The Mystery Wife

Draco Malfoy, wealthy scion of the greatest of the English Wizarding families and former Brat Prince of Slytherin, was unaccustomed to being ignored. But after being laughed at by every Muggle in the Bull's Head Pub for being too pretty and too well dressed, and being forbidden to go storming off into the night by Snape, who'd kept him magically pinned to his seat and Silenced for a good fifteen minutes afterward, Draco was more than happy to be ignored.

It left him time to sit there and hate Snape.

Becoming an admittedly gorgeous woman hadn't improved Snape in the slightest, or made her less fundamentally frightening. A murderer was still a murderer, and Snape was a murderer.

And Draco's parents had sent him off to be the murderer's Apprentice, and to live with her, and to be at her sexual beck and call if she ever decided she was drunk or bored enough to give it a go.

He hated her rolling Rs and her loud raucous pub laughter and everything about her, from the smallest black hair on her head to her tiniest toenail. He hated the way other men looked at her, and she fenced them off with flirtation and laughter, managing not to bruise a single male ego in the process of dodging them. He hated the fact that she seemed to have fallen into the role of a low-class woman so bloody easily. Did anyone know Snape, really? Murderer and master spy and Merlin knew what else? The man...woman...whatever...was a fucking chameleon. This was not remotely the same person who'd taught his Potions classes all those years. He knew that one. He'd watched that one.

He'd had a childhood crush on that one, not that he would have admitted as much to anyone.

It might have been the voice, purring soft silken promises of bewitching the mind and ensnaring the senses. I can teach you to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death. It had fired the imagination. It had fired other things, too, in the breathlessly silent darkness of Draco's curtained bed, when he'd been younger and heated and confused.

That younger self wouldn't have minded being in sexual thrall to Severus Snape.

Oh, but now...seeing the filthy little Muggle dunghill that had spawned Snape, hearing those Rs roll off her tongue, rough and tumble, realizing that she was as common as the Weasleys...no, lower, the Weasleys at least had civil and comprehensible tongues in their heads...

And yet, the man, when he'd been a man, had managed to move in the highest circles of Wizarding society, apparently without missing a beat or giving himself away with a single rolling R. He'd even been noted for a certain elegance that had seemed to speak to Draco of high birth and good breeding.

Draco found himself watching the woman as closely as he'd once watched the man. It was entirely possible that no one on earth knew Snape as well as he did, had watched Snape as much as he had. Only in the weary little lines between the brows was there any shade of resemblance between the Potions Master he'd known and the Mistress to whom he was now entirely leg-shackled. Those dark eyes, which had been rather cold and remote and sharp as blades, were now flashing warmly at every merriment that went around the table.

And it was a rather large, scarred table, hazy with cigarette smoke, flooded with low, rumbling, laughing, badly dressed men. Draco tried to eat his dinner in peace, noting that at least the food wasn't bad, in a coarse, needs-must-when-the-devil-drives sort of way.

Of course, after a day that felt like a century, a day in which he'd been multiply hexed, nearly burned to death by Fiendfyre and sold off by his own parents to live with Professor Snape, it was entirely possible that any slop they set in front of him would be delicious.

The warm beer was dreadful, but at least it was something to drink. Draco found himself drinking rather a lot of it in this appalling company, and noted that Snape left her own almost untouched.

"Alright?" she asked Draco quietly as she pretended to listen to Richard.

"Not sodding likely," he snapped.

"Ah, yes, the Brat Prince of Slytherin is in rare form, as predicted," she said, sotto voce. "I did try to warn you that you would be mocked out of your own lily-white skin when you came here. Everyone is. But as we haven't gotten into a fight yet, you've passed muster. Well done."

The light in her eyes seemed sincerely appreciative, and in a better mood, Draco would have clung to the smallest scrap of approbation from Snape. As it was, he was sulking and entirely content to be so.

"Fantastic. Brilliant. Your cutthroat friends haven't killed me yet," he grumbled.

"Richard's friends, Draco, not mine. This is in fact something of a road test of my own ability to pass muster. We won't have to stay overlong; I've proven my point to myself. I knew these men as boys. I scrapped with them all through my childhood. If they're flirting with me now, with absolutely no idea of who I am, I should be able to fool very nearly anyone who looks at me."

"Great. Fantastic. So can we go?"

"Shortly."

Snape didn't elaborate on that or qualify it in any way, and Draco wasn't in the mood to talk anyway, so they both left it there, and Snape visibly turned her attention back to the loud, wrangling, laughing, boisterous and beer-sodden conversation going on around them.

Draco polished off another utterly disgusting warm beer and tried to parse the conversation, for the lack of anything better to occupy his mind. It didn't take long, frankly, to grow bored enough by the attempt to turn back to his consideration of Snape.

If the man was going to be a woman, and it was beginning to look as if he really was stuck with it, he was going to have to learn how to dress.

Tonight's attempt wouldn't have passed muster with anyone but these pathetic yokels. A blowsy floral print dress, hopelessly out of fashion even in the Muggle world, that looked as if it had probably been raided from his mother's closet.

Merlin, it looked ridiculous on Snape.

She could be a woman of fashion, Draco realized. The black eyes, the long, artfully wavy black hair, the winter-pale skin would be impossibly dramatic in wine red, and entirely, strikingly monochromatic in black. A tailored look, to accentuate the fine bone structure. Clean, classic lines. No flowers, for Merlin's sake. Snape really should burn that sodding dress.

And replace it with a little black one.

Oh, fuck, I'm drunk, he realized.

"What the fuck should we call you?" he slurred in Snape's ear. "You need a name. And a new dress that isn't that one."

Snape froze, the cigarette halfway to her lips.

"Go ahead, you can smoke. I won't tell anyone." Draco snickered.

"Buggering hell," Snape swore softly, going instantly for her handbag. She tossed Muggle money on the table, funny colored bills, and then she grabbed Draco by the wrist and tugged him up out of his battered wooden chair. He was about to laugh, but then everyone else did, and that hacked him off for some reason he wasn't entirely sure about at the moment.

"Tha'rt wasting thissen on 'im, bewer," one of the men called, and the others laughed harder.

Snape summoned a dazzling smile and a husky laugh. "Catch 'em young, my loves," she winked, and the men around her erupted with a roar of laughter. She led Draco out with a last, smug look over her shoulder at them, and it only made them laugh harder.

That laughter grated on Draco after the day he'd had, and he would have turned around and hexed the lot of them if it hadn't been for Snape's pincer-like grip on his wrist and insistence on dragging him out.