The Mystery Wife

After the (utterly excruciating) Transfigurations NEWT, Draco wanted nothing more than to hide from everyone in the world who thought he was having hot gay sex with Harry Potter. Since that apparently included everyone but Snape and Potter, and being anywhere in the vicinity of Potter was Right Out, Draco went to the Headmaster's office to do his hiding there.

Sevanna limped stiffly into the room as soon as she heard him come in, and she actually smiled when she saw him.

It helped.

Actually, it made him feel rather warm around the collar.

"How did Transfigurations go?" she asked him without preamble, easing slowly and carefully into the nearest chair.

"It was bloody awful," Draco replied with a wry smirk. "I always hated that class. But I think I did well enough, thanks to you." He perched on the arm of the sofa nearest her chair. "Can I get you anything? A potion? A glass of wine, even?"

"Wine, and only if you'll join me. If you have time, that is; I don't mean to take you away from your friends. You haven't much time left to enjoy being together, after all. In three days, you'll be leaving this place forever. We both will. I'll confess to a bit of... maudlin sentiment. But only to you."

Draco felt his smirk turning into what was probably a disgustingly infatuated smile, and ducked away to fetch the wine before that became too visible.

"The Secretly Sentimental Slytherin Society," he drawled in amusement over his shoulder. "Membership: unknown, and we like it that way, thank you very much... We'll toast the old pile of rock together, then."

"To Hogwarts," Sevanna sighed, rising with a soft, pained exhalation and following him back into the kitchen at a slow, dignified walk. It managed not to be a limp, but only just.

"Didn't I say I was going to get it for you?" Draco scolded her, making impatient shooing motions towards the nearest chair. "You saved my arse, you saved Potter's arse, you saved my parents' arses... I should think you were entitled to a bit of laziness!"

She snorted soft derision at him. "Pain is weakness leaving the body. So much weakness has left my body in the last two days that I will never be allowed to die."

"I didn't say you were allowed to die, I said you were allowed to sit," he snarked back. "Dying was not on the menu."

It was a testament to her exhaustion that she allowed the snark to pass without further comment. She leaned back against the kitchen island, mahogany wood with a gleaming black granite countertop, grazing it with a fingertip. "I put this in here, you know," she murmured. "I wanted a real, functioning kitchen, one good for more than the occasional pot of tea. It was the only room I changed; the rest is something of a monument to Dumbledore."

That lay between them for a moment, sticky and uncomfortable while she stared down at the countertop.

"For the life of me, I'm not at all certain why I'll miss Hogwarts," she frowned. "I will not miss living in these rooms, being reminded every day of the man I killed, sleeping in his bed."

She shook her head and summoned a wry sort of grimace that would not have passed muster for a smile under any circumstances. "Maudlin, indeed, and you hardly came here tonight to discuss either my bed or Dumbledore's."

That instantly brought a welter of images to his eighteen-year-old and hormone-soaked mind, and as he felt himself going red, she laughed softly.

"Your Potions NEWT, then?" she asked. "Tomorrow, is it not? I don't believe you need to worry, truly. You're ready. Pound Granger into the sand for Slytherin."

"Oh, I will. Or die trying," Draco agreed, smirking. "She has no imagination, you know. If they ask anything theoretical, anything outside of what she's memorized, she's toast. She'll make an excellent barrister because of that, I suppose, but she'd make a crap Potions Mistress. No, it's Potter I'm worried about," he added, the smirk transmuting instantly into an irritated frown. "Not on his own merits, of course. But I can't figure out how he was bloody cheating back in sixth year, so I can't be sure he's not going to do the same tomorrow."

Sevanna took the glass of wine he handed her, one corner of her mouth turning downward in sharp disapproval. "Do you not?" she murmured. "As it happens, Potter got his hands on my old sixth year textbook, one in which I had made extensive notations, corrections and improvements on the old formulas. Little prick was apparently taking my work and passing it off as his own, all bloody year."

Draco stared incredulously at her for a long, long moment, heat climbing into his face.

