Desperate Measures

“Before you go, there is one other thing I wanted to mention,” Dumbledore said.  

The staff were all weary of the day and afflicted with the general irritability that flavoured the final two weeks of school, and they barely suppressed their groans. The Headmaster had – most tediously – called an impromptu staff meeting after dinner, and everyone was anxious to have done with it so that they could return to their rooms. They had already begun gathering up their things and scraping back their chairs, and at the Headmaster’s words, they all stopped what they were doing and glared at him, silently daring him to be long-winded.  

“Professors Granger and Snape were married on Saturday,” Albus said, smiling first at Hermione at one end of the High Table and then at Severus on the other. “I’m sure you all will join me in offering them our best wishes. That’s all. Thank you.” The Headmaster rose from his chair then, gave the assembly a brief nod, and left the room.  

Hermione and Severus, left in the centre of the most awkward silence in Hogwarts history, were briefly united in their desire to kill the man with their bare hands.  

The staff simply didn’t know what to do. Had this been the culmination of a long-time love affair, it would have been a simple case of hugs and congratulations all around. But this particular couple – if they could even be called that – seemed not to qualify for that response. Instead the staff members stared and then caught themselves staring and looked away, only to find themselves staring again.  

“Of course, I knew it already,” Sybil Trelawney intoned, breaking the painful silence. “I saw it in my morning tea leaves.”  

“Oh, you did not!” Minerva snapped. Impending retirement had loosened her tongue a great deal where Sybil was concerned.  

Surprisingly, Alastor Moody was the first to make a civil response. “Well, congratulations then,” he said, giving them each a nod. He left the room, clearly disinterested in any specifics, but his words seemed to pave the way for the others, and soon a ripple of murmured congratulations went up and down the table.  

Hermione felt as though she’d been stripped naked in front of a crowd and fought the profound urge to bolt and hide herself from view. She knew this had to be gotten through one way or another, however, and so she stood her ground and managed to say thank-you to her colleagues as they offered up their doubtful felicitations. Snape made no such effort, instead staring with rapt attention at Curt, who was in his father’s lap and, oblivious to the tension around him, was gnawing and drooling contentedly on a rubber teething ring.  

Fortunately, the Hogwarts staff members didn’t have the nerve to voice the questions they so obviously wanted to ask, and Hermione wasn’t about to volunteer the answers. She offered her colleagues a brittle smile as she tucked her parchment into her bag, and then she walked down the table to Severus and reached for Curt. He handed her the child without a word, and then the two left the room together by the rear door, each heading in the direction of their respective rooms.  

“Just a minute, you two.” Minerva McGonagall’s voice rang out in the stone hallway. “I’d like a word, please.”  

“Yes?” Hermione said politely as Snape stalked over.  

“I have an idea of what this is about,” she said sternly, “and I won’t bother pretending that I like it. But I’ve known you both since you were eleven years old, and I happen to think you can make this work if only you will. Hermione, I want to see you in my chambers tonight. We’ll talk then. Severus, I know better than to think you’ll talk to me, so I’ll just say this: Unless you want to spend the rest of your life as a newt, you’ll do right by this girl. Don’t let me hear otherwise, or you’ll regret it, young man.” “Thank you, Minerva. Your faith in me is overwhelming. At the moment, however, Professor Granger seems to be bearing up well under her considerable burden, so if you don’t mind, I have essays to mark. I might have some time at breakfast if you’d like to threaten me some more then.” With a brief nod, he turned and left them, and Hermione couldn’t help but giggle.  

“Really, Minerva, that was a bit dramatic, don’t you think?” “To the contrary. I don’t think it was nearly dramatic enough, but it was the best I could do on short notice.” Her stern look faded to something closer to concern. “ Oh, dear girl, what have you gone and done?”  

“I admit I’m not entirely sure about that yet,” Hermione said, shifting Curt’s weight slightly. At almost three months old, he had plumped up considerably and was beginning to be an armload. “I’m going to find out as I go along, I suppose. I want Curt to have a mother and a father, and Severus and I are both committed to giving him that.”  

“It takes a great deal more than that to make a marriage, Hermione.” “And you know this how?” she asked, annoyed.  

