Something of a Personal Nature

Chapter 12 Something of a Personal Nature

The notebooks were the obvious place to begin. He had been to a local papelería and bought a set of similar ones, with pasteboard bindings and quadrille pages; these he put in a stack on her desk. The routine of espionage was returning easily to him...he had, almost without conscious thought, planned his course of action along with a backup plan and explanation should she return early and surprise him in flagrante. The tent was pitched farther up the hill behind Wilbur's pen, the area directly around the house being too steeply sloped to accommodate it. There were half a dozen plausible explanations why he might have come down to the house; his presence in the study would be a bit trickier to explain.

He took the leftmost notebook from the shelf and opened it. The first page was dated June 2001, and was covered with notes for the creation of a spell for finding hidden objects: lists of words in various languages, some circled and some crossed out; arithmantic formulae and linguistic charts. This went on for some fifty pages, and culminated in two lists:

sithka

sithkae

sitkala

seku

setku

orlop

orloep

horloip

ubilaz

eubilaz

ybilax

lawwo

lawvo

lavvok

kudzdhdam

kudizh-dam

kudham-izh

hudjanek

hudianik

khudjank

skurijan

eskurian

He reasoned that these must be the actual spell-words, and resisted the temptation to test them on the spot; best to get on with the task at hand and try out her various spells at his leisure when he was assured of some privacy.

He closed the notebook, and slid it beneath one of the blank ones. Drawing his wand, he passed it diagonally across the cover of the empty notebook and said, "Reproductor Libri." The resultant copy he reduced and slipped into his pocket, then replaced the original on the shelf and took down the next notebook in the series.

When he opened the sixth notebook, an envelope fluttered to the floor. He recognized the Ministry letterhead even before he opened it and saw the familiar handwriting.

Dear Hermione,

Harry

Which of the Ministry's postwar policy decisions had provoked the rift between them? he wondered. Confined in Azkaban, he had hardly been in the thick of things politically, but it was no secret that the Ministry, in the aftermath of Voldemort's demise, had tended to err on the side of safety rather than liberty. There was a deal more surveillance and intrusiveness than there had been in past years...interceptions of Owl posts, monitoring of the Floo network, that sort of thing...all in the name of keeping the public safe.

He waited until after he had copied the notebook before replacing the letter between its pages; Ministry correspondence was often protected by spells that alerted the sender in the event of unauthorized copying.

The remaining three dozen notebooks took over an hour to copy, and once he had the miniatures safely stowed, and the bookshelf returned to its former order, he Apparated back up the hill and into the tent.

She was right, he thought...the praetorist she used was indeed excellent. The tent was a marvel of compact utility, a bit like a Romany caravan that was somehow larger inside than out and with lights and gas and hot and cold running water. There was a small living area, with a kitchen off to the left and a bedroom to the right. On the far wall of the bedroom, two doors led to a small closet and a bathroom almost as large as the bedroom itself.

Adding a second bedroom and closet would be the work of a few minutes, but the bathroom, he realized suddenly, was another matter entirely. He hadn't shared toilet facilities with anyone else since his years as a student at Hogwarts...certainly not in Azkaban...and the thought of sitting on the lav with the latest issue of Modern Grimoire while Granger tapped impatiently at the door was off-putting to say the least. Still, magical plumbing added significantly to the weight of the finished tent, so any additions had to be worth the extra effort involved in lugging them about. The thought of explaining his choices to her ("I like to take my time. And have a read. And a fag.") made him wince.

He pulled from his coat pocket a folded parchment on which he had made a number of preliminary sketches, and set about methodically making modifications to the tent, beginning in the little entryway-cum-living room and proceeding clockwise, so that the bedrooms and bathroom were left for last. Perhaps by the time he got round to them, inspiration would have struck.

******

Hermione made her way up the hill, carrying the tea-tray and fretting over the issue of the loo.

She hadn't said anything to Severus about adding bathroom fixtures. It was only while waiting for the tea to steep and anticipating what she might see when she entered the tent that it occurred to her suddenly that a man might not understand the necessity for separate facilities. It wasn't that she was prudish...in fact the thought of his catching a glimpse of her, wet and naked from the bath, was disconcertingly interesting. But six years at Hogwarts had done nothing to make her less uncomfortable with smelling other people's poo...or worse, knowing that they could smell hers; during her fifth year, she had spent months trying to fashion a variant of Evanesco that would remove all traces from the air. Men seemed strangely immune to this concern, or even to find it a subject for hilarity, and the thought of Snape making a sarky remark about her womanly perfumes made her cringe.

The tent looked exactly the same on the outside, but when she ducked through the opening, she was immediately aware that it seemed bigger. And lighter: the entryway now had a large window through which she could clearly see Wilbur, rooting in the mud beneath the late afternoon sunlight.

"Anyone home?" she called, setting the tray down on a low table that hadn't been there before. "I've brought tea."

Snape came in, wand in hand, from one of the side rooms. His eyes widened when he saw the quantity of food on the tray.

"You didn't come down for lunch," she said, feeling oddly apologetic, "and I thought you might be hungry."

"Famished," he agreed, "but would you like to have a look round before we eat?"

