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The Heir by Sarablade [Reviews - 2]

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A/N
No infringement...bla bla

Notre Dame de Paris should be reclassified as modern opera, really. And you should check it out on youtube, (BELLE first). Its relevance to the story may or may not come out in the next chapters.

Also, live a little. Google the new decors of the Cafe de la Paix.

NDP's never played in the Opera Garnier House, but it should, so there I''ve corrected it.

Hope you enjoy reading half as much as I enjoy imagining it... and tell me about it.

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Birthday Girl



In the autumn dusk, his long coat merged with the shade of the building facing the SRAP bank, and the gusts of freezing wind with the icepick bursting through his gut at regular intervals.


Stalking his prey had always made him feel exhilaratingly powerful and dangerous, even – especially- when the target was much stronger than him, but now shame at hiding warred with the miserable turmoil souring his stomach. He, arguably the most powerful wizard alive in England, was quaking in adolescent gloom, watching a Mudb… a Muggleborn from a street corner and willing his hands to stop sweating. You’re so weak sniggered the little voice in his brain. Hankering after a Mudblood like that… Will you even dare come out of the shadows to offer her a- a parenthesis?

Would he? Would she be pleased to see him?


He would never know.


She stepped out of the glass office building, a small but distinctively expensive bunch of exotic flowers tucked under her arm. She looked tired, but flushed and flustered, with the telltale shaking lips of the repressed delighted smile. Acid bile rose to his throat…


As Snape’s mind tried to wrap itself around the fact that Gisbert had given her flowers for her birthday, his gut quaked again when he saw her soft smile, rereading the jewel case of the CD she was holding. The miserable bastard’d bought her music, too.


Like for his impromptu offer of a lodging underneath his house to the emaciated Azkaban parolee with the bitter chocolate eyes, he would ponder a long time, afterwards, what had made him act so rashly. Within a few seconds he’d Apparated home and was racking his nightstand’s drawer for Ginny’s tickets, bellowing to Polly to set up his dress Muggle evening suit and transform one of Hermione’s better robes.


At the same time, his Patronus was sternly bidding Hermione to make haste on her way home.


He’d taken care that the word ‘home’ should stand out in the message, but the mother in her, at the stark tone of the Patronus, thought only of Emery and what could have happened to him. Her birthday suddenly seemed an ominous temptation to Bellatrix to hit her through the boy.


She almost ran to her Apparition point, forgetting to secrete the flowers as she’d meant to. Snape was waiting for her in the vestibule, in dazzling white shirtsleeves and black wool trousers, arms folded on his tapered chest, slim hips jutted against the wall tapestry. His long narrow face echoed his long narrow body, and the malevolent strength and sheer danger emanating from it hit her again as his eyes focused on the flowers. A wounded tiger. A remote corner of her mind registered the dark appeal of him, even as she scanned the room for Emery.


“What happened?”


“Manners, Granger.”


It couldn’t be so terrible, if he took the time to snark. Or was it already too late? Was he trying to numb her before the hit?


“I’m sorry, sir,” she blurted automatically. Still, his black eyes were fixed on her, preying. Silent.

“S- Sir? Is everything all right?”


He allowed himself a small smirk at being in control again. “Up to your room,” he instructed.


Was she being punished? For the flowers?

“Get dressed with the clothes Polly prepared for you, and for
Merlin’s sake do something civilized with your hair.”


She narrowed her eyes at him. Was it about her birthday? The previous year’s celebration had been… had been quite generous, actually. Coldly.


He’d archly bid Emery to wish her a good birthday when she’d taken the boy to share his breakfast, as he did from time to time. He’d pointedly refrained from uttering any wishes himself, or from inviting her to join their meal.


The morning work, last year, had been taciturn and efficient. Routine. But he’d called an end to their work right after they’d finished the cold lunch they always shared in the lab- same food for both, to each a book and not a word exchanged-, coldly announcing that the rest of his day would be spent with Emery. The boy had come back with a present for her, the whole set of Beautiful Fairies and Brave Warlocks jacketed in hammered copper and animated dolls of all the characters, the choice of a three-year-old with a grown man’s purse. In the enlarged package she’d found a beautifully feminine quill holder with mother-of-pearl inlays.

Snape’d avoided her for a straight fortnight afterwards.


This year she had left early for work at the bank, as usual, hoping when she met him in the lab for their evening session he’d say something. Maybe. Maybe he’d call a parenthesis? Maybe she’d be bold enough to request one as her birthday present… she’d spent half the day at work trying to work up the nerve to do so, blustering and blushing when Jason had presented her with her gifts... because she felt so undeserving of them, mooning about her… her other boss.


“Fifteen minutes in the vestibule,” Snape snapped.


She dressed herself in nine, and spent six with Em. Anyway the Apparition would mess her hair…


Half an hour later she stood, reeling from Apparition and exhilaration, before the Paris Opera house. Instinctively her hand crept higher as she scanned the magnificent square, from the crook of his elbow where she’d latched for the Apparition, onto his biceps. “Oh.”


