A Merciless Affection

Chapter 18: Of Shoes...or of Riddles

Sarah knew she ought have gone back to Gryffindor Tower to sleep, but with no one else there yet, she had some leeway, and she took it. No one would make the effort of looking for her all day anyway, except at mealtimes. That, unfortunately, was an all-too-necessary inconvenience. Early on Saturday morning, leaving him still asleep (she had learned that he was not, by nature, an early riser--which, she decided, might account for some of his testiness during term time), she popped back to her room to shower, change and make the trek down to the Great Hall for breakfast.

He was still sleeping when she got back, although it didn't take long for the rattling of bottles in the workroom to wake him up. Predictably, he checked on her progress before he headed for the bathroom; the pattering of water made it clear that he was taking a shower.

Whether she was feeling particularly wicked this morning, or whether it was simply knowing that this was likely the last opportunity she would have for a long time, she tiptoed into the bathroom. A spell kept the water inside the stall, but did not significantly obscure the view. Turned away from the door, he had just ducked his head under the water, rubbing vigorously at his face. It was only after he had grabbed the soap and started lathering up his body that he turned around and noticed her bemused observance.

"I cannot abide soap in my eyes," he said, almost defensively, although she hadn't said a word. Then, sharply, "Do you mind?"

"No, I don't mind," Sarah said offhandedly, as if he were asking her opinion of his bathing habits instead of hinting strongly that he would rather shower in private. Although the offhandedness did not come easily to her; she had to pretend a nonchalance she still did not feel about looking at a stark naked man. She shrugged slightly, as his expression darkened, and she flounced out of the bathroom with a brash, "I am your wife, you know."

The whole exchange, she decided, leaning against the wall outside, had been decidedly strange.

* * *

He was inexplicably restless all morning, picking irritably at the least deviation in her potion-making techniques from what he would have done himself. She was almost glad to go back to Gryffindor Tower, even though it was for the purpose of making the long trip downstairs to lunch.

There were a few more students at the table (although thankfully none from her dormitory), and Snape came in late, which proved to be a more significant trial than Sarah expected. It was only the presence of Umbridge, acting like a burr against her skin, that kept reminding her from moment to moment that she must be a student--and nothing more than a student.

The problem wasn't some ridiculous urge to behave with outrageous familiarity. She could have fought that easily. It was the habit she had developed of watching him all day without hindrance, of feeling more comfortable than she should in the presence of the grouchy Potions master of Hogwarts. It would surely be easier, wouldn't it, once he was sitting at the staff table and she was back at the far end of the Gryffindor table?

The meal had made her so antsy that she did not have the patience to climb up all the way up to her room afterward. Instead she ducked down the side hallway on the first floor, slid down the wall to sit in the alcove behind the armor, and Portkeyed herself into his room.

He was waiting for her, and not in his workroom. She had not felt such a frenzied desire for him since the beginning of their relationship, and his own actions indicated that she was not the only one. They made love as if they were gulping down water at the last spring on the edge of a vast desert.

"I have errands," he said, as soon as he had enough breath again. "Among other things, Potter must be informed of the headmaster's instructions for his extra lessons. I think perhaps I can survive that encounter now without wanting to hex him into tomorrow."

He cleaned up and dressed, while she lay still, daydreaming drowsily about the contents of a sharp and possibly lewd letter to her aunt. She wouldn't dare to send it, of course, but it was satisfying to imagine it out.

"Go back to your room," Snape said, interrupting her thoughts. He looked down at her and frowned slightly. "This lack of restraint hasn't been good for us. The term begins the day after tomorrow. You know what we have to do." There was steel in his voice.

Sarah shut her eyes, trying to find the steel in her own soul. "I know."

She kept her eyes closed until he was gone.

* * *

Sarah welcomed the start of term more than she had ever imagined possible. Their complete separation for the last day of the holidays had been a misery, and only the singularly menacing expression Snape wore during meals kept her from throwing caution to the wind while she still had any real chance to do so. It was far easier to fall asleep in a roomful of chattering girls than to toss and turn all alone for hours, knowing that the solution to her loneliness was the mere forbidden twist of a ring away from her.

What surprised her most was that it was loneliness, more so than lust. She had grown accustomed to having him at her shoulder as she worked, sitting across from her as she ate or read. Even when he was gone, his personal space bore the unmistakable stamp of his presence, cradling her with that same curious mixture of comfort and disquiet that she felt whenever his arms were around her. It had never bothered her before that their relationship was a matter of secrets and darkness. But now, as she walked restlessly around the grounds in the cold sunshine, watching other students grouped together in conversation in twos and threes, his absence from her side was like a rent in the fabric of the universe.

