Friendly Overtures

Disclaimer: Don't own it.

It was soon apparent to Hermione that Lucius Malfoy, when he didn't know that one was a filthy Mudblood, was a charismatic playboy. If she didn't know better, she would think that he was trying to charm her out of her knickers. Oddly enough, his final goal seemed to be getting "Sev," whose irritation and hormones seemed be battling for supremacy, into them. It was all very surreal, considering the circumstances of the situation.

Hermione sipped from the glass of mead she held. She had accepted it against her better judgment, but hadn't wanted to appear rude or suspicious; or, more than she already was, at any rate. Besides, she'd given it a surreptitious sniff, could detect no poison, and she really was quite thirsty.

They were seated in the parlor of Spinner's End. Malfoy had commandeered the single threadbare armchair, forcing Snape and Hermione to sit side-by-side on the uncomfortable sofa. To Hermione's dismay, the room had changed little from the state she found it when she'd opened the house earlier that month. The same ratty, clunky furniture sat in the same locations; the same grisly books lined the walls; the very air of the room pressed down on her with the same heavy weight. Try as she might, the only real difference she could discern was a lack of dust and old newspapers. Malfoy, in his sapphire blue frock coat with silver piping and lace-edged sleeves, looked as out of place as a peacock in a flock of pigeons.

He was now plying her with a fifth photograph of a pale, chubby toddler with a dusting of white hair, the other four scattered across the scratched surface of the coffee table. Oblivious to the camera, despite the young woman trying to direct his attention forward, he was yanking on the ear of a wincing house-elf. Humming in a fair approximation of admiration, she mused that she'd rather have perused the infamous photos of Mrs. Figg's cats. This thought led her to Harry, and how old he would be in this time period. Was he living at the Durselys' already? Or was he still a happy, burbling baby surrounded by his parents' love?

"A fine young wizard, is he not?" Malfoy asked rhetorically as he gazed proudly at the child. Snape sighed loudly and pointedly, tapping his thigh with an index finger. "Are we boring you, Sev?" Without bothering to wait for an answer (it was fairly obvious to Hermione what it would have been), he turned back to her and smiled slyly. "Don't let him fool you. He's really quite fond of children."

"He must be, to teach at a boarding school," she agreed earnestly, sneaking a peek at a fuming Professor Snape, who had crossed his legs with a huff. A grin tugged at her lips, and she squelched it ruthlessly. The knowledge that he was a professor, therefore loyal to Dumbledore, gave her a strong enough sense of relief to find humor in the situation. That he was dressed casually in faded denim and a charcoal gray tee shirt made him seem infinitely more approachable.

Tee shirt!

Hermione tried to stifle a gasp as her eyes snapped to his left forearm. No Dark Mark marred the smooth, pale skin. Immensely relieved to have fallen into the past after the Dark wizard had been vanquished, she refocused her attention on Malfoy.

"Yes, quite. In fact, he's Draco's godfather," he said, stressing the last word significantly as he pulled a sixth photograph from a pocket in his robes and extended it toward her. With a careless flick of his wrist, he sent it fluttering out of his hand to land at Snape's feet. "Oh, how clumsy of me! Would you be so kind as to retrieve that for me, Miss Greenglass?"

Hermione wasn't fooled: the first photo that he'd dropped had fluttered over the arm of the sofa, requiring her to leave her seat, then bend over to recover it. Snape's slight flush had clued her to the fact that he'd probably gotten an eyeful of her arse. The second photo ended up wedged between the cushions (she couldn't quite figure that one out). Giving Malfoy the benefit of the doubt, though why, she couldn't say, she'd leaned over to fish it out, presenting her sofa mate with a clear view down her top. This third demonstration of "clumsiness" seemed to have been orchestrated to bring her face perilously close to Snape's crotch.

Lucius raised an expectant eyebrow. Hermione darted a glance at Snape; his foot had begun to shake and it was jiggling the sofa. Sweat was beginning to bead on his upper lip, and the flush from earlier was creeping down his neck. Never had Hermione seen her former professor look so on tenterhooks, and yet so ill at ease. It was tempting, almost, to lean forward ever so innocently, just to see if he'd explode in a ball of flaming embarrassment and frustration. Almost, but not quite; Ron would have been furious with her.

"Professor," she said politely, and he jerked in his seat, the toe of his boot catching the bottom of the table with a thump. "I can't quite reach the photograph for Mr. Malfoy. Would you mind?"