“I know this because I’ve been alive a lot longer than you have,” Minerva snapped. “I may never have married myself, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t had the opportunity to observe those that are. As I said, I actually believe that you and Severus could make this work - and I’m probably the only staff member here who does believe that, by the way - but you won’t if you don’t acknowledge up front the difficulties that are ahead. If you think that just loving Curt is enough, I’m afraid you’ll ruin his life along with your own.”

“How dare you?” Hermione gasped. “I thought that of all the staff members, you would be the one who had at least a little faith in my judgment, but if you can’t be supportive, then please keep your opinions to yourself. This is none of your business, Minerva. This is none of anyone’s business. It is between Severus and me, and everyone else around here can just stay out of it!”  

“That’s not likely, Hermione. You’ll find that the walls of this castle shrink when something like this is going on. We all have to live here together, and if you and Severus make a mess of your lives, it’ll affect everyone around you.” She saw Hermione was about to make another retort and held up her hand. “No, you’re right,” she said. “I’ve said enough, and I’ll say no more just now. I care about you, child, and want to see you happy. I sincerely hope that you will be.”  

She smoothed a gentle hand over Curt’s dark head and then swept away down the hall. Hermione was still seething, but more than that, she was hurt. She had counted on Minerva as an ally and was crushed that her mentor had exhibited such a low opinion of her judgment. With a sigh she took Curt and headed to her rooms.  

§ § § §  

Several hours later, she was nursing her son, rocking gently back and forth in front of the dwindling fire, when she heard a soft knock at the door.

“Come in, Minerva,” she called, unlocking the door with her wand.

“How did you know it was me?” the older witch asked, stepping across the threshold and closing the door behind her.

“I knew if I didn’t come to you, you’d come to me,” Hermione said tiredly. “Have you called in the reinforcements as well?”

“No, Rosa and Irma elected me as the group’s emissary, in spite of my poor performance after dinner. We didn’t want it to appear that we were ganging up on you.” Minerva was in her favourite dressing gown of Black Watch plaid, her hair in a long plait over her shoulder. In the firelight she looked softer - younger - as she curled into one end of tthe sofa like the feline she sometimes was. “I’m sorry, my dear. I’m afraid I was caught rather off-guard by Albus’s announcement this evening. I shouldn’t have spoken to you as I did.”

“I notice you don’t say you didn’t mean it,” Hermione pointed out, not quite ready to forgive.

“No, I won’t say that.”

They fell silent then, the only sound the shifting of the fire and the snapping of the resulting sparks. Curt pulled away from her breast, sound asleep, his head lolling heavily against her arm and his mouth hanging open slightly. His hair was getting so long, she noticed. It was still very fine, but thicker now and beginning to fall into his eyes and to cover his neck. She brushed it away from his forehead and kissed him gently before pulling her blouse down and rising to settle him into bed.

It was with some reluctance that she turned away from the peaceful sight of her baby sleeping and faced Minerva McGonagall, who had been watching them quietly.

“Will we wake him if we talk here?” Minerva asked softly.

“No.” Hermione shook her head as she moved to join Minerva on the sofa. “For the next several hours, the Hogwarts Express could come through here and it wouldn’t wake him. After about midnight, though, he’s more apt to wake up.”

“You’re wonderful with him, you know.”

“I’m his mother now, Minerva,” Hermione said with quiet satisfaction. “Really and truly his mother. I signed the adoption papers on Saturday.”

“And that’s also when you…?”

“Yes.”

Minerva toyed with the sash on her ancient dressing gown, her mouth pursed thoughtfully. “I wish you had felt you could come to me about this beforehand.”

“So that you could talk me out of it, you mean?”

Minerva sighed. “I suppose so, yes. I know how you’ve always felt about him, Hermione. I’m not saying you haven’t had just cause,” she said, holding up a hand to stop Hermione from interrupting. “I’m just saying that I’m not sure you’ll be able to really…approach this with an open mind.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I suppose I mean exactly what I said to you after dinner tonight. I actually think that you and Severus might be able to make this work, but only if you’re willing to approach it without all of your childish preconceptions and start with a blank slate.”