"I KNEW it!" he exploded. "Bastard! He had that brainless Slughorn fawning all over him-- rhapsodizing through every bloody class about how brilliant he was, such a natural at Potions, it was enough to make you sick-- Oh, no, the Malfoys are not to be known by decent people, but two-faced cheaters are fine! If they're Harry Sodding Potter, they can do what they like, of course! Bloody hell, did he know it was yours? Has he even bothered to apologize?!"

Sevanna laughed softly into her wine. "Do you imagine it would ever occur to him? And the whole bloody year, I had to listen to Slughorn sing odes in his praise, telling me Potter was such a potions genius that 'not even you, Severus...'"

She drifted off there, leaving Draco to infer the rest.

"Just once," she murmured, "I would love to have heard the old man admit that I'd been the best he'd ever taught. I had the highest potions OWLs and NEWTs in three centuries, and I was in his House. I wound up apprenticing with Belby instead of him, you know, and not purely because the notion of going to bed with Slughorn was less than palatable. And, again, Belby took credit for much that was mine, including the invention of the Wolfsbane Potion. I can promise you this much: what you create, I will not take the credit for."

What Draco suspected was another infatuated smile tugged at his mouth again, and he hid it behind his wine glass. "Well, you hardly need to," he murmured. "You're brilliant. Whereas Slughorn would bloody well have to, and Belby sounds like he was enough of a berk to want to. But thanks."

He stole a cautious glance at her, and added, "Doesn't sound like you're getting much out of this apprenticeship, though."

The low-lidded glance she gave him over her own wineglass was enough to make his toes curl. "I'm getting a great deal. Conversation, companionship, and someone who isn't constantly, ruthlessly using me for his own ends and tossing me to the wolves."

"Who did that?" Draco asked. "I mean, other than the Dark Lord. You can't be talking about him... well, I suppose you could, but he did that to everybody."

"He and Albus both did that to everybody. Albus used Potter every bit as badly as he used me, treating him like a tool to be kept alive until he could deliver himself into the Dark Lord's hands for us. Albus believed that in killing Potter, the Dark Lord would also destroy himself. I half killed myself trying to keep the boy alive, only to find in the end that Potter was being preserved solely to sacrifice himself at the right moment. Lily's only son..."

She looked at Draco evenly. "If you ever wonder exactly what you bring me," she said, "don't. You're light and air in a dark room. You give me something to focus on beyond lost love and wasted years."

Draco felt his face heat up again. He had not a single bloody idea what to say. What could you say, to a history like that? He'd felt like he was living in a dark room for two years. She'd-- he'd-- been living in one for what sounded like two decades.

Finally he gave her a faint, lopsided smile. "You're free now," he offered hesitantly, in a tone that acknowledged what a small repayment it was. "I know you'll have to get used to being... different, but... you can do anything you want. You can't be expected to teach me all the time, I shouldn't think. We could travel, visit museums, go to the theatre, attend potions conventions." His smile grew a little stronger. "I'll keep you focused. I'll pester you to go out and do things with me. If nothing else, annoyance and hexing makes for a brilliant distraction."

She actually smiled faintly at that. "And I will have to try to be less morbid company, I suppose." She polished off her wine and held out her glass for a refill, and Draco poured her another. "Who knows? Life as a woman is distinctly odd, and occasionally inconvenient, but it can only be an improvement in many ways. My life is, at least, my own. We're free to go anywhere we wish, you and I. We could travel the world for the next three years if you wanted."

Draco snorted a laugh. "I'll be too busy gawking and shopping to learn anything. But if you insist," he sighed, with a theatrical air of long-suffering obedience. "I'm only the apprentice... my job is not to question, but to carry luggage... which in your case will be easy, Merlin help me if you were Pansy and her thirty-four thousand pairs of shoes, most of them pink..."

Sevanna smiled slowly. "I will make you another promise, Apprentice mine. I will never wear pink. And if you attempt to bury me in it, just to be perverse, I vow to haunt you."

Draco pretended to consider this thoughtfully. "You know... I'm sorry, but I think it's going to have to be pink," he said in a mock-regretful tone, not quite able to suppress a smile of his own. "Because given my experience of the last week, I think I'd rather like to have you haunting me."

