The Mystery Wife

"Sevanna?" Draco called, as he came bounding upstairs into their attic laboratory. He found her sorting dried herbs into glass jars, labeling and stoppering them. "You have got to come out today... I found a wand shop. I think she's better than Ollivander. Bloody hell."

"LeClair's?" Sevanna murmured a bit absently, concentrating on her work. "They are reputedly excellent. The Sight runs in the family. Must make for utterly horrifying conversations."

"She's... unnervingly perceptive, yes," Draco admitted with a smirk, which was followed by a faint blush as he remembered exactly how perceptive she had been. "But she also sorted me out on the first try, so I'll forgive her that, I suppose." He held up his new wand.

"Beautiful," Sevanna murmured, glancing up from her bottling at last. "Hawthorn?"

"Yes. And phoenix feather," Draco admitted. He gave a tentative little flick to the wand, which ironically enough was the same white-gold colour that his hair used to be, and it again drew a shimmering trail of red and gold through the air. "I feel like a bit of a class traitor."

"Hardly that," Sevanna said bitterly, her eyes hard and distant as she returned to her bottling. "After all you and I have betrayed, class strikes me as the least of our worries."

"It was a metaphor," Draco drawled coolly, stiffening. "I suppose I should have said House traitor. Of course, I've already betrayed them, haven't I?"

He stuffed the wand into his pocket, suddenly not wanting to look at it anymore.

"What can I do?" he asked tersely, his head bent unnecessarily to the task of rolling up his sleeves. "This looks like an apprentice's work, not yours."

"You can wash your hands and join me in bottling these herbs," Sevanna nodded, as if she hadn't just cut them both to the quick.

Draco kept quiet for once, his mouth drawn in a narrow white line, and obediently pitched in, fetching fresh bottles and labels and ingredients, and placing the filled bottles in ranks on the shelves. The less dignified part of the work, to be sure, but it prevented him from having to say anything; especially as anything he had to say at this point would start a row.

So he kept his mouth tightly shut, and watched to see when she was about to need something. Draco was used to watching Severus Snape.

She set about dicing the marrowroots in silence, her knife moving so swiftly it was a blur. It would have been a real pleasure to watch her work, under other circumstances; she was a legend in the brewing world, as either Severus Snape or Sevanna Prince, and finding out that these two people were actually one and the same struck Draco as simply being astonishingly unfair.

"Go on and slice those elderflower stalks into half-inch pieces," she said without rancor. "The petals get bottled separately, as do the leaves, and the ends simply get tossed."

Losing herself in work seemed to soothe her somewhat; for the first time in the last several days, perhaps the first time in a lifetime of watching her, Draco saw her unwinding ever so slightly. The eternally tense set of her shoulders was easing as she chopped, sliced, diced and bottled, faster and more efficiently than any human had a right to. She brushed a lock of stray hair out of her eyes with a forearm, looking like nothing so much as a pianist playing a wild concerto.

"Note to self," Draco murmured, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth as he set about stripping the leaves and flowers from the elder branches. "Sleeves that won't get in the way. Also buy pins and combs."

Sevanna's lips took on a mordantly amused set. "Sleeves that won't get in the way aren't so much of an option for us, unless we manage to cover up the Dark Mark with Muggle tattoos. Pity; I always preferred to wear my sleeves rolled to the elbow."

"A cool climate seems indicated for both of us, doesn't it?" Draco replied with equally black humour. "Shouldn't have moved south. No flying around in summer without a shirt for me, no matter how hot it gets. And your going without a shirt would raise eyebrows." He glanced briefly up at her, and added cheekily, his eyes dancing, "Not to mention other things."

Sevanna snorted soft derision at him, sounding a bit more like the Professor Draco remembered. "It will not happen. Much. Unless we go to the Riviera on holiday."

Note to self: ask to go to the Riviera for my birthday, Draco thought, but wasn't quite brave enough to say.

"There'll be rioting," he did, however, mutter, his mouth twitching. "Remind me to pack a giant barrel of ice water."

"So you can defend what precious little is left of my honor?" she drawled as she diced.

"You're the most honourable person I've ever met," Draco replied seriously, keeping his eyes carefully on his hands. In a lighter tone, he added, "And while you're perfectly capable of defending your own honour-- more capable than I am, in fact-- there are proprieties to be observed. Lugging ice water and dousing impertinent people with it so you can sunbathe undisturbed is the Apprentice's job, I should think."