“Childish!” Hermione exclaimed hotly. “You know perfectly well that he…”

“That is exactly what I’m talking about,” Minerva interrupted sharply. “I’m not saying that Severus’s behaviour has been blameless over the years. It’s been far from that, and I’ve let him know chapter and verse exactly what I think of how he treats my Gryffindors, your set in particular. His treatment of Longbottom alone would have gotten anyone else sacked, but you and I both know that he was needed by the Order in those days, and the strain of that situation told on us all. He has gotten a little better since the war ended, you know.”

“I suppose,” Hermione said grudgingly. “Though since I was in my seventh year when the war ended, I wasn’t really in a position to reap the benefits.”

“That’s neither here nor there. What’s important is not how you saw him then but what you do from this point on.”

“All right.” She hadn’t meant to sound quite so long-suffering, but that was how it came out, even to her own ears.

“Don’t all right me, young lady,” Minerva said impatiently. “I know when someone’s trying to get me to hush up, and it’s not going to work in this case.”

“What do you want me to say? I’ll try to look at Snape differently, all right? I’ve married him and I plan to be the best wife I can to him.” She almost added, for as long as it lasts, but then she caught herself just in time. “I wasn’t trying to hush you up; I was trying to agree with you.”

“Perhaps, but I’ve not finished yet, and I’m not leaving here until I do. Have I ever told you that my parents were in an arranged marriage?”

“Er, no. I don’t think so. But I know that it used to be fairly common in wizarding families.”

“It still happens today. Not quite so blatantly, of course, but several of our pureblood students have been being pushed toward one another by their families all their lives. Sometimes these students wind up rebelling, but as often as not they marry, and many of them go on to do quite well together, at least as far as I can tell. My parents marriage was arranged when they were fourteen. They married at eighteen, not long after they finished at Hogwarts.”

“Did they date one another in the meantime?” Hermione wasn’t sure where this discussion was going, but she was intrigued in spite of herself.

“Not at all. Of course, the rules about fraternization between the boys and girls here were much stricter back then. I’m sure the students still found places to have a discreet snog, adolescent hormones being what they are, but if they’d been caught, it would have probably meant expulsion from the school. My mother told me that she and my father barely knew one another at the time they were married.”

“How awful!”

“I don’t think so,” Minerva mused. “They had a long and - as far as I could tell - a happy marriage. There were three of us children, and my brother and sister would tell you the same. That’s not to say they never had their moments of trouble; all couples do, I’m sure, but they were committed to the marriage from the very first and committed to working together to resolve whatever problems they had. My sister married not long after finishing here, and Mum sat us both down then - I was sixteen - and gave us a long talk about marriage and what it took to keep a marriage strong. I think I blushed for a week - some of it was quite, er, specific, for my sister’s sake more than my own, of course - but I’ve never forgotten the things that she told us that day. It’s consoled me, frankly, as I’ve watched some of my students enter into marriages that were more their parents’ idea than their own. I’ve hoped that they would discover what my Mum and Father had - that a good marriage, in the end, is more about the commitment to making it work than it is about being head over heels in love.”

Well, Hermione was beginning to see the point, but she wasn’t exactly sure what response she should make. ‘All right’ certainly hadn’t gone over well.

“The problem here,” Minerva said, relieving her for the moment of the need to respond, “is that you and Severus do know one another. I rather think you’d be better off like my parents, starting fresh, with no preconceived notions. That’s what I mean when I say that you need to try to forget those opinions you formed as a young girl - however justified they might have been at the time - and try to enter into this marriage with the determination to make things between you work, no matter what. You have not chosen an easy man, but neither have you chosen a terrible one. He will not be pleasant all the time, but I’d be very surprised if he were cruel.”

“He’s certainly capable of being cruel,” Hermione said, subconsciously running her tongue over her top teeth.

“Everyone is capable of being cruel, my dear. The only question is what it takes to bring that out in us. Those years were extremely hard on Severus, and you had the misfortune of being Harry Potter’s friend, which put you in his direct line of fire.”

“I’m still Harry Potter’s friend,” Hermione said, with just a touch of defiance. “I don’t intend for that to change.”