And “Oh” again, when she understood they were going in.


“If you’ll allow me,” he stiffly uttered as he pulled her into the shade of a marble statue. He muttered under his breath and very light Glamors changed his features and hers. “Many wizards will be attending. Many of them British, too,” he explained succinctly, handing her a small mirror. It was… just barely not her, she saw. Nothing was really different, but nothing was the same. Looking at him she saw his nose was shorter and wider, his jaw squarer under short brown hair… somehow he’d made himself look like Jason, she noticed with a pang. Was it on purpose?


“Parenthesis has begun”, he announced with an uncertain look on his new face as they went up the stone stairs. From the second they’d gone through the heavy iron and gold doors, it was as if their personalities had taken on Glamors, too.


His hand on the small of her back steered her with the consummate grace of a dancer... he ran a witty commentary on the baroque décor and the upcoming performances announced in colorful placards in gilded frames, he gave her cloak to the attendant and engaged her in elegant chit chat… they melded, they smiled at other suave couples milling around. Only her Unspeakable training made her detect his wand in the hand behind her back, the way his eyes rowed all over the place even as he kept pointing statues and decorations to her… but when he looked into her eyes another kind of tension showed on his Glamored face for a blink, a gut-wrenching mix of shyness, care for her, and raw wolfish hunger so acute she had to avert her eyes and close her mouth before a moan embarrassed her into self-annihilation. He nodded silently, a hovering presence receding behind her.


In the first-floor foyer a pearled woman with kind wrinkles and violet-tinted stiff curls brought manicured hands to her chest as a white-haired gentleman, his ponytail reaching to his waist and his Bordeaux coattails to the back of his knees, came back from the buffet with champagne and chocolates.

“Happy seventieth anniversary, my love,” he smiled in French. “You’re even more fetching than on our hand-fasting day.”


“How could you know? You were so afraid you’d have handfasted a hippogriff and never known until after the ceremony. You never even looked at me,” smiled his wife. “But I,” her voice took a gourmand quality, “I couldn’t take my eyes from you… and the figure you cut is even more handsome today, Charles.”


With a pang of envy Hermione averted her head from the happy couple, afraid Severus would react as he usually did before displays of affection. And indeed, when she turned to him, nobody was standing at her side anymore.


Her small jealousy flare turned into downright misery.


She looked around her, flustered. After a moment he materialized again just behind her, with two champagne flutes and a single red rose. “Happy birthday.” Her gut wrenched again, this time in surprised delight. So much blood went up to her cheeks it was only normal her belly fluttered with that terribly empty feeling. From under heavy eyebrows his eyes – his own unglamored eyes- lingered on the irrepressible smile that stretched her lips up to her ears, and even his thin lips quirked upwards, at least a tenth of an inch. It was wider than any smile he’d ever held for her, though. Than any smile she’d ever seen on him, except for Em.


Oh, she thought for the third time that evening. Would it only have been on his real features.


Their hands brushed as she took the glass from him, and they both hissed in shock at the electricity. She suddenly thought she’d gladly forgo whatever they were going to see –she hadn’t even asked about the play yet - and go with him for a walk in the Paris streets, and- and a hotel somewhere. Yet after Lucius, she’d felt certain she’d never have that kind of thoughts or desires any more…


His eyes widened fractionally and he stuttered. Was he such a Legilimens, as to hear her mind? “I- we should take our places. ‘Notre Dame the Paris’ is about to begin.”


She felt herself blush even darker at yet another stupid smile lighting her face like a little girl’s. “Thank you so much! For- for everything. Severus.” She forced herself to say his name although it still made her uncomfortable. Would it be too forward to say aloud that she’d only rather have him looking like himself?


“You owe your thanks to Mrs. Potter, actually. She came up with the idea… and the tickets.”


“Then I’ll have to thank her doubly, for the tickets and for having afforded me your company instead of coming with me…” She faltered as his eyes bore into hers without any hint of Legilimency, but only a compelling, burning need to see the truth in her eye . “It’s a parenthesis, and my birthday. I… just for once I should be able to say what I mean,” she blurted. “To really thank you for your, ah- your companionship. And for-”


“Let’s take our seats,” he cut. His hand came up, hovered near her shoulder, then skimmed her back until it almost touched her waist again to steer her towards the entrance, and her breath caught anew.


She wouldn’t catch it for the next two hours, spellbound by the powerful waves of the music, the richness of the voices, the magic of the story, and Severus’ smell near her, and his hand almost touching hers on the plush armrest. Almost… Until the gravelly, bass voice of Quasimodo began his lament at Esmeralda’s cursed beauty, and her hand mindlessly grabbed his as she leant forwards, drawn into the story.


