Eight

Disclaimer: All characters are the property of J.K. Rowling. I intend no infringement and am making no profit.

***

"Come in."

Granger made a barely perceptible flick of her wand in the direction of the other room, and Severus heard the faint click of the front door opening. The girl...young woman, he corrected himself, mildly amused...remained standing at the foot of the bed, her hands perched obstinately on her shapely hips. Hardly a girl at all.

She'd been antagonizing him for days now, and it was rapidly becoming unendurable. He should have known that if anyone would dismiss his repeated scorn, it would be Granger. The more frequently she demanded answers about the potion, the more he glared at her and refused to respond. They'd reached a sort of stalemate earlier that morning, and Granger had brashly declared that as it was only Saturday, she had all weekend to wait. She wasn't moving, she claimed, until he provided her with the answers she desired. Though he assured himself repeatedly that he loathed her very presence, Severus was forced to acknowledge that the sight of her in such a snit was becoming endlessly amusing.

To Severus' astonishment, Susan Bones walked into the room, her wild auburn hair windblown and her cheeks bright pink. "It's getting cold out there," she remarked cheerily, a large dish, presumably bearing some kind of food, encircled in her hands. "Autumn's definitely here. Hermione, what are you doing?"

Had Severus been able to speak, he could certainly have provided Miss Bones with an accurate overview of Granger's irrationality. As it was, he lay immobile in the bed, Granger having long since propped him up against an array of charmed pillows so that he was forced to look at her directly.

The chit sincerely thought she could beat him in a staring contest. If anything, she would provoke him into further progress by forcing him to laugh. Despite having not set foot outside that morning, her mousy brown hair was in a state of complete disarray, and she was flushed with the effort of arguing with an unresponsive opponent. How trying that had to be, he thought viciously, for someone so unaccustomed to simply shutting the hell up once in a while.

"I'm waiting for him to answer me," Granger replied in a surprisingly intimidating growl. Severus had to rein in a sudden spike of admiration. "He refuses to answer any of my questions about the potion that put him in this state."

"How can he possibly answer?" Miss Bones interjected. "He can't talk."

"No, but he can respond perfectly well to yes-and-no questions. Can't you, Professor?" she snapped, her hands returning to her hips. Miss Bones was eyeing her friend with a curious mixture of bemusement and worry, a combination hardly improved by Granger's scantily clad state. She'd marched into his room early that morning wearing barely more than her sleeping attire, announcing that she'd spent the entire night researching potions and was sick and tired of his stubbornness.

"Honestly, Professor, you're the most ridiculous man I've ever met," Granger declared, pointing an accusatory finger at his stationary form. "I've already told you that I'll hold anything you tell me in the strictest confidence. I'm bound by law, as your Healer and your guardian, not to divulge anything you say. You know perfectly well that it will all go toward improving your condition, if any further improvements are possible.

"Am I to surmise from this...this absurd display...that you don't want to improve?" she finished shrilly. There was no need for him to reply, really; she provided all the theatrics for him. Granger threw up her hands with a shriek of feminine frustration and stalked out of the room, Miss Bones trailing behind her. Severus thought he caught the faint sounds of her friend admonishing Granger to put on clothing.

"I'm sure it's nothing he's never seen before," Granger shot back waspishly in reference to her thin cotton shirt and pants, and Severus chuckled internally. He'd never imagined that arousing the girl's anger could be so simple.

***

Hermione spent a great deal of time that Saturday afternoon deliberating the best way to continue her offensive. Susan stuffed her full of a delicious casserole and then dragged her shopping for the afternoon, but it didn't require much perception on Susan's part to notice that her heart wasn't in it.

"You okay, Hermione?" Susan finally asked when they'd settled in a small Muggle café. Hermione shook her head miserably, sipping at her latté.

"I've reached a serious impasse with Snape," she explained in response to Susan's knitted brows. "This isn't just temporary stubbornness. He has serious reservations about telling me what happened with that potion or who made it. He completely refuses to react to anything I ask or say."

"Why would he fight it?" Susan bit into a biscotti, still visibly confused.

Hermione half-heartedly blew a stream of air over the filmy surface of her drink. "I don't know. I can't help but wonder if it has anything to do with Narcissa." She'd disciplined herself against staring at Snape's illicit picture of Narcissa Malfoy quite so frequently, but she still found it impossible to push her thoughts regarding the image entirely from her mind. Truthfully, the thought of the wispy blonde as the the object of Snape's affections...requited or otherwise...still set her teeth on edge.

"The Malfoy woman?"

