The Occasional Foolish Risk

15 The Occasional Foolish Risk

Hermione stood with her forehead resting against the tiled wall, letting the cool water wash the accumulated sweat and grit from her body. It was such a relief to let go the reins for a while and just breathe. Traveling with Snape was a bit like having a cranky four-year-old in tow...she was aware that he wasn't enjoying himself, and pestered by a constant niggling anxiety that he would wander off and get lost. Plus, he had been more ill-humored than usual when they arrived in São Paulo, complaining that her snoring had kept him awake.

"I don't snore. And besides, why didn't you take some Dreamless Sleep before we took off? That's what I always do."

"Because," he said with asperity, "you expressly forbade any sort of magic."

"Any spells and so forth. But taking a potion isn't a problem."

"Now you tell me."

"Well, you can sleep after we get to the hotel. Just now we have to get through customs."

He had taken his annoyance out on her by leaving her to lug her own suitcase through the customs checkpoint and heave it back onto the conveyor belt.

Fernanda had been waiting for them at the departure gate for their connecting flight, and Hermione noticed that Snape's mood...or at least the outward display of it...improved visibly when she introduced them. He actually smiled, the fatuous git.

"How'd you get through security without a boarding pass?" asked Hermione.

Fer grinned and waggled her fingers in the air. "You know: 'These aren't the droids you're looking for.'"

Snape looked gratifyingly mystified by this statement.

Fer handed her a slip of paper. "Your owls are in the cargo hold. Just pick them up with your checked luggage when you get to Manaus. I sent four of those little burrowing owls and one frigatebird in case you need to ship any packages."

"Thank you," said Snape silkily, and smiled even more broadly, if such a thing was possible. "We are most grateful for the trouble you've gone to."

Hermione regarded him with frank astonishment and no small measure of irritation. He was looking at Fernanda with the quiet, focused intensity that he usually reserved for complex potions formulas or a good single-malt whisky. She'd certainly never seen him look at her that way, and she'd saved his wretched life. The owls would be a tremendous help, of course, and it really had been kind of Fer to organize them, but it wasn't as if she'd offered to give him a kidney, for god's sake.

"Fer and I are going for a coffee," she said crossly, taking Fernanda's arm and throwing Snape a look that said, as clearly as she could make it, you are not invited.

"What an interesting-looking man," said Fernanda, looking back over her shoulder as Hermione steered her towards a coffee shop. She grinned wickedly. "He gives me a delicious feeling between my toes."

Hermione was only half listening...distracted by fatigue, the task of summoning up her Portuguese to order the coffee, and her irritation with Snape. "He...what? Snape? Your toes?"

"Yes," Fernanda said. "The big ones."

It took Hermione a second to parse this, and when she did, she gaped at Fernanda. "Seriously? Snape? Are you joking?" She was aware, as the words were leaving her mouth, that the reaction was reflexive, the kind of thing she would have said automatically when she was at Hogwarts.

"You don't find him attractive?"

"Attractive? No," she said, with more conviction than she felt. "He's got that nose." Which had, of course, nothing to do with anything. He was Professor Snape, and that alone took him off the, well, table.

"To hell with the nose," said Fernanda. "He has those eyes. And that voice. You're going to be six weeks in the jungle listening to that voice." The grin returned. "Besides, you know what they say about the size of a man's nose."

Hermione jabbed her in the shoulder with a finger. "Stop it, you. I don't need to be speculating on the size of Severus Snape's cock."

"Is he sharing your tent? Maybe you'll get to see it, and you can report back to me. Just send one of the owls. Or the frigatebird, if necessary."

"Shut up! Talk to me about something else." She cast about for a suitably neutral topic. "How are your parents? Still peeved about you moving out and living on your own?"

"Getting over it. It's my dad more than my mom, if you want the truth. He has visions of devious men taking advantage of my innocence and vulnerability to rob me of my virtue if he's not there to guard it."

Hermione laughed. "Any truth to that?"

"I'm working on it. Give me time." She paused for a moment, a smile teasing at the corners of her mouth. "I have some vacation coming...maybe I should come visit you and have a sleepover in the jungle."

This remark irked Hermione more than it should have. After all, why should it bother her if Fernanda made leering references to Snape?

But it did bother her. It bothered her a lot, in fact. Which was something she was going to have to examine in detail once she was by herself.

For now, she focused on catching up with Fer, exchanging amusing stories with her about their jobs and complaining affectionately about what a bother it was to have dads who constantly nagged one to floss more. They drank their coffees and gossiped about friends: who had got married and who had had babies and who had decided she was a lesbian and left her husband to run off with the Beauxbatons flight instructor.

Back at the gate, she kissed Fer goodbye and watched grumpily as Snape took advantage of local custom to upgrade the air kiss on the cheek to something involving actual contact, and to extend the duration that tiny bit more, just enough that it was clearly deliberate, but not long enough to get himself slapped.

Her mood wasn't improved by his remarking, once Fer was out of earshot, "You could have warned me your friend was so... attractive." The pause made it sound as though he'd been on the verge of saying something else...probably, knowing him, something completely inappropriate...and had stopped himself just in time.

