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Magpies and Mulberries by Hephastus [Reviews - 5]

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The Problem with Saying Good Night


We left the restaurant and I realized horribly that we would have to say good night. I was delving around in the cobwebby corners of my romantic history, trying to remember how one does say good night after a dinner like that, except that I could not concentrate because of the chatterbox next to me.

“I’ve learned the most interesting way of making them more solid and I’m dying to try it out, you know?” She looked up at me with those soft brown eyes glowing, and pulled on her gloves. “Remember how the dragons of healing are always so shadowy and kind of mystical? I mean if you’ve ever tried using them? But Mr. Long taught me a Chinese charm, though it is Tibetan, really, and I already did the preparatory work for it, I was just waiting for the proper occasion to summon them and would you want to go back to your dungeon workshop and try it?” She barely paused in her nattering as she took my arm. Her palm was soft on my forearm and the body contact made me swallow. “It was a Tibetan charm he did, as I recall, and their magic is very unstable and very powerful so I already did the offerings, and cleared my intention and sent a request to the pure lands (that’s another Tibetan Buddhist construct, but they’re quite helpful to outsiders, you know) telling them exactly what was up. And borrowing that kind of magic from another culture, you have to be very considerate. I used up all my beeswax candles on it but I think the butter offerings really did the trick. Do say you’ll come with me to summon the dragons! Then we can go first thing in the morning and I bet Russian rupees it will clear up that Extrapolation charm’s issue. What do you say, Snape?” I could feel Hermione’s hopefulness trying to coerce me. It was like being shepherded by an Australian cattle dog. The comparison of a poodle earlier didn’t do the force of her justice.

“But what are they for, Hermione?” I was thinking about Fiona for some reason and I asked the question to both find out what the dragons were to be used for, but also to buy time. There was something Fiona had told me that was bothering me. Oh yes. It was the Mark. She told me that she had put the Mark in my mind so that she could show me something important. What was so important? Was it a lure to drain my blood? But no. She didn’t need to do something so complex to earn her supper, surely. Then what?

“Severus? Hello, the castle lights are on but I’m knocking and no one’s there.”
She took her thumb and forefinger and pinched me through my sleeve.

“Stop that. You feel like a trout nibbling.” I shook my arms irritably, the robes ruffling in the night air. “I was just ruminating on a point. We’re almost to the Apparation spot. So how will these dragons assist us?”

She huffed. “They stabilize magical energy. They’re actually a lot like the Asian version of the Felix Felicis charm. They bring…for lack of a better word…luck and good energy to the magic you’re trying to impart to your work.”

I realized she was handing me the key to my current dilemma. “I agree. To the workshop, then. I don’t want to go back to that damnable island without a proper working charm.” We Apparated back to the castle via the use of Dumbledore’s instructions (because of my past spying, he had allowed me that) and Hermione and I wasted no time in getting down to the dungeons.

Finally, I closed the door behind us to my workroom.

“Oh, but this is brilliant! I had no idea you were so organized!” The young woman swept over to my shelves of potions ingredients and beamed back at me as if the generousness of her approval would brighten my day. I had had enough to drink tonight, but sometimes she did make me want to reach for the firewhisky.

“Right, then. The night’s not getting any younger, and we had best get to it.” Hermione shrugged off her long cloak, clicked purposefully over to my long work table and closed her eyes. She knit her brow, and swished and flicked expertly.

In a light puff of pinkish red smoke, a shape hovered. A distinct smell of cordite filled the room. Hermione opened her eyes and I could see her relishing silently in the fruits of her wand. “There you are.” She eyed her dragon of healing with a dimpled grin I found alarmingly attractive and both her hands laced across her chest, her left hip cocked up saucily. She glanced at me to see if my long face registered anything beyond my normal sneer. I didn’t want to appear interested so I left my expression as it was.

