the baby’s fussy fidgeting had subsided into deep, rhythmic breathing and his hands had fallen still, balled into tiny fists, Snape had stilled as well, had settled back into his chair and simply watched the child sleep. None of his usual activities could be performed just then; there was nothing more pressing than sitting quietly in front of his fire, with his arm curled around his son’s soft warmth.

It was then that he had finally had the chance to examine the boy, to look for familiar bits and pieces and to see how they had been arranged to form this entirely new person. It was such a clichéd thing for a father to do - for any parent to do - and it certainly waasn’t something he’d ever expected to be doing himself, but he found it an interesting exercise and ultimately concluded that the genetic mix had been largely favourable. The long limbs and fine black hair were his contribution, and he expected the child would one day be grateful for the former and curse him for the latter. Diana had been short and, though not exactly overweight, she had tended toward a certain softness and yearned for greater height. It had been a joke between them when they had kissed; he’d bent over and she’d stood on tiptoes to make their lips meet.

The baby’s rounded face, full lips, and upturned nose were Diana’s legacy, and for the nose, at least, the child should thank his lucky stars - if a baby who’d spent twenty-seven years in cupboard could rightly be said to havelucky stars, which Snape doubted. Whatever, the nose was a definite improvement over the one with which most Snapes were afflicted, and there could be no question that Diana had made a worthy contribution to the creation of their child.

In the quiet of his rooms that day, Snape had seen what he hadn’t wanted to see before, and he had felt the first spark of connection. This was his child. His and Diana’s, whatever that meant now, with her dead and gone for so many years. A few minutes of passion he couldn’t even remember had produced a human being with Snape and Fletcher blood mingling in its veins and warming its soft flesh. He could feel it as he placed his hand over the baby’s head, threading his fingers through the silky fine hair to rest lightly over the fontanel, which rose and fell with each beat of the child’s heart.
 

His child.

Soon after, his eyes had drifted shut and they had slept and breathed in tandem, and when he woke and realized the child had gone from his arms, he had felt a moment of purest panic. Even after he saw the baby with Granger, nursing contentedly, he had felt the jittery after-effects of the adrenaline that had shot through him, leaving his mouth cottony with fear.

That day, for the first time, it had seemed strange to see his son at Hermione Granger’s breast, and he began to wonder what he might have given up when he had told her with such conviction that the child couldn’t possibly be anything to do with him. He began to wonder what it was that Diana had sought to deny him when she had given birth in secret and then put their child to sleep. She would be pleased, he thought, that Hermione Granger had taken custody of the boy. In fact, Granger was just the type that Diana would have hand-picked as a successor, had she been given the opportunity. And perhaps that should be considered, when he made his final decision, but after only a few hours with his son, the decision no longer seemed as obvious as it once had. That evening at Table, when Albus had handed him the baby, he had felt publicly validated as Curtius Snape’s father for the first time. He realized that despite his own feelings of inadequacy, he had some fledgling desire to actually fill that role.

And so he had looked forward that week to keeping the baby again on Saturday. He didn’t know what Granger was finding to do with herself, and he didn’t care, hurrying her out the door as soon as possible. He expected another comfortable couple of hours in his chair and settled there immediately with his son in his arms.

They were getting on well, for two people who had no idea how to talk to one another, when a sudden eruption in the vicinity of Curt’s nappy had him groping for his wand to summon Winky. She came quickly - fortunately for her - but not quickly enough. The nappy hadn’t contained the entire disaster, and it had soaked through Curt’s clothing and onto Snape’s robes. He didn’t realize it until he handed the child to the house-elf for changing, and then his long nose flared in disgust as he saw the damp spot on his sleeve.

He hurried to his room to strip off the soiled clothing as the baby screamed his way through the extensive changing. It didn’t appear to have soaked through to his shirt, but he changed that too, just in case. He returned to the sitting room in a clean shirt and trousers to find that Winky had completed the more revolting aspects of her job and was snapping the baby into a clean sleep suit. He was still screaming, however, red-faced and furious, and Snape gestured to him irritably.

“Can’t you do something about that?”

“Master Curt is needing feeding,” Winky said. “Is there a bottle?”