"Look around you," she said shortly. "You're in Brazil. Attractive women are thick on the ground here. No need to be crude about it." Which was unfair, of course, as he hadn't been the least bit crude.

But he didn't take the bait, the prat, just looked at her in obvious amusement, and she was saved from further discussion of the topic by the announcement of their flight.

Now, standing exhausted in the shower in her Manaus hotel suite, she made herself think about that flash of annoyance at the harmless flirtation that had passed back and forth between Fernanda and Severus. It had been nothing...less than nothing, really...just the kind of mutual acknowledgment of the other's potential as a sexual partner that so often leavens the social interactions of people between the ages of eighteen and eighty. She herself had engaged in it countless times, with a broad range of men and women, regardless of whether she felt any actual attraction to them.

But never with Snape. Or about Snape. Or in Snape's presence, even.

There had been that second, in the lab, when she had abruptly confronted...at least in concept, not in the flesh, thank god...his maleness; and if she was honest, she'd been looking at him differently ever since that moment. But this new awareness of him was still at odds with an image forged in her childhood and reinforced throughout her adolescence: the greasy git, the loathsome, repugnant Potions Master. She and her classmates had all had schoolgirl crushes on Lockhart (which made her laugh, now, because of course Lockhart had been gay, not to mention batshit crazy and a stonking great egotistical wanker). Some of had them even swooned over Draco's arrogant, patrician father. But as far as she had been aware, no one, not even the Slytherins, had spared a single hormonal flutter for Severus Snape.

Lockhart, she thought now. Lockhart had been a watershed for her...the last time she'd ever fallen for a man just because he was pretty to look at. It was as if that misguided infatuation, and the ensuing disillusionment, had matured her romantic tastes at a stroke.

She thought back over the men she'd been interested in since. Ron hardly counted...theirs was a connection born of proximity, and adrenaline, and the conviction that every day might be their last. As soon as the war was over, her romance with Ron ended, too, each regarding the other with mortified awkwardness. And then, of course, he had fallen into step with Harry in the Ministry's postwar abominations, and the friendship had been over as well.

Who else had there been, really? Viktor, for a brief while...and Viktor wasn't good-looking by any stretch of the imagination. Nor was he especially clever, though he wasn't dim, either. The thing that had caught Hermione's attention...fired her imagination, made her think about him in that way, made her want him...was his extraordinary skill at one single thing. On the ground, he was just another bloke. But on a broom, in the air, he took your breath away, anticipating his opponents' moves before they even thought of them, inhabiting his own body in a way that turned her knees to water.

And after Ron? She'd briefly felt the same way about a Mediwizard from the US, one of an international team of specialists that had come over in the aftermath of the war. And later, a violist from the London Phil, a man who, as naturally as breathing, brought forth from his instrument a voice of sweet, piercing melancholy, like the grieving of angels.

In both cases, her lovesickness had not survived deeper acquaintance with its object: the American had turned out to have a wife and two veg back in Boston, and the violist had sixteen cats and a mother-of-pearl-inlaid box containing a decade's worth of carefully hoarded toenail parings.

Since then, there had been no one. Of course, that depended on how you defined things. Because technically speaking, there had been quite a few, including a great many of her former Hogwarts classmates (including oh-god-what-was-she-thinking Draco Malfoy) and a fair number of Muggle men (and the occasional woman) met in bars or on holiday, and more than a few research colleagues in one or another of the countries she'd gone specimen-hunting (ha!) in. Every one of them taken up and and discarded almost immediately, until...about five years ago...she had realized that what she was looking for was in the past, and couldn't be recaptured, and there was an end to it.

So she had just... stopped. And begun working a little more obsessively, and drinking a little more...well, a lot more...and taking the occasional foolish risk in order to piss off the Ministry. But no more fucking, because at least this way the only one who might get hurt was her.

So it wasn't accurate to say "no one," if sex was what you were talking about. It was no one only in the sense that there hadn't been anyone who had captured her attention, had given her that same sense of longing, of yearning mixed with helpless admiration that Viktor had first triggered in her a lifetime ago. She had gradually come to look upon that remembered feeling as an illusion based on the confluence of adolescent hormones and the emotional thrill ride that was coming of age in wartime.

Very tentatively, she tested the idea of Severus in that role. He certainly wasn't eye candy...but then he wasn't hard to look at, either. Fer had put her finger on it when she'd called his looks "interesting." So that was all right, but nothing likely to awaken the slumbering beast in her.

No. If the beast was stirring, it was in response to that other thing, the thing that had always been her particular weakness...the extraordinary ability and mastery of his craft, skill so absolute that it deceived the beholder into thinking it effortless. Add to that his ferocious integrity, and a sardonic wit sharp enough to match her own, thrust for thrust and parry for parry.

Of course. Of course.

She turned off the tap and stepped out of the shower.

"Fuck," she said.

A/N: My beta/britpick team, corianderpie and exartemarte, have extraordinary vision in many senses of the word.

Special thanks this chapter to ferporcel for making an unscheduled guest appearance!