Sevanna had frozen, mid-stroke. "If I am the most honorable person you've ever met," she murmured, "you have led a more deprived and unfortunate life than I had heretofore imagined."

Draco looked up at her, apparently unmoved by this self-disparagement, his newly blue-green eyes calm as deep water.

"Would you still be keeping your promise to protect me, if it wasn't actually an Unbreakable Vow?" he asked.

Her knife started moving again, chopping swiftly and efficiently. "A promise given has all the force of an Unbreakable Vow, or it should. What interests me, I suppose, is that you knew I would think so. The question is, I assume, rhetorical, as you know damned well I would continue to offer my protection and teaching, regardless of the Vow. The difference is that you would be free, and not constrained to accept it."

That got him. He hadn't wanted to come here, and he'd made sure everyone in hearing distance knew it. Had that really only been three days ago?

Of course, three days ago, he'd been terrified out of his mind. He'd been terrified out of his mind for most of the previous two years, come to think of it. But three days ago, he'd believed that he was being sent off in service to a psychotic murderer whom he'd insulted repeatedly and who despised him, with nonconsensual sex thrown in as an extra dose of Hell.

He looked around at the spacious, sky-lit laboratory. Through the windows, the rooftops of Paris stretched to the horizon.

Then he looked at Sevanna. The staggering beauty of the view didn't suffer for the change in subject matter.

Psychotic? Not bloody likely.

Despised? Not if Richard was to be believed.

And nonconsensual certainly didn't figure into this equation anymore.

"I've... become resigned to the notion," Draco replied with a smirk, mostly at his own expense. "Completing my education is important, if I'm to have a future. See how much I've matured? Being an Apprentice is good for me."

Sevanna looked drolly up at him. "Resigned to the notion. Damned with faint praise, but I suppose it's as good a place to begin as any."

Draco's smirk widened. "I suppose. You could always begin by teaching me to express ironic understatement a little more clearly."

"I'm here to teach you potions, boy. Irony, you get to learn on your own time. Keep breathing; it'll come to you."

Draco laughed. He raced through the rest of the elderflower stalks, slicing them neatly as ordered into half-inch segments, and piled them into a jar.

"Come outside. You said you wanted to have a life, after being cooped up in a dungeon for years. We can finish this later," he pleaded with a coaxing smile. "You can make me do it, even. But you should have a wand of your own. And we need proper clothes. There are all sorts of brilliant shops, and cafés, and bakeries..."

Sevanna's eyes flicked to the nearest window, her temptation screamingly evident, for someone who was showing almost no trace of emotion.

"There's dozens of restaurants, too," Draco added persuasively. "Loads of French food, and Chinese and Italian and this Arabian place that smelled heavenly... We haven't eaten since breakfast."

"True," she murmured, her eyes now flickering over the brilliant pastel shops outside. "True, and just at the moment, I don't quite feel like cooking."

"And you'd have to be barmy to want me to cook," Draco quipped. He did a doubletake. "Wait. You know how to cook?"

Her answering smile was edged and challenging. "Do I," she drawled. "Cooking bears a number of similarities to brewing, generally with more palatable results. It's a hobby of mine. I'll teach you, if you're at all sensible enough to be interested; it's a useful skill. Makes you less dependent on others. But, come, you're right that unpacking and setting up shop will keep until we've both got decent clothes and wands that cannot be traced back to our old lives."

She took his arm and ushered him out the door, locking and Warding it behind her.

Draco was very careful neither to cheer, nor jump about, nor act in any way like a pleased child. He was seventeen, thank you very much.

"Food first, or clothes first, or a wand?" he asked in a composed if cheerful voice. "I think we should probably take it in the reverse of that order, actually, but I'm only the lowly Apprentice..."

Sevanna pursed her lips briefly in thought, not bothering to dignify that last bit with a response. "Food first, I suspect," she said as she steered him down the street in the direction of the Seine. "Believe it or not, I do remember what it was like to be a bottomless pit of a seventeen-year-old. Long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, eating large leaves and each other, I was one."

Draco snorted. "I didn't realise Hogwarts was around back then. It's really held up well, hasn't it? So've you, for that matter. Did anyone know proper fire spells yet, or did you have to bang two rocks together beneath your cauldrons in Potions class?"

They passed a perfectly lovely-looking Turkish restaurant, and Sevanna steered them into an alley. "Ah, yes," she reminisced. "Those were the days. Everyone had a forehead like Goyle's, and hair like Hermione Granger's."