She looked back at the dragon. I admit that it was fabulous, other worldly, but looked a little displaced. It blinked its large yellow eyes, the iris inside a blackened carnelian, and brought its head to ground, sniffing the table it was on. Its eyes darted left to right, snuffling, eyeing, watching, still a little dazed. It was a small, delicate beast, finely crafted. About half the length of a broom, long and slender, with scales like rusted iron and a smooth burgundy skin on its belly. It lifted its head and blinked at Hermione. “Rrrrrruuurrrrrr?”

I watched with my own arms crossed. “Hmmph. It’s bonding. Lovely.” I snorted, the skin around my nose wrinkling in barely concealed irritation at her triumph.

But as Hermione gave me one of her own venomous stares back, there was a second poofing sound that had accompanied the first dragon’s appearance.

Hermione jumped. “Oh! Two! Did you…?” Another dragon appeared, graceful, long tail curling cat-like, its head immediately going to ground and sniffing, sniffing. The first thing that caught its attention was the other dark red dragon. This second dragon was a deep indigo blue, with aluminum-silver belly scales, and Slavic yellow eyes with a tobacco-smoke center. He (this dragon was definitely male) didn’t give his creator and lady-goddess Hermione a second thought. His tail curled and his whiskers, like a catfish’s but much longer, whipped seductively. He purred at the base of the other dragon’s tail.

I decided that dragons were interesting but we were here to get some work done. “Right. Get me that cauldron from over there.”

Hermione’s head whipped around and her eyes shot daggers at me. I pretended not to notice. She bustled over to the racks of standard cauldrons and I hissed. “No. No, not those…over there. The specialized ones.” She turned in mid-stride, stood in front of the more specialized cauldrons, and whipped her body around, her eyes narrowing at me. “Well. Which one?”

I pointed, my upper lip lifting in imitation of an aristocrat who’d missed his tea. “That one. No the other ‘that one.’ The one with the *brass lining*…it can’t react with the cinnabar…Nimue, don’t you read?”

She hoisted it down, and turned, a tendril of hair stuck to her cheek. “I read, Snape, but it’s hard to tell brass linings from gold linings when they’re freshly scrubbed! You don’t have to be so insufferable all the time! I mean, really. It’s like a game with you or something.” She bustled back over to the table with the ingredients and plunked the cauldron down, her back to the dragons. “It is almost Christmas time! I came a long way, you know, and we have a great deal to hash through.” Her face was flushed unevenly, as if she’d been out in the snow, except for the dark anger that made her pupils go a stormy amber.
She brushed the hair out of her face in a sharp motion. “I’ve been leaping around the world, trying to find answers to these medical issues, all right? I mean couldn’t you manage to be just a bit more hospitable instead of just downright Scrooge-like?” She paused, biting her lip. “Please?” She added that last bit, and her anger gave way so quickly to worry, her eyes widening as she realized who she was talking to, that I barked out a laugh.

Hermione smiled, and the dimples appeared again. “You have a nice laugh. All throaty and deep. Even though it does burst on the ears like a Christmas cracker.” My face reddened and Hermione turned away from me and cleared her throat.

I breathed in deeply, still watching her. “Well. We should get started. Could you *please* bring me the jar of cinnabar from the special stores in the other room? It’s poisonous. I didn’t want it out on the table…” But Hermione had already loped off, happy to attend to the next bit of work to be done. I walked back into the vicinity of the dragons of summoning, idly inventorying the materials on the desk I had laid out just this morning…the dragon bones, the astragalus, the ginseng, and my eyes lifted to the dragons as my ears caught the low mewling sounds of…no.

My eyes focused more clearly on the two beasties. The male dragon had curled his whiskers (he had two sets) around the head of the female dragon (was it safe to assume she was female? The male was so…assuredly male that in absence of the appropriate gear I had to assume the rust-red dragon was female). In any case, there was a lot of licking and amorous purring going on, and now I tilted my head slowly to the side. The female dragon was using her tail to - was that even possible? The male dragon lifted his head and gave a high-pitched cry of pleasure. I blushed deeply. The male dragon had hunkered closer to the female. He was running his talons over her lower back, playing some kind of little piano-esque tune she seemed quite happy to hear, good heavens, very happy to hear…I’d heard about horses, but I had no idea that dragons were so…

“Perhaps we should give them some privacy.” I had been so engrossed that it barely registered that Hermione had come up beside me and was staring as well.

