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Honeysuckle by [Reviews - 64]

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She braced her hands on the sink, knuckles whitening on the scummy steel as she resisted the urge to throw something, preferably something heavy and satisfyingly breakable. Six years she'd been in her pokey little house and her Georgian architectural nightmare of a library, almost six and a half according to the unsettlingly jolly Queerditch Community calendar that hung on the wall. She's done so well at cutting her ties with the old Hermione…

Well, no. That wasn't entirely right. She was still Hermione Granger to the core, all paper and hair and still incapable of holding her sharp tongue.

She'd done so well at discarding Hogwarts and all the unwanted trappings that came along with it. She'd bought a new wand, kept off the Floo network, had her sporadic mail rerouted through the small owlery attached to Leaven and Loaf's bakery and made a concerted effort to avoid socialising.

There was a crash from the sitting room, quickly followed by a low muffled curse.

Hermione picked up the gaily-coloured tea towel from its lonely hook above the sink, and absentmindedly wiped at a drinking glass. She pretended not to hear the shuffle of papers and soft creak of cupboard doors being opened. It sounded like Severus Snape was having a merry time investigating her belongings.

The damp cloth squeaked in protest as she gave the glass a particularly vicious wipe.

She had lied before about not receiving any correspondence from Hogwarts. In the uneasy week after she first moved into the Maus Haus there had been two letters delivered by the almost outstandingly non-descript school owls, and she had received both with unease.

The first had been from Albus Dumbledore. Written in green ink on impressively heavy paper, it was heart-felt and moving and utterly, utterly insipid. The letter itself was written in the bland script of a Repro-Quill, and her name was carefully written in the laborious and jerky handwriting of a well-trained house elf. A form letter. Hermione had studied it whilst standing in the middle of the then-empty sitting room, her toes curling in the new rag rug. She read it twice and calmly ripped it in two, then made herself a cup of tea.

The second, surprisingly enough, was from Pomona Sprout. The chatty blithe woman had sent her a genuinely anxious letter, the generous open handwriting bursting over with motherly concern and affection. Hermione had put the letter on her desk and resolved to send her a letter back, telling her about the strange little house with the turret and the sticky windows, and her job in a dusty small library.
She didn't know whether it was because she didn't have the courage to pick up a quill or because she didn't know what to say, but the reply was never written. The original letter was swallowed up by clutter, and like so many other things, she had forgotten about it.

"I thought you invited me in for a civil drink," Snape called.
"I have bagged tea and fizzy water. Take your pick," she replied.

He appeared at the doorframe and made to lean casually against it, but not before he noticed the powdery lead paint that was bubbling and curling away from the wood. He carefully folded his arms around himself instead. "Unskilled in the art of being a gracious host, are you?"

She thought about stuffing the damp tea towel into his mouth.

"And you're not exactly a stellar guest."
Snape made a noise that in a different situation could have been an aborted chuckle. "Seeing as you're making no move to furnish me with tea, I'll have to settle for fizzy water. No ice."

Hermione mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like a ripe insult, but he was already back in the sitting room, happily picking his way through the papers on her desk.

--

There is precious little more uncomfortable than a long silence between two near strangers. For the sake of something to do, Hermione sipped her water and covertly glanced at the man in the other paisley-patterned armchair.
Much to her disgust, he'd taken the one chair that was well used and comfortable, leaving her with the hard and dusty seat. She wouldn't be surprised if he'd tested them both while she had been in the kitchen.
In all honesty, she was having some difficultly marrying her shaky memories of a tense and tightly folded man with the person artlessly draped across her furniture. He looked positively boneless, staring around the room with barely-concealed curiosity.

A faint smell of honeysuckles pervaded the room.

"I notice that there's a distinct lack of red and gold decoration. Abandoning your school affiliations, or did you acquire a sudden burst of a good taste?"
"The only people who hold onto house loyalty after graduation are the perpetually childish and House Masters. I'm starting to suspect that sometimes the two are one and the same. Professor."
He sniggered. "I don't recall you being so venomous, Miss Granger."

Hermione sipped her water and chided herself. He might be pushy and have appalling manners, but the least she could do is not take the barbs that he so generously baited her with. Snape set down his glass and unfolded himself from the chair, skirting the rag rug and inspecting the curios lined up on the mantelpiece. There was only one wizarding photograph there, a black and white picture of a wanly smiling Hermione, shielding her eyes from the sun and pointing to a sign proclaiming Queerditch North Village Library.
"No photos of your little friends?"
A terse no issued from the depths of the uncomfortable chair.
Snape scratched at his chin with a long purple-stained finger and turned around to see Hermione glowering at him.
"May I," he asked, "inquire as to where your photos are? I seem to recall a weedy little runt of a boy with a camera bigger than his head that followed you around at Hogwarts. Surely you…"
"I had them put away."
"Curious. I thought the whole point of photographs was to display them."
The stare turned venomous. Snape huffed and turned his attention to a glass-fronted cabinet that house a set of briar rose china that lived under a thin blanket of dust.
He appeared to be addressing a teacup when he commented, "You're being awfully churlish, Miss Granger. Very poor manners."