"Yes. Maybe she did petition for custody of him in order to harm him... Maybe he realizes that he has something to fear from her, and he knows that answering any of my questions could only put him in more danger."

"Snape may be an unreasonable git, but surely even he realizes that he's safe with you," Susan argued. "What does he think, that you're going to turn him over to that Malfoy woman once you get the answers of out him?"

Hermione felt an oddly defensive streak rising in her chest. "Well, why not?" she insisted a little more heatedly. "He has that picture of her, after all. Maybe that isn't a picture that he took when he was in bed with her. Maybe it's blackmail. Maybe she threatened him in the past, and he had to use it as leverage to keep himself safe from her at one point."

Susan's lip curled, her expression assuming a look of skeptical scorn. "Not that I'm saying Snape in bed with Narcissa Malfoy is any more plausible," she began, "but how would he have acquired that picture from someone other than her? He couldn't have just strolled up to her husband and asked for that sort of thing."

"Maybe it wasn't her husband." Half-formed suspicions were beginning to solidify in Hermione's mind, surfacing and then retreating just as quickly. There were myriad ways in which Snape could have acquired the image...he was, after all, a former spy, and the concept of covert reconnaissance was hardly unknown to him...but really, the means by which he'd done it was irrelevant to her. He'd obviously done it to protect himself, but why?

"Perhaps," Susan suggested with an excited look in her eyes, "he was having an affair with her, and he had the picture because if her husband ever suspected she was being unfaithful, he could claim it was someone else. Say that he'd found proof because she'd taken dirty pictures and given them to another man, someone he knew. You can't deny that it would be just like a Slytherin to think of any possible way to save their own arse."

"No," Hermione interrupted firmly, "that's not it. He wasn't having an affair with her; she's not his type."

The patrons at a nearby table jumped, startled, at the sound of Susan's soaring laughter. "His type?" she echoed disbelievingly, coughing and giggling simultaneously. "Since when are you an expert on his type? How do you know Snape even has a type?"

Hermione pursed her lips resolutely and remained silent.

Susan, noticing her friend's discomfiture, sobered immediately. "Hermione, I'm not making fun of you," she murmured, her voice softening to dissuade any further attention from the other customers. "But really, logically, my suggestion is just as possible as yours. You have no idea if Snape has a particular type of woman he goes after. For all you know, women aren't his type at all."

"I just know," Hermione returned, but even she could hear that the spark had gone out of her tone. "He's too smart for someone like her. He'd want to be with someone who is his equal... Not her."

"How do you know she's not just as smart as him?" Susan flagged down their waitress and requested the check, all the while glancing worriedly back and forth in Hermione's direction. Eventually Hermione found herself growing tired of squirming under her friend's gaze.

Once they'd left the building and were walking through the crisp air again, Susan restated the question in a firmer tone. "Again, I ask you, how do you know Narcissa Malfoy isn't just as smart as Snape? They're about the same age, right? They might have been at Hogwarts together. If anyone would know how intelligent she is, it would be one of her classmates, another Slytherin."

"Lucius Malfoy is five years older than Snape," Hermione replied matter-of-factly and automatically. "All their biographical details were printed in the Prophet after the last of the Death Eaters were incarcerated."

"That doesn't mean Narcissa is...older than him, I mean," Susan hastened to add.

Hermione drew her coat more tightly around her chest and stared at the horizon, the dozens of people milling about her falling into the blurred periphery of her vision. Autumn had arrived in full force, and the cold would only become more pronounced. Snape had been under her care for months, and before long, questions would surface regarding her progress...or lack thereof...with her infamous patient. St. Mungo's no longer housed him, to be sure, but the hospital was nevertheless funding his continued supply of potions, and she was already having difficulty paying Horace Slughorn for his regular...and absurdly overpriced...production of Snape's vitamin supplement, as it was not a procedure she had the wherewithal or the knowledge to undertake herself.

Her wages were considerable in comparison to the average witch's or wizard's, as were most Healers', but she was by no means affluent. Ever a slave to the debt she'd incurred as a student, her requisite monthly payments to Gringotts sapped a significant deal of her income. In three of four years' time, when she'd fully reimbursed the Wizarding bank for the loans she'd taken out to complete her apprenticeship, she could conceivably pay for Snape's long-term care without pronounced financial difficulty.