“Just a moment. I’ll have to prepare it.” Snape had prepared fresh formula in anticipation of keeping Curt again, and he stepped into his lab to heat it to the correct temperature before putting it in the bottle Granger had left him. The baby was still screaming when he returned, the tiny house-elf walking him and patting his back.

“Is Mr Severus wanting to feed baby?” Winky asked, offering him the child.

“Er, I suppose so,” Snape said, taking the baby in one arm while holding the bottle with the other. He pushed the nipple between Curt’s lips, only to have him thrust it out again with his tongue. “What’s the matter with him?” Snape growled.

“Master Curt is not liking the bottle these days,” Winky informed him, cringing slightly. “Master Curt is wanting Miss Hermione.”

“Well Miss Hermione isn’t here,” Snape snapped, still trying to force the bottle into the baby’s mouth, jamming it now against the thrusting tongue. “If he had an iota of sense he’d realize that and cooperate.”

“Master Curt is just a baby, sir.” Winky sounded personally wounded.

“I’m well aware of that, you fool. Here, you try.” Snape pushed the child back to the house-elf and watched as she tried unsuccessfully to get him to take the bottle. He quickly decided that the screaming was second only to Cruciatus when it came to the effect on his nerves, and he wondered how much trouble he would get in if he cast a silencing charm. A lot, probably, particularly since the damned house-elf would report it to Granger immediately. It irritated him that he found that thought intimidating.

Finally, finally, when Snape was ready to hand the child over to a Dementor himself, if it would just shut him up, Winky got Curt to drink a few sips of the bottle. For a few blissful moments, silence reigned. He pulled away once the edge had been taken off his hunger, and he continued to fuss as Winky burped him.

“Here. I’ll try again,” Snape said, now that the baby was calmer. He reached for Curt, and the moment he took him in his arms, the baby spit up, soiling his father’s shirt with sour formula.

“Damn it!” Snape swore, practically throwing the baby back at Winky.

“Master Curt isn’t used to that milk,” Winky defended.

“Just hold him while I change,” Snape hissed through clenched teeth.

When he returned from changing his clothes a second time, Winky had rocked Curt into a light sleep.

“Do you think he’ll stay asleep?” Snape asked.

“If Professor Snape will hold him, I think Master Curt will sleep,” Winky said.

“I’ll hold him.” He took the baby carefully, having no wish to jostle him awake or further upset the contents of his stomach, and Winky disappeared with a pop after promising to return if he needed her.

Thus it was that Hermione found the two of them once again settled comfortably in the arm chair before the fire.

“How did it go?” she asked.

“Fine. No problems.”
 

§§§§

 Snape had been awake when she’d arrived that day, but he hadn’t opened the door to her. When she had knocked, the door had swung open magically, and she entered as he was putting his wand to one side. His movements were cautious, with obvious care being taken to keep from awakening the child in his arms. She settled across from him without being invited as she asked the predictable questions about how things had gone.

He didn’t ask about her lunch, and she was grateful to be spared the lie. She could not tell him that she had arranged the luncheon for the sole purpose of prying into his past, couldn’t tell him how the story Sirius had told her continued to thread its way through her mind, clinging to previously known facts and obscuring them like wisps of fog. If she, who had been entirely uninvolved up until two months ago, was being tormented by ‘if only’s,’ how much worse must it be for Snape, who had lived through it all? How much worse for Sirius, who had…well, if not loved Diana, at least cared for her. Both men blamed themselves and one another for her death, and in fact, both had had a hand, however unintentional it might have been. Total absolution could not be granted to either of them, and she wondered if they still yearned for it – if they ever had – or if whatever guilt they had once felt had been replaced by other feelings, more recent regrets. Looking at Snape, it was hard to imagine that there had been loves and losses more recent than Diana Fletcher; in truth, it was hard to imagine that there had ever been a Diana Fletcher at all - that “Snape” (you said the name with a slight curling of the lips, as if the very taste of it was foul) had ever been a boy named Severus who had loved and laughed and burned with passion as young flesh came together in dark corners.