"House colours in war paint, I suppose?" Draco inquired, with the air of someone taking notes for a monograph. "What with the school uniform probably being animal skins... Hmm, marigold for Hufflepuff, bloodroot for Gryffindor... Ravenclaws would have had it easy, with all that woad running around-- oops, the dinosaurs were before the Picts, weren't they? Why are we in an alley?"

"We're cutting through to the Muggle streets," said Sevanna. "And you'll find Paris is considerably safer than Yorkshire, when it comes to that." They made it through to the other side without seeing anything but a handful of stray cats, and the Muggle street beyond it was bustling, with people, with cars.

"Food first," she said, "And perhaps clothing here as well, at least for me. I can afford to be an eccentric, but not a dowdy one."

She started marching them up the street in the direction of the Seine.

"We're going to buy Muggle clothes first?" Draco asked incredulously. "Well, alright. It'd certainly suggest an explanation as to why no one's ever met you in the wizarding world: you spend all your social time here. Is Sevanna Prince a Mu--Muggleborn?"

"Thank you for amending that, as if the pejorative term for Muggleborns ever passes your lips in my hearing, I will hex you for it, hard. Sevanna Prince is a halfblood, the nonexistent daughter of my mother's brother, Octavius. Octavius had a clandestine affair with a renowned Muggle chemist, Dr. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. When she conceived me, she gave birth to me in secret and gave me to Octavius to raise, as she was already happily married to another Muggle. She and her husband were Obliviated afterward, and forgot all about the affair and my unwanted birth. Tragic," she said dryly, her lips quirking. "I was raised by my father, but remained fascinated by the work of my mother, and many of my inventions owe an intellectual debt to her research in crystallography. That last, ironically, is quite true."

"Which bit is true? Your mother's research? Your mother must have been a witch, though. I thought your father was the Muggle. She was researching crystallography? What the devil is crystallography?"

Sevanna dragged them into a rather quaint Muggle café right beside the Left Bank of the Seine, and grabbed them a quiet outdoor table beneath a dark red awning.

"One of my favorite places in Paris," she confessed with a small smile. "One of the 24-hour places, and I am a rather notorious night owl. A view of the Seine, the Louvre, just over there across the river, and the best hot chocolate in the city." She settled back in her chair with a contented sigh. "Immediately across the river from this spot, you'll find one of the oldest coffeehouses extant in Paris, eighteenth century, and an excellent perfumer's, next door. I'll take you to the coffeehouse when we visit the Louvre, as both are well worth seeing, but just now, this place will do as well as any for food."

She opened her menu and started perusing it, having entirely avoided clearing up any of Draco's confusion.

The waiter came around and took their orders, croques messieurs with hot chocolates, and Sevanna fired up a cigarette.

"My father was a Muggle," she said, breaking the silence. "A Yorkshireman named Tobias Snape, uneducated but brilliant, a frustrated intellectual in reduced circumstances. How he ended up with my mother, or she with him, I will never know. She was a witch, Eileen Prince, rather plain and singularly unaccomplished. The great triumph of her life seems to have been a talent for gobstones, back at Hogwarts. She married my father, they had Richard and then me, and they lived and died fighting like cats in that ruin of a house you saw."

"Why would you marry someone that you fought with constantly?" Draco wondered. The mental image Draco now had of his teacher's childhood was a rather dreary one. And he already knew that Tobias had been in the habit of walloping both of his sons. "Sounds... unrestful, if you ask me. I'm surprised the house is still standing."

Sevanna let out a short, sharp breath of amusement, filled with cigarette smoke. Draco had seen the Mud...Muggleborns smoking them from time to time, but he'd never smoked one, himself. He thought Sevanna looked rather like a dragon doing that, habit of the lower orders or no.

He thought briefly about taking it up, himself.

"I suppose the fact that the house is still standing is a tribute to some heretofore unacknowledged sentimentality in me," she mused, staring out at the Seine. "I would not have expected it to matter, but it did."

Draco fiddled with his napkin. "I don't have the fondest recent memories of my home, either. But I don't think I could have burned it down, even at the worst. It matters." He looked up and gave her a lopsided smile. "The Secretly-Sentimental Slytherin Support Group; membership, two. I won't tell anyone if you won't."

"I would promise to take it to my grave, but I've already been. Cigarette?" she offered blithely.