“I doubt Severus will expect for you to part ways completely with the Potters and the Weasleys, but neither should you expect for him to suddenly enjoy socializing with them. It is one of many areas in which a compromise will have to be reached if you’re to succeed in this.”

“That’s going to be hard,” Hermione said, sounding a bit sulky.

“And it’s past time you realized it. Your first loyalties must change, however, if this is to work. The minute you let him put that ring on your finger, you made the decision to make Severus and Curt your first priorities. It is, quite frankly, one reason why I never chose to marry myself. I am simply too selfish and have little interest in taking a family’s needs into consideration. My mother’s talk back when I was sixteen helped me to realize that.”

“You take this entire school’s needs into consideration every day,” Hermione pointed out.

“Yes, but that was my choice, and I could walk away from that responsibility any time I wanted to. I’m doing it in just a few weeks, in fact. You’ve entered into something that you can’t walk away from so easily.”

Again, it was on the tip of Hermione’s tongue to tell Minerva the truth about her marriage. She was realizing, belatedly, that this was not going to be an easy secret to keep. The “back door” that Severus had left them in committing to a one-year trial had become her consolation, and she knew that her friends would find it consoling as well. Conversations such as this one would be easily ended if she could just say that it was not even a realmarriage, and it was only for a year, at that. She felt sufficient gratitude for his forethought, however, that she managed to keep her word. The next year stretched ahead of her, a long, uncomfortable twelve-months, but had it not been for Snape’s Slytherin instinct to create a loophole, it might have been the rest of her life. Yes, she was grateful to him.

“You’re right, of course,” she said finally. “It will…take some getting used to, and I know that what we did was impulsive, but we both truly want what’s best for Curt. Surely that counts for something, doesn’t it?”

“Of course it does. It just doesn’t count for everything. You do have several advantages, however. You’re remaining here at Hogwarts, I gather?”

“Yes. Albus has said he’ll create a new set of rooms for us, but we won’t actually make that change until the students are gone for the summer.”

“A wise choice.” Minerva nodded approvingly. “And Albus was right to see that you start out in neutral territory, so to speak. I shudder to think of you moving down into that hole Severus has been living in for so many years.”

Hermione giggled. “I’ve seen it. It’s not so bad. Nothing like what we pictured when I was a student, anyway.”

“It would be like moving into a turtle’s shell,” Minerva said dismissively. “Too small, too dark, and too much his own space by far. I wouldn’t see you and Curt there for any consideration. But I’m glad you’re remaining at Hogwarts. The House-elves will see to your meals and all your other needs, and you’ll be free to concern yourself with Curt and with getting used to one another. Most newly married couples don’t have that luxury, you know. The beds need making and the meals want cooking and there’s no small army of House-elves to see to all of that for them.”

“Albus is going to assign Winky to us permanently,” Hermione said. “To help with Curt, mainly, but I suppose to do other things as well. It willmake things easier.” The magnanimous impulses that had led her to organize S.P.E.W. all those years ago had clearly been replaced by more selfish inclinations, but she preferred not to think of it in quite those terms and was grateful that Minerva didn’t bring it up either.

“Take full advantage of it. Where will your rooms be?”

“I don’t know. I suppose they might still be in the dungeons, so that Severus will be close to the Slytherins. I, er, told Albus I couldn’t serve as Head of Gryffindor.” She looked nervously at Minerva, unsure of her reaction.

Minerva compressed her lips for a moment with obvious displeasure, and then she nodded. “Probably a wise decision, though I won’t pretend I’m not disappointed. I’m being selfish, of course. It’s made it easier for me to leave knowing I was leaving my Gryffindors in hands I trusted.”

“I’m sorry, Minerva,” Hermione said softly. “I feel like I’m disappointing everyone lately, but I’m not sure what I could have done differently. I used to think everything through so carefully, but ever since Curt, I’ve just had to react. There’s just been no time for anything else. I’ve never…” She bit her lip, feeling herself start to cry. “I don’t recognize myself anymore.”

“Shhh,” Minerva said, reaching for the younger woman and pulling her close as she dissolved into tears. “This thinking with your heart is tricky business, child, and it’s high time you learned how.” She stroked Hermione’s wild nest of hair, let down from the pins she kept it in for teaching, and soothed her as she wept. It soon ended with a shuddering breath, and Hermione drew away and wiped her eyes and sniffed. Minerva pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her dressing gown and handed it to the younger witch. “Blow,” she instructed.