That did it. Putting her glass on the spindly-legged side table with entire too much force, she rocketed to her feet and balled her hands on her hips. "Listen, you portentous great prat. If you're going to act like a supercilious bastard – more of a supercilious bastard – go back to your school and do it there. They pay you a passable wage for being rude, I don't."
Snape was equally amused to see that she stamped her foot when she shouted, and she hadn't dared to step over the rug and get any closer. Ingrained respect is hard to override at the best of times.

He turned back to the mantelpiece and picked up the photo. Behind him Hermione dropped back into her seat, the springs compacting with a satisfying creak. She let her head fall into cradling hands and rubbed at her temples.
"You're not going to let up, are you? You're going to stand there and stare at the imitation Doulton until I break down and tell you everything." She stared balefully at him between a gap in her fingers. "I could have sworn you had more finesse than that."
Snape snorted. "You undersell me, Miss Granger."
"For goodness sake," she said acidly. "Considering that you're already being rude and nosey, you might as well dispense with the formalities and call me by my given name."
"On the whole," he said, "I think I'd prefer to call you Miss Granger."

--

Sitting back down in the comfortable armchair, Snape sipped his now flat fizzy water and gave an airy wave of his hand. "Put it this way. As a diversion from my usual fare of being a nightmare for randy teenagers and eating very big dinners, you, Miss Granger, are somewhat interesting. Truth be told, I didn't think you had it in you to do a disappearing act. Given my druthers, I would have predicted said that your widely-famed loyalty would have you faithfully dragging your two compatriots around by the wrist forever."
Hermione sniffed. "Faithfulness is only valuable when the recipient of said faith returns it in kind."
Snape arched his eyebrows. "Do tell."
She sighed and sat forward, her hands loosely clasped around her knees. "Why are you so desperate to know?"
"Because," he said with all the careful slow enunciation that one might use when addressing a particularly dim child, "I'm curious and looking for a new story to tell at the pub. And I'll have you know that I've had a thousand adjectives levelled at me before, but 'desperate' is not one of them."

Hermione mirrored his scornful expression. "You were desperate for that Order of Merlin."
"So were you," he challenged.
"And neither of us got it," she said. "Mores the pity."
Snape sat a little straighter. "Is this what it's all about? You didn't get a ha'penny worth of tin on a cheap ribbon, so you ran away?"
She fought the urge to roll her eyes. "That was merely the icing on a very bitter cake, Professor."
"And here I was thinking," he scoffed, "that you were red and gold to the core. I missed out on the blasted medal twice, and I didn't pack up my trunks and go running away to a house in the Maldives."
Hermione pushed herself to her feet. "Would you stop bringing everything back to house loyalty? It’s getting tiresome."

She walked to the window and leaned against the sill. Much to her surprise, she almost tipped backwards. She blinked owlishly at the slightly warped panes of glass, open for the first time in years. "You fixed my window?"
He shrugged. "I refuse to sit in an airless room. Your domestic spellwork needs practice if you can't unstick a simple sash window, Miss Granger."

She carefully leaned her hip against the sill and absentmindedly fiddled with the crumbly paint caught between the casement panes.
"As I was saying, you of all people should know there's a world of difference between what personality you have at eleven, and what you're like when you're eighteen." Hermione paused and gave a small crooked smile. "Although I suspect that you were a conniving little wretch when you were sorted, and you got worse with every passing year."
He accepted the backhanded compliment with a slight nod.

She passed her hand over her face. "You know, I spent that last year absolutely terrified that I was going to die some miserable crummy death at the hands of a power-mad eugenics proselytiser in a pantomime mask. Don't laugh."
He had the grace to look affronted, or at least acted the part well. "I wouldn't dream of it."

"I heard that you played your cards very close then."
He raised an eyebrow. "I was waiting to see who would reward me more."
"Isn't that a bit callous, even for you?"
Snape sat back and crossed his legs, regarding her with an almost bored expression. "Do you honestly think I'd do otherwise?"
She silently regarded him for a moment. "I think you're a cold hearted bastard who constantly looks out for himself above all others. So… no, you wouldn't do otherwise."
"Aha," he said. "You're smarter than your looks suggest. Tell me about your little bitter cake."
She frowned. "Don't you dare think that I left because of some misguided search for pity."
"I assure you that I am incapable of pity at the very best of times."

