5th of March 2019

11. 5th of March 2019

Severus was watching the chessboard, not quite believing what he was seeing: Hermione Weasley's grasp of chess was abysmal, and how a reasonably intelligent woman謡hich she was幼ould be so bad at the game was nothing less than baffling.

He would try again, though. He had tried before, but now he would force her to make the right move.

"Tower C8 to C6," he said, creating a fork for her, and as a result, the tower he had just moved turned its head and glared at Severus and shook its fist at him. Severus glared back, and that made it settle down, grumbling and muttering something incoherent.

Now she could either take his queen or the tower he had just moved. Either move would ensure that he would be rendered checkmated within four or five moves. She just couldn't fail this time.

She looked down at the board. "He was such a good chess-player. He taught me," Hermione said, while her hand hovered over the knight.

Severus caught himself holding his breath. Yes, that was it. She was learning, finally. "Who did?" asked Severus, knowing whom she was talking about, but not wanting her to think about him.

"Ron, of course. Until that chess game in our first year, I'd thought he was a bit of twit. Brave, but still a twit. Then it turned out he was smart. Strategic smart. I was ever so impressed."

She tilted her head, smiled, and pulled her hand back from the knight.

"You can't fool me, you know," she said. "You can't have my queen."

And with that, she removed one of his pawns and opened herself up to be checkmated in two moves. And this time he did it. He just couldn't bare to continue this travesty of a chess game any longer.

"Obviously I can, and without even trying." He stared at the chessboard. One of his rooks and a pawn were undignified enough to give their opponents the two-fingered salute. It was probably Ronald Weasley's old set she was using. "Please tell me that you are, at the very least, able to see what you just did to yourself."

The dismayed, wide-eyed look she gave him must have been something she had designed to make Ronald Weasley fall at her feet. But then it was replaced with a mulish one, and she pursed her lips and looked at the chessboard again.

It was taking her much too long to find her mistake.

"You cannot even see where you went wrong, can you?"

She looked up at him and smiled, not at all embarrassed now, as he'd been expecting. "Ron always did say I was terrible at chess. He said the chess part of my brain must have shrivelled up and died from too much reading and too little time spent playing board games with older siblings. At least, that was his theory."

"And homespun does not even start to describe it," he said.

She rose and went to the fireplace, putting more wood on the fading embers.

"Did you play a lot of board games when you were little?" she asked.

The fire roared to life again, and two fire lizards came scuttling up from the embers and started to play on the burning sticks of wood.

"Yes, often. Not much else to do but read and play games where I lived. And why did you just do that?"

She looked up from the fire, two wrinkles visible between her eyebrows. "Did what?"

"The fire. You could have used magic. It's impolite to turn your back on a conversation like you just did."

She giggled and turned her back on him again, poking about in the fire and making the lizards go frantic with glee when the flames burnt higher into the chimney.

"I never got out of the habit," she said, as she returned to her seat opposite the frame he was currently inhabiting. "It's a Muggelborn thing, I reckon. It's obvious when to use some things, like protective spells, Transfiguration and D.A.D.A. When there isn't any practical equivalent in Muggle terms. It's the Charms I tend to forget about sometimes. I just act as if I have no magic. It used to annoy Ron terribly." Her voice trailed off into nothing.

She was talking about Ron Weasley again. Which was unacceptable, since Severus was there with her.

"I learnt chess from my maternal grandfather," he said. "I played a lot with ... a friend, and then with my housemates at Hogwarts."

She gave him an absent look. The following question wasn't entirely incongruous, but almost, and it made all the muscles in his body bunch up as they once had before going into a fight.

"How did you deal with losing Lily Evans?"

No one had ever asked him that. Not even Albus. But he could be honest now. He was a portrait after all, and the living couldn't touch him.

"I set out to get revenge. First on James Potter. Then on the Dark Lord. I thought you had made that rather simple deduction a long time ago."

The lizards seemed to be playing a game of chicken now曜umping out on the could stone floor, running as far as they were able, and then running back into the fire again.

"What would you have done if there had been no one to punish?"

Like it was for her? The ones to blame all dead in the same accident.

"I have no idea. Insanity might have been the result."

She barked a laugh. A nasty, crude laugh.

"I'm not allowed to go insane. I've got children to think of." She rose and went over to the window. Her back was to him, shoulders tense, spine stiff.

Looking at that stiff neck and tense shoulders, he wondered if he would have been better off with a family of his own, even if the woman had not been Lily.

Probably not.

"At least you have something of him left. I had nothing at all."

Then he rose and left the painting.