Hermione obeyed. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“That probably just means it was overdue,” Minerva said with a gentle smile. “My shoulder is yours to cry on whenever you need it. You know that.”

“But you’re leaving.”

“You’re thinking like a Muggle, child. There’s nowhere I could go that I couldn’t be back here instantly, if you were to have need of me.”

“It’s not the same,” Hermione said, shaking her head. “You know it’s not. I wish you would stay - just one more year.” It was as close as she would come to admitting that her marriage was a temporary one.

“No,” Minerva answered firmly. “You’ve made your decision, Hermione. Now you must find a way to live with it. It’s probably best that I’ll be gone. Running to me every time things got difficult wouldn’t help you. And I don’t want you running to Rosa and Irma on a whim either. We’ll all be here for you if you truly have need of us, but you and Severus need to learn to depend on one another.”

Hermione nodded miserably. It was ironic, she thought, that in getting married she had put herself in the position of feeling so very alone. She couldn’t imagine depending on Snape, yet by marrying him, she had managed to isolate herself from nearly everyone else.

Minerva left soon after that, and before she turned in, Hermione stood for a long time at the side of Curt’s cot, watching his peaceful sleep and reminding herself again and again, that he was worth it.

§ § § §  

The next day, the awkwardness of the rest of the staff was nearly palpable, and Hermione fled the breakfast table for the sanctity of her office at the first possible opportunity. It was a great relief when her first class filed in and treated her just as they always had. Next term, of course, there would be awkwardness with the students as well, but for now they provided her with the respite of normalcy, and she threw herself into her teaching duties, making every effort to put the tangled mess of her personal life out of her mind.

It honestly never occurred to her that there was one important person who had been absent from dinner and, consequently, from the staff meeting the night before in which Albus had announced her marriage to Snape. It didn’t occur to her, in fact, until lunch time, when she entered the Great Hall with Curt in her arms and saw Charlie Weasley’s normally smiling face glaring down at her from the High Table. She faltered briefly and then continued toward him, offering him an uncertain smile that was not returned.

Snape rose as she approached the table and offered her a brief nod of greeting before reaching for the baby. “Thank you,” Hermione murmured, handing Curt over gratefully. She knew that Snape wasn’t taking Curt to be helpful - he just wanted a few minutes with his chiild - but she was pleased to have the baby off her hands for the moment so that she could concentrate on the upcoming conversation with Charlie.

She took her usual seat at the end of the table with Charlie immediately on her right. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I didn’t mean for you to hear about it from someone else. I didn’t know Albus was going to announce it until it was already done.”

“You’ve lost your fucking mind,” he said, his voice low and intense and his hazel eyes narrowed to angry slits. “What possessed you?”

And she’d thought Minerva’s initial reaction was unpleasant.

“I think we’d better have this conversation outside.” She glanced at the door behind the High Table, and Charlie nodded coldly and scraped back his chair.

The minute the door shut behind them, she let loose. “How dare you speak to me that way? And in front of the entire school!”

“What choice did I have? It’s not like you bothered to tell me privately, now did you? Have you told anyone? Ron? My sister? Harry? We’re yourfriends, Hermione, or doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“It means a lot to me, and you know it. It does not, however, mean that I need to ask your permission before making decisions about my own life. Harry didn’t ask me before he proposed to Ginny. Ron and Corinne eloped, and everyone wound up delighted about it.”

“That’s because Corinne is the best thing that ever happened to him,” Charlie said, as if explaining something to a particularly slow student. “Without her, Ron would still be trying to figure out which shoe goes on which foot. No one could possibly object to Corinne. Whereas Snape…”

“Is my husband,” Hermione said, surprising herself with her defensive tone.

“And you were just so swept away by your love for him that you couldn’t wait to get married,” Charlie said sarcastically. “Please don’t ask me to believe that.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything. This is between Snape and me.”

“Snape,” Charlie repeated snidely.

“Severus,” she said, feeling as though she’d been caught out. “It’s between Severus and me.”