Hermione folded her arms and closed her eyes for the briefest of moments. "You know that I was holed up with Janice Vector for those three days."
He nodded.
"We sat in that windowless little pokey shed all that time, and we had barely any idea of what was happening outside. I mean, we could use the arthimantic predictions as a reasonably reliable indicator of what was happening, but we didn't know any real specifics."
She gave a mirthless laugh. "I ended up with a sinus infection from the bags of fertiliser. I kept sneezing and sneezing the entire time. When someone finally remembered to come and tell us that it was mostly over and the white hats had won, we came out and met everyone. You had a pristine white bandage over half your face, I remember that clearly. Everyone looked so filthy and ragged, but you'd managed to find clean clothes from somewhere and were stalking about like some wounded Byronic anti-hero."
Obligingly he pushed the lank hair away from his forehead, revealing a small indentation below his hairline. "Some bastard punched me in the head while they were wearing a signet ring," he said. "For months I had a perfect square-cut gem mark on my forehead."

She shook her head. "Ron, I remember that he was boasting about having a split eyebrow. He wore it like it was some stupid badge of pride."
Snape let out a bark of laughter. "I'm guessing that he never confessed to you how he got it. The fool boy was running around after that victory of sorts had been declared, and was so busy trying to impress us with his derring-do that he ran into a sandstone buttress and split his head open."
Hermione gave a most unladylike snort. "I'm not surprised. It was a short while after that that they asked 'where I'd been hiding' and 'why I didn't stand up and fight like the rest of them'."

She sobered; anger slowly blooming over her face and staining her cheeks pink. "They said that I'd let everyone down by not kitting up and having a glorious last stand with them. Like I'd packed an overnight bag and spent the weekend away, not getting blood and bone dust up my nose and trying to provide predictions. The cheek of it."

He didn't say anything.

Hermione sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Then barely anyone said anything to Vector except to criticise where we couldn't send out the numbers fast enough, and Albus gave me some sort of half-hearted pat on the back. It made me feel like I was some sort of tag-along, wanting to help but only getting in the way. Then the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I was the logical anchor to Harry and Ron's grand 'Boys Own Adventure', forever ruining the fun and getting in the way. Plus I hated Quidditch and grew out of Gobstones in my first year, so that was a nail in the coffin of our friendship if ever there was one."

The smell of the flowers blooming outside the window was almost overpowering.

She eased herself up from the window and picked her way across the room to sit back in the uncomfortable chair, drawing her legs underneath herself. The sun was nearly gone now, and Snape could barely see her face. He imagined that she was grimacing.
"Then the Orders of Merlin were given out and Vector and I were both passed over. Lots of people who deserved one missed out. Hagrid, for example. Flitwick, Matriarch Longbottom… you."
"I wasn't expecting it," he said. "Once burned and twice shy, and other such twee rubbish."
"There wasn't even a handshake and a 'thank you for your effort'. Jut that awkward pat on the back and a hideous rote letter from Albus. That was it, really. I heard about an apprentice librarian job opening up at Queerditch, and I took it. Barely even gave it more a few minutes thought, which completely unthinkable for me. I bought a new wand the day after I moved in, shut down the Floo and generally tried to be 'Hermione Granger: Librarian' instead of 'Hermione Granger: Boring Witch With Much More Interesting Friends'."

"Wallowing in self pity." He tapped his fingers on the armrest.
She flared. "Of course I was. I had seven years worth of self-pity to catch up on, plus interest. I don't think I've been in the throes of self-pity for a long time now."
She paused and shrugged. "Or at least I wasn't until you showed up and spent the last hour knocking the scabs off my deeply wounded pride."
Snape leaned forward. "So if you'd been feted and coddled and carried down Diagon Alley in a gilded sedan chair by four bowed Death Eaters, you would have been happy?"
"I would have been amused, at least," she retorted.

Snape stood up then, his movements jerky after sitting down for so long. He spelled the gas lantern on her desk to light and stood there, his face painted unflatteringly hard in the chill blue light. "I think I've overstayed my welcome."
She didn't get up. "You wouldn't want to miss your dinner. I see middle-age spread has made its claim on you."
"Hmmph. Just as I see hair serum is yet to make an impact on that unkempt mess you call hair, Miss Granger. Now, a polite host would walk their guest out."
"I'm merely exhibiting all the traits of an unskilled host, remember?"
She stood up anyway, her back making an unpleasant pop.

Snape was already standing by the red front door, his satchel of papers hanging from one thin shoulder.
"Will you be fine walking to the western thicket?"
He chuckled completely without humour. "I assure you, Miss Granger, that I am several times more frightening than anything living in Queerditch North."

He let himself out, gingerly picking his way across the uneven path by the sickly green light emitted by his wand. He paused as he stepped past the gate, looking back to where Hermione was an indistinct shape leaning against the doorframe.

"Miss Granger?"
"I'm still here," she replied.
"Your house," he said, "really is atrocious. You should get someone to come around and fix your windows."

He closed the squeaking gate and strolled down the lane, dousing the light from his wand after he turned the corner.

--


Afterword: this short story is completed, but if you are inclined to read more, there is a companion story called 'Smoke'.
Thank you very much for all your kind feedback and support this story has received over the last year.
- lara



Honeysuckle by [Reviews - 64]

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