Then again, the “Snape” whose name was bitter on her tongue couldn’t possibly be the same Snape who sat before her with a baby’s head nestled against his lean chest, wrinkling his starched white shirt. He was not the same man who had fallen asleep like that the week before, the harsh lines of his face relaxed and nearly gentle as he cradled his son in his arms.

What immense power lay in that tiny, sleeping form! The baby had taken over her life and driven her every decision for the last two months, but that seemed minor indeed compared to the change he had wrought in Snape - or at least in her interpretation of him. Severus Snape had loomed large and terrifying for so long now, a creature sometimes less than human and sometimes more so, but never had she been able to see him as Minerva McGonagall did, when she wrapped both bony hands around her teacup and got that distant, troubled look in her eyes as she hinted at what might have been. It was common among Minerva’s generation…they dwelt a great deal on ‘if only’s’ and remembered with tears and regrets the fallen friends, the broken lives, the shattered loves.

Hermione’s generation seemed unable to take that view of things, as yet, though they too had buried parents, friends, and housemates and had seen the violent interruption of every normal thing. When it was over, when Voldemort was finally dead and gone and the summer rains had washed away the last traces of blood, they had picked themselves up and moved on with a dogged determination to set their world to rights. There was a tacit agreement among them that they would not dwell on the past as Voldemort’s first generation of survivors had done. No, they would move on, just as if it hadn’t happened. They would find jobs and marry sweethearts and move into whatever they could afford, and then they would trade up as soon as possible, as soon as the first baby was followed by a second and then a third. An entire generation of magical babies was being born into these lives of determined cheerfulness, in which the dead were never mentioned, and Hermione had long nursed the feeling that she was the only one not cooperating. She hadn’t married, she hadn’t reproduced, she hadn’t even remained in London, a safe distance from the memories. No, she had returned to Hogwarts and found that she was more comfortable with Minerva’s brand of grief, with quiet conversations deeply shadowed by honest regrets.

Until now, however, she had not been able to count Severus Snape amongst the victims, and she had dismissed Minerva’s attempts to do so. He was alive, wasn’t he, and as acerbic as ever. He was strong and invulnerable and quick to attack weakness in others. Anyone less like a victim was hard to imagine, but now he was there, in front of her, and the child in his arms was like a puzzle piece that had been missing for nearly three decades. It had been tapped into place by Charlie, by Sirius, by Dumbledore, and even by a wizened house-elf, and the image of Snape had altered, now that the hole had been filled. She could not see him as less than human with Curt sleeping in his arms.

They sat in edgy silence. Neither wanted to awaken the sleeping baby, but Hermione was anxious to be gone. In her own rooms, she could play with Curt and try to forget what Sirius had told her. She could try to put Snape back into his proper skin. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat, and the squeak of the leather was loud in the silence of the room. There was an otherworldliness about the dungeons on the weekend, a sense that they were entirely disconnected from the rest of the castle. There were no footsteps in the corridor outside and no students calling back and forth to one another. There was just that deep and unrelieved silence that seemed to press against her as she waited. She watched the fire, darting looks at Curt, at Snape, willing the former to wake up and the latter to be a simple bastard again.

Eventually Curt did begin to stir. He stretched first, his long toes visible as they pressed against the fabric of his sleep suit, and then he waved his small fists in the air as he screwed up his face and made the first fractious sounds of complaint, like a musician tuning his instrument.

The two adults rose as one, Snape handing the baby to Hermione quickly. “He’ll need to eat. The bottle was not terribly popular.”

“Oh, I was afraid of that,” Hermione said, re-seating herself as Curt turned to her breast and began to root vigorously. When his searching mouth met with cloth, he was instantly enraged, and Snape winced slightly as the baby’s screams echoed from the dungeon walls. “Just a second, Curt,” Hermione murmured. “It’ll just be a second.”

He didn’t make it easy on her, but she managed to get him to the breast in record time, and the screams were instantly replaced by the sounds of Curt’s greedy suckling. “Could you hand me a blanket, please?” she asked, once the baby had calmed down and she’d started breathing normally again.