“Come on, Hermione. I know why you did this. Everyone knows why you did this.”

“Well, you’d be an expert, now wouldn’t you?” she snapped. “Because from where I’m standing, what I did and what you did aren’t all that different. Tell me you didn’t marry Elspeth because she was pregnant with Jack.”

Charlie’s face flushed and his jaw clenched, and Hermione realized immediately that she’d gone too far, even if he’d had it coming.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No,” Charlie said, his voice tight, furious. “You’re absolutely right. I married Elspeth because I got her pregnant. And then I lost the use of this arm, and I moved her from Romania and the work she loved and locked her up in a house with a crying baby and let her go slowly crazy while I did what I damn well pleased. Or that’s what she said, anyway, the other night when she told me she was leaving me and going back to Romania.”

“Oh, Charlie,” Hermione breathed. “I’m so sorry. I…don’t really know what to say.”

“There’s nothing to say. I screwed up my life, and hers, and probably Jack’s too, and now I see one of my best friends making the same mistake - only probably bigger, because this is Snape we’re talking about - and I’ll be damned if I’ll stand by and mouth platitudes about how it’llprobably all work out.” Charlie struck the wall with his good hand to emphasize his point. “It won’t. It doesn’t.”

“I couldn’t…see any other way,” she said in a small voice.

“Well, I can tell you from experience that that’s a piss-poor way to start a marriage.”

Hermione had no answer to that.

“I seem to have lost my appetite,” Charlie said finally, after a long silence. “I’m going back to my office.”

Hermione nodded. “Charlie - if there’s anything I can do…”

He laughed, a harsh, mirthless sound. “Right.”

After he’d disappeared down the corridor, she took a deep breath and leaned her forehead against the cool stone wall. She seemed to have lost her appetite as well.

§ § § §  

It was one of those nights when his body refused to rest, and he knew that it wouldn’t rest until it had been pushed to the point of exhaustion - until he had prowled the darkened corridoors for hours and climbed a thousand stone steps. He paced his small rooms until the rest of the castle’s inhabitants - with the exception of Filch, of course - should have retired to their chambers and common rooms, and then he ventured out into the flame-lit hallway and climbed the narrow steps that led him out of the dungeons.

His nightly prowls were always more interesting when he could catch a student or two out after hours, and this night, he particularly felt the need for diversion, so he headed to one popular spot after another, silently canvassing the castle in search of young lovers out for a snog before being parted for the summer. It was pure pleasure to embarrass these foolish children and to punish them for their inability to control their raging hormones. He might even be doing them a favour; his own life would certainly be different just now if someone had caught him and Diana on whichever night it was that Curt was conceived and returned them, humiliated, to their common rooms. The humiliation would have been short-lived indeed compared to the far-reaching consequences of that night. But he didn’t pretend that his motivation was at all altruistic. It was a diversion and a chance to delight in the predictable foolishness of the children who annoyed him by day. It was a chance to laugh secretly as the girls hurried to rearrange their clothing, their blushes visible even in the gloom of whichever corner he’d caught them in, and the boys leaped to position themselves behind whatever happened to be nearby and solid enough to shield their tented robes from the Potions Master’s view.

It was funny. He was a bastard, and it was funny, and that was why he did it.

And on that night, he did it in the hopes that some unlucky couple would take his mind off of his own considerable problems - off the fact that in less than two weeks, he would be living with one of his former students, one whom he’d never even liked during her years at Hogwarts. His life, while not exactly full or happy, had at least grown comfortably predictable and dull in the years since Voldemort had finally been defeated. He liked it that way, and he was virtually certain that he was not going to enjoy having that life disrupted. The reaction of his fellow staff members had been awkward, but it was nothing to him compared with the moment when he would leave the rooms he’d inhabited for nearly twenty years and move in with his wife and child.