I jumped a mile. “Don’t creep up on me like that!” I whipped out my wand. My face was on fire. “I’ll just send them back to their proper plane of existence…”

Hermione put her hand on my wand. Her voice was uncharacteristically low. “No. Don’t. Let’s just go into your private offices. Let them be.” She looked up at me but dropped her gaze immediately. “I’m sure this doesn’t happen very often. I mean, if two creatures take a…clear delight in one another, why disturb them?” She blushed herself and brushed her hair out of her face almost defiantly.

I lowered my wand, mystified at this line of reasoning. “As you wish.” I glanced quickly over to the dragons again, who were by this time clearly coupled and writhing. My eyes shot up to the ceiling.

Her gaze lowered to the floor. “Come on, then. I’ll gather up the potions bits if you’ll get the other.” I complied like a cowed school-boy, and hurried for the door, the dragons’ tender hissing and steaming following me out in a whisper of good wishes that I could not bear to hear.


Hermione was strangely quiet as we prepared and composed the potion she had researched and studied so carefully over the last week. When she resummoned a new dragon of healing, the one that appeared was resentful; brimstone and the smell of treacle filled the air upon its arrival. Its skin was a bright, lurid green and it put its steam-circled head down upon the table, wrapped its tail around itself, and hissed, its long tapered ears flattening to its head. It was a completely odious creature. Neither the color or the attitude of the creature was lost on me this time, and I eyed Hermione surreptitiously from beneath the lids of my eyes as we worked. She simply looked very focused and stiff. There was a resigned feel to the edges of her eyes. They looked weary, or as if she carried a private sadness that she had not yet learned to disguise. I knew that feeling so integrally that it was no longer a feeling, but simply a way of being. I didn’t want to think about that.

The numbness began to invade me again as we crushed, chopped, and diced. It was a trick that worked very well and fooled my body into believing that what was in front of me was a kind of magic, a kind of trickery. I knew that Hermione only wanted my company for the information I could provide; once she’d gotten older, the illusion of wanting to be around me, or doing what I asked with the exuberance of who she was would leave. I was to be just another ladder that Hermione Granger would climb, and the only trickery of the thing was that I was the first rung. She didn’t know herself of her happy deception, and I, quite frankly, so enjoyed just the simple warmth of her presence that I wasn’t going to inform her of her future history or where I stood in it. My insides tightened at this. And what was supremely sad about the whole thing was that I, Severus Snape, was happy enough to bend over and provide that first rung, just to be near her, and smell her hair, smell the light musk of her, of jasmine and sunlight on dew and the warm smell of baking that came from her clothing whenever she moved.

And so, the more quiet she became, the more removed, the more distant I also moved. Until by the end, when the potion was softly simmering, we took pains to not look at each other. I bade her a short good night as she nodded at me in silence. She picked up her fine coat, and removed herself from my workroom with a stiff nod of her chin.

My skull hammered with a headache.

But as I was dragging about, putting the more hazardous ingredients up, I floundered up out of my own syrupy bitterness, and I realized the dragons in my potions room needed to be dealt with. The dragons. My head came up. She only needed to have conjured one, but she had conjured two. Two that were…well, they had great affection for one another. I paused with my hand on the glass jar of cinnabar. I knew that frequently emotions got mixed into magic and summoning. It happened. It was common and it was normal. And then she had summoned a green and resentful, purely spiteful dragon.

Jealous. Jealousy.

I almost dropped the precious jar of cinnabar, and pushed it back as it teetered just in time. I bolted for the door. I hadn’t really said good night to her, had I? Not a proper good night.


Magpies and Mulberries by Hephastus [Reviews - 5]

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