"Ooh, yes, if you don't mind." She cast a quick Stasis charm on the teapot and followed him.

To the left of the kitchen, he had added a modest workroom, with shelves, a bench, and a small collection of instruments for processing specimens. It, too, had a window: a small round porthole set high in the wall.

She picked up an antique-looking knife with an elegant carved black handle. "This is beautiful," she said. "It's dragon fang, isn't it? Where did you get it?"

"It was my mother's," he replied...and then, in answer to the question she had not asked, "I had Narcissa pop over to my house and pick up some of my things."

She felt the blood drain from her face. "To send or to bring?" she asked quietly.

"To bring, naturally," he said, as if he were talking about nothing of more consequence than the morning's milk delivery. "Much quicker than shipping them."

"You brought Narcissa Malfoy to my house?"

Her voice, still pitched low, was shaking with anger, and he turned in surprise to look at her.

"Of course not. I met her at my hotel room in Salamanca. She has no idea you're here."

The pounding in her ears began to recede.

"Was that wise? Letting her know where you were, I mean. I thought you were trying to stay under the Ministry's radar."

"Under their what?"

"Where they couldn't find you. How do you know she won't report back to them?"

"Oh, Narcissa's nothing if not discreet. Besides, she owes me."

For what?

She wasn't sure she wanted to know.

The kitchen was much the same, with the addition of a window over the sink. He seemed to like windows, she thought, and wondered if the years in Azkaban had left him a bit claustrophobic. "The extra daylight is quite nice," she said, by way of sidling up to the topic.

"Yes," he said. "I was wondering why you didn't have any windows. Thought maybe you had a pathological aversion to them."

"No," she said, "it was just the money. Yossarian's charges an outrageous premium for those one-way windows, and I decided it wasn't worth it. I don't spend that much time indoors when I'm in the field anyway." Got enough of that in the Forest of Dean, thank you very much.

"They take advantage of you, then. It's really not that difficult or complicated."

"Not for you, maybe."

"Hmph," he said, but she could tell he was pleased.

Her apprehensions regarding the bathroom arrangements proved groundless. One small, central room now contained only the bathtub, to which he had added a shower surrounded by a water-repelling charm. There was a bedroom on either side of this room, and on the far side of each, a tiny room with a toilet and washbasin.

She was flooded with a ridiculous sense of relief. "Oh, well done," she said.

"You don't mind the extra weight?" he asked diffidently. "I thought, er, under the circumstances..."

"No," she said. "It's perfect."

Back in the living room, he picked up a sandwich and sat down in a brown leather armchair she'd never seen before.

"Lovely view," she said, gesturing toward the window with a sliver of ham before popping it into her mouth. "Just as well he can't see me in here making a meal of one of his relatives."

"Who's going to take care of him while we're away?"

"The neighbor's boy, Raul. He feeds Crookshanks, too, although I do worry that he'll come by one day and find Crookshanks has kicked it. Could be traumatic for a twelve-year-old."

"Arriving to find an ex-cat, you mean." And then, at her astonished look, "What? I'm not completely ignorant of the popular Muggle culture, you know."

"Yes, you can just manage the odd obscure forty-years-out-of-date reference."

He smirked, and for several minutes they drank their tea in silence. After a while he said, "There's something I've been wanting to ask you, if you don't mind. Something of a personal nature."

Her pulse quickened, and she made herself focus on his hands as they set his teacup back onto the table. "Go on."

"That healing charm you used on me," he began.

Oh. She felt curiously let down. "What about it?"

"You said you had never tried it out before."

"No. No opportunity, really." He didn't expect her to inflict wounds on Wilbur just so that she could heal them, did he?

"I would have thought it might effect some improvement..." he was reaching out a hand toward her face "...to this."

He had laid his fingers along her jaw, and now brushed his thumb gently along the scar that extended from the corner of her mouth out across her cheek.

She blinked. "I...no, I never thought of trying it."

"Really? I would have thought..." he stopped, clearly thinking better of what he had been about to say, and took his hand away from her face.

"After all this time, I forget it's there," she said, knowing how feeble that sounded.

He regarded her levelly. "I find that difficult to believe."

There was a long silence.

"Not that you're not a beautiful woman nonetheless."

The air inside the tent seemed suddenly very still and hot.

She lifted her chin and looked defiantly at him. "No, then," she admitted, "I don't really forget it. I've just never...I've never wanted to change it."

He raised an eyebrow.

"I want it there," she said. "It's a reminder...for me, and for the people who know me. I want them to be reminded, every time they see me. Not to be able to forget." Her lips were trembling, and she pressed them together.

"Reminded of what? Not to forget what?"

She stared at him.

"If you don't mind my asking."

She could feel herself starting to cry. She always cried when she was angry, and it always mortified her.

"Reminded of who I got it from."

"And who was that?"

His gaze was holding her now, the black eyes looking steadily into hers.

She looked back.

"You, of course," she said.

A/N

I have a wonderful beta/Britpick team: corianderpie and exartemarte. They regularly rock my world!

Spells in this chapter: Reproductor Libri is mine. Evanesco is canon, and I thought the Stasis charm was, too, but I can't find any reference to it. So the evidence would suggest that I stole it from the aforementioned corianderpie.