Snape reached into her enormous bag and handed her the first blanket he came to, and she covered herself and relaxed back into the leather chair. Snape seemed to relax too, and though the room was quiet again, the silence no longer seemed oppressive. She wished she could think of something to say to him, but there was so little precedent for making conversation with Severus Snape. The only thing they seemed to have in common was Curt, and she didn’t particularly like to think about that.

“So, he didn’t take the bottle too well?” she ventured, rather inanely.

“No,” Snape admitted. “Perhaps a quarter of it, but no more, and even that was under duress.”

“I thought you said you didn’t have any problems.”

He arched an eyebrow at her. “I meant that I hadn’t had any problems I couldn’t handle. As you can see, he’s perfectly fine.”

Something dawned on her then, and she couldn’t suppress her gleeful look as she said, “I notice you’ve changed clothes.”

He glared. “I’m keeping this room warmer than usual, Professor Granger. I shed my robes for that reason.”

“Of course.” She grinned at him and ignored the fact that his glare intensified. “You know, you’re on a first-name basis with every other instructor at this school.”

“That’s not true. Most of the instructors at this school I try very hard not to speak to at all.”

She snorted. “Well, since it appears that we’re going to have to speak to one another, perhaps you could call me Hermione.”

“I could.”

“Must you go out of your way to be difficult?”

“I’ve wondered the same about you since you were eleven.”

She smiled at that. “Really, Professor, I hardly think it’s fair to hold that against me. I will admit that I was annoying back then, but surely I’m less so now?”

“Can you honestly say that you don’t hold my behaviour from those days against me?” he challenged.

“I probably wouldn’t if I’d seen the least evidence of change,” she said, and then she clapped her free hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t terribly tactful, was it?”

He smirked. “Speaking of not having changed.”

“Touché.” She felt she’d performed poorly in that round, so she decided to abandon the field and ask the question that had moved to the forefront of her mind as Curt had nursed. “I’m sorry to bother you, but may I have a drink of water?”

“Of course.” Snape rose and fetched her a glass, placing it on the small table beside her as he had done the previous week.

“Thank you.” She had taken advantage of his absence to switch Curt to the opposite breast, hoping to get him just full enough that she could take her leave and let him finish in the privacy of her rooms. He continued to nurse quietly for a few minutes and then pulled off, his hands tangling in the blanket. Good. He was finished then.

She pulled her robes to and then said, “Can you…?”

“Here.” Snape took Curt from her arms and sat with him again, propping his long legs on the ottoman and arranging the baby upright against his thighs so that they were face to face. Hermione watched as Curt responded to his father immediately with a wide grin.

“He’s so much fun now that he’s smiling,” she said, as she finished closing her robes. “He loves for you to talk to him.” Curt automatically turned toward the sound of her voice and beamed at her in turn.

“Is it too soon to begin Potions instruction?” Snape asked lightly.

Hermione giggled. “Probably not. My parents read all sorts of things to me when I was a baby. Before I was born, even. Ginny said Harry’s been reading Quidditch magazines to Anna ever since she was a few days old.”

Snape snorted his opinion of that. “It figures. Potter’s cultivating mediocrity, as usual.”

“I think all that matters is that they hear the sound of your voice and know that you’re talking to them,” Hermione said, automatically defending her friend. “I doubt it will impact Anna’s future Quidditch abilities or academic abilities in the slightest.”

 Snape waved his hand at her dismissively. “Calm yourself, Professor. We all have our little duties to perform in this life, and insulting Potter is one of mine. It is a matter of no importance to me how he chooses to parent his child.”

Hermione laughed. “I think he parents very well, actually. He’s certainly enthusiastic about it. All Harry’s ever wanted is a family.”

“Hmm.” Clearly disinterested in Harry and Harry’s progeny, Snape turned his attention back to Curt, letting him grip his index finger and even unbending so far as to return the baby’s smiles. Hermione sat still, practically holding her breath. Part of her still wanted to take the baby and run, to find someplace where she could keep him to herself and never ever have to share, but there was also a part of her that realized she was being given a peek at something truly unique.