It took real effort to sit in Potions class on Monday and be the girl who had chosen not to go down to the dungeons. Again, it was mainly the knowledge of how angry he would be if she slipped up that kept her locked painfully into the character she had abandoned on Boxing Day.

If it had been an ordinary class period, with him wandering about the classroom checking on their potions, it might have been considerably more difficult. Instead, Snape announced that each of the seventh year N.E.W.T. students was being assigned a private workroom in the dungeons for the purposes of developing a final project in preparation for the examination.

"Your projects must be submitted to me for approval before you begin. Nothing with potentially lethal results will be permitted, as you will be working, for the most part, unsupervised. It would be excessively difficult to explain to your parents why their child has become merely a damp spot on the dungeon wall."

The Slytherins in the class all giggled, while everyone else sent each other glances that expressed varying degrees of dubious amusement. It was too near to a joke for most of them to process it, coming from this particular teacher. Sarah satisfied herself with a quiet grin.

"In selecting your project, you must consider carefully what strengths you wish to emphasize to the examiners when the time comes for you to prepare your potion in the exam. However, I warn you that the highest marks are given only for potions that are either successfully experimental in nature," he shot a pointed look at (Sarah would have sworn) the Weasley twins, "or else widely acknowledged to be of significant difficulty."

He spent the rest of the lesson lecturing on potential options. Although Sarah was finding, ironically, that it had become much easier than it once was not to be distracted by the mere sound of his voice (accustomed as she had become to hearing it all day), nevertheless she could not decide between several of the more difficult potions he described. She was not an experimenter. Leave that to the likes of the Weasleys, whose mutual glances at one another throughout the lecture were entirely too smug.

Near the end of the class period, Snape brought out a list of room assignments, which he read aloud, while the students who had decided that class was already over had to scramble for their quills to write down their assigned room numbers. After giving several stern warnings about the rules for the use of the student workrooms (they would be inspected weekly, for instance, and failure to maintain the expected level of tidiness would result--as would the breaking of most of the other rules--in an unbreakable locking charm being placed on the door for a length of time appropriate to the infraction), Snape released the class so that they could locate their workrooms.

The student workrooms were, Sarah discovered when she found hers, little more than dank stone cells, each provided (as cross-comparison between students showed) with a table and a small cabinet. There was fierce competition for the better items among the battered school-owned equipment that Snape was permitting to be checked out for use in the workrooms. Sarah refrained from participating in the ugliness; in the end it resulted in the loss of more than a few House points by everyone but the Slytherins, who were, in many of the cases, the instigators. Certainly they had ended up with the better equipment. She still had a meager hope that she would be able buy her own equipment, although she had feared from the very beginning of their quarrel that Aunt Portia would use her position as Sarah's guardian to convince Gringotts to freeze her accounts. If that turned out to be the case, Sarah thought dubiously, perhaps Snape would let her borrow some of his. Certainly he was not going to permit her to fail for lack of it.

* * *

On Tuesday morning, Sarah risked a long glance at the staff table as she came into the Great Hall, wondering anxiously how the Occlumency lesson had gone. Snape, however, was not at the staff table, and as she took her usual place with the rest of the seventh years, she noticed that the other teachers wore extremely grim expressions. In alarm, she ran her eyes along the Gryffindor table, looking for Potter, worried that somehow the dreaded lesson had turned out badly wrong. She heard a whisper of "Azkaban" behind her--just a few seconds before she saw the bespectacled, wild-haired boy sitting safely in front of his breakfast. Her relief was short-lived, however. His expression, too, was gloomy, and he looked around the room as if in disbelief. One of his friends, the fifth year Girl Wonder, Hermione Granger, passed a copy of the Daily Prophet across the table to him, and he looked up from it even more appalled.

Sarah, not seeing anyone near her at the Gryffindor table reading the paper, turned around to look at the Hufflepuffs behind her. One of them, just a little down the way, was holding up a copy to show his neighbor, and the shocking headline MASS BREAKOUT FROM AZKABAN fairly jumped out at her. The front page was taken up almost entirely by photographs of the criminals in question. She thought she recognized a couple of them, even at this distance, without being able to see the captions under the pictures. Old friends of her father's. Death Eaters.