What do you think you're doing? the sensible part of his mind immediately screamed in panic. Are you FLIRTING? With Professor Snape?! Bloody hell, you are, aren't you? Are you mad?

"Careful, Mr. Malfoy," she drawled, and her voice was brandywine, a molten and dangerous purr. "You might tempt me to alter our currently safe and innocent arrangement."

It was warning and challenge, and a temptation all its own, to a Malfoy.

"Oh, not so innocent as all that," he drawled, carefully setting his wine glass down on the countertop. "You know how I told you, back in Diagon Alley, that Granger and Weasley and Potter were still behind you?"

Her answering smile was slow and languid. "I remember."

Draco leaned in close, deliberately giving her plenty of time to move away or reprimand him.

"I lied," he whispered with a smirk, and kissed her.

She didn't slap him, she didn't stop him. He felt her smile against his mouth, a brief warmth, and she nipped his lower lip softly before she deepened the kiss. He heard the click of her wineglass being set down on the countertop beside her, and then her arms were winding around him and her fingernails were trailing maddening exquisite patterns along his spine, the nape of his neck. He shivered, and her breath caught in his mouth.

They ignited. She ground against him and he was suddenly, achingly hard, gasping, shivering.

"Are you entirely sure of what you want, Draco?"

Impossible to breathe, impossible to think. Her voice was muted by the rush of his own blood, roaring in his ears.

"Are you?" Again, against his mouth as she kissed him. She pulled away, flushed, erotic in her dishevelment, and the urge to give chase, to seduce, to take her there on the countertop was so overwhelming he had to close his eyes against it.

"I'm a bit confused about which gender I want, I must admit," he quipped breathlessly. He coaxed her back again, pressing her against himself with a hand at the base of her spine, another threading carefully into her hair. He tilted his head so he could sketch a burning, hopefully tempting line of kisses down her throat, tasting her skin in dizzying little nips. "But I've noticed a strange pattern, lately-- it's whichever one you happen to be. Does that help?"

The breath of an answering laugh stirred the hairs along his temple. "So long as you realize... this is not... an expectation of your position. Nor mine. I will not play the whore because your father wants you to learn... and I will not make you one. But you are beautiful as Endymion, and your mouth would tempt a saint, and I am tired of fighting myself and the world."

She shivered as his kisses trailed lower, exploring the curve of a collarbone.

"Professor Snape," said the calm voice of the Bloody Baron, jolting them immediately out of the haze of blind wanting and back into the world.

They broke apart like guilty schoolchildren, and the reminder that Draco still fit the description may well have contributed to Sevanna's high color.

"Bloody buggering... WHAT?!" she bit the Baron's head off.

"Your pardon, fair one," said the ghost, etching her a little bow in midair. "But there is great consternation among the students. Two of the Gryffindors have been caught using magic in the halls, against one of your Slytherins."

"Bloody hell... not my Slytherins anymore, of course. You've talked to Slughorn?"

"The fat one is not you. The Slytherins look to you, Professor."

"Right," she said tightly. "Where will I find them?"

"They are currently in the Great Hall, being berated by Professor McGonagall."

She rubbed the back of her neck as if it pained her. "Very well. I'll be down directly. Better still, summon them here, would you?"

"I shall," the ghost nodded, and departed.

Sevanna glanced at Draco, and her color deepened. "It is... undoubtedly wiser to wait until you've graduated, at least. I should not have let things go so far. My apologies."

"It'll certainly be more private after I've graduated, anyway," Draco said dryly, and thumped his forehead down onto the countertop. The cool marble felt good on his overheated skin. Not as good as Sevanna would have, though. And oh, that was a bad, bad thought. This was going to really bloody hurt in a few minutes... "I figured we were safe in here; no portraits or mirrors... We'd better go find out what's going on, I suppose. Damn it, I told them not to go anywhere alone."

"And of course," she said dryly, "Slytherins always do everything they're told."

She took a swig of Polyjuice and transformed herself back into Snape's ghost, and the two of them made their rather slow and painful way down to the Great Hall.

It was going to be a very long night.