Once, in the Spring of her fifth year, when she was sick of communal living and exasperated with Harry and Ron’s persistent refusal to mature into rational human beings, she had taken her books out onto the grounds to study. She had found a comfortable spot not far from the Forbidden Forest, and soon the warm sun and soft breeze had lulled her, and she had fallen asleep with her head pillowed in her arms. She was in shadow when she awoke, and the ground beneath her was cool. As her eyes fluttered open, she froze, unable to believe what she was seeing. A mother unicorn and her foal were grazing, not two metres from where she slept. They must have known that she was there, but apparently they had decided that the sleeping human gave them nothing to fear, and they moved around her, the foal gambolling playfully around its sedate mother, its horn flashing in the gold of the setting sun. Eventually Hermione sat up - cautiously, carefully - and for a moment the unicorns went rigid, and then the baby edged closer to its mother and stared at her with enormous eyes. But she had only wrapped her arms around her legs and stared back at them, willing them to believe that she meant them no harm. She saw them relax, and though the mother kept one eye on the nearby human, the foal went back to its previous antics, appearing to exult in having an audience. Hermione had never been a particularly fanciful girl. She thrived on facts, on knowledge, on the type of information that could be found in the Arithmancy text open at her feet. She’d never had any particular wish to watch a unicorn at play. But as the foal danced around her and the mother peacefully grazed, Hermione realized that she was privileged to see something that few humans ever saw, to share precious moments with the unicorns as day slid gently into evening, and she knew as it was happening that it would become one of her most treasured memories. She had never told a soul about the unicorns, nor had she ever seen another one wild, roaming free.

Watching Snape with Curt gave her much the same feeling - the feeling that she was seeing something so private, so intimate, that even to speak of it would constitute a violation. It made her want to fold up into herself, to make herself as unobtrusive as possible so that the thing that was timidly emerging wouldn’t be frightened away. She coveted this time with Curt - this sweet, happy time after a feeding when the smiles spilled out of him and his hands waved erratically in the air. His eyes had lost their newborn murkiness and grown so dark that the pupils and irises blended together, and when he was happy, they shone like onyx. They were his father’s eyes, and at the same time they weren’t, for Curt hadn’t yet learned to glare, hadn’t yet learned to narrow his eyes with cold contempt. But with Curt in his lap, Snape wasn’t doing either of those things, and for a few moments his eyes matched his son’s, and a spark of recognition seemed to leap between them, one to the other. For those few moments, instead of feeling threatened, Hermione actually felt privileged, and she remained still and silent in her seat so that Snape could enjoy a few moments of what she enjoyed every day.

Her time with the unicorns had ended when the sun had set behind the trees of the forest, and they had been left in velvety darkness relieved by the barest sliver of a moon. The mother unicorn had looked at Hermione and then glanced at the glowing windows of the castle, as if to say that it was time for young humans to be getting home. Hermione stood, and this time the unicorns didn’t spook at her movement but instead moved gracefully away from her and into the forest.

Snape’s time with Curt ended more prosaically, when Curt turned toward Hermione and then spit up, managing a direct hit on Snape’s trousers. Snape swore and Hermione laughed, reaching for a flannel from her bag and wiping Snape’s leg before lifting Curt away and putting him over her shoulder, patting his back.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as he stood up and continued to dab at his trousers. “We should have burped him.”

“It’s all right,” Snape said dryly. “It’s less offensive than the formula he spit on me earlier and a great deal less unpleasant than what happened before that.”

“I thought you changed because of the heat.”

“I lied.”

She smiled. “Which explains why Curt’s clothes were changed as well. I’ll be sure to compliment him on his performance later.” She reached for her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “I suppose we’d better go…let you change clothes again. Thank you for watching him.”

“I told you no thanks were necessary. In fact…I’d like to have him again next Saturday.” It was clearly not a request, and Hermione felt all her misgivings about letting Snape spend time with Curt return in a rush. She had the feeling that there was no turning back now, however, and so she tried to give in with grace.

“Of course,” she managed. “I’ll try to time it better so that he’s eaten right before he comes and you won’t have to bother with the bottle.”

“Thank you.” He opened the door for her and then, as she crossed the threshold, he reached out one hand and lightly caressed Curt’s head in farewell. “Good afternoon…Hermione.”

“And to you, Severus.”