She had not thought the day could seem any longer. It was difficult not to pull out her ring right here and now and go looking for him. She wasn't that stupid, of course. But she could not concentrate in Defense Against the Dark Arts, although Professor Umbridge was out of sorts, asking pointless questions at random, sweetly eviscerating the unfortunates who failed to give her the answers she wanted.

Sarah's relief at seeing Snape at the staff table at lunch, to all appearances safe and sound, was impossible to hide.

"Hm?" Angelina said, hearing her sigh.

"Oh, uh, Snape's back," Sarah said, taking refuge in a fraction of the truth while she thought quickly. The other girl's eyebrows went up, and she hastily explained, "I noticed he wasn't at breakfast, and all through Umbridge's class this morning I was thinking about how horrible it would be if he got sick and she made up her mind to teach Potions as well."

"That's pretty sad," Angelina grimaced, "although it seems to me like the two would be interchangeable."

"Au contraire," one of the Weasley twins chimed in. "Granted that Snape is a bit of a prat."

"But," continued the other twin, "he's not a complete idiot."

"I imagine you two have your projects already planned out," Sarah said.

"Planned and executed."

"Easiest term we've had in ages."

* * *

For the first time, Sarah was glad that her dorm mates were on the Quidditch team. Tired players tended to turn in as early as possible on practice nights. Still, it was going on eleven o'clock before she let her anxiety to leave overtake her cautious fears. With spells in place, she turned her ring shakily to the left.

He wasn't in his room.

Sarah bounded off the bed in near panic. Not in the bathroom, not in the workroom. She finally found him in his office, grading papers.

"What's the matter?" he asked, taking in her breathless relief.

"I was just worried that...that something bad had happened."

"Are you referring to the escapes from Azkaban?" He looked at her a bit warily. "I assure you I had nothing to do with that incident."

"Did you know it was going to happen?" Having been distracted from the original tack she had planned for the conversation, Sarah wasn't thinking clearly enough to keep the question from popping out.

"If I did," he said, eyes narrowing, "can you imagine that anyone at the Ministry would possibly have taken me seriously?"

He had a good point. She took a seat in the chair on this side of his desk, trying to frame what she wanted to say. "What I was really concerned about was how...well, how the Occlumency lesson went." It sounded horribly forward, as if she were prying; she wasn't sure how to explain the panic she had felt, thinking for those long, long seconds that he had been sent to Azkaban for attacking Harry Potter. It occurred to her for the first time that Dumbledore would probably not have let her hear news like that as gossip in the Great Hall. But at the time it had seemed altogether possible that such a thing had happened.

Snape's face took on a predictably sour look. "It might have been worse, although I find it difficult to imagine how. The boy has no self-control. Just as I warned the headmaster beforehand. And of course the headmaster's solution, if I found that to be the case, was a second lesson each week. I am afraid," he said, "that Wednesday nights are going to be off-limits as well."

"That's half the week!" Sarah protested.

"My, I thought your arithmetic skills were better than that." But there was a glint in his eye.

"You know what I mean!"

"I do," he said. "But it isn't as if this is worse than before the holidays. Also consider, Sarah, that I'm no longer a boy. There are times when you positively exhaust me."

Sarah said nothing. For no reason she could put her finger on, the comment had stung deeply. Casting about for something to distract her attention, she noticed a rather fat and gaudy purple envelope on the corner of the desk. She picked it up. It was addressed to Severus Snape, Potions Master of Hogwarts from Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts.

"What's this?" she asked.

Snape groaned and raised a hand his forehead as if he had a headache. He drew a deep breath, heaved a sigh, then said, "Oh, go on, you may as well know."

It had already been opened, and the contents replaced rather roughly. Sarah eased them out of the envelope. The item that had made it so bulky was a small packet emblazoned with large, friendly letters spelling out: Dora Dulce's Densified Decadent Devil's Food Delight. The other half of the contents was a card. The illustration on the cover depicted an elderly wizard blowing out an inferno of a birthday cake, whereupon he turned into a child, who rapidly grew up, sprouted a long grey beard, noticed that the cake was on fire again, and blew it out, with the same results as before. The words Many Happy Returns of a Second Youth chased each other around the edge of the card. Inside, Dumbledore had written: Although I know how you feel about such reminders, I thought you might have had a change of heart this year. Share and enjoy.

"It's your birthday?" Sarah said, fixing Snape with a quizzical eye.