"Lucius, if you please," Malfoy corrected her, his smile tightening slightly as Snape plucked the photo from the floor and handed it to her. With languid grace, Malfoy rose from the chair and glided to the sofa, seating himself at the end and forcing Hermione to scoot to her left. Her hand accidentally brushed Snape's thigh, and he leapt to his feet.

"Lucius, if we've concluded our business, then I really must ask you to leave. Both of you," he finished with a pointed glare at Hermione.

Malfoy stood as well, towering over Snape's smaller form. "Now, Severus," he said in a placating, condescending tone as he grasped Snape's elbow and led him to the parlor's doorway. "You really must learn to sit back and enjoy life. Good things come to those who wait."

Hermione followed them with her eyes while trying to stifle a yawn. The warm stillness of the room and the alcohol in her glass were fogging the crystalline clarity of her mind, burnishing everything with a hazy glow. Allowing her head to loll on the back of the sofa, she blinked slowly and tried to remember why the miserable young man before her had turned on the Dark Lord not so long ago. Her thoughts moved as if swimming through molasses, but the right one finally struggled free: love. Voldemort had killed someone he had loved, but who, Harry could not, or would not, say.

She blinked again; it was getting difficult to keep her eyes open. Her muscles were relaxing, and it felt wonderful, as if she were wrapped in a cozy down comforter and tucked into bed by her mother. It wasn't until her glass slipped from her fingers to splash cool mead across her shins, that she realized that something was horribly wrong. Snape swore furiously at Malfoy, but she couldn't quite catch the words...

The world came back into focus with a thumping in her head, reminiscent of a pickup bed full of subwoofers set to eleven. Hermione groaned and pressed her palms to her eyes, imminently thankful for the cold, wet flannel that was resting on her forehead.

"If you think you can sit up, I have a headache potion."

Her eyes snapped open, struggling to focus on a vial of pale blue liquid hovering in front of her face. Over the edge of the vial, two black eyes watched her steadily. She jerked back into the sofa cushions, and he flinched, as if expecting a blow. Thin lips pursed and shoulders hunched, Snape leaned away from her until he was sitting up straight, perched on the edge of the coffee table near her knees. The flannel slithered off of her forehead and landed on the floor with a squelching plop.

Rising carefully onto her elbows, for she had been lying on her back sprawled across the sofa, she watched him warily as he set the potion on the table and retreated to the wingback armchair.

"It is illegal to drug one's guests," Hermione rasped through a parched throat, ignoring the potion and the throbbing of her temples. She licked her dry lips, longing for a glass of water, but more than hesitant to drink anything else she was handed in this house. Hurt and betrayal was blooming under her ribcage that this man that she had admired and defended had allowed her to come to harm under his roof, possibly by his hand.

His mouth twisted mockingly as he crossed his legs and rested his elbows on his knees, steepling his fingers in front of his face. The pose didn't fit his angular, gangly body, but she knew he would grow into it. "Lucius has always fancied himself above the law." At her look of distrust, he continued, "Believe you me, Miss Greenglass, I had no idea what he'd planned."

"And just what did he have planned?" she snapped, and then coughed to clear her throat.

"Does it matter? You are unharmed. Drink the potion; it's clean. And then you explain why you were sneaking about in my backyard."

"I wasn't in your backyard," she bit out, grimacing at the cottony taste of her mouth. His potion was tempting, not for just the relief it promised her head, but the liquid to wet her tongue. She wanted to believe that he'd been ignorant of Lucius spiking her drink. "And I certainly wasn't sneaking; don't you think I wouldn't have yelled had I been?"

He stared at her, hard, his eyes twin pools of crude oil and just as impossible to fathom. Refusing to meet the gaze of a known Legilimens, she focused on the dark lashes that framed each eye. They were mascara-commercial lashes: thick, long and curled at each tip. She realized that she'd never had the opportunity (or inclination) to study him so closely and decided that they were a striking feature. His nose, though big for his narrow face, had too much character to be considered ugly. She caught herself wondering if what they said about big noses was true and tucked that thought into the corner of her mind reserved for Things She Had No Business Thinking.

Snape broke the staring contest with a disgusted harrumph and an almost defeated twist to his lips. "What brings you to Manchester, Miss Greenglass?" he finally asked in a somewhat resigned, polite tone.

'He's used to being mistrusted,' she thought, finally deciding to take him on faith and drink his potion. Almost instantly, the pain in her head subsided with no odd side effects that she could determine. She breathed a faint sigh of relief, noting that he, too, had seemed to relax, his shoulders dropping and the crease between his eyebrows unfolding.