At the moment, however, it was questionable. Susan had offered once or twice to speak with Slughorn about possibly providing the vitamin supplement to her at a discounted rate as a St. Mungo's employee, but Hermione couldn't help but feel that while it was technically legal, being so evasive in her patient's care only underscored her desperation. Yet she knew she couldn't very well ask the neonatal Healers for a supply; she had no desire to arouse any more questions about Snape's state than she was already facing on a regular basis, both from Slughorn and from her colleagues. Really, she thought darkly, it was only a matter of time before Slughorn blabbed to someone at St. Mungo's about her alteration of Snape's care. She simply wanted to preserve the peace for as long as possible.

Her situation, all in all, was a simplistic one: it had been foolish for her to think that she was financially able to care for Snape, even if intellectually and professionally she was more than equal to the challenge.

It was rather like caring for a child as a single mother, she mused as she and Susan continued their walk. She giggled involuntarily. There were many parallels, of course...Snape was wholly dependent upon her care in all areas of life...but he was hardly a child.

Susan had glanced up at her curiously. "What's so funny?" she demanded.

"Well, for one, you've got biscotti crumbs on your chin."

Susan's fair skin disappeared behind a bright red flush as she brushed self-consciously at her chin. "Gone?" she asked, her voice squeaky with embarrassment. Hermione smiled at her and nodded.

"Gone."

"What's two?"

"What?"

"You said 'for one,' " Susan reiterated. "What's two?"

"Oh." Hermione laughed. "I was just thinking about how supporting Snape is kind of like being a single mother and supporting a child. I go to work every day and bring back the food and clothes, but all he does is stare at me and be sullen."

Susan laughed as well. "He always did strike me as temperamental," she agreed. "He probably would have bitten our heads off if we hadn't been students. Couldn't lose tenure, you know.

"Of course," Susan continued with a wicked smile, "he's hardly a little boy. The day will come when you'll have cured him so thoroughly and so well that he'll be able to get out of that bed, and I'd wager you'll be in for it then."

"For what?" Hermione demanded, startled.

"For going through his house."

Thunderstruck, Hermione stopped dead in her tracks. An old woman who'd been walking directly behind them squawked in protest as both she and her small dog nearly collided with the two girls, but Hermione was far too consumed by her own confusion.

"What are you talking about? I went over to his house to clean. No one's taken care of it in years."

"And Professor McGonagall didn't warn you against it?" Susan asked skeptically. "I'm not criticizing you, mind...I'm just surprised. I know that handling someone else's home and estate is a pretty common practice in the Muggle world, but for us, it's practically unheard of."

"She did mention that once," Hermione mumbled distractedly, recalling her conversation with the Headmistress in the back of her mind, "but I also remember very vividly that I told her I'd feel better if I went over there and did some repairs myself, and she agreed that the house could probably use it."

"But you'll notice she didn't say that Snape would be okay with it."

"I beg your pardon?" Susan was looking at her with infuriating patience and indulgence, making Hermione feel doubly stupid, like a well-meaning but impertinent child. "I was only doing what was appropriate under the circumstances. If he ever does recover, he'll require that house as living space since he's no longer employed at Hogwarts. I couldn't just let it fall into completely disrepair. No human being could possibly live there safely if I hadn't..."

Susan sighed. "I love you, Hermione, but even a decade hasn't been sufficient to teach you some things. If he'd been dead and you were going through his things to determine what would be sold, that would be different...it would be acceptable. But prolonged illnesses and comas are much more common here than for Muggles. After all, magic can keep a person alive even longer than most Muggle medical technology."

"Agreed," Hermione replied, her feet once again falling into effortless tandem with Susan's leisurely steps. "But why does that make my decision to care for his house inappropriate?"

"Wizards just don't do that," Susan explained softly, "not while the owner is still alive. Maybe Muggle notions of privacy are completely different; I really don't know. It's just one of those quirks that exists, but they never think to mention it in Muggle Studies classes."

"That's why he's so upset with me." Hermione felt the overwhelming urge to slam her head against the nearest brick wall. "How could I be so thick? Of course he's being uncooperative...I told him about everything I rearranged and cleared out. That was the night he first opened his eyes, so I completely forgot about it afterward. But if it's as inappropriate as you say, he's probably furious with me."

"I wouldn't doubt it," Susan agreed, refastening her long hair with an easy habitual flick of her wand. "But like I said, I'm not criticizing you. You're absolutely right: if Snape does recover, the day will come when he'll need to live there, and then, I imagine, he'll be grateful for all the work you've put it."

"I certainly hope so." Hermione wasn't sure whether she ought to feel indignant or ashamed. She resumed staring contemplatively at the horizon, wondering how to atone for what a man as strict and unrelenting as Snape undoubtedly considered an enormous indiscretion.