He dreaded it, and yet he couldn’t quite bring himself to regret the decision he had made to become a regular feature in his child’s life. He’d held his son at lunch that day, and then again at dinner, and he thought perhaps the child smiled more quickly for him than he did for the others on the staff - with the exception, of course, of Hermionne. Curt seemed perfectly content with his father…seemed even to like him a bit. Snape hadn’t been liked by a child since he’d been one himself, and until now it had never mattered to him. For the first time, however, he wanted a child not to be frightened of him - not to look at him and see a greasy, unpleasant man. But after nearly a lifetime of cultivating that persona, was it possible for him to project anything else? He wasn’t sure. It was entirely possible that by living with his son he was only giving the boy the chance to see his father’s flaws all that much more closely. Of course, Snape had been nearly grown before he’d seen his own father for who he really was. He wasn’t sure if that thought was a hopeful one or not.

He was in a seldom-used storage room on the fifth floor of the castle when he heard the soft mrrp of a cat’s greeting and looked up to see a tabby with familiar markings sitting in the doorway.

“You’re out late tonight,” he noted, expecting her to answer him. Instead, she approached him and rubbed her head once against the leg of his trousers.

“Stop that,” he said irritably, but he didn’t move away.

She transformed then, rising up before him wearing the same plaid dressing gown she’d worn the night before during her conversation with Hermione.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Oh, I figured you’d be prowling about somewhere. It’s taken me an hour to find you.”

“You’ve already threatened me with transfiguration. What now?”

Minerva compressed her lips, trying and failing to hide her smile, but she didn’t answer him directly. “I caught you two in here once,” she said, gesturing to one corner of the room. “Over there, you were, and I doubt you’d have appreciated being interrupted.”

“What?” Snape stared at her, thunderstruck.

“Not everyone is as merciless as you are, Severus,” she answered smugly. “You were both good students, and we all liked seeing you together. It was sweet, really.”

Snape glared at her. “If you have any wish to live to see retirement, Minerva, I’d suggest you don’t use that word in reference to me again. I am not and have never been…sweet.”

Minerva snorted. “Don’t get shirty with me, young man. I’ll remind you that I’ve known you since you were a scrawny eleven-year-old just learning to use your first wand. I didn’t put up with any nonsense from you then, and I’m not apt to start now. You’re not sweet, and no one would be fool enough to say you were. But you and Diana were sweet together. She brought out the best in you, and there are a few of us around who still remember it. Though I admit we didn’t think it had gone quite as far as it had, we knew you two were snogging all over the castle. We thought you were good for one another so we left you alone.”

Snape actually felt himself go hot with mortification, which was completely ridiculous given that his embarrassment was a quarter of a century overdue. But the very thought that his teachers - some of whom were now his colleagues - had not only known what he and Diana were doing together but had sat arounddiscussing it…“Does this story have a point?” he snapped.

“It does, but you won’t like it.”

“What a surprise.”

“You’re getting a second chance of sorts, Severus. I don’t know that either you or Hermione entered into this with your heads screwed on straight - I rather doubt you did, frankly - but I think that marriage and fatherhood might be just what you need. Might even give you the chance to be happy again, as you were with Diana for a little while. So my point is: don’t mess this up.”

“That’s it?” he asked sarcastically. “The newt threat was more creative, you know.”

“It still stands,” Minerva assured him. “In the meantime, if you want more entertaining lectures, you’ll need to go to Albus. I expect he’s been rehearsing.”

“I’ll pass, thank you,” Severus said dryly.

“I rather thought you might,” Minerva said with a smile. “Now, if you don’t mind, it’s past my bedtime. Goodnight, Severus.”

“Goodnight, Minerva.” Before he’d gotten the words out she had transformed again and was winding her way gracefully past the assortment of odds and ends in the room. In the doorway she stopped, glanced back at him briefly, and he thought she might have winked, but he wasn’t entirely sure. The next moment she was gone.

He looked again at the corner she had indicated, and he imagined he saw himself there, his younger self, wrapped around Diana’s soft warmth. He saw them as Minerva must have seen them, utterly oblivious to everything but each other, frantically trying to put feelings into touch and taste since it seemed the right words would never be found. The memory was so strong that he could almost feel her presence in the room with him, and for just a moment, it was a comfort rather than an accusation.

And then the feeling passed, and he was alone in an empty storage room.

It was early yet, and he hadn’t come close to completing his normal rounds, but he decided to return to his rooms anyway. If any young lovers hadventured out, they would be safe, just this once, from the Hogwarts Potions Master.