"Obviously. Otherwise I would not have been subjected to that." He glared at the card in Sarah's hands.

She shut the monstrosity and waved it between them. "So, is this my fault, too?"

"Hardly. He always finds an excuse to make an exception. Indeed, the exception is the rule, in this case."

Sarah picked up the package. "Shall we at least enjoy the cake?"

"It's sure to be stale. And probably made with preservative potions that will keep our bodies from rotting decently for several hundred years."

She opened the package anyway. A small brown disk inside promptly expanded into a double-layered chocolate cake, complete with icing. She stole some from an unobtrusive spot near the bottom. "Not too bad, really." Then, trying to make the question sound nonchalant, "So, how old are you today, anyway?"

"A day older than yesterday," Snape said between his teeth.

Concluding that discretion was, even more than usual, the better part of valor, Sarah went into the workroom, retrieved a couple of stirring spoons, used a scourgifying spell on them several times in succession, and returned to the office. She offered one to him. "Live just a little."

He took the spoon, but growled, "I had far different thoughts about how to celebrate my birthday." He ate a small spoonful of the cake and made a face.

"Well," Sarah said, raising her eyebrows. She scooped up a generous bite. "That is what I came here for. In a sense."

"Yes, I know," he grimaced. "Here." He passed part of a stack of unrolled parchments across the desk. "Thanks to Mr. Potter I accomplished nothing last night, and at this rate, these won't be finished for tomorrow. I'm sure that you are quite competent enough to grade first year essays. The sooner this particular torment is finished with, the sooner we can...celebrate."

Sarah picked up the top parchment and began scanning it as she nibbled on the cake. He had been right--it was rather stale. It sorted well with the essays. "Oh my, these are bad. Gary Boland of Hufflepuff thinks that Jabberwocky feathers are used in memory potions. He's even quoted some nonsensical poem."

"Don't feel excessively sorry for them," Snape said, glancing up from the essay he was reading. "You must be aware of my standards by now; I expect you to grade accordingly."

Sarah set aside her spoon, retrieved a spare quill and, after another reading and a rapid mental calculation, wrote down a score. It was only as she began to write a comment underneath it that she realized....

"Oh, no! Even the first years will know this isn't your handwriting." Snape's spiky hand was distinctive, and her own neat printing looked nothing like it. She looked up in alarm.

"Hmm." Snape took the paper from her hand, picked up his wand and tapped the sheet. "Forgero Severus Snape!"

He handed it back, and Sarah watched the ink rearrange itself slightly into letters of a different shape, but one that she knew very well.

"That's...wicked." She wasn't sure if she meant it literally or as a compliment. Maybe both.

"You will never tell anyone I taught you that charm. Nor will you ever teach it to anyone else. Particularly to other students." He looked sour again, as if irritated by the remembrance of her situation.

Sarah was still boggled by the implications. "Knowing this...can any document be trusted? The Ministry...."

"Fortunately," Snape said, "there is a countercharm, which the Ministry uses on documents where forgery is suspected. There are certain mental tricks that can subvert it--the countercharm only reveals the identity which the writer earnestly believed they possessed when they wrote the words. But I'll teach the countercharm to you as well, since you may wish to use it on these papers as you grade them. By this point, the first years have managed to determine who is and is not able to do the homework I set. Occasionally there are less-than-honest attempts to remedy a string of poor marks." He flicked his wand again, touching the point to the forged comments. "Auctorem veritum revealo!"

Lines of fire appeared in the air above the page, spelling out a name that she had never yet written with her own hand: Sarah Snape.

Sarah felt a chill run down her spine and lodge in her stomach. Snape's face seemed to go entirely blank for a moment.

"Do all of the teachers check their students' essays for cheating?" she asked, in a thin whisper.

"Not in the seventh year," he said dismissively. "At this point, marks are insignificant, except as a guide to what may be expected on the N.E.W.T. No Hogwarts teacher would make the effort to check up on..." he trailed off, his eyes widening with the same realization that had just occurred to Sarah.

"Professor..."

"Dolores..." Snape spoke at the same time.

Then together, "Umbridge."

"Oh, no." Sarah wrung her hands.

"You haven't turned in any work yet?" Snape wanted to know.

"No. But there's an essay due tomorrow. I've already finished it."

"You will be dropping Defense Against the Dark Arts immediately," he ordered, in a tone so imperious that she would have been inclined to quarrel with it if she had not been determined on the same course of action.

The biggest problem, of course, would be how.