The end of the music found her wide-eyed and short-breathed, a tear to which she was oblivious rolling down her cheek. From the profound, male beauty of the four resounding voices praising and cursing the beautiful gipsy to her death, from the breathtaking simplicity of the strength and the sadness of the tragic final accents etching themselves into her heart… and from the shock of finding Snape’s hand firmly gripped in hers, and his thumb drawing small soothing circles on the soft space between her own thumb and the other fingers.

Her grueling Unspeakable training had taught her subconscious to overreact at some stimuli and hide surprise lest it killed her. But they could do nothing for the mad cavalcade of her heartbeat, and the flush in her cheeks...


When she finally did dare to look at him she almost fell in his eyes, so huge and black and channeled upon her face. He’d been physically hurting for two hours, as he watched the play of emotions on her face, as happy tears he was somehow responsible for rolled along her cheeks and she held on to his hand for comfort, and as the deep consciousness of the ephemeral nature of their parenthesis etched itself in his soul, in acid. As the inside of his arm hurt for the feel of her shoulders.


I don’t need anything else, he kept telling himself. Holding her hand as she enjoys good music. I don’t need anything else, staying like that forever.


I am going to marry Bellatrix.


The churn of acid in his belly only receded as he, too, pulled on his past as a spy and concentrated only on her profile, on the feverish rises of her breast, on the flush in her cheeks, and imagined it was for him.


She turned to him as soon as they found themselves, a little disoriented, on the Place de l’Opera under a mist of Paris autumn rain, its cold caress light on their cheeks and the smell of roasted chestnuts and wet leaves mingling with the aroma of the coffee from the cafes around them. “Thank you,” she whispered.


She was facing him and stepped forwards as if to hug him, but checked herself. He cursed her reserve… couldn’t find it in him to cross the small step separating them, either. Cursed himself. Looked around, maybe some malevolent enemy was indeed lurking behind the Metro opening, and he’d be able to curse for real and alleviate the frustration.


It was maybe a mark of his rapture over her, that he missed. Instead of picking up the signals of the shape receding behind the Metro sign on his left, and of the two wizards stalking them from behind, he could only feel the eyes of the woman standing with him in the rain, watch the pale orange light of the street lamps coloring the pearls of water and her hair with copper-ish golden hues. Only hear the beating in his chest, only see her lips curved in a smile meant for him.


Only think of not going home just yet.


Not, Merlin forbid, of kissing the damp lips, open and inviting as she looked at him with so much hope, so much goodness in her eyes that he just couldn’t resist and slid it a very discreet, very tiny tentacle of Legilimency- to graze at the foremost thoughts that she was almost saying aloud really, nothing invasive.


He swallowed thickly.

She was thinking of him kissing her. Here, in the rain, outside, with his hands on all the parts of her body he wouldn’t even say the name of to himself when he thought of her, every night in his bed, or on the armchair by the fire and the Firewhisky.


He savagely repressed the urge to do just that, to ravage her in the middle of the street… Did she think so little of herself? That she didn’t deserve minimal courting, that he could take her, just like that, with no wining and dining, no flowers, not all those things she needed but didn’t even wish for?


She only thinks she has to thank you for taking her out on Ginny’s money before you’re marrying another woman, sniggered the little corner. That’s how much you’ve broken her.


She didn’t look broken though. She looked flushed, and happy, and… a little hopeful?


He swallowed again, with even greater difficulty. So much conflicting emotions coursing in his veins regarding Hermione alone… How could he have heeded the warning signals his fighting senses were firing at him?


“Would you care for a- an ice cream maybe? Dinner?”


She smiled in delight, faltered…”It’s too much. I can’t presume to-“

An uneasy feeling was spreading in her back, which she attributed to the tension of finding herself, finally, on a- ah, a date with Severus Snape, and him ready to… to spend money on her. She mutely cast a discrete ward around the two of them, to calm herself really, to blot out any stupoid feeling somebody was trying to harm them when she was only jittery about the man with her, and resolutely shook the frights away.


“I’m hungry,” he declared. “What I need is a bowl of Parisian onion soup. With croutons and red wine, like Zola’s cols bleus. Maybe an éclair later?”


There would be champagne he decided.


That smile of her again. “Let’s eat, then.” He would devour that smile, he thought wolfishly before chastising himself. She didn’t need his lecherousness for a birthday present. Bad enough she thought she owed him anything… carnal.


He’d wine and dine her at the Café de la Paix just across the square. If this was the evening he’d remember all his life, he’d give her, and himself, something nice to remember. And the last revamp last year turned the upper floors into a luxury hotel, sniggered the little voice again.


“Not exactly a proletarian onion soup,” she commented with a wry smile as they stood before the green and gold breathtaking extravagance of the décor from the outside. Lucius used to take her there, too… before the refurbishments.


She’ never know his smile could be so rakish. The Glamors had waned, and although his face was still charmed to look whole they looked like themselves again. His hand grazed her cheek, all of its own will, and all of its own will her head leaned into it, the droplets of rain on her cheek almost sizzling as contact was, finally, made.


“Let’s go in,” he said.


The Heir by Sarablade [Reviews - 2]

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