"Well, you see..." she hedged as she pulled her body into a sitting position, not really sure how to explain, since she had no real idea herself. "Cleaning out your house in order to build a memorial in your honor," was not going to cut it. She needed time to figure out how she had arrived here and how to get back, and thought it a strong possibility that she would need access to the dry well behind his house. A sharp object digging into her thigh gave her a flash of inspiration. She tossed her head to flick a curl out of her face and let her eyes roam the room, trying to look both casual and dodgy at once. "A late relative of mine left me a trinket, and I wanted someone to take a look at it. I'd heard that a Dark wizard lived in the area, specializing in potions and oddities."

His face seemed to fall, and a frown clouded his features. "Perhaps you should take it to a shop keeper that specializes in such... ah... trinkets."

"I didn't want to be seen going into one of those kinds of places, not with all the trouble with Vol...You Know Who," she corrected herself, glad that she'd read up on the social climate of wizarding England during Voldemort's first rise to power and hoping that her sources were good.

Snape looked at her askance, not having missed her almost-usage of the Dark Lord's name. "He's dead. And I imagine you wouldn't want to be seen here, either," he sneered mockingly as he gestured at his dismal little parlor.

"But it's a bit less observed than Borgin and Burkes," she pointed out reasonably, ignoring his lie about Voldemort's demise. He scowled, but said nothing. She wondered if he'd been looking for another response and whether she might have hurt his feelings, but remembered that she'd just been drugged, for Merlin's sake, and couldn't feel too badly about it. And now that they were discussing it, having Snape analyze the bottle and its contents seemed like as good a place to start as any for finding out what in bleeding hell was going on. "I can pay," she prodded, hoping that he wouldn't charge more than the few Galleons she had in her pockets.

That statement seemed to settle something in his mind, for he abruptly leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. "Show me."

Flashing him a quick smile, she pulled it from her shorts pocket and set it on the table. No sooner than her fingertips had released it, the phial lifted, as if the stopper were strung on a wire, to stand on its sharp point, chiming almost inaudibly. As the quiet tinkling was absorbed into the padded walls of the parlor, it balanced there, the crystal facets winking softly in the dim light.

Snape reached for the bottle, a strange gleam of avarice in his dark eyes, and Hermione had an uncomfortable flash of trepidation that by sitting in this parlor with this man, handing over this object, she could somehow be altering the flow of events from their true course. She didn't know what the phial held or what it could do; she had no knowledge of whether Snape had met a Heidi Greenglass or how they had interacted. Was she blazing a new trail through time or was she playing through motions already carved into history? Tensing with sudden anxiety, she moved to snatch the bottle away, but Snape beat her to it.

"Do you want me to look at it or not?" he asked crossly, weighing the phial in the palm of his hand.

She retreated back into her seat, forcing her hands to fold neatly in her lap. She was here now, wasn't she? Blindfolded and treading on very thin ice, she would have to feel her way between the cracks. "Yes... yes, of course."

"Where can I contact you?"

"Contact me?" she repeated, drawing a blank. She hadn't even considered where she would be staying until she found her way home.

He released an impatient snort as he unstopped the bottle and fanned the air over the air over its lip, trying to catch the contents' scent. "For when I've finished my analysis." The implied dunderhead hung in the air between them.

"Oh, I can't leave it here," she said quickly, suddenly nervous to have it out of her sight. "I'll bring it over when you have time to study it. Perhaps I can help..."

"I shall not need the help of a silly little chit like you."

"Fine," she snapped sharply. Ron was right: he was a git. She could solve this mystery on her own and not have to suffer the insults of this manky young man. Rising from the sofa, she reached for the phial in Snape's hand. He recoiled, standing quickly and closing his hand over it, sending her a baleful glare. "Your services are no longer required," she said, gesturing once again that he should give her the phial.

For several long minutes, measured by the soft ticking of the carriage clock sitting on the mantle, they stood at an impasse. The determination to which he clung to the small bottle intrigued and alarmed her, but she was not willing to back down until he had made some sort of concession: his help would make her situation easier. Again, she was careful to avoid eye contact and felt a perverse glee that it was frustrating him.

Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, he finally spoke politely, as if their last exchange had not occurred. "I am available for most of the day tomorrow."

Following his lead, she responded in a similar tone, "What time shall I drop by?"

"Ten o'clock would be acceptable. Do not be late." Winding his way around the coffee table, he grasped her elbow and led her to the front door, opening it for her with an awkward flourish that she was sure was mimicked, albeit poorly, from Malfoy. She was stepping over the threshold when she turned pointedly back to him.

"Professor, the phial."

He narrowed his eyes and slowly, reluctantly dropped the bottle into her outstretched hand.

A/N: Thanks for reading and I appreciate your feedback.