"If you laugh at me when I die coughing, my revenge will be terrible. Yes, please."

She handed one to him without comment, and lit it with a Muggle lighter. Draco inhaled experimentally, and pleasantly surprised himself by not immediately choking to death.

Oh, he wanted to, mind, but he was managing, barely, to hold it in.

He puffed out the smoke experimentally, pretending he was his namesake, and smiled at the result. "I like them," he decided, his voice rasping only a bit.

Sevanna startled him by laughing. He'd never heard her do it before, not really. Not like this, full and wholehearted. Even if it was at his expense, it was very nearly worth it, just to say he'd seen it.

"If I weren't dizzy from starvation, a criminal lack of chocolate, and this death stick, you'd be in for it," he drawled, the corner of his mouth quirking as he watched her laugh. He took another drag on the cigarette and blew the smoke at her.

The waiter showed up with their hot chocolates just in time to keep them from either flirting or fighting. The hot chocolates were marvelous confections in clear glass mugs, piled with whipped cream, and while they would undoubtedly be better in the winter than in May, they were certainly beautiful.

"What do you want to do about your NEWTs?" she asked, blowing on her hot chocolate to cool it. "You've got a month to cram for them, and given a month and private tutoring, I believe you could pass them."

Draco's eyebrows shot up. "You really think so?" he murmured, looking down at his hot chocolate. "I missed my entire seventh year. And I... wasn't paying attention to my marks, for much of sixth year."

"I do not say it would be easy, merely that I believe it to be possible," she said, spooning off a bit of whipped cream. "Having seen class after class wrestle with them, I have an excellent feel for what will be asked and what you'll need to know. If you were able to graduate with a few NEWTs to your credit, it would do a great deal to erase the damage of the last two years and let you move on with your life as it should have been."

Alright, as far as it went, but now Draco was distracted. He was having a hard time concentrating on how his life should have been, frankly-- not that he was really clear on that topic at the best of times-- while Sevanna was sitting there licking whipped cream off a spoon.

Draco came a hair's-breadth from banging his forehead on the table and howling.

Sadly, the Malfoy dignity would not allow this.

Draco downed a gulp of too-hot chocolate and burned his tongue. There. Searing pain. That should sort that problem out.

"If I'm going to do this at all," he retorted, "I want more than 'a few NEWTs to my credit'. It's going to completely suck, going back there, you know. I'm not having everyone leave me in the dust, on top of it."

One corner of Sevanna's mouth curled upward. "Good. Then we're agreed. You will likely be the only Slytherin who returns to take the NEWTs and graduate. You'll be alone in the lion's den, and you'll have the honour of Slytherin resting on your shoulders. I frankly want to prepare you so well that they will be eating your dust."

She leaned back in her chair and spooned off another bit of whipped cream, and Draco's urge to bang his head on the table multiplied exponentially.

"It was once the only way I had of competing with my rivals, you know," she murmured. "Dumbledore favoured them so egregiously that James Potter was named Head Boy in spite of having been implicated in dozens of pranks over the years, including a plot to kill me. The OWLs and the NEWTs, however, were proctored independently, and there, I managed to leave everyone so far in my dust that Dumbledore's eternal and irritating favoritism was finally visible for exactly what it was. A Pyrrhic victory, but satisfying nevertheless."

"At this point, I'll take whatever victory I can get," Draco muttered, leaning back in his own chair and taking another drag off his cigarette. "Especially one that echoes yours. Dumbledore did favor Gryffindor, completely bloody shamelessly."

He glanced cautiously at Sevanna, remembering what Richard had said about Potter's parents, and decided not to ask. He didn't understand how James Potter could have both tried to kill him -- her -- and saved her life, but it was going to be a sore subject either way.

"Well, at least there's one comfort," Draco pointed out in a lighter tone, smirking across at her. "We got to see at least one group of people treating Potter exactly like anyone else would be treated, if they'd done what he'd done."

"The Gringotts goblins," Sevanna smiled reminiscently. "I'm sending them a fruit basket at the earliest opportunity."

Draco grinned evilly at her, wisps of smoke coiling around his head. "Damn it, I was going to do that. 'Dear sirs... Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for allowing me to see Potter tossed out on his ear. While it is surely less than he deserved at your hands, it will remain a memory I will treasure forever. Gleefully yours, Dra...ven.' What do you think they'd like? Fruit? Chocolates? Champagne? My first born?"

"Probably the